Root Cause Core - HSS 2014

Explanation
This is a collection of answers to various Ks for cap, fem, race, and policy positions.
Capitalism
Cap A2 Fem
Capitalism is the root cause of patriarchy – economic is used as a weapon to maintain
existing gender hierarchies
Pharr, ‘98. Suzanne Pharr. “Homophobia as a Weapon of Sexism.” Race, Class, and Gender in the United States. 6th
edition. http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=9I7ExPk-
920C&oi=fnd&pg=PA160&dq=capitalism+root+cause+sexism+patriarchy&ots=r8Sy4j_EAN&sig=G0z-
DnqAQK7YeETkia0qO14HQ1Y#v=onepage&q&f=true – clawan
Economics is the great controller in both sexism and racism. If a person can't
acquire food, shelter, and clothing and provide them for children, then that person can be forced to
do many things in order to survive. The major tactic, world- wide, is to provide
unrecompensed or inadequately recompensed labor for the benefit of those who
control wealth. Hence, we see women performing unpaid labor in the home or filling
low-paid jobs, and we see people of color in the lowest-paid jobs available. The
method is complex: limit educational and training opportunities for women and for people of
color and then withhold adequate paying jobs with the excuse that people of
color and women are incapable of filling them. Blame the economic victim and keep
the victim's self-esteem low through invisibility and distortion within the media and
education. Allow a few people of color and women to succeed among the
profitmakers so that blaming those who don't "make it” can be intensified.
Encourage those few who succeed in gaining power now to turn against those who remain behind rather than to use their
resources to make change for all. Maintain
the myth of scarcity – that there are not enough jobs, resources,
etc., to go around among the middle class so that they will not unite with laborers,
immigrants, and the unemployed. The method keeps in place a system of control
and profit by a few and a constant source of cheap labor to maintain it. If anyone
steps out of line, take her/his job away. Let homelessness and hunger do their work. The
economic weapon works. And we end up saying, “I would do this or that – be openly who l am, speak out
against injustice, work for civil rights, join a labor union, go to a political march, etc. – if l didn’t have this job. I can’t
afford to lose it." We stay in an abusive situation because we see no other way to survive .... Violence
against
women is directly related to the condition of women in a society that refuses us
equal pay, equal access to resources, and equal status with males. From this condition
comes men's confirmation of their sense of ownership of women, power over
women, and assumed right to control women for their own means. Men physically
and emotionally abuse women because they can, because they live in a world that gives them permission. Male violence
is fed by their sense of their right to dominate and control, and their sense of superiority over a group of people who,
because of gender, they consider inferior to them.
AT: Intersectionality/Micropolitics
Material relations cannot be changed through personal action – culturalizing class
relations displaces any serious challenge to capitalism
McLaren ‘4
, Distinguished Fellow – Critical Studies @ Chapman U and UCLA urban schooling prof, and Scatamburlo-D’Annibale,
associate professor of Communication – U Windsor
(Peter and Valerie, “Class Dismissed? Historical materialism and the politics of ‘difference’,” Educational Philosophy and
Theory Vol. 36, Issue 2, p. 183-199) //ghs-nr)
Eager to take a wide detour around political economy, post-Marxists tend to assume
that the principal political points of departure in the current ‘postmodern’ world
must necessarily be ‘cultural.’ As such, most, but not all post-Marxists have gravitated
towards a politics of ‘difference’ which is largely premised on uncovering relations of
power that reside in the arrangement and deployment of subjectivity in cultural and ideological
practices (cf. Jordan & Weedon, 1995). Advocates of ‘difference’ politics therefore posit their ideas as bold steps
forward in advancing the interests of those historically marginalized by ‘dominant’
social and cultural narratives.¶ There is no doubt that post-Marxism has advanced our knowledge of the
hidden trajectories of power within the processes of representation and that it remains useful in adumbrating the
formation of subjectivity and its expressive dimensions as well as complementing our understandings of the relationships
between ‘difference,’ language, and cultural configurations. However,
post-Marxists have been woefully
remiss in addressing the constitution of class formations and the machinations of capitalist
social organization. In some instances, capitalism and class relations have been thoroughly
‘otherized;’ in others, class is summoned only as part of the triumvirate of ‘race, class, and
gender’ in which class is reduced to merely another form of ‘difference.’ Enamored
with the ‘cultural’ and seemingly blind to the ‘economic,’ the rhetorical excesses
of post-Marxists have also prevented them from considering the stark reality of
contemporary class conditions under global capitalism. As we hope to show, the radical
displacement of class analysis in contemporary theoretical narratives and the concomitant
decentering of capitalism, the anointing of ‘difference’ as a primary explanatory
construct, and the ‘culturalization’ of politics, have had detrimental effects on
‘left’ theory and practice. Reconceptualizing ‘Difference’¶ The manner in which ‘difference’ has
been taken up within ‘post-al’ frameworks has tended to stress its cultural dimensions
while marginalizing and, in some cases, completely ignoring the economic and material
dimensions of difference. This posturing has been quite evident in many ‘post-al’
theories of ‘race’ and in the realm of ‘ludic’1 cultural studies that have valorized an account
of difference—particularly ‘racial difference’—in almost exclusively ‘superstructuralist’ terms (Sahay, 1998). But this
treatment of ‘difference’ and claims about
‘the “relative autonomy” of “race”’ have been
‘enabled by a reduction and distortion of Marxian class analysis’ which ‘involves
equating class analysis with some version of economic determinism.’ The key move in this distorting gesture depends on
the ‘view that the economic is the base, the cultural/political/ideological the superstructure.’ It is then ‘relatively easy to
show that the (presumably non-political) economic base does not cause the political/cultural/ideological superstructure,
that the latter is/are not epiphenomenal but relatively autonomous or autonomous causal categories’ (Meyerson, 2000, p.
