1NC

1NC K
just like exploitative civil rights lawyers, the affs professionalized approach disembodies
the possibility of an anti-racist legalization movementwe should keep the center of
gravity out of Washington and in localized spaces
Alexander 10, Associate Professor of Law
[2010, Michelle Alexander, is an associate professor of law at Ohio State University, a civil rights advocate and a
writer. New Jim Crow : Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness ProQuest ebrary, pp. 213-215]

A bit of civil rights history may be helpful here. Civil rights advocacy has not always looked the way it does
today. Throughout most of our nations history from the days of the abolitionist movement through the Civil Rights Movement racial
justice advocacy has generally revolved around grassroots organizing and the strategic mobilization of public
opinion. In recent years, however, a bit of mythology has sprung up regarding the centrality of litigation to racial
justice struggles. The success of the brilliant legal crusade that led to Brown v. Board of Education has created a
widespread perception that civil rights lawyers are the most important players in racial justice advocacy. This image
was enhanced following the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1965, when civil rights lawyers became embroiled in highly
visible and controversial efforts to end hiring discrimination, create affirmative action plans, and enforce school desegregation orders. As
public attention shifted from the streets to the courtroom , the extraordinary grassroots movement that made
civil rights legislation possible faded from public view . The lawyers took over. With all deliberate speed, civil rights
organizations became professionalized and increasingly disconnected from the communities they claimed to
represent . Legal scholar and former NAACP Legal Defense Fund lawyer Derrick Bell was among the first to critique this
phenomenon, arguing in a 1976 Yale Law Journal article that civil rights lawyers were pursuing their own agendas in
school desegregation cases even when they conflicted with their clients expressed desires. 3 Two decades later, former NAACP Legal
Defense Fund lawyer and current Harvard Law School professor Lani Guinier published a memoir in which she acknowledged that, by the
early 1990s, [civil rights] litigators like me had become like the Washington insiders we were so suspicious of. . . .
We reflexively distanced ourselves from the very people on whose behalf we brought the cases in the first
place . 4 This shift, she noted, had profound consequences for the future of racial justice advocacy; in fact, it was
debilitating to the movement . Instead of a moral crusade, the movement became an almost purely legal
crusade. Civil rights advocates pursued their own agendas as unelected representatives of communities
defined by race and displayed considerable skill navigating courtrooms and halls of power across America. The law
became what the lawyers and lobbyists said it was, with little or no input from the people whose fate hung in the balance. Guinier continued: In
charge, we channeled a passion for change into legal negotiations and lawsuits. We defined the issues in terms of
developing legal doctrine and establishing legal precedent ; our clients became important, but secondary,
players in a formal arena that required lawyers to translate lay claims into technical speech . We then
disembodied plaintiffs claims in judicially manageable or judicially enforceable terms, unenforceable without more
lawyers. Simultaneously, the movements center of gravity shifted to Washington, D.C. As lawyers and national
pundits became more prominent than clients and citizens, we isolated ourselves from the people who were
our anchor and on whose behalf we had labored . We not only left people behind; we also lost touch with the moral
force at the heart of the movement itself . 5 Not surprisingly, as civil rights advocates converted a grassroots
movement into a legal campaign, and as civil rights leaders became political insiders, many civil rights
organizations became top-heavy with lawyers . This development enhanced their ability to wage legal battles
but impeded their ability to acknowledge or respond to the emergence of a new caste system. Lawyers have a
tendency to identify and concentrate on problems they know how to solve i.e., problems that can be solved through
litigation. The mass incarceration of people of color is not that kind of problem. Widespread preoccupation with
litigation, however, is not the only or even the main reason civil rights groups have shied away from challenging the new caste system.
Challenging mass incarceration requires something civil rights advocates have long been reluctant to do :
advocacy on behalf of criminals . Even at the height of Jim Crow segregation when black men were more likely to be
lynched than to receive a fair trial in the South NAACP lawyers were reluctant to advocate on behalf of blacks accused
of crimes unless the lawyers were convinced of the mens innocence. 6 The major exception was anti death penalty
advocacy. Over the years, civil rights lawyers have made heroic efforts to save the lives of condemned criminals. But outside of the death penalty
arena, civil rights advocates have long been reluctant to leap to the defense of accused criminals. Advocates
have found they are most successful when they draw attention to certain types of black people (those who are
easily understood by mainstream whites as good and respectable) and tell certain types of stories about them. Since the days
when abolitionists struggled to eradicate slavery, racial justice advocates have gone to great lengths to identify black
people who defy racial stereotypes, and they have exercised considerable message discipline, telling only those
stories of racial injustice that will evoke sympathy among whites.

And, reforming the war on drugs shifts the pieces of the puzzle that is the prison industrial
complex. It leaves intact the architecture of mass incarceration
Schoenfeld 12 (Heather, Assistant Professor of Sociology, The Ohio State University. The War on Drugs, the
Politics of Crime, and Mass Incarceration in the United States.Spring, 2012 The Journal of Gender Race and
Justice. 15 J. Gender Race & Just. 315 Veeder)
In the current economic climate, as states scrounge to find the dollars to fund essential services such as education, highways, and public employee
pensions, the war on drugs increasingly looks like a relic of the past. n217 Across the country, policymakers are asking whether it is
really cost-efficient or effective to arrest, prosecute, and imprison people for possessing, or even selling,
certain drugs. Some wonder why incarceration rates have not plunged with crime rates. Could it be that drug
crimes are responsible for the United States's exceptionally high incarceration rates? As this Article demonstrates, the answers to these
questions are not always straightforward. According to this and other analyses, the war on drugs is not what is sustaining high
incarceration rates in the United States . Rather, we need to look at decisions to prosecute, ability to convict,
and length of time served in [*349] prison for all categories of offenses. On the other hand, the war on drugs certainly
contributes to high incarceration rates in important ways. Drug offenses are the only crime whose incidence (as measured by arrests) has
increased consistently over the past decade and a half. As property and violent crime rates declined, police diverted resources to drug offenses -
the arrest rate for drug possession alone increased by over 35% since 1994. n218 Currently, felony convictions for drug offenses comprise
approximately 34% of all felony convictions in state courts. n219 In some states, such as Florida, prison admissions rates for drug offenses
outpace those for property offenses. n220 Finally, in urban courthouses across the country, drug cases represent half of the criminal caseload.
n221 Even if only a small percentage of those offenders are sentenced to prison, they put a huge strain on the system and have enormous
repercussions for those charged. Often an arrest for a drug offense marks young black men's entry into the criminal justice system, and it becomes
a key moment in the criminalization process that increases the likelihood of eventual incarceration. Given this reality, the recent focus on
reforming the war on drugs is not necessarily mistaken, but incomplete. As the above analysis makes clear, drug-war
reforms are limited in their ability to reverse mass incarceration because they only take aim at one
component of a complex and interconnected system of decision-making. Each stage of the criminal justice
process and offense category represents a piece to the mass-incarceration puzzle, but just reforming one piece
(or taking it out of the equation) causes other pieces to shift and grow - never changing the actual size of the
puzzle . Take, for example, the decriminalization of marijuana. If police could no longer make arrests for
marijuana possession or sale, would a whole group of people be kept out of the system or, more likely, would
the police just arrest them for a different petty offense? If prosecutors no longer had to process drug-
possession arrests, would they simply put more effort into convicting those charged with burglary or drug
sales? Likewise, the most widely accepted alternative to business as usual in the war on drugs, specialized courts for drug-addicted offenders,
have done very little to lower [*350] incarceration rates. In fact, drug courts do not actually take people out of the system. Instead, these courts
use the severity of the system to funnel people into supervised drug treatment. n222 By diverting defendants already labeled
"felons" to other spaces within the system, drug courts and other diversion programs may have simply
increased the number of defendants eligible for enhanced sentencing. n223 Of course, marijuana decriminalization and
drug courts do not exhaust possible drug-war reforms; yet these examples show that reforms that fail to address decision-making
across the whole system - from arrest to prosecution to sentencing to parole and probation - will fail to make a
significant dent in incarceration rates. Additionally, and perhaps more notably, drug-war reforms are limited in their
ability to reverse mass incarceration because they leave the architecture of mass incarceration in place. This
includes not only the physical resources and incentives mentioned above - prisons themselves, powerful
special interest groups, and political and economic payoffs for being "tough on crime" - but rather the
"deeply flawed public consensus" that sustains the system. n224 This Article contributes to our understanding of the political
origins of that consensus so that advocates for justice may begin to challenge its assumptions and attending policies and practices.
Their innovation advantage means the aff results in a racist interest convergence that
makes racial change impossible
Alexander 14
[03/10/14, Michelle Alexander, is an associate professor of law at Ohio State University, a civil rights advocate and
a writer Interviewed by Phillip Smith, "The New Jim Crow" Author Michelle Alexander Talks Race and Drug
War, http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/2014/mar/10/new_jim_crow_michelle_alexander_tal]

Michelle Alexander: The landscape absolutely has changed in profound ways. When writing this book, I was feeling incredibly frustrated by the failure of many civil rights
organizations and leaders to make the war on drugs a critical priority in their organization and also by the failure of many of my progressive friends and allies to awaken to the magnitude of the harm caused by the war on drugs and
mass incarceration. At the same time, not so long ago, I didn't understand the horror of the drug war myself, I failed to connect the dots and understand the ways these systems of racial and social control are born and reborn. But over
last few years, I couldn't be more pleased with reception. Many people warned me that civil rights organizations could be defensive or angered by criticisms in the book, but they've done nothing but respond with enthusiasm and some

real self-reflection. There is absolutely an awakening taking place . It's important to understand that this didn't start with my book -- Angela Davis coined the term "prison industrial
complex" years ago; Mumia Abu-Jamal was writing from prison about mass incarceration and our racialized prison state. Many, many advocates have been doing this work and connecting the dots for far longer than I have. I wanted

I am optimistic, but at the same time, I see real reasons for

to lend more credibility and support for the work that so many have been doing for some, but that has been marginalized.

concern. There are important victories in legalizing marijuana in Colorado and Washington, in Holder speaking out against mandatory minimums and felon
disenfranchisement, in politicians across the country raising concerns about the size of the prison state for the first time in 40 years, but much of the dialog is still driven by fiscal
concerns rather than genuine concern for the people and communities most impacted, the families destroyed. We haven't
yet really had the kind of conversation we must have as a nation if we are going to do more than tinker
with the machine and break our habit of creating mass incarceration in America. Asha Bandele: Obama has his My Brother's Keeper
initiative directed at black boys falling behind. A lot of this is driven by having families and communities disrupted by the drug war. Obama nodded at the structural racism that dismembers communities, but he said it was a moral

I'm glad that Obama is shining a spotlight on the real

failing. He's addressed race the least of any modern American president. Your thoughts? Michelle Alexander:

crisis facing black communities today, in particular black boys and young men, and he's right to draw attention to it and elevate it, but I worry that the initiative is
based more in rhetoric than in a meaningful commitment to addressing the structures and institutions that
have created these conditions in our communities . There is a commitment to studying the problem and identifying programs that work to keep black kids in school and out of
jail, and there is an aspect that seeks to engage foundations and corporations, but there is nothing in the initiative that offers any kind of policy change

from the government or any government funding of any kind to support these desperately needed programs. There is an implicit assumption that we just need to find what works to lift people up by their
bootstraps, without acknowledging that we're waging a war on these communities we claim to be so concerned about. The initiative itself reflects this common narrative that suggests the reasons why there are so many poor people of
color trapped at the bottom -- bad schools, poverty, broken homes. And if we encourage people to stay in school and get and stay married, then the whole problem of mass incarceration will no longer be of any real concern. But I've
come to believe we have it backwards. These communities are poor and have failing schools and broken homes not because of their personal failings, but because we've declared war on them, spent billions building prisons while
allowing schools to fail, targeted children in these communities, stopping, searching, frisking them -- and the first arrest is typically for some nonviolent minor drug offense, which occurs with equal frequency in middle class white
neighborhoods but typically goes ignored. We saddle them with criminal records, jail them, then release them to a parallel universe where they are discriminated against for the rest of their lives, locked into permanent second-class
status. We've done this in the communities most in need our support and economic investment. Rather than providing meaningful support to these families and communities where the jobs have gone overseas and they are struggling to
move from an industrial-based economy to a global one, we have declared war on them. We have stood back and said "What is wrong with them?" The more pressing question is "What is wrong with us?" Asha Bandele: During the
Great Depression, FDR had the New Deal, but now it seem like there is no social commitment at the highest levels of government. And we see things like Eric Holder and Rand Paul standing together to end mandatory minimums. Is

We have to be very clear that so much of the progress being made on drug policy reflects
this an unholy alliance? Michelle Alexander:

the fact that we are at a time when politicians are highly motivated to downsize prisons because we can't
afford the massive prison state without raising taxes on the predominantly white middle class. This is the first time in 40 years we've
been willing to have a serious conversation about prison downsizing. But I'm deeply concerned about us doing
the right things for the wrong reasons . This movement to end mass incarceration and the war on drugs is
about breaking the habit of forming caste-like systems and creating a new ethic of care and concern for each
of us , this idea that each of us has basic human rights. That is the ultimate goal of this movement. The real issue that lies at the core of
every caste system ever created is the devaluing of human beings. If we're going to do this just to save some
cash, we haven't woken up to the magnitude of the harm . If we are not willing to have a searching
conversation about how we got to this place, how we are able to lock up millions of people, we will find
ourselves either still having a slightly downsized mass incarceration system or some new system of racial
control because we will have not learned the core lesson our racial history is trying to teach us. We have to
learn to care for them, the Other, the ghetto dwellers we demonize. Temporary, fleeting political alliances with
politicians who may have no real interest in communities of color is problematic. We need to stay focused on
doing the right things for the right reasons, and not count as victories battles won when the real lessons have
not been learned . Asha Bandele: Portugal decriminalized all drugs and drug use has remained flat, overdoses been cut by a third, HIV cut by two-thirds. What can we learn from taking a public health approach
and its fundamental rejection of stigma? Michelle Alexander: Portugal is an excellent example of how it is possible to reduce addiction and abuse and drug related crime in a non-punitive manner without filling prisons and jails.

we criminalize drugs because we are so concerned about the harm they cause people, but we wind up
Supposedly,

inflicting far more pain and suffering than the substances themselves. What are we doing really when we
criminalize drugs is not criminalizing substances, but people. I support a wholesale shift to a public health model for dealing with drug addiction and abuse.
How would we treat people abusing if we really cared about them? Would we put them in a cage, saddle them
with criminal records that will force them into legal discrimination the rest of their lives? I support the
decriminalization of all drugs for personal use. If you possess a substance, we should help you get education
and support, not demonize, shame, and punish you for the rest of your life. I'm thrilled that Colorado and
Washington have legalized marijuana and DC has decriminalized it -- these are critically important steps in
shifting from a purely punitive approach . But there are warning flags. I flick on the news, and I see images of people using
marijuana and trying to run legitimate businesses, and they're almost all white . When we thought of them as
black or brown, we had a purely punitive approach. Also, it seems like its exclusively white men being
interviewed as wanting to start marijuana businesses and make a lot of money selling marijuana . I have to say the
image doesn't sit right . Here are white men poised to run big marijuana businesses after 40 years of
impoverished black kids getting prison time for doing the same thing. As we talk about legalization, we have
to also be willing to talk about reparations for the war on drugs , as in how do we repair the harm caused. With
regard to Iraq, Colin Powell said "If you break it, you own it," but we haven't learned that basic lesson from our own racial history. We set the

slaves free with nothing, and after Reconstruction, a new caste system arose, Jim Crow. A movement arose
and we stopped Jim Crow, but we got no reparations after the waging of a brutal war on poor communities of
color that decimated families and fanned the violence it was supposed to addres s. Do we simply say "We're
done now, let's move on" and white men can make money? This time, we have to get it right; we have to tell the
whole truth, we have to repair the harm done. It's not enough to just stop. Enormous harm had been done;
we have to repair those communities.

Challenging institutional racism is a prior ethical question it makes violence structurally

inevitable and foundationally negates morality making their utilitarianism arguments
incoherent
Albert Memmi 2k, Professor Emeritus of Sociology @ U of Paris, Naiteire, Racism, Translated by Steve
Martinot, p. 163-165

The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without remission, probably never
achieved. Yet, for this very reason, it is a struggle to be undertaken without surcease and without
concessions. One cannot be indulgent toward racism; one must not even let the monster in the house,
especially not in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means to augment the bestial part in us and in other
people, which is to diminish what is human. To accept the racist universe to the slightest degree is to endorse
fear, injustice, and violence. It is to accept the persistence of the dark history in which we still largely live. it
is to agree that the outsider will always be a possible victim (and which man is not himself an outsider
relative to someone else?. Racism illustrates, in sum, the inevitable negativity of the condition of the dominated
that is, it illuminates in a certain sense the entire human condition. The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it
is, and always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to the ultimate passage from animosity to
humanity . In that sense, we cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge. However, it remains true that ones moral
conduit only emerges from a choice: one has to want it. It is a choice among other choices, and always
debatable in its foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking, that the choice to conduct oneself
morally is the condition for the establishment of a human order, for which racism is the very negation . This
is almost a redundancy. One cannot found a moral order, let alone a legislative order, on racism, because
racism signifies the exclusion of the other, and his or her subjection to violence and domination. From an ethical
point of view, if one can deploy a little religious language, racism is the truly capital sin. It is not an accident that almost all
of humanitys spiritual traditions counsels respect for the weak, for orphans, widows, or strangers. It is not just a
question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments. Such unanimity in the safeguarding of the other suggests
the real utility of such sentiments. All things considered, we have an interest in banishing injustice, because injustice engenders

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

the k outweighs the world has already ended for people of color
OMOLADE 84 City College Center for Worker Education in New York City
Barbara-a historian of black women for the past twenty years and an organizer in both the womens and civil rights/black power movements;
Women of Color and the Nuclear Holocaust; WOMENS STUDIES QUARTERLY, Vol. 12., No. 2, Teaching about Peace, War, and Women in
the Military, Summer, p. 12; http://www.jstor.org/stable/4004305
In April, 1979, the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency released a report on the effects of
nuclear war that concludes that, in a general nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet
Union, 25 to 100 million people would be killed. This is approximately the same number of African
people who died between 1492 and 1890 as a result of the African slave trade to the New World. The
same federal report also comments on the destruction of urban housing that would cause massive
shortages after a nuclear war, as well as on the crops that would be lost, causing massive food
shortages. Of course, for people of color the world over, starvation is already a common problem,
when, for example, a nations crops are grown for export rather than to feed its own people. And the
housing of people of color throughout the worlds urban areas is already blighted and inhumane:
families live in shacks, shanty towns, or on the streets; even in the urban areas of North America, the
poor may live without heat or running water. For people of color, the world as we knew it ended
centuries ago. Our world, with its own languages, customs and ways, ended. And we are only now
beginning to see with increasing clarity that our task is to reclaim that world, struggle for it, and
rebuild it in our own image. The death culture we live in has convinced many to be more concerned
with death than with life, more willing to demonstrate for survival at any cost than to struggle for
liberty and peace with dignity. Nuclear disarmament becomes a safe issue when it is not linked to the
daily and historic issues of racism, to the ways in which people of color continue to be murdered. Acts
of war, nuclear holocausts, and genocide have already been declared on our jobs, our housing, our
schools, our families, and our lands. As women of color, we are warriors, not pacifists. We must fight as a people
on all fronts, or we will continue to die as a people. We have fought in peoples wars in China, in Cuba, in
Guinea-Bissau, and in such struggles as the civil rights movement, the womens movement, and in countless daily encounters
with landlords, welfare departments, and schools. These struggles are not abstractions, but the only
means by which we have gained the ability to eat and to provide for the future of our people. We
wonder who will lead the battle for nuclear disarmament with the vigor and clarity that women of color have learned
from participating in other struggles. Who will make the political links among racism, sexism, imperialism,
cultural integrity, and nuclear arsenals and housing? Who will stand up?

We advocate an abolitionist praxis that works to establish medium term steps towards
ending the carceral stateradical political imagination is key
Ben-Moshe 11, Liat Ben-Moshe Syracuse University, Genealogies of Resistance to Incarceration: Abolition
Politics within Deinstitutionalization and Anti-Prison Activism in the U.S.,
http://surface.syr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1070&context=soc_etd

Abolition requires a vision for the future but also taking immediate steps on the way to that vision, in the form of
non-reformist reforms , as discussed in chapter 5. The goal is to improve present circumstances but without
compromising the larger goal of abolition. This is the reason why Ruthie Gilmore comments46 that prison abolition work means
being a theoretical puritan but a method slut and building coalitions towards the goal of creating a social system that wi;; not necessitate prisons
and in which imprisonment would be inconceivable. This is the idea of becoming, instead of being, or of potentiality, as opposed to possibility.
For Agamben (1999), potentiality differs from possibility, which is something that might happen in the future;
while potentiality represents the imminent, that which is present but not fully manifested yet at present
time. This characterization of abolition could also been seen in the case of deinstitutionalization activists who
insisted on a non-carceral and inclusive world way before alternatives to institutionalization were in place in all
locales (or in any for that matter). The
goal was to close down institutions and refute the institutional and
segregationist mindset in the future while the alternatives were not ready-made and indeed could not have
been, as such a framework did not exist at that time. Queer theorist Jos Esteban Muoz suggests that we must strive, in the face of
the here and now totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. We must dream and
enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds (2009: 1). It is my
contention that this vision, although discussed here in relation to queer futurity, is applicable to radical anti-institutionalization stances,
disability activism in the form of disability justice and prison abolition. According to Gordon (2004), and following the work of cultural
worker Toni Cade Bambara, abolition efforts must take place while we are still enslaved. She states abolition time is a
type of revolutionary time. But rather than stop the world, as if in an absolute break between now and then,
it is a daily part of it (Gordon 2004: 198). Emancipation is ongoing work and cannot wait until the time is ripe
for it. Sociologist and life-long anarchist activist Howard Ehrlich47 believes that radicals, as opposed to reformers or revolutionaries, are almost
by definition not of the society. Most are politically engaged and experiment with alternative ways of being and thinking, in terms of
antiauthoritarianism, anti-racism, anti-capitalism etc. The radical life is living today the way you would like the future
society to be. Similarly, Ernest Bloch exclaims that the essential function of utopia is a critique of what is present. If
we had not already gone beyond the barriers, we could not even perceive them as barriers (in Muoz 2009: 37).
This is reminiscent of Thomas Mathiesens work, which theorized abolition as the unfinished, always a work in

progress. Mathiesens work has often been criticized for lacking any concrete suggestions for penology or even activism, thus remaining

abstract and detached from specific activist and policy stances (Saleh-Hanna 2000). But reclaiming utopia as a liberatory, as
opposed to derogatory, position would conceive this work as helpful in fashioning new ways of envisioning
the world and opening up opportunities that are not closed off by readymade prescriptions . For Muoz, the
here and now is a prison house (2009: 1). The connection to prison abolition and the more radical factions of
the anti-institutional stance are conjured up by this affirmation from Muoz , and not simply because he brings up
prison as the ultimate metaphor for stagnation and lack of imagination. Muoz further discusses Ernst Bloch s distinction between concrete and
abstract utopias, explaining that the latter are useful only as they pose a critique function that fuels a critical
potentially transformative political imagination (2009: 3). Concrete utopias, on the other hand, represent
collective hopes, and are the blocks upon which hope can exist . As Bloch writes hopes methodology dwells in the
region of the not-yet (quoted in Muoz 2009: 3). The
not-yet, as Bloch refers to it, seems akin to Mathiesens
formulation of the unfinished in relation to the work of the abolitionist. Hope is indeed a fundamental requirement for
long-time activists. One cannot do any meaningful work for social change without some amalgamation of hope,
pragmatism and a horizon of possibility. But, as Muoz reminds us, this fear of both hope and utopia, as affective structures and
approaches to challenges within the social, has been prone to disappointment (2009: 9). Utopia and hope are hard to keep up, and harder to
sustain as critical frameworks and affective economies when alternatives such as pessimism, inertia, resignation, and even disappointment itself
are abounding. There are also material and symbolic consequences of taking up utopia as a guiding force for
change. When one is called utopian this usually connotes something degrading, a navet of sorts, that makes one look foolish or dangerous,
depending on the context (as we have seen in the charges thrown at both deinstitutionalization activists and prison abolitionists, as described in
the previous chapter). In any case, utopia is not often a feature that makes one be taken seriously.

Frameworkthe role of this debate should be about the development of movements to

challenge institutional racismwhether or not marijuana legalization is good or bad is
secondary to how reforms comes in to be
Alexander 10, Associate Professor of Law
[2010, Michelle Alexander, is an associate professor of law at Ohio State University, a civil rights advocate and a
writer. New Jim Crow : Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness ProQuest ebrary, pp. 221-224]