2). In such formulations the ‘cultural’ is treated as a separate and autonomous sphere, severed from its embeddedness
within sociopolitical and economic arrangements. As a result, many of these ‘culturalist’ narratives have
produced autonomist and reified conceptualizations of difference which ‘far from
enabling those subjects most marginalized by racial difference’ have, in effect, reduced ‘difference to a
question of knowledge/power relations’ that can presumably be ‘dealt with (negotiated)
on a discursive level without a fundamental change in the relations of production’ (Sahay, 1998).¶ At this
juncture, it is necessary to point out that arguing that ‘culture’ is generally conditioned/shaped by
material forces does not reinscribe the simplistic and presumably ‘deterministic’
base/superstructure metaphor which has plagued some strands of Marxist theory. Rather, we invoke Marx's
own writings from both the Grundrisse and Capital in which he contends that there is a consolidating logic
in the relations of production that permeates society in the complex variety of its ‘empirical’
reality. This emphasizes Marx's understanding of capitalism and capital as a ‘social’
relation—one which stresses the interpenetration of these categories, the realities which they reflect, and one which
therefore offers a unified and dialectical analysis of history, ideology, culture, politics, economics and
society (see also Marx, 1972, 1976, 1977).2¶ Foregrounding the limitations of ‘difference’ and ‘representational’
politics does not suggest a disavowal of the importance of cultural and/or discursive arena(s) as sites of contestation
and struggle. We readily acknowledge the significance of contemporary theorizations that have sought to valorize
precisely those forms of ‘difference’ that have historically been denigrated. This has undoubtedly been an important
development since they have enabled subordinated groups to reconstruct their own histories and give voice to their
individual and collective identities. However, they have also tended to redefine politics as a
signifying activity generally confined to the realm of ‘representation’ while
displacing a politics grounded in the mobilization of forces against the material
sources of political and economic marginalization. In their rush to avoid the
‘capital’ sin of ‘economism,’ many post-Marxists (who often ignore their own class privilege) have
fallen prey to an ahistorical form of culturalism which holds, among other things, that cultural
struggles external to class organizing provide the cutting edge of emancipatory politics.3 In many respects, this
posturing, has yielded an ‘intellectual pseudopolitics’ that has served to
empower ‘the theorist while explicitly disempowering’ real citizens (Turner, 1994, p.
410). We do not discount concerns over representation; rather our point is that progressive educators and theorists
should not be straightjacketed by struggles that fail to move beyond the politics
of difference and representation in the cultural realm. While space limitations prevent us from elaborating this
point, we contend that culturalist arguments are deeply problematic both in terms of their
penchant for de-emphasizing the totalizing (yes totalizing!) power and function
of capital and for their attempts to employ culture as a construct that would diminish the centrality of class. In a
proper historical materialist account, ‘culture’ is not the ‘other’ of class but , rather,
constitutes part of a more comprehensive theorization of class rule in different
contexts.4¶ ‘Post-al’ theorizations of ‘difference’ circumvent and undermine any systematic
knowledge of the material dimensions of difference and tend to segregate questions
of ‘difference’ from class formation and capitalist social relations. We therefore believe that it is
necessary to (re)conceptualize ‘difference’ by drawing upon Marx's materialist
and historical formulations. ‘Difference’ needs to be understood as the product
of social contradictions and in relation to political and economic organization.