The list could go on, of course, but the point has been made. The
central question for racial justice advocates is this: are we
serious about ending this system of control , or not? If we are, there is a tremendous amount of work to be done .
The notion that all of these reforms can be accomplished piecemeal one at a time, through disconnected
advocacy strategies seems deeply misguided. All of the needed reforms have less to do with failed policies than
a deeply flawed public consensus , one that is indifferent, at best , to the experience of poor people of color. As
Martin Luther King Jr. explained back in 1965, when describing why it was far more important to engage in mass
mobilizations than file lawsuits, Were trying to win the right to vote and we have to focus the attention of
the world on that. We cant do that making legal cases. We have to make the case in the court of public
opinion. 21 King certainly appreciated the contributions of civil rights lawyers (he relied on them to get him out of jail),
but he opposed the tendency of civil rights lawyers to identify a handful of individuals who could make great
plaintiffs in a court of law, then file isolated cases . He believed what was necessary was to mobilize thousands
to make their case in the court of public opinion. In his view, it was a flawed public consensus not merely
flawed policy that was at the root of racial oppression. Today, no less than fifty years ago, a flawed public
consensus lies at the core of the prevailing caste system. When people think about crime, especially drug crime, they
do not think about suburban housewives violating laws regulating prescription drugs or white frat boys using
ecstasy. Drug crime in this country is understood to be black and brown , and it is because drug crime is racially
defined in the public consciousness that the electorate has not cared much what happens to drug criminals
at least not the way they would have cared if the criminals were understood to be white. It is this failure to care,
really care across color lines, that lies at the core of this system of control and every racial caste system that has

existed in the United States or anywhere else in the world . Those who believe that advocacy challenging mass
incarceration can be successful without overturning the public consensus that gave rise to it are engaging in
fanciful thinking, a form of denial . Isolated victories can be won even a string of victories but in the absence of
a fundamental shift in public consciousness, the system as a whole will remain intact . To the extent that
major changes are achieved without a complete shift, the system will rebound. The caste system will
reemerge in a new form , just as convict leasing replaced slavery, or it will be reborn, just as mass
incarceration replaced Jim Crow. Sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant make a similar point in their book Racial
Formation in the United States. They attribute the cyclical nature of racial progress to the unstable equilibrium
that characterizes the United States racial order. 22 Under normal conditions, they argue, state institutions are
able to normalize the organization and enforcement of the prevailing racial order , and the system functions
relatively automatically. Challenges to the racial order during these periods are easily marginalized or
suppressed, and the prevailing system of racial meanings, identity, and ideology seems natural. These conditions
clearly prevailed during slavery and Jim Crow. When the equilibrium is disrupted, however, as in Reconstruction and the Civil Rights
Movement, the state initially resists, then attempts to absorb the challenge through a series of reforms that are ,
if not entirely symbolic, at least not critical to the operation of the racial order. In the ab-sence of a truly
egalitarian racial consensus, these predictable cycles inevitably give rise to new, extraordinarily
comprehensive systems of racialized social control . One example of the way in which a well established racial order easily
absorbs legal challenges is the infamous aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education decision . After the Supreme Court
declared separate schools inherently unequal in 1954, segregation persisted unabated. One commentator notes: The statistics from the
Southern states are truly amazing. For ten years, 1954 1964, virtually nothing happened. 23 Not a single black
child attended an integrated public grade school in South Carolina, Alabama, or Mississippi as of the 1962 1963 school year. Across the
South as a whole, a mere 1 percent of black school children were attending school with whites in 1964 a full
decade after Brown was decided. 24 Brown did not end Jim Crow; a mass movement had to emerge first one that
aimed to create a new public consensus opposed to the evils of Jim Crow . This does not mean Brown v. Board was
meaningless, as some commentators have claimed. 25 Brown gave critical legitimacy to the demands of civil rights
activists who risked their lives to end Jim Crow , and it helped to inspire the movement (as well as a fierce backlash).
26 But standing alone, Brown accomplished for African Americans little more than Abraham Lincolns
Emancipation Proclamation. A civil war had to be waged to end slavery; a mass movement was necessary to bring a formal end to Jim
Crow. Those who imagine that far less is required to dismantle mass incarceration and build a new, egalitarian
racial consensus reflecting a compassionate rather than punitive impulse toward poor people of color fail to
appreciate the distance between Martin Luther King Jr.s dream and the ongoing racial nightmare for those
locked up and locked out of American society. The foregoing should not be read as a call for movement
building to the exclusion of reform work . To the contrary, reform work is the work of movement building ,
provided that it is done consciously as movement-building work. If all the reforms mentioned above were
actually adopted, a radical transformation in our society would have taken place . T he relevant question is
not whether to engage in reform work, but how. There is no shortage of worthy reform efforts and goals.
Differences of opinion are inevitable about which reforms are most important and in what order of priority they should be pursued. These debates
are worthwhile, but it is critical to keep in mind that the question of how we do reform work is even more
important than the specific reforms we seek. If the way we pursue reforms does not contribute to the
building of a movement to dismantle the system of mass incarceration , and if our advocacy does not upset the
prevailing public consensus that supports the new caste system, none of the reforms, even if won, will
successfully disrupt the nations racial equilibrium. Challenges to the system will be easily absorbed or
deflected, and the accommodations made will serve primarily to legitimate the system, not undermine it. We
run the risk of winning isolated battles but losing the larger war.
 1NC Innovation
Discussion of environmental problems that ignore the disproportionate effects on
minorities establish privilege, marginalize minorities, and doom effective environmental
strategies
Tim Wise April 13th 2011 Tim Wise and White Privilege http://changefromwithin.org/2011/04/13/tim-wise-and-
white-privilege/ [Wise served as an adjunct faculty member at the Smith College School for Social Work, in
Northampton, Massachusetts, where he co-taught a Masters level class on Racism in the U.S. In 2001, Wise trained
journalists to eliminate racial bias in reporting, as a visiting faculty-in-residence at the Poynter Institute in St.
Petersburg, Florida. From 1999-2003, Wise was an advisor to the Fisk University Race Relations Institute, in
Nashville, and in the early 90s he was Youth Coordinator and Associate Director of the Louisiana Coalition Against
Racism and Nazism: the largest of the many groups organized for the purpose of defeating neo-Nazi political and
this candidate, David Duke. He graduated from Tulane University in 1990 and received antiracism training from the
Peoples Institute for Survival and Beyond, in New Orleans.]
But as troubling as colorblindness can be when evinced by liberals, colormuteness may be even worse.
Colormuteness comes into play in the way many on the white liberal-left fail to give voice to the connections
between a given issue about which they are passionate, and the issue of racism and racial inequity. So, for
instance, when environmental activists focus on the harms of pollution to the planet in the abstract, or to non-
human species, but largely ignore the day-to-day environmental issues facing people of color, like
disproportionate exposure to lead paint, or municipal, medical and toxic waste, they marginalize black and
brown folks within the movement, and in so doing, reinforce racial division and inequity. Likewise, when
climate change activists focus on the ecological costs of global warming, but fail to discuss the way in which
climate change disproportionately affects people of color around the globe, they undermine the ability of the
green movement to gain strength, and they reinforce white privilege. How many climate change activists, for
instance, really connect the dots between global warming and racism? Even as people of color are twice as likely as whites
to live in the congested communities that experience the most smog and toxic concentration thanks to fossil fuel use? Even as heat waves
connected to climate change kill people of color at twice the rate of their white counterparts? Even as agricultural disruptions due to warming
caused disproportionately by the white west cost African nations $600 billion annually? Even as the contribution to fossil fuel emissions by
people of color is 20 percent below that of whites, on average? Sadly, these facts are typically subordinated within climate
activism to simple the world is ending rhetoric, or predictions (accurate though they may be) that unless
emissions are brought under control global warming will eventually kill millions. Fact is, warming is killing a
lot of people now, and most of them are black and brown. To build a global movement to roll back the
ecological catastrophe facing us, environmentalists and clean energy advocates must connect the dots between
planetary destruction and the real lives being destroyed currently, which are disproportionately of color. To
do anything less is not only to engage in a form of racist marginalizing of people of color and their concerns,
but is to weaken the fight for survival.

Technology functions as a white mythologythe ideals of enlightenment, progress, and

western superiority are intimately tied to technological progress
Dinerstein, 06 [Septermber 2006, Joel Dinerstein is an Assistant Professor of English at Tulane University ,
Technology and Its Discontents: On the Verge of the Posthuman American Quarterly, Volume 58, Number 3, pp.
569-570]
Immediately after 9/11, a Middle East correspondent for The Nation summarized the coming war on terrorism as
[their] theology versus [our] technology, the suicide bomber against the nuclear power.1 His statement missed the point:
technology is the American theology . For Americans, it is not the Christian God but technology that
structures the American sense of power and revenge, the nations abstract sense of well-being, its
arrogant sense of superiority , and its righteous justification for global dominance . In the introduction to
Technological Visions, Marita Sturken and Douglas Thomas declare that in the popular imagination, technology
is often
synonymous with the future, but it is more accurate to say that technology is synonymous with faith in
the futur eboth in the future as a better world and as one in which the United States bestrides the globe
as a colossus .2 Technology has long been the unacknowledged source of European and Euro-American
superiority within modernity, and its underlying mythos always traffics in what James W. Carey once called
 secular religiosity.3 Lewis Mumford called the American belief system mechano-idolatry as early as 1934; a few years later he
deemed it our mechano-centric religion. David F. Noble calls this ideology the religion of technology in a work of the same
name that traces its European roots to a doctrine that combines millenarianism , rationalism , and
Christian redemption in the writings of monks, explorers, inventors, and NASA scientists . If we take into
account the functions of religion and not its rituals, it is not a deity who insures the American future but new
technologies: smart bombs in the Gulf War, Viagra and Prozac in the pharmacy, satellite TV at home .
It is not social justice or equitable economic distribution that will reduce hunger, greed, and poverty,
but fables of abundance and the rhetoric of technological utopianism . The United States is in thrall to
techno-fundamentalism, in Siva Vaidhyanathans apt phrase; to Thomas P. Hughes, a god named technology has
possessed Americans . Or, as public policy scholar Edward Wenk Jr. sums it up, we are . . . inclined to equate
technology with civilization [itself].4Technology as an abstract concept functions as a white
mythology . Yet scholars of whiteness rarely engage technology as a site of dominant white cultural
practices (except in popular culture), and scholars of technology often sidestep the subtext of whiteness within
this mythos. The underlying ideology and cultural practices of technology were central to American
studies scholarship in its second and third generations, but the field has marginalized this critical framework; it is as
if these works of (mostly) white men are now irrelevant to the fields central concerns of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ethnic
identity on the one hand, and power, empire, and nation on the other. In this essay I will integrate some older works into the fields
current concerns to situate the current posthuman discourse within an unmarked white tradition of technological utopianism that also
functions as a form of social evasion. By the conclusion, I hope to have shown that the posthuman is an escape from the panhuman.

Be a skeptictech progress doesnt help society but calcify inequalities by only benefiting
people of privilege
Dinerstein, 06 [Septermber 2006, Joel Dinerstein is an Assistant Professor of English at Tulane University ,
Technology and Its Discontents: On the Verge of the Posthuman American Quarterly, Volume 58, Number 3, pp.
569-570]
Kurzweil has mapped responses and fears of the posthuman futurelike mineonto a three-stage transition model for accepting new
technologies: (1) awe and wonderment at their potential to overcome age-old problems; (2) a sense of dread at the new set of
dangers; (3) realizing the only viable and responsible path is to set a careful course . . . [to] reap the benefits while managing the
dangers. Has any nation ever actually succeeded at steering such a careful course? Note Kurzweils
rhetorical assumptions: that new technologies overcome age-old problems; that autonomous technology
cannot be questioned, only managed; that our dread is cowardice. Given market forces and the consumer drive for
self-improvement, these technologies may be inevitable , but nothing in human history points to
posthumanity living deeper, richer lives that benefit the majority of the earths peoples . (As Mike Davis
has recently shown, a billion people now live in slums.) Tools and technologies are not inherently good or bad,
inevitable or autonomous, progressive or regressive, as scholars from Mumford to Nye have always insisted; they are
merely vehicles and applications of human beings .64 If progress means to go forward, Carl Becker
wondered in 1936 with the Nazis in ascendance and the Stalin purges in full bloom, [then] forward to what end, to the
attainment of what object? In 1963, theologian Paul Tillich reduced progress to the pejorative term, forwardism. More to
the point here, Bill McKibben wonders how a future of robots and genetic enhancement is something
higher and better for techno-utopians when they so rarely pay even lip service to social needs
such as feed[ing] the hungry. 65 GNR enthusiasts assume technological progress will produce social
progress . Yet even if GNR technologies come on-line as predicted, why would this produce a better
society rather than just health, hedonism, and mobility for the upper classes? It wont; thats just how
myth works . Technological progress is the quasi-religious myth of a desacralized industrial civilization; it is sustained through new
technological products, not empirical social change. The real questions we need to confront are these: What is
progress for? What is technology for? Scientists might rightly claim such questions are not within their purview, but they
surely demand attention from American studies scholars. A few suggestions: at the institutional and disciplinary level, we
need to make technology indispensable to the fields mastery and our understanding of whiteness; at
the rhetorical level, we need to interrogate the assumptions of the posthuman, as it continues the
white, Western tendency to universalize its own concepts; at the transnational level, we need to engage
 critiques of specifically Western ideals of technology and rationalism, as in the works of Ashis Nandy and
Francisco Varela. Andy Clark may be right when he defines the human organism as tools all the way down, but we are also creolized
all the way up.66 In providing intellectual leadership, the first step is simple: return to the fusion of the terms social and progress,
and uncouple technological progress. In the vernacular, the phrase technological innovation always connotes
linear progress (i.e., new technologies = beneficial social change). To return to social progress as a criteria for
judging humankind would place Western technology within a global eco-culture whose disastrous
contemporary state is due at least in part to the white legacies of colonialism, capitalism, and
technology, often in service to the Enlightenment ideal of the liberal human subject (the human).

Their internal link is about subsistence farmingthey dont spill over

Statistical analysis and studies proves the profit motive makes meaningful innovation
impossible
Maxton, 11 [10/28/11, Graeme Maxton, Our age of 'endarkenment',
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/innovation/2011/1028/1224306357282.html
The consensus suggests we are in a glorious age of innovation, but by historical standards our rate of
development is slowing down . If this continues, we face some difficult challenges in the near future THE RECENT DEATH
of Apples Steve Jobs provides us all with an opportunity to reflect. Not only on what life, and death, can mean, but also about our level
of innovativeness today. Apples iconic devices are often held up as symbols of modern humankinds creativity. The latest iPad or
iPhone make it easy to assume that our level of innovativeness is strong, that we are still making big leaps forward, going boldly where
no man has gone before. But we are not. In reality, we are taking tiny baby-steps as a species, and even some of
these seem to be backwards. Rather than living in an age of scientific wonder, our level of
innovativeness is actually falling and has been in steady decline for decades . According to work
carried by Dr Jonathan Huebner, a physicist working at the Pentagons Naval Air Warfare Center in
California and published in the New Scientist, our rate of technological innovation peaked a century
ago and has been declining ever since . Huebner believes, quite reasonably, that the more minds there are, the
more innovation there should be, all other things being equal. On this basis, the rate of technological progress we
are making today is barely better than in the 1600s . The rate of innovation peaked in 1873 and has
been declining ever since . Extrapolating into the future, Huebner predicts that by 2024 our rate of
innovation will drop to levels last seen in the Dark Ages. According to Huebner, this is partly because we have
already found 85 per cent of the fundamental technologies that are feasible. If science and technology were a
tree, we have already found the trunk and most of the branches. It is easy to think this may be right. Many of what we consider
to be inventions today are not really very groundbreaking. Apples phones, tablets and computers are certainly cool. But they are
also just improved versions of products that have existed for decades . It is the same in many other areas
of science too. The genome project, which will eventually map our genetic world and hopefully bring us new medical
breakthroughs, is only possible because of the discovery of DNA more than 50 years ago. The jet engine, the
atom bomb and the silicon chip are all decades old too. So is the internet. Of course we are still doing big things.
The Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland may take us into uncharted territory in particle physics one day. The International
Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor in France could generate power in the same way as the sun when it is complete. Satellites are
being sent beyond the farthest reaches of our solar system. But in a history chronicling the past 30 years, very few of our inventions
would be seen as major leaps forward. Most are only small steps, refinements to developments that are decades old. We are not taking
the steps as bold as those needed to discover gravity, new continents or the principles of flight. This is a shame, because there is still so
much to discover. We finished exploring most of the terra firma in our world more than 150 years ago but have only just started looking
properly at the sea, the largest part. We still do not understand consciousness and know very little about what is in the universe around
us. So what is wrong? There are three possible explanations for our loss of innovative momentum and direction. The first is Dr
Huebners belief that we have found most of the tree of knowledge already, though that may prove to be a foolhardy claim. When we
understand so little about so much, there seem to be major branches of the tree yet to discover. The second constraint on our
rate of innovativeness is economic . The third is that we are simply not being ambitious enough. Modern economics is
certainly holding us back. When economics meddles in science, profit and the business-case
suddenly loom large, fuzzing minds . Technologists and scientists are driven by what can be marketed
and consumed, not by what will improve our world . This is why we think of Apples products as innovative, when the
company is really just a developer of consumables like so many others. This also explains why Americas particle accelerator, Tevatron,
was shut down last month. Budget cuts made necessary by the financial crisis, mean that scientific advancement has to pay. Similarly,
 NASAs budget is being reduced and there are efforts to privatise space travel instead, putting big business on the bridge. This leaves
weapons development as the main focus of US research instead. Moreover, economics, at least the way we think about it today, has
given us the wrong goals , and not just in science. Because our progress is now measured in terms of the rate
of economic growth we can achieve each year, not in terms of the betterment of society or the pursuit of knowledge, we
are chasing the wrong objective. The third problem is our level of ambition or rather the lack of it.
Compared to the time of the European Enlightenment, 200 years or so ago, when ideas flourished and humankind made giant bounds
ahead, our vision now seems to extend little further than the ends of our noses . The Enlightenment brought us
modern science and reasoning. It encouraged everyone to think about how they could improve the world, creating a seed bed of ideas
that grew into a giant forest of thoughts, sustaining us for generations. If we are to change, we need more of that sort of thinking, that
sort of ambition. It is not just that we have the opportunity to move humankind forward, to discover so much that is not yet known that
should motivate a change in our ambitions either. We are going to have to raise our sights for other reasons too. When scientists
and doom-mongers talk about future oil shortages or the depletion of copper, zinc, rare earths or
dozens of other natural resources, there is a tendency for the non-scientific among us to dismiss these
claims. We assume that our innovativeness will somehow provide solutions when they are needed. We will
find another form of energy and replace the copper, zinc and other metals with something else. Yet this
ignores scientific reality . When the worlds raw materials have gone, they have gone. We cannot
recreate basic metals, no matter how clever we are . Nor can we step up to the scale of these problems while we are
constrained by the thought that an iPad is a big step forward.

The Feds wont crack down their ev is from 2013, ours is predictive
Schoenherr, 14citing Gregory P. Magarian, JD, professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis.
Neil, Wash U Expert: States should have some power over criminal laws of marijuana, Wash U News,
http://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/27165.aspx
Role of the states If the federal government decriminalizes or legalizes marijuana possession at the federal level, it could do so in a way that left
the states free to criminalize marijuana, or it could do so in a way that stripped the states of that power, Magarian said. The relevant
constitutional doctrine is called federal preemption. The federal government, where it has power to regulate, always has power to
bar the states from regulating. Often the federal government doesnt do this, in what are often called cooperative
federalism arrangements, such as Medicaid. If the federal government really wanted to federalize all marijuana
law, it could most directly do so by enacting a comprehensive set of marijuana regulations taxing sales, imposing standards for medical
marijuana, etc. The federal government As a predictive matter, I dont think the federal government will do that with
marijuana, Magarian said. At a minimum, the feds would be very unlikely to step on core areas of state regulation
schools, traffic, etc. as
they relate to marijuana. Beyond that, I think for both political and policy reasons the feds
will leave states with substantial power to criminalize marijuana possession and sale . The feds may preempt state
regulation in specific policy areas, like insurance coverage rules for medical marijuana.
 1NC War on Drugs
Internal link is about training others in harm reductionwont create a policy body in
Afghanistan or corruption

The affirmative continues the discourse of saving Afghanistan, reinforcing the

paternalism and neo-colonialism behind US actions
Crowe 07
(L. A. Crowe, Researcher, York Centre for International and Security Studies, York University, 2007, The Fuzzy
Dream: Discourse, Historical myths, and Militarized (in)Security - Interrogating dangerous myths of Afghanistan
and the West http://archive.sgir.eu/uploads/Crowe-loricrowe.pdf)
These elements of oppositional binaries is closely related to the second element: contemporary discourse has developed
from and further perpetuates a particular ideology that emmanates from a neo-liberal capitalist and
imperial agenda that is founded upon neo-colonialist attitudes and assumptions. The US campaign to
fight terrorism, initiated after September 11th explains Nahla Abdo has crystallized all the ideological
underpinnings of colonial and imperial policies towards the constructed other .82 This emerges in the
heroism myth mentioned above; for example, Debrix explains how narratives around humanitarianism serve an ideological purpose in
that it contributes to the reinforcement of neoliberal policies in pathological regions of the international landscape.83 It also emerges
in the militarization myth, insofar as neoliberal globalisation relies on the institutionalization of neo-colonialism and the
commodification and (re)colonization of labor via militarized strategies of imperial politics. That is, as Agathangelou and Ling point out,
Neoliberal economics enables globalized militarization.84 Embedded in this normalization of neo-colonial frames
are the elements of linearity and thus assumed rationality of reasoning in the West. As Canada stepped up its
role in direct combat operations (which included an increase of combat troops, fighter jets, and tanks with long-range firing
capacities85), Stephen Harper appealed to troop morale on the ground in Afghanistan, stating: Canada and the international community
are determined to take a failed state and create a "democratic, prosperous and modern country."86 (my italics) Proposed solutions
to the conflict(s) in Afghanistan have been framed and justified not only as saving backwards Afghanistan
but also as generously bringing it into the modern, capitalist, neoliberal age. Moreover, this element
represents an continuity of colonial power, presenting the one correct truth or resolution, emmanating
from the objective gaze of the problem-solving Western world. Representations of Afghanistan
present Western voices as the authority and the potential progress such authority can bring to the
East as naturally desirable. This rationality also presumes an inherent value of Western
methodology (including statistical analysis, quantification of data, etc) and devalues alternative epistemologies
including those of the Afghan people. This is problematic for several reasons: 1) It forecloses and discourages
thinking outside the box and instead relies upon the masters tools which include violent military force, the installation of a
democratic regime, peacekeeping, and reconstruction and foreign aid alternative strategies are deemed radical, unworkable, and
anti-American; 2) it prioritizes numbers and statitistics over lived experiences. By relying on tallies of
deaths, percetages of voters, and numbers of insurgents for example, the experiences of those living in
the region are obfuscated and devalued, and; 3)it reproduces a colonial hierarchy of knowledge
production. Old colonial narratives of have re-surfaced with renewed vigor in the case of Afghanistan
is contingent on and mutually reinforced by opposing narratives of a civilized and developed West.
For example: Consider the language which is being usedCalling the perpetrators evildoers, irrational, calling them the
forces of darkness, uncivilized, intent on destroying civilization, intent on destroying democracy. They hate freedom, we are
told. Every person of colour, and I would want to say also every Aboriginal person, will recognize that language. The language of us
versus them, of civilization versus the forces of darkness, this language is rooted in the colonial legacy.87 This colonizer/colonized
dichotomy is key to the civilisational justification the US administration pursues (We wage war to save civilization itself88) which, as
Agathangelou and Ling explain, is motivated by a constructed medieval evil that threatens American freedom and democracy, the
apotheosis of modern civilization, and therefore must be disciplined/civilized. In his Speech to Congress on September 21, 2001, Bush
portrays the irrational Other as Evil and retributive seeking to destroy the developed, secure
prosperous and civilized free world: These terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and
end a way of lifeAl Qaeda is to terror what the mafia is to crime. But its goal is not making money; its goal is remaking the
world, and imposing its radical beliefs on people everywhere.89 This production of othering and re-
institutionalization of colonial discourse has been enabled by and facilitated culture clash
explanations.90 The danger of such theories, warns Razack, lies not only in their decontextualization and
dehistoricization, but also on its reliance on the Enlightenment narrative and notions of European
moral superiority that justify the use of force. This is evident in the unproblematic way in which
outside forces have assumed a right of interference in the region spanning from the 18th century when imperial
 powers demarcated the Durrand Line (which created a border between British India and Afghanistan with the goal of making
Afghanistan an effective buffer statefor British Imperial interests91) to the American intervention that began in the Cold War,
followed by the Soviets in the 1980s and the Americans, Canadians and British today. In fact, The Wests practical
engagement in Afghanistan reveals how it has served to reporoduce this neo-colonial myth as well as
the complexities and paradoxes which simultaneously de-stabilize that myth. During the cold war, the Soviet
and the Americans used Afghanistan as the battleground for power, choosing to sponsor and condemn
various regimes as they saw fit; this history of foreign engagement contributed to state fragmentation,
underdevelopment, and the self-sustaining war-economy that persist today. An example of this is the use of
rentier incomes during the early 1900s that were used as a means of control and coercion.92