We need to acknowledge that ‘otherness’ and/or difference is not something that
passively happens, but, rather, is actively produced. In other words, since systems of
differences almost always involve relations of domination and oppression, we must
concern ourselves with the economies of relations of difference that exist in
specific contexts. Drawing upon the Marxist concept of mediation enables us to unsettle our categorical
approaches to both class and difference, for it was Marx himself who warned against creating false dichotomies in the
situation of our politics—that it was absurd to ‘choose between consciousness and the world, subjectivity and social
organization, personal or collective will and historical or structural determination.’ In a similar vein, it is equally absurd
to see ‘difference as a historical form of consciousness unconnected to class formation, development of capital and class
politics’ (Bannerji, 1995, p. 30). Bannerji points to the need to historicize ‘difference’ in
relation to the history and social organization of capital and class (inclusive of imperialist
and colonialist legacies). Apprehending the meaning and function of difference in this manner necessarily highlights the
importance of exploring (1) the institutional and structural aspects of difference; (2) the meanings that get attached to
categories of difference; and (3) how differences are produced out of, and lived within specific historical formations.5 ¶
AT: Modern Oppression Disproves
Turn - trying to explain away the historical record of capitalism through appeals to
race is a main component of the neoliberal strategy of sanitation
Reed 2013 – professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in race and American politics. He
has taught at Yale, Northwestern and the New School for Social Research. An expert on racial and economic inequality,
he is a founding member of the Labor Party and a frequent contributor to The Nation (2/25, Adolph, Nonsite, “Django
Unchained, or, The Help: How “Cultural Politics” Is Worse Than No Politics at All, and Why”,
http://nonsite.org/feature/django-unchained-or-the-help-how-cultural-politics-is-worse-than-no-politics-at-all-and-
why)
The tendency to craft political critique by demanding that we fix our gaze in the
rearview mirror appeals to an intellectual laziness. Marking superficial similarities
with familiar images of oppression is less mentally taxing than attempting to
parse the multifarious, often contradictory dynamics and relations that shape racial
inequality in particular and politics in general in the current moment. Assertions that
phenomena like the Jena, Louisiana, incident, the killings of James Craig Anderson and Trayvon
Martin, and racial disparities in incarceration demonstrate persistence of old-
school, white supremacist racism and charges that the sensibilities of Thomas Dixon and Margaret
Mitchell continue to shape most Americans’ understandings of slavery do important, obfuscatory ideological
work. They lay claim to a moral urgency that, as Mahmood Mamdani argues concerning the rhetorical use of
charges of genocide, enables disparaging efforts either to differentiate discrete inequalities
or to generate historically specific causal accounts of them as irresponsible dodges
that abet injustice by temporizing in its face.38 But more is at work here as well. Insistence on the
transhistorical primacy of racism as a source of inequality is a class politics. It’s the
politics of a stratum of the professional-managerial class whose material location and interests, and thus whose
ideological commitments, are bound up with parsing, interpreting and administering inequality defined in terms of
disparities among ascriptively defined populations reified as groups or even cultures. In fact, much of the intellectual life
of this stratum is devoted to “shoehorning into the rubric of racism all manner of inequalities that may appear statistically
as racial disparities.”39 And thatproject shares capitalism’s ideological tendency to
obscure race’s foundations, as well as the foundations of all such ascriptive hierarchies, in historically
specific political economy. This felicitous convergence may help explain why proponents of
“cultural politics” are so inclined to treat the products and production processes
of the mass entertainment industry as a terrain for political struggle and debate. They
don’t see the industry’s imperatives as fundamentally incompatible with the notions of a just society they seek to
advance. In fact, they
share its fetishization of heroes and penchant for inspirational stories of
individual Overcoming. This sort of “politics of representation” is no more than an
image-management discourse within neoliberalism . That strains of an ersatz left imagine it to be
something more marks the extent of our defeat. And then, of course, there’s that Upton Sinclair point.