No impact to Pakistan instabilitytheir ev is hype

Hundley 12 (Before joining the Pulitzer Center, Tom Hundley was a newspaper journalist for 36 years, including
nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. During that time he served as the Tribunes
bureau chief in Jerusalem, Warsaw, Rome and London, reporting from more than 60 countries. He has covered three
wars in the Persian Gulf, the Arab-Israeli conflict and the rise of Irans post-revolutionary theocracy. His work has
won numerous journalism awards. He has taught at the American University in Dubai and at Dominican University
in River Forest, Illinois. He has also been a Middle East correspondent for GlobalPost and a contributing writer for
the Chicago News Cooperative. Tom graduated from Georgetown University and holds a masters degree in
international relations from the University of Pennsylvania. He was also National Endowment for the Humanities
journalism fellow at the University of Michigan. Published September 5, 2012
With both sides armed to the teeth, it is easy to exaggerate the fears and much harder to pinpoint where the real dangers lie. For the
United States, the nightmare scenario is that some of Pakistan's warheads or its fissile material falls into the hands of the Taliban or al Qaeda -- or,
worse, that the whole country falls into the hands of the Taliban. For example, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former CIA officer now at Harvard
University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, has warned of the "lethal proximity between terrorists, extremists, and nuclear
weapons insiders" in Pakistan. This is a reality, but on the whole, Pakistan's nuclear arsenal appears to be reasonably secure against internal
threats, according to those who know the country best. To outsiders , Pakistan appears to be permanently teetering on the
brink of collapse. The fact that large swaths of the country are literally beyond the control of the central government is not reassuring. But a
weak state does not mean a weak society, and powerful internal dynamics based largely on kinship and tribe make
it highly unlikely that Pakistan would ever fall under the control of an outfit like the Taliban. During the country's
intermittent bouts of democracy, its civilian leaders have been consistently incompetent and corrupt, bu t even in the worst of times , the
military has maintained a high standard of professionalism. And there is nothing that matters more to the Pakistani
military than keeping the nuclear arsenal -- its crown jewels -- out of the hands of India, the United States, and homegrown
extremists. "Pakistan struggled to acquire these weapons against the wishes of the world. Our nuclear capability comes as a result of great
sacrifice. It is our most precious and powerful weapon -- for our defense, our security, and our political prestige," Talat Masood, a retired
Pakistani lieutenant general, told me. "We keep them safe." Pakistan's nuclear security is in the responsibility of the Strategic Plans
Division, which appears to function pretty much as a separate branch of the military. It has its own training facility and an
elaborate set of controls and screening procedures to keep track of all warheads and fissile material and to monitor
any blips in the behavior patterns of its personnel. The 15 or so sites where weapons are stored are the mostly
heavily guarded in the country. Even if some group managed to steal or commandeer a weapon, it is highly unlikely the
group would be able to use it . The greater danger is the theft of fissile material, which could be used to make a crude bomb. "With 70 to
80 kilos of highly enriched uranium, it would be fairly easy to make one in the basement of a building in the city of your choice," said Pervez
Hoodbhoy, a distinguished nuclear physicist at Islamabad's Quaid-i-Azam University. At the moment, Pakistan has a stockpile of about 2.75 tons
-- or some 30 bombs' worth -- of highly enriched uranium. It does not tell Americans where it is stored. "All nuclear countries are conscious of
the risks, nuclear weapons states especially so," said Gen. Ehsan ul-Haq, who speaks with the been-there-done-that authority of a man who has
served as both chairman of Pakistan's Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee and head of the ISI, its controversial spy agency. "Of course there are
concerns. Some are genuine, but much of what you read in the U.S. media is irrational and reflective of paranoia. Rising
radicalism in Pakistan? Yes, this is true, and the military is very conscious of this." Perhaps the most credible endorsement of Pakistan's
nuclear security regime comes from its most steadfast enemy. The consensus among India's top generals and defense
experts is that Pakistan's nukes are pretty secure. "No one can be 100 percent secure, but I think they are more than 99 percent
secure ," said Shashindra Tyagi, a former chief of staff of the Indian Air Force. "They keep a very close watch on personnel. All of the steps
that could be taken have been taken. This business of the Taliban taking over -- it can't be ruled out, but I think it's unlikely. The
Pakistani military understands the threats they face better than anyone, and they are smart enough to take care it."
Yogesh Joshi, an analyst at the Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses in New Delhi, agrees: "Different states have different perceptions of
risk. The U.S. has contingency plans [to secure Pakistan's nukes] because its nightmare scenario is that Pakistan's weapons fall into terrorist
hands. The view from India over the years is that Pakistan, probably more than any other nuclear weapons state, has taken
measures to secure its weapons. At the political level here, there's a lot of confidence that Pakistan's nuclear weapons are secure."
No Pakistan collapsetons of checks
Bandow 9 Senior Fellow @ Cato, former special assistant to Reagan (11/31/09, Doug, Recognizing the Limits
of American Power in Afghanistan, Huffington Post, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10924)
From Pakistan's perspective, limiting the war on almost any terms would be better than prosecuting it for years, even to "victory," whatever that
would mean. In fact, the least likely outcome is a takeover by widely unpopular Pakistani militants. The Pakistan
military is the nation's strongest institution; while the army might not be able to rule alone, it can prevent any
other force from ruling. Indeed, Bennett Ramberg made the important point: "Pakistan, Iran and the former Soviet
republics to the north have demonstrated a brutal capacity to suppress political violence to ensure survival.
This suggests that even were Afghanistan to become a terrorist haven, the neighborhood can adapt and
resist." The results might not be pretty, but the region would not descend into chaos. In contrast, warned Bacevich: "To risk the
stability of that nuclear-armed state in the vain hope of salvaging Afghanistan would be a terrible mistake."
2NC
 2nc fw
The goal of debate should be to develop debaters as individuals with tools and techniques to
challenge institutional and interpersonal violencepersuasion and advocacy can do more
to help inform us as ethical subjects oriented towards the building of social justice
movementsconnecting our advocacy to how we create the change is more productive than
using the skills we gain to become another mouthpiece for the state
Harnett 10
[2010, Stephen John Hartnett is Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at The University of
Colorado Denver, Communication, Social Justice, and Joyful Commitment, Western Journal of Communication,
Volume 74, Issue 1, 2010; pages 68-93]

How curious, then, to realize that for

many of our colleagues in the field, communication is still largely studied and taught
not as a component of social justice but as a set of politically vacuous truisms or as tools for equipping
would-be corporate warriors to make even more money. But that orientation is finally changing. For example, in his 2008 National
Communication Association Presidential Address, Art Bochner delivered a rousing speech entitled Communication's Calling: The Importance of What We Care
About. Using his presidential bully pulpit to try to nudge his assembled listeners toward a deeper commitment to engaging in social justice scholarship, Bochner
asked communication scholars to focus attention on the conscience and authenticity of our discipline (2008, p. 15). To demonstrate that he was not unilaterally
trying to wrench the field in a new direction, Bochner reminded us that when the discipline of communication was first institutionalized in 1914 as the National
Association of Academic Teachers of Public Speaking, We may not have been outlaws, but certainly we were rebels (p. 15). Fleeing the esoteric bickering of
English departments, our intellectual forebears saw themselves as venturing off into new territory that would be marked by pragmatism and prudence marshaled in the
service of the public good. With the ancient Greeks as their guide, those founders hoped that teaching basic speaking skills could enhance democracy by enabling
citizens both to argue more clearly and to listen more fully. Using this history as his warrant for asking the audience to think about how their careers could include
reflection on questions of social justice, NCA President Bochner concluded his speech by reminding us that our students come to us seeking not
only job skills and citizenship training but also deeper philosophical guidance regarding how they should
live (p. 19). We should be clear that most of us do not have answers to that question, but just asking it amounts to a welcome turn
toward understanding how our profession could address such questions as How do we live, and how might
we live differently ? How can our teaching, research, and service make a difference in the world? We need
not settle for being technocrats , Bochner was arguing, stopping just short of begging us to engage instead in
research, teaching, and service that confront oppression , strive to empower others, and do so while humbly
seeking answers to life's big questions . As Bochner suggested in an exchange following his lecture, we should be asking What is
our mission?What can and should we do to live better and more fulfilling lives as scholars, teachers, and
citizens (personal communication, June 1, 2009)? 2 NCA President Bochner could raise these questions largely because the field has undergone a dramatic
transformation in the past two decades: Fueled by a new generation of scholars committed to focusing their talents on
ending gender inequity, racial discrimination, the machinery of empire, and the prison-industrial complex,
we are slowly but surely shedding our legacy of being technocrats and Yes Men (and Women) for the state ,
instead assuming increasingly visible roles as national leaders in multifaceted movements for social justice . To
further this trend, this essay engages in four moves. First, it reviews some of the lingering conditions that hinder our pursuit of engaged social justice scholarship and
activism; this section of the essay is written in a traditional, academically critical mode. Second, it offers an intellectual history of the movements and subgenres of
communication scholarship that have led us to this juncture of our field's evolution; this part of the essay is written in a retrospective and celebratory mode. Third, it
offers some cautionary tales and then some thankful reckonings regarding the dilemmas and rewards of pursuing engaged social justice scholarship and activism;
because these pages are based on my personal experiences, this aspect of the essay is autobiographical, even confessional. Fourth, the essay closes with a meditation
on the existential question of how to approach scholarship and activism in the face of overwhelming obstacles; this closing movement of the essay is written in a
philosophical, even sermonic mode. Written
amidst the worst economic crash since 1929, in a season when talk of another
deadly pandemic (this time the H1N1, Swine Flu) fills the airwaves, as the nation continues to pour billions of dollars
into catastrophic wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and as the homeless roam the streets below my third-floor
window in alcoholic and mental health stupors, I hope both to add a sense of urgency to Bochner's call and to
answer his question about what is our mission? by advocating for engaged communication scholarship
that teaches, studies, and joins political projects committed to building social justice . Those of us who already engage in
such projects suspect that we might not end racism or imperialism or the prison-system in our lifetimes; consequently, even
as we tackle the day's pressing problems, we also need to find ways to not become consumed by those
struggles. Indeed, we have all learned that the haggard activist, angry and enflamed, accusing others of their
transgressions while embodying anxiety, achieves little, alienates many, and often succumbs to despair .
Working toward the third phrase that comprises my title, joyful commitment, thus asks us to pledge ourselves to work for
social justice and for personal growth, to be both radical in our demands and gentle in our demeanor , both
outraged by inequality and oppression and joyous in our commitments to end them. As Martin Luther King Jr. asked in a
speech from 1957, where he called upon the power of revolutionary love, Agape means nothing sentimental or basically affectionate.
It means understanding, redeeming good will for all men [and women]. It is an overflowing love which seeks
nothing in return (p. 22). As this essay unfolds, I thus ask my colleagues to consider how the field of communication
can work for social justice while embodying joyful commitment, hence honoring King's call to build our
political projects from a place of overflowing love (p. 22; see also Hartnett, 2007; Kelly, 2005). Citizenship Training, Embedded
Intellectuals, & Theory Wolves If you add up the pedagogical efforts of the tens of thousands of us who have taught public speaking over the past century, then the
number of students we have helped to learn how to speak in public, write clean sentences, use libraries, and
engage in the other intellectual and creative tasks that empower them to be more effective citizens would
number in the hu,ndreds of thousands. As the founders of the field knew well, public speaking skills (and increasingly the other
mediated forms of communication that we teach and study) are tools of persuasion and enlightenment, even weapons for
progressive social change when handled adroitly. And so I would like to begin this essay by suggesting that we should all feel a sense of pride
in the fact that the field of communication is based in part on a commitment to enhancing civic engagement. As Jerry Hauser (2004) observes, harking all the way
back to democracy's Athenian roots, and using the term rhetoric to encapsulate the modes of citizenship training that I am alluding to here, Rhetoric lay at the
heart of citizenship and of the citizen's public identity. This position of centrality is rhetoric's birthright (pp. 1, 12). From this perspective, our discipline is enmeshed
to its very core in the larger promises of democratic governance, Enlightenment principles, and civic life. I will focus my comments below on other matters, but want
to foreground my support for the premise that teaching communication is a noble civic duty. 3 We have been taught to celebrate this tradition
of teaching public speaking and other communication skills as the building blocks of democracy ; and while we could
question that birthright, particularly the ways it has ignored questions of race, class, gender, sexuality, nationalism, and other political topics, I propose that we
also need to deepen an ongoing conversation about some other troubling skeletons . For a new generation of critical
communication historians is unearthing the startling ways that our field, far from being committed to citizenship training and
democratic engagement, has in fact functioned from its inception as a tool of the state . Dating back to the decades after
World War I and then accelerating dramatically around World War II, these critics argue, the field of communication has been both
embedded within and eagerly complicit with the National Security State. As Jack Bratich notes, The history of
communication is bound up with state and corporate interests (2008, p. 25). Feeding off of grants and contracts from such
interests, communication scholars were implicitly embedded within the political imperatives and intellectual
frameworks of the Cold War state, hence functioning less as bearers of brave new truths and teachers of
engaged citizens than as clerks for the massive machinery that spewed out generations of dogmatic
anticommunism, love of the Bomb, cheerful consumerism, and unquestioned U.S. international dominance
(Taylor & Hartnett, 2000; see also Greene & Hicks, 2005). The field's record of studying, let alone confronting, the inequalities
embodied in gendered and racializing discourses are equally thin, albeit improving rapidly. Save for the recent efforts of John
McHale and those of us associated with PCARE, our field's stand on prisons and the death penalty has amounted to an

almost century-long silence (see Hartnett & Larson, 2006; McHale, 2002, 2007; PCARE, 2007). Surely, for every one communication scholar who has
worked alongside an NGO or as a community activist, there
have been many more who worked either as consultants for the
state or as the servants of monster corporations that make millions of dollars by exploiting the labor of those
invisible workers most communication scholars will never see, hear from, or think about . And still today, if you flip
through the announcements of recent grant recipients in any issue of Spectra, it will become clear where many of our colleague's solidarities lie. Both historically and
in the present, then, many members of the field of communication have served and continue to serve those in power in
short, an alarming number
of our peers are clerks for the state. 4 Any discussion about the future of the field of communication and its
commitments to teaching, studying, and engaging social justice issues must therefore confront this curious
contradiction buried within our institutional DNA: historically, our notions of how public speaking can enhance the democracy
have been so limited regarding race, class, gender, and other obvious political issues, that our call to engage in
citizenship training has amounted to producing departments of well-behaved bourgeois debaters. There are
triumphs buried in the dross, to be sure, but they are too few and too far between . At the same time, the field's high-
flying grant-getting stars have tended to favor projects sanctioned by corporate interests and National
Security State imperatives, meaning that much of our work has not so much enhanced the democracy as
enriched capitalists and provided the military-industrial complex with the veneer of intellectual legitimacy . As
we shall see below, one response to this predicament has been to turn to European critical theorists, albeit with curious consequences. 5

The purpose of debate should be to evaluate the performative weight of competing

presentations of knowledge. The affirmatives bold vision is necessary to disrupt anti-racist
imaginaries but the negatives focus on pragmatic tactics ensures replication of the status
quo
Bhattacharyya 13, Race and Ethnicity Prof at Aston University (Gargi, How can we live with ourselves?
Universities and the attempt to reconcile learning and doing, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 36, No. 9, 1411-1428)
In the negotiations that Michael Keith (2008) characterizes as complicity with the bureaucracy through which much politics operates, the role
of the scholar is, at best, changeable, ranging from playing the expert to trimming knowledge to fit the demands and attention span of the
audience, to speaking in whatever dubious tongue will achieve the desired end. Keith argues that our responsibility is to evaluate the
performative weight of various presentations of knowledge. Arguably, the value added by scholars is the ability
to move between different presentations of knowledge with some understanding of which register will yield
influence and with whom. Whether this judgement is an outcome of intellectual work or an indication of the
slightly different skills that can develop when learning to deploy academic knowledge in public arenas, a set of
skills that might be characterized as owing more to political than to scholarly judgement, is left undecided. In the struggle to reach racial justice,
these judgement calls can lead the would-be engaged scholar into some murky waters. At the end of 2009, I and a colleague assisted a local Asian
womens group with a report on experiences of maternity services and post-natal depression for the tactical objective of influencing the local
health trust to support targeted services for Asian women in that area. In the writing of the report, both I and the group understood the need to
stress particular recognized needs, such as language and (despite some argument on my part) the more nebulous culture. In our wider
discussions it was clear that what was being demanded was a service that responded to very local needs of women with extensive caring
responsibilities and limited mobility and who found existing services unresponsive and often disrespectful language played a part for some of
these women, but flexibility and attention to their particular circumstances was the more general need. The decision to present these needs as
requiring services tailored to particular cultural and linguistic needs was shaped primarily by a reading of what was likely to work and what was
likely to achieve a service that was sufficiently local and that could employ local women. Whether or not the funders believed this articulation of
need or whether they too understood this to be a necessary fiction to overcome the barriers to accessing decent services for poorer parts of the
city the report fulfilled the bureaucratic requirements of all concerned and the pilot project went ahead. Strategic essentialism shows its
pragmatic usefulness again and a particular staging of ethnicity as lack becomes justified as the means by which resources are allocated to people
who are, undoubtedly, needy. So far, so justified, no? Yes, the depiction of ethnic identity deployed in this micro-negotiation (just one more tiny
piece of theatre in the business of a busy city and overstretched and painfully bureaucratic public services) borders on the reductive and is
carefully edited to meet the requirements of the exercise, but, what else is there to do? This is no more than another example of the day-to-day
play on the fictions of stable identity and community boundary demanded so often in the pursuit of social (if not, perhaps, racial) justice in urban
Britain today. In my wider discussions with this group, members complained vociferously about their treatment at the hands of South Asian
professionals with their most strident criticisms directed at the middle-class Asian women that they encountered through health and maternity
services and who appeared unable to treat Asian women from this neighbourhood (marked in local imagination as closed, lowincome and home to
a particular and close-knit Pakistani community) with the respect necessary in any professional relationship. At least one articulate and vocal
young woman (and it is worth noting that I feel impelled to tell you this in case the earlier strategic representation of Asian women from this
neighbourhood as needing remedial assistance clouds the story) explained that, after terrible experiences of maternity care, if she encounters a
woman doctor she just leaves because she prefers to see a man. I asked the group about this issue repeatedly until they thought that I was
obsessed with Asian women professionals (no doubt because I was positioned in this role myself, as possessor of the tactical expertise necessary
to present their demands as a formal report to funders). Why would you want to construct a service with the potential to create another layer of
disrespectful Asian health workers who cannot behave professionally to those they perceive to be of a lower status? The response seemed to be,
although never quite made explicit, that cultural knowledge here could be used to ensure employment for local women with direct experience of
some of the issues identified. The desire was to disrupt the inadequacies of professionalism in favour of some more equal footing between worker
and client and ethnicity, culture and locality offered a means of framing this other desire in a manner that could be comprehensible to the health
trust. Some years ago, I had another experience of being asked to assist a womens group to access funding. Then it was a request to help draft a
tender document that could elicit research about the needs of Muslim women, with particular attention to access to services. I tell this story as an
indication of how clueless I have been because at that time I wrote back saying that I would be pleased to help but I was not sure that Muslim
women could be shown to have shared needs as Muslim women. Birminghams Muslim population is very ethnically diverse, ranging from
communities with a long history of settlement in the city and a visible presence in local politics (whatever the unhelpful nepotism of some of this
representation) to very recent arrivals who face challenges accessing any public service. These communities are dispersed unevenly across the
city a factor that itself can shape visibility in local political imagination. Despite the overall vulnerability to poverty of the most readily
identifiable Muslim communities, in common with most large cities Birmingham is also home to some Muslim groups who are well represented
in professional occupations. What would it mean to formulate a proposal based on the assumption that women from these diverse groups had the
same needs that could be serviced by one city-wide group? Of course, I did not hear from them again because I had made it all too obvious that I
did not get it. The objective was to form a Muslim womens group at a time when such a development could, conceivably, access some start-up
support. The language of needs was no more than the tactical fiction prescribed by (possibly imagined) funders. The shared need was not for
enhanced access to services. In a time of frightening Islamophobia and in a city with one of the most sizeable and noticeable Muslim populations
of any British city but where public life of all kinds is overwhelmingly male, riding the conjunction of popular fears and public-sector
bureaucracies of allocation could allow a temporary creation of a public space and possible voice for Muslim women. The point was the
possibility of intervention, not how many people could be signposted to relevant benefits. Even my slow self could understand this, but I could
not make the leap from this tactic to the fictional staging of need on the basis of an already older and probably unsustainable model of community
representation. More fool me. I am pretty certain that this same group did access funding successfully, under the auspices of the highly
controversial Prevent programme. Prevent was the title of the Labour governments domestic anti-terrorism and anti-extremism programme,
focused, allegedly, on preventing the circumstances that might harbour extremism and possible violence (see HCCLGC 2010). In practice,
funding was siphoned to a highly diverse range of projects that made little overall sense (see Kundnani 2009). Some of the initiatives further
alienated Muslim communities but some others were initiated by community organizations that recognized that purporting to address the
extremism agenda was one of the few remaining avenues for state support for community services. The performance of identity required for this
funding regime refocused from ethnicity to religious identity (although many of the local groups that received funding emerged from initiatives
that had grown from particular ethnic communities in particular areas) and from needs to civic participation. Whereas the needs model,
institutionalized most famously in the legislative response to the Lawrence Enquiry, created a space where groups sought to demonstrate their
disproportionate disadvantage in accessing one or other public services as the lever to access attention, resources and recognition, Prevent
represented Muslim communities as an ever-present danger that needed to be reshaped. Better to assist these people to become citizens because,
otherwise, who knows what might happen? In both cases, funding rests on somewhat demeaning performances of identity look how abject and/or
dangerous we are. I understand the overarching pragmatism of local organizations. Their priority is to navigate whatever terrain
local power and politics offers and to achieve some gains in the process, by whatever means necessary. It is
unsurprising that they are disinterested in seeking to disrupt racist imaginaries, because this much more
uncertain project threatens to distract from achieving some local gains on the ground. At worst, attempts to complicate
local folk understandings of race and ethnicity (and it is these folk understandings that shape institutional decision-making) can be deployed to
sustain existing inequalities if Asian women are not the needy creatures of this depiction, then no local post-natal support is necessary; if Muslim
women are a highly diverse group with varying access to public life, then why offer any assistance to create a public space for them? At my most
cynical, this can seem like an update of the infamous race industry that Gilroy (1987) critiqued so forcefully in the 1980s. When seeking to
cooperate with any emerging public towards the goal of racial justice, it can seem that the anxious scholar has no option but to feed the tendency
to solidify and simplify ethnic identity for short term ends because this staging of identity remains a central aspect of negotiating with public
institutions in this time and place. I do not want to argue that these tactical performances are not necessary, or that scholars should devote their
energies to complicating understandings of the constitution of identities. As David Goldberg (2008) has argued convincingly, the critique and
attempted dismantling of the category of race has been incorporated effectively by those who wish to silence all talk of racism. However, the
imperative to be comprehensible to existing regimes of power , however localized and temporary their influence, seems
to lead to a privileging of tactics over knowledge . We might not believe the portrayal of the world that we
present to decision-makers for tactical reasons, but outcomes trump understanding, not least because the
confusions of understanding can lead to the maintenance of things as they are . In this situation, one of the demands on
the would-be scholaractivist is to not say too much or be too eager to demonstrate the range and extent of their knowledge: just enough from the
world of scholarship and not a word more (almost) Private sociologies contemplation, imagination and what cannot be learned in public Crudely
put we need both the forms of technocratic knowledge that might make the workings of the bureau transparent both to itself and to its public . .
.and the forms of ethical knowledge that might challenge the status quo itself. (Keith 2008, p. 327) Michael Keith suggests that a public
scholarship needs to move between these registers of technocratic knowledge (which of course, will have varying demands according to location
and objective) and ethical knowledge. I wonder if, as well as this attention to what is being done and what can be done and the other question of
what should be done, there is another division between the scholarship that seeks to know the world as it is (and which may combine or move
between the technical and the ethical in this endeavour) and another aspect of intellectual life that seeks to imagine an elsewhere. The ethical may
imply this elsewhere to some extent but the terms of ethical critique may also be constrained by what is, because this imperfect present forms the
basis of describing what is lacking and what could be. The imaginative elsewhere that I am thinking of can be envisioned only when there is a
momentary move away from focusing on the constraints of the here and now. In most of the spaces that I know (British-based, refracted through
the demands of a very local politics, appealing to the community as a means of legitimation), there is a demand that knowledge for political
purposes is suitable for quick summary, contains only limited ambiguity or uncertainty, is targeted and comprehensible to the desired audience,
and can be demonstrated as true in a manner that is convincing to sceptical audiences of limited specialist education. The criticisms of the
demand that research should demonstrate its impact echo a number of these points not least in arguing that the demand for accessibility may
militate against originality or complexity. To have an impact, research must banish some of the uncertainty that necessarily accompanies almost
any scholarly endeavour. In an echo of some strands of anti-capitalism, the refusal of marketization, even using the language of former elites, may
contribute to a reclaiming of learning as an activity undertaken between those struggling to become human. This continues the desire to escape
the instrumentalization of all human relationships that accompanies the intensive marketization of our lives. It is not hard to see that the public
engagement of scholars or even the hybrid creature, the scholaractivist, can be easily accommodated within the institutional imperatives of the
marketized university. For all the tactical benefits of performing scholarly expertise in public arenas, such performances cannot fulfil the range of
our responsibilities to learning or to politics. Arguably, the ability to choose different registers of scholarly performance in pursuit of particular
tactical ends is itself a skill that arises from practices that cannot be encompassed in the terms of public engagement. The balance between
professional expertise and populism, the ability to place the tactics of that moment in a historical context, an anticipation of the consequences of
some performances and a consideration of how the most local of concerns is connected, often unknowingly, to a wider world where the tactics of
immediate need may take on anothersignificance all of this requires times of contemplation away from the noise of immediate instrumental
demands. One of the many discomforts arising from the marketization of universities is the will to transform all knowledge into easily digestible
lumps of product. There is less and less room to suggest that knowing is difficult, sometimes arduous and that understanding requires intensive
application from the audience, not only from the scholar. Not all learning is amenable to a quick summary that can be repackaged for a variety of
marketing purposes and, more importantly, without some institutional tolerance for the messy, time-consuming and uncertain practices of
scholarship, the marketable commodity of expertise, including in sound-bite form, can never emerge. Perhaps inevitably, the pressure to produce
knowledge in a manner that can meet such demands shapes scholarly life, including the manner in which scholars seek to connect with publics.
For this reason, I want to end with a defence of the most lonely and private practices of scholarship. In another period of extreme violence and
economic crisis, some sought to imagine otherwise through the active refusal of orderly form and a wilful remaking of the terms of meaning. The
experiment with form and fracturing of meaning that we name as modernism combined a commentary on and a critique of a mass-produced
world, reusing the everyday languages of commodification in order to render them strange. Whereas some of the leading exponents of high
modernism were unabashed about their adherence to elitism, they also understood the corrosive impact of the market when it becomes the
measure of all human worth and capacity. The dance of twentieth-century cultural debate, from modernism to postmodernism and late modernity,
returns repeatedly to these questions, to the pacifying impact of understanding our lives through explanatory narratives modelled on marketing
slogans and, equally, the uncertainty and elusiveness of meaning in such an intensely commodified world (for a discussion of these debates, see
Huyssen 1986). Whatever else, who could read, watch, see or listen to any art from the last 100 years and believe that what human beings can
know about themselves and each other is amenable to being summarized and reproduced in short accessible bursts that can be transferred across
marketing forms? Sometimes understanding important things can be laborious, and the labour is an important component of developing
understanding. Perhaps scholarship cannot adopt such poetic approaches easily and the jolt in consciousness of those modernist experiments can
never be repeated for us. If what is required is an experiment in form, then it must take a shape for our time. However, sometimes at least,
perhaps we should choose ellipsis over transparency, suggestive fragments over too tidy narratives, a writing that reveals the painstaking
processes of learning and that demands a similar level of scholarly attention from the reader. Scholarly writing is, and often should be, a private
affair. There may be occasional moments of clarity when there is an urgent and accessible message to publicize. Sometimes a lifetime of work
yields a way of understanding that can be reworked for popular commentary. But the business of reading, analysis and writing to learn, which is
what I take most scholarship to be, is a far more lonely, timeconsuming and haphazard process. Sometimes perhaps the point about public
scholarship is not so much the ability to produce scholarly work as the commitment to being part of the public. There have been times, even in
my political lifetime, when it seemed fairly clear that there was a movement, or a network, or, at the very least, a collection of people who
together were engaged in activities that we hoped would change society. If and when academic work was produced by some members of this
group, it was tolerated or viewed with passing interest. If things were written by those not recognized as part of the larger activity, this work was
viewed with bemusement or disinterest. To be honest, almost no one who has met me in any political campaign will be familiar with what I write
and most have no idea what I do for a living. Writing offers a space of contemplation for me. This is where I can think about the dilemmas of
political life without the pressure of having to do something. Although I also conduct research for funders who demand immediate
recommendations, most of my writing is not programmatic. A lot of it is barely academic but I know that it has a relation to my political life,
although this may be meaningful to no one but me. So there you have it. Try to be a half-decent comrade. Do not rush to commentary before you
are able to do everyday work the kind of political work that an older comrade described by saying that another person was no longer with us
because he had said that he did not want to do this donkey work any more, when in fact donkey work is all there is. Use your energies to become
part of the public; forget trying to address some public that you scarcely know. Enjoy the luxury of writing when you can, but do not write with
that painfully self-conscious sense of analysing the movement. Focus on becoming your own public because in such an unjust world, most
people cannot afford the luxury of sociology and, unless we can cut the working day and provide childcare, our badgering will not change that.
Do not restrict our thinking and ambition to tinkering with what is. Dare to dream the future when we can. At
the same time, try to explain why knowledge is painful but necessary. Make space to practise living with knowledge while
imagining something else. Most of all, admit that we can know what is and what has been, but not what could
be, because it is in the could be that all of our salvations lie.