AT: Permutation/Intersectionality
The permutaton is worse than the aff alone. Intersectionality strips a class focus of its
revolutionary potential by treating it as another form of difference
McLaren ‘4
In stating this, we need to include an important caveat that differentiates our approach from
those invoking the well-worn race/class/gender triplet which can sound , to the uninitiated,
both radical and vaguely Marxian. It is not. Race, class and gender, while they
invariably intersect and interact, are not co-primary. This ‘triplet’ approximates what the
‘philosophers might call a category mistake.’ On the surface the triplet may be convincing —some
people are oppressed because of their race, others as a result of their gender, yet others because of their class— but this
‘is grossly misleading’ for it is not that ‘some individuals manifest certain
characteristics known as “class” which then results in their oppression ; on the
contrary, to be a member of a social class just is to be oppressed’ and in this regard
class is ‘a wholly social category’ (Eagleton, 1998, p. 289). Furthermore, even though ‘class’ is usually
invoked as part of the aforementioned and much vaunted triptych, it is usually gutted of its
practical, social dimension or treated solely as a cultural phenomenon—as just another form
of ‘difference.’ In these instances, class is transformed from an economic and, indeed, social
category to an exclusively cultural or discursive one or one in which class merely signifies a
‘subject position.’ Class is therefore cut off from the political economy of capitalism and class
power severed from exploitation and a power structure ‘in which those who control collectively
produced resources only do so because of the value generated by those who do not’ (Hennessy & Ingraham, 1997, p. 2). ¶
Such theorizing has had the effect of replacing an historical materialist class
analysis with a cultural analysis of class. As a result, many post-Marxists have also
stripped the idea of class of precisely that element which, for Marx, made it radical—namely
its status as a universal form of exploitation whose abolition required (and was also central to) the
abolition of all manifestations of oppression (Marx, 1978, p. 60). With regard to this issue, Kovel (2002) is particularly
insightful, for he explicitly addresses an issue which continues to vex the Left—namely the priority given to different
categories of what he calls ‘dominative splitting’—those categories of ‘gender, class, race, ethnic and national exclusion,’
etc. Kovel argues that we need to ask the question of priority with respect to what? He notes that if
we mean priority with respect to time, then the category of gender would have priority since there are traces of gender
oppression in all other forms of oppression. If we were to prioritize in terms of existential significance, Kovel suggests
that we would have to depend upon the immediate historical forces that bear down on distinct groups of people—he
offers examples of Jews in 1930s Germany who suffered from brutal forms of anti-Semitism and Palestinians today who
experience anti-Arab racism under Israeli domination. The
question of what has political priority,
however, would depend upon which transformation of relations of oppression are
practically more urgent and, while this would certainly depend upon the preceding categories, it would
also depend upon the fashion in which all the forces acting in a concrete situation
are deployed. As to the question of which split sets into motion all of the others, the priority would
have to be given to class since class relations¶ entail the state as an instrument of
enforcement and control, and it is the state that shapes and organizes the splits that appear in human
ecosystems. Thus class is both logically and historically distinct from other forms of
exclusion (hence we should not talk of ‘classism’ to go along with ‘sexism’ and
‘racism,’ and ‘species-ism’). This is, first of all, because class is an essentially man-
made category, without root in even a mystified biology. We cannot imagine a
human world without gender distinctions—although we can imagine a world without domination
by gender. But a world without class is eminently imaginable—indeed, such was the human
world for the great majority of our species’ time on earth, during all of which considerable fuss was made over gender.
Historically, the difference arises because ‘class’ signifies one side of a larger figure that includes a state apparatus whose
conquests and regulations create races and shape gender relations. Thus there will be no true resolution of racism so long
as class society stands, inasmuch as a racially oppressed society implies the activities of a class-defending state. Nor can
gender inequality be enacted away so long as class society, with its state, demands the super-exploitation of women's
labor. (Kovel, 2002, pp. 123–124)
AT: Personal Experience
Experiential knowledge is valuable in its appliclation to a broader social context, but
fetishization of experience as a means to itself priveleges personal relations over
larger structures
McLaren ‘4
Another caveat. In making such a claim, we are not renouncing the concept of experience . On the
contrary, we believe it is imperative to retain the category of lived experience as a
reference point in light of misguided post-Marxist critiques which imply that all forms of Marxian class analysis
are dismissive of subjectivity. We are not, however, advocating the uncritical fetishization of
‘experience’ that tends to assume that experience somehow guarantees the
authenticity of knowledge and which often treats experience as self-explanatory,
transparent, and solely individual. Rather, we advance a framework that seeks to
make connections between seemingly isolated situations and /or particular
experiences by exploring how they are constituted in, and circumscribed by, broader
historical and social circumstances. Experiential understandings, in and of themselves, are
suspect because, dialectically, they constitute a unity of opposites—they are at once unique, specific, and
personal, but also thoroughly partial, social, and the products of historical forces about which individuals may know
little or nothing (Gimenez, 2001). In this sense, a rich description of immediate experience in terms of consciousness of a
Such
particular form of oppression (racial or otherwise) can be an appropriate and indispensable point of departure.
an understanding, however, can easily become an isolated ‘difference’ prison unless
it transcends the immediate perceived point of oppression, confronts the social
system in which it is rooted, and expands into a complex and multifaceted
analysis (of forms of social mediation) that is capable of mapping out the general organization of social relations.