Otherwise debate becomes a game of administrative tinkering that always displaces

normative questions of incarceration in favor of sanitized issues of process
Murakawa 14, Associate Professor
[2014, Naomi Murakawa is an Associate Professor Center for African American Studies, First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America.
ProQuest ebrary]

The history of liberal law-and-order matters because the same proposals for better administration, proffered with
the same good intentions, are likely to reproduce the same monstrous outcomes in the twenty-first century . The
problems of a normatively untethered liberal law-and-order regime are clear in the arc of liberal positions on
judicial discretion. Mid-century liberals viewed discretion as dangerous individualized justice , tailored to each
defendant from each judges moral cloth in all its idiosyncratic textures . Judicial discretion lurked in laws twilight
zone, dispensing what Judge Marvin Frankel called law without order. Liberal fear of discretion endured through the mid-1980s, when one
could easily characterize the mainstream liberal thought as unambiguously opposed to discretionary administrative interpretation and
implementation. 15 With the rise of sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimums through the 1980s and 1990s, however, liberals called for
more judicial discretion by praising that which they previously reprimanded justice customized to each individual defendant. 16 As a
project to control the irrationalities of racial bias and administrative discretion, liberal law-and-order ignored
empirical lessons and displaced normative questions. Reformers invoked the promises and perils of
discretion while ignoring the central findings of research. The American Bar Foundations 1957 survey and the myriad
studies it inspired analyzed discretion within the total criminal justice system. As a system, carceral machinery is not easily

corrected by small administrative adjustments : tighten discretion in one place, and the criminal justice
system accommodates, to use the original language of the ABF studies, so that discretion simply becomes more
important for a different decision maker. Accommodation is evident of sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimums, which
diminished judicial discretion but effectively increased prosecutorial discretion. When situated with a total system approach, the amount of
discretion has neither increased nor decreased, concludes Samuel Walker; it has simply moved from one agency to another. 17
Administrative tinkering does not confront the damning features of the American carceral state, its scale
and its racial concentration , which, when taken together reinforce and raise African American vulnerability
to premature death . By focusing on the intra-system problems of discretion, lawmakers displaced
questions of justice onto the more manageable, measurable issues of system function . When framed as a problem of
discretion that is, individual decision making permissible by formal rules then solutions to racial inequality double back to
individual administrators and their institutional rules. In this sense, problematizing discretion forces questions
of remediation onto sanitary administrative grounds . Should judges be elected or appointed? Should judges
administer justice through sentencing guidelines? No guidelines and some mandatory minimums? No
mandatory minimums and only mandatory maximums? Will judges or parole boards select the final release
date? These questions matter, but they cannot replace clear commitments to racial justice . When they are
posed independently of normative goals, process becomes the proxy, not the path, to justice . Without a
normatively grounded understanding of racial violence, liberal reforms will do the administrative shuffle .
This book traced a stark half-century turn from confronting white racial violence administered and enabled by carceral apparatuses, to controlling
black criminality through a procedurally fortified, race-neutral system. Race liberals institutionalized the right to safety while skirting its
animating call against state-sanctioned white violence. Fixation on administrative minutiae distracted from the normative
core of punishment in a system of persistent racial hierarchy. Unlike administrative tinkering, reforms for
decriminalization and decarceration would push debates to their normative core: what warrants
punishment, in what form, and why? 18 In place of liberal searches for the ideal procedural path to life
incarceration, metrics of racial justice should focus on what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls the state-sanctioned or
extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death. 19 Seeing
racism as group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death gives proper context to acts of violence between individuals. If we situate
private violence in relation to group-differentiated reality, we begin to see the tight weave of state and private racial violence. An example often
mobilized to repressive ends is the fact that most crimes occur within rather than between racial groups, such that African Americans, Latinos,
and Native Americans confront high incarceration rates and high victimization rates. This is the complex story of the U.S. racial
state, where normal institutional and ideological processes perpetuate the multigenerational transmission of
accumulated advantage and accumulated disadvantage. 20 Accumulated advantage imparts a presumption of innocence;
inherited wealth enables home ownership in class-segregated areas (i.e., a safe neighborhood) and medical insurance for diagnosis of
conditions and coverage of various prescriptions such as Ritalin (i.e., more effective forms of meth). In contrast, accumulated
disadvantage imparts a presumption of guilt.
 2nc at: perm
tag
Bhattacharyya 13, Race and Ethnicity Prof at Aston University (Gargi, How can we live with ourselves?
Universities and the attempt to reconcile learning and doing, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 36, No. 9, 1411-1428)
In Britain also there has been a move away from radical imagination in the politics of race, towards either
highly institutionalized activity designed to measure and correct differential outcomes, or to ethnic particularity
that challenges racism faced by a particular group but rarely links this activity to other struggles or a vision of an
alternative society. However necessary these forms of organization may be because institutional outcomes
continue to harden inequality between groups and mobilization needs to take place where people are, building on the
affiliations that make sense to them the loss of a larger vision and set of aspirations diminishes what anti-racist
politics can be . Kelly (2002, p. xii) goes on to specify the loss that arises from too exclusive a focus on
matters of institutional detail or immediate politicking: Without new visions we dont know what to build,
only what to knock down. We not only end up confused, rudderless, and cynical, but we forget that making
a revolution is not a series of clever maneuvers and tactics but a process that can and must transform us.
This new revolutionary subject is unlikely to emerge from the mundane techniques of management that have
come to typify useful research in the field of racism. In response to the formulation of recent research funding in
the UK, research in the field of race and racism that connects with users has tended towards the technical. Much of
this is shaped by the demand that research demonstrate its own impact, that is, shows its usefulness to an audience
beyond academia, often before any findings are made and in order for time and money to be allocated.6 For the
field of race and ethnic studies, this demand brings a model of knowledge as technique often management
technique. Whether racism is seen to arise from communicational barriers between groups or from flawed
institutional practices, the solution is presented as alternative practices do this and others will adapt their behaviour
in these ways. If this were the extent of the imaginative failure, things would not be too bad. After all, universities
rarely include the most exciting of ideas until the excitement can be rewritten as tradition. Sometimes banishment
from the academy can help to get a different and more energetic audience for ideas that aspire to change our world.
However, the politics of race seems to be institutionalized in an even more tightly confined logic in the spaces
outside the academy. There may be a widespread recognition that racism demands an institutional response, but this
is ripped away from any larger political narrative altogether. As a result, the attempts by scholars to address a
public also tend to be limited by the narrow demands of such technical or legalistic approaches to what anti-
racism can and should be. There is a dilemma here. For scholars who wish to connect with so called
practitioners and who, perhaps, consider this world of equalities practice as their public research is likely to
become focused around these questions of technical organization. Of course, many of us still seek to document
and explore the complexity of racism and its impact in the world but the focus for this endeavour becomes
segmented by institutional focus and, often, a rush to make recommendations. Access to research funding in
Britain, increasingly the only route to creating space for scholarly work, demands that research delivers this impact
of immediate and usable advice. At the same time, the public of practitioners a group here that is overwhelmingly
concentrated in organizations tasked with delivering services to diverse populations, whether through statutory
services or the third sector appear to understand the role of the intellectual only as this kind of technical adviser.7
Useful research becomes only this research that can enable alternative and potentially more effective
operation of bureaucratic practices of one kind or another. This framing of anti-racist research transforms
the kind of politics that can be imagined for this intellectual endeavour. This is anti-racism as a matter of
organizational adaptation, not any wider social transformation . Perhaps some believe that transformation
occurs through the collective impact of these many small organizational changes that has certainly been the
unspoken implication of anti- racist work since the Lawrence Enquiry but, whatever the benefits of improved
institutional practices, if these in fact have been achieved, this approach abandons any sense of political
movement . We may be producing work that connects with a public, but the aspirations of both scholars and public
seem less than they were.
 2nc impact
This outweighsinstitutional structures of domination create everyday holocaustsyou
should reject singular focused impacts in favor of working against the ongoing extinctions
of people of color
Omolade 89
[1989, Barbara Omolade is a historian of black women for the past twenty years and an organizer in both the
womens and civil rights/black power movements, We Speak for the Planet in Rocking the ship of state : toward
a feminist peace politics, pp. 172-176]

efforts by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan to limit nuclear testing, stockpiling, and weaponry,
Recent
demonstrate how "peace" can
while still protecting their own arsenals and selling arms to countries and factions around the world, vividly

become an abstract concept within a culture of war. Many peace activists are similarly blind to the constant
wars and threats of war being waged against people of color and the planet by those who march for "peace"
and by those they march against. These pacifists , like Gorbachev and Reagan, frequently want people of color
to fear what they fear and define peace as they define it. They are unmindful that our lands and peoples
have already been and are being destroyed as part of the "final solution" of the "color line." It is difficult to
persuade the remnants of Native American tribes , the starving of African deserts , and the victims of the
Cambodian "killing fields" that nuclear war is the major danger to human life on the planet and that only a
nuclear "winter" embodies fear and futurelessness for humanity . The peace movement suffers greatly from its
lack of a historical and holistic perspective, practice, and vision that include the voices and experiences of
people of color; the movement's goals and messages have therefore been easily coopted and expropriated by
world leaders who share the same culture of racial dominance and arrogance . The peace movement's racist
blinders have divorced peace from freedom, from feminism, from education reform, from legal rights, from
human rights, from international alliances and friendships, from national liberation, from the particular (for

and the general (human being). Nevertheless, social movements such as the civil rights-
example, black female, Native American male)

black power movement in the United States have always demanded peace with justice, with liberation, and with
social and economic reconstruction and cultural freedom at home and abroad. The integration of our past and our present
holocausts and our struggle to define our own lives and have our basic needs met are at the core of the
inseparable struggles for world peace and social betterment. The Achilles heel of the organized peace movement in this country
has always been its whiteness. In this multi-racial and racist society, no allwhite movement can have the strength to bring about basic changes. It is
axiomatic that basic changes do not occur in any society unless the people who are oppressed move to make them occur. In our society it is people of
color who are the most oppressed. Indeed our entire history teaches us that when people of color have organized and struggled-most especially, because
of their particular history, Black people-have moved in a more humane direction as a society, toward a better life for all people.1 Western man's

whiteness, imagination, enlightened science, and movements toward peace have developed from a culture and history
mobilized against women of color . The political advancements of white men have grown directly from the
devastation and holocaust of people of color and our lands . This technological and material progress has been in direct proportion
to the undevelopment of women of color. Yet the dayto- day survival, political struggles, and rising up of women of color,
especially black women in the United States, reveal both complex resistance to holocaust and undevelopment and often

conflicted responses to the military and war. The Holocausts Women of color are survivors of and remain
casualties of holocausts , and we are direct victims of war -that is, of open armed conflict between countries or between factions
within the same country. But women of color were not soldiers , nor did we trade animal pelts or slaves to the white
man for guns, nor did we sell or lease our lands to the white man for wealth. Most men and women of color
resisted and fought back , were slaughtered , enslaved , and force marched into plantation labor camps to
serve the white masters of war and to build their empires and war machines . People of color were and are
victims of holocausts-that is, of great and widespread destruction, usually by fire. The world as we knew and
created it was destroyed in a continual scorched earth policy of the white man. The experience of Jews and other Europeans under
the Nazis can teach us the value of understanding the totality of destructive intent, the extensiveness of torture, and the demonical apparatus of war
aimed at the human spirit. A Jewish father pushed his daughter from the lines of certain death at Auschwitz and said, "You will be a remembrance-You tell
the story. You survive." She lived. He died. Many have criticized the Jews for forcing non-Jews to remember the 6 million Jews who died under the Nazis and
women of color, we, too, are "remembrances"
for etching the names Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Terezin and Warsaw in our minds. Yet as

of all the holocausts against the people of the world. We must remember the names of concentration camps
such as Jesus, Justice, Brotherhood, and Integrity , ships that carried millions of African men, women, and
children chained and brutalized across the ocean to the "New World." We must remember the Arawaks, the
Taino, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, the Narragansett, the Montauk, the Delaware, and the other Native
American names of thousands of U.S. towns that stand for tribes of people who are no more. We must
remember the holocausts visited against the Hawaiians, the aboriginal peoples of Australia, the Pacific Island
peoples, and the women and children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We must remember the slaughter of men
and women at Sharpeville, the children of Soweto, and the men of Attica. We must never, ever, forget the
children disfigured, the men maimed, and the women broken in our holocausts-we must remember the
names, the numbers, the faces, and the stories and teach them to our children and our children's children so
the world can never forget our suffering and our courage. Whereas the particularity of the Jewish holocaust under the Nazis is over,
our holocausts continue . We are the madres locos (crazy mothers) in the Argentinian square silently demanding
news of our missing kin from the fascists who rule. We are the children of El Salvador who see our mothers
and fathers shot in front of our eyes . We are the Palestinian and Lebanese women and children overrun by
Israeli, Lebanese, and U.S. soldiers . We are the women and children of the bantustans and refugee camps
and the prisoners of Robbin Island. We are the starving in the Sahel , the poor in Brazil , the sterilized in
Puerto Rico. We are the brothers and sisters of Grenada who carry the seeds of the New Jewel Movement in our hearts, not daring to speak of it
with our lipsyet. Our holocaust is South Africa ruled by men who loved Adolf Hitler, who have developed the Nazi techniques of terror to more
sophisticated levels. Passes replace the Nazi badges and stars. Skin color is the ultimate badge of persecution. Forced removals of women, children, and
the elderly-the "useless appendages of South Africa"-into barren, arid bantustans without resources for survival have replaced the need for concentration
camps. Black sex-segregated barracks and cells attached to work sites achieve two objectives: The work camps destroy black family and community life, a
presumed source of resistance, and attempt to create human automatons whose purpose is to serve the South African state's drive toward wealth and
hegemony. Like other fascist regimes, South Africa disallows any democratic rights to black people; they are denied the right to vote, to dissent, to
peaceful assembly, to free speech, and to political representation. The regime has all the typical Nazi-like political apparatus: house arrests of dissenters
such as Winnie Mandela; prison murder of protestors such as Stephen Biko; penal colonies such as Robbin Island. Black people, especially children, are
routinely arrested without cause, detained without limits, and confronted with the economic and social disparities of a nation built around racial
separation. Legally and economically, South African apartheid is structural and institutionalized racial war. The Organization of African Unity's regional
intergovernmental meeting in 1984 in Tanzania was called to review and appraise the achievements of the United Nations Decade for Women. The
meeting considered South Africa's racist apartheid regime a peace issue. The "regime is an affront to the dignity of all Africans on the continent and a
stark reminder of the absence of equality and peace, representing the worst form of institutionalized oppression and strife." Pacifists such as Martin Luther
King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi who have used nonviolent resistance charged that those who used violence to obtain justice were just as evil as their
oppressors. Yet all successful revolutionary movements have used organized violence. This is especially true of national liberation movements that have
obtained state power and reorganized the institutions of their nations for the benefit of the people. If men and women in South Africa do not use organized
violence, they could remain in the permanent violent state of the slave. Could it be that pacifism and nonviolence cannot become a way of life for the
oppressed? Are they only tactics with specific and limited use for protecting people from further violence? For most people in the developing communities
and the developing world consistent nonviolence is a luxury; it presumes that those who have and use nonviolent weapons will refrain from using them
long enough for nonviolent resisters to win political battles. To survive, peoples in developing countries must use a varied repertoire of issues, tactics, and
approaches. Sometimes arms are needed to defeat apartheid and defend freedom in South Africa; sometimes nonviolent demonstrations for justice are

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

View the impact debate from the lens of the dispossessedconventional moral theory
operates on a false assumption of equal opportunity, the negs demand for justice precedes
other discussion of competing moral theories
Mills 97 Associate Prof of Philosophy @ U Illinois, Chicago
(Charles-; The Racial Contract)
The Racial Contract has always been recognized by nonwhites as the real determinant of (most) white moral/political practice and thus as the real
moral/political agreement to be challenged . If the epistemology of the signatories, the agents, of the Racial Contract requires
evasion and denial of the realities of race, the epistemology of the victims, the objects, of the Racial Contract is,
unsurprisingly, focused on these realities themselves. (So there is a reciprocal relationship, the Racial Contract tracking white
moral/political consciousness, the reaction to the Racial Contract tracking nonwhite moral/political consciousness and stimulating a puzzled
investigation of that white moral/political consciousness .) The term "standpoint theory" is now routinely used to signify the notion that in
understanding the workings of a system of oppression, a perspective from the bottom up is more likely to be
accurate than one from the top down. What is involved here, then, is a "racial" version of standpoint theory, a perspectival cognitive

advantage that is grounded in the phenomenological experience of the

disjuncture between official (white) reality and actual
(nonwhite) experience, the "double-consciousness" of which W. E . B . Du Bois spoke .48 This differential racial experience generates
an alternative moral and political perception of social reality which is encapsulated in the insight from the black American folk
tradition I have used as the epigraph of this book : the central realization, summing up the Racial Contract, that "when white people say Justice,'
they mean 'Just Us."' Nonwhites have always (at least in first encounters) been bemused or astonished by the invisibility of the Racial Contract to
whites, the fact that whites have routinely talked in universalist terms even when it has been quite clear that the scope has really been limited to
themselves . Correspondingly, nonwhites, with no vested material or psychic interest in the Racial Contract-objects
rather than subjects of it, viewing it from outside rather than inside , subpersons rather than persons-are (at least before
ideological conditioning) able to see its terms quite clearly. Thus the hypocrisy of the racial polity is most transparent to its victims .
The corollary is that nonwhite interest in white moral and political theory has necessarily been focused less on the details of the
particular competing moral and political candidates (utilitarianism versus deontology versus natural rights theory;
liberalism versus conservatism versus socialism) than in the unacknowledged Racial Contract that has usually framed

their functioning. The variable that makes the most difference to the fate of nonwhites is not the fine- or even coarse-grained conceptual
divergences of the different theories themselves (all have their Herrenvolk variants), but whether or not the subclause invoking the Racial
Contract, thus putting the theory into Herrenvolk mode, has been activated . The details of the moral theories thus become less
important than the metatheory , the Racial Contract, in which they are embedded. The crucial question is
whether nonwhites are counted as full persons, part of the population covered by the moral operator, or not.
1NR
 1NR K
THE AFF IS BROWN VS. BOARD
Tate 2014, Professor of Political Science at UC Irvine (Katherine, Something's in the Air: Race, Crime, and the
Legalization of Marijuana)
Finally, legalization represents a dream carrying dangerous, long- term, and chilling political costs. These are
the kinds of costs to a Black civil rights agenda that Derrick Bell (2004) passionately argues came with the
landmark 1954 Brown decision, outlawing de jure segregation in public schools. Brown, he argues, "dismisses
Plessy." the 1896 ruling upholding separate-but-equal, "without dismantling it." After Brown, he points out, the
massive continuing problem of segregation leading to the unequal education of minority school children now
was widely seen as rooted in things such income inequality or other cultural factors, not in American racism.
Legalization of marijuana, therefore, could do the same, silencing further claims about this unfairness since
the "only" unfairness left now in the criminal justice system under legal pot is punishing "drug trafficking"
and "criminal-minded" minors or "dangerous" and "violent" minority drunks. Bell theorizes that Plessy was
struck down because it served the long-term interests of White Americans. The benefits of Brown to Blacks,
he contends, were nil. Thus. Bell concludes that we can't fix American racism with American law . American
law operates under a silent covenant, or the understanding by elites that the racial order will be the same.
Furthermore, like Brown, legalization will reduce public responsibility and a public response to a legacy of
racism and discrimination in the criminal justice system against minority' citizens . Arguments that racism
continues to inflict serious harm on minorities and their families will be dismissed in the same manner that
concerns over segregation in public schools are dismissed. In the end. under legalization, many will argue that
problems continue to exist in the minority' community only because this community has a higher percentage
of individuals who abuse drugs. Legalization demands today appear especially elitist, and literally so, because
legalization may really only benefit America's economic and social elites. In fact, medical marijuana profoundly
illustrates the way laws protect wealth and "Whiteness" over the poor Black and Latino communities. Wealthy
Americans use this legal route over the poor, who can only gain access to the drug through illegal means.
Legalization of one banned substance for social use will not kill the disease of racism in America, as
supporters claim. While some proponents of legalization talk about keeping the price of the drug high to generate
higher taxes and keeping its use low, others point out that this strategy will not eliminate then the black market
(Pacula 2009: quoted in Scherlen 2012). Legalization of marijuana won't free the black and brown prisoners ,
and high rates of incarceration for minorities may continue unabated in states where pot is legal. Minorities
must understand that laws and policies may not apply to them equally. Furthermore, "law abiding" and "decent"
Americans will still seek to blame Blacks and Latinos for the social ills involved in drug use: minorities will
continue to be punished for it and a racial disparity in sentencing for drug use will persist. In the end,
legalization won't result in any collective benefits for Blacks, Latinos and other minority groups, only
punishing social costs combined with the enormous political cost of adopting a policy to kill racism in the
American legal system and society when it won't.

The status quo is decriminalization but legalization causes regulations that

disproportionately harm poor people and minorities causes net more persecution
Gulite 2014 - graduated cum laude from The George Washington Universitys Honors Program with degrees in
Political Science and Criminal Justice. During her time at school, she served as the GW Liberty Societys president
and worked closely with the DC Forum for Freedom in addition to Students for Liberty (Kelli, 3 Ways Marijuana
Legalization Can Screw Poor Minorities http://thoughtsonliberty.com/3-ways-marijuana-legalization-can-screw-
poor-minorities)
Luckily, the nationwide decriminalization of marijuana is almost here. In October, Maryland will be the
seventeenth state to decriminalize the possession of marijuana. Its not unreasonable to believe that the nationwide
legalization, commercial production, and regulation of marijuana will soon follow. A majority of Americans support
legalization, the New York Times recently came out in full support of federal legalization, and the two states that
have already legalized marijuana, Colorado and Washington, have only reported positive results. With the dawn of
the commercial production of legal pot, it is important to keep in mind those who the drug war has affected most,
poor minorities. Yes, marijuana legalization would generate millions in tax revenue and could provide a substantial
boost to the economy. However, we should be wary of regulations surrounding the legalized commercial
production of weed that protect big business or state interests to the detriment of poor minorities. Here are three
potentially harmful regulations: 1. Criminal Background Checks and Occupational Licensing In Colorado and
Washington, marijuana businesses have been subject to fairly strict licensing laws. The Colorado Department of
Revenue has an entire Marijuana Enforcement Division to review marijuana business and professional license
applications. To obtain an occupational license in Colorado, owners must undergo a full criminal background
check as licensees may not have any Controlled Substance Felony Convictions that have not been fully
discharged for five years prior to applying. Given the well-documented disproportionate enforcement of drug
policy on minorities, such licensing requirements could easily and unfairly skew the new legal marijuana
market in favor of whites. 2. The Overbearing Costs of Marijuana Retail Licenses and Taxation Legalization
proponents have consistently argued that states should legalize in order to tax marijuana businesses and
collect revenue from licensing fees. The states that have legalized marijuana have taken this mantra to heart.
Colorado made nearly $6 million in revenue from marijuana dispensaries just this past month. One Colorado
marijuana business owner reported that permit and licensing fees cost him $20,000 just in one year. While poor
minorities were able to participate in the illegal marijuana economy, they will not be able to participate in the
legal drug economy if the state continues to charge such enormous fees and taxes. 3. Zealously Persecuting
Black Market Distribution As it stands now, marijuana legalization has created a perfect storm to continue to
imprison poor minorities for nonviolent weed offenses. Poor minorities, who are more likely to have felony drug
charges, are largely unable to participate in the legal marijuana market. If they do have a clean criminal
history, they are still priced out of the market by bigger businesses who can afford outrageously high state taxes
and fees upfront. While dispensaries are charging high premiums to cover their overhead, a black market for
cheap marijuana will emerge in poor communities. But now, laws intended to protect legal marijuana
business interests will be used to persecute those participating in the black market, as decriminalization
doesnt yet protect distributors or dealers.
 2NC Afghanistan
Central Asia war wont escalate
Weitz 6 (Richard, Washington Quarterly, Summer, senior fellow and associate director of
the Center for Future Security Strategies at the Hudson Institute, Lexis)
Central Asian security affairs have become much more complex than during the original nineteenth-century great game between czarist Russia and the United Kingdom. At that time, these two
governments could largely dominate local affairs, but today a variety of influential actors are involved in the region. The early 1990s witnessed a vigorous competition between Turkey and Iran
for influence in Central Asia. More recently, India and Pakistan have pursued a mixture of cooperative and competitive policies in the region that have influenced and been affected by their
broader relationship. The now independent Central Asian countries also invariably affect the region's international relations as they seek to maneuver among the major powers without
compromising their newfound autonomy. Although Russia, China, and the United States substantially affect regional security issues,
they cannot dictate outcomes the way imperial governments frequently did a century ago. Concerns about a
renewed great game are thus exaggerated. The contest for influence in the region does not directly challenge
the vital national interests of China, Russia, or the United States, the most important extraregional countries in Central Asian security affairs. Unless
restrained, however, competitive pressures risk impeding opportunities for beneficial cooperation among these countries. The three external great powers have
incentives to compete for local allies, energy resources, and military advantage, but they also share
substantial interests, especially in reducing terrorism and drug trafficking. If properly aligned, the major multilateral security organizations active in Central Asia could provide
opportunities for cooperative diplomacy in a region where bilateral ties traditionally have predominated.