That, however, requires a broad class-based approach.
AT: Colorblindness
Prioritizing class in revolutionary movements does not diminish the importance of
identity – Their cooption argument rests on the flawed assumption that working class
people see race as central to their identity
McLaren ‘4
A radical political economy framework is crucial since various ‘culturalist’

perspectives seem to diminish
the role of political economy and class forces in shaping the edifice of ‘the social’—
including the shifting constellations and meanings of ‘difference.’ Furthermore, none of the ‘differences’ valorized in
culturalist narratives alone, and certainly not ‘race’ by itself can explain the massive transformation of the structure of
capitalism in recent years. We agree with Meyerson (2000) that ‘race’ is not an adequate explanatory category on its own
and that the use of ‘race’ as a descriptive or analytical category has serious consequences for the way in which social life is
presumed to be constituted and organized. The category of ‘race’—the conceptual framework that the oppressed often
employ to interpret their experiences of inequality ‘often clouds the concrete reality of class, and blurs the actual structure
of power and privilege.’ In this regard, ‘race’ is all too often a ‘barrier to understanding the central role of class in shaping
personal and collective outcomes within a capitalist society’ (Marable, 1995, pp. 8, 226). In many ways, the use of ‘race’
has become an analytical trap precisely when it has been employed in antiseptic isolation from the messy terrain of
historical and material relations. This, of course, does
not imply that we ignore racism and
racial oppression; rather, an analytical shift from ‘race’ to a plural conceptualization
of ‘racisms’ and their historical articulations is necessary (cf. McLaren & Torres, 1999).
However, it is important to note that ‘race’ doesn’t explain racism and forms of racial oppression. Those relations are best
understood within the context of class rule, as Bannerji, Kovel, Marable and Meyerson imply—but that compels us to
forge a conceptual shift in theorizing, which entails (among other things) moving beyond the ideology of ‘difference’ and
‘race’ as the dominant prisms for understanding exploitation and oppression. We are aware of some potential
implications for white Marxist criticalists to unwittingly support racist practices in their criticisms of ‘race-first’ positions
articulated in the social sciences. In those instances, white
criticalists wrongly go on ‘high alert’ in
placing theorists of color under special surveillance for downplaying an analysis of capitalism
and class. These activities on the part of white criticalists must be condemned, as
must be efforts to stress class analysis primarily as a means of creating a white
vanguard position in the struggle against capitalism. Our position is one that attempts to
link practices of racial oppression to the central, totalizing dynamics of capitalist
society in order to resist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy more fully.7¶ We have
argued that it is virtually impossible to conceptualize class without attending to the forms and contents of difference, but
we insist that this does not imply that class struggle is now outdated by the politics of difference. As Jameson (1998, p.
136) notes, we are now in the midst of returning to the ‘most fundamental form of class struggle’ in light of current global
conditions. Today's climate suggests that classstruggle is ‘not yet a thing of the past’ and that
those who seek to undermine its centrality are not only ‘morally callous’ and ‘seriously out of
touch with reality’ but also largely blind to the ‘needs of the large mass of people who are barely
surviving capital's newly-honed mechanisms of globalized greed’ (Harvey, 1998, pp. 7–9). In our view, a more
comprehensive and politically useful understanding of the contemporary historical juncture necessitates foregrounding
class analysis and the primacy of the working class as the fundamental agent of change.8 ¶ This does not render
as ‘secondary’ the concerns of those marginalized by race, ethnicity, etc. as is routinely
charged by post-Marxists. It is often assumed that foregrounding capitalist social relations
necessarily undermines the importance of attending to ‘difference’ and/or trivializes struggles against
racism, etc., in favor of an abstractly defined class-based politics typically
identified as ‘white.’ Yet, such formulations rest on a bizarre but generally
unspoken logic that assumes that racial and ethnic ‘minorities’ are only
conjuncturally related to the working class. This stance is patently absurd since
the concept of the ‘working class’ is undoubtedly comprised of men and women
of different races, ethnicities, etc. (Mitter, 1997). A good deal of post-Marxist critique is subtly racist (not
to mention essentialist) insofar as it implies that ‘people of color’ could not possibly be concerned with issues beyond
those related to their ‘racial’ or ‘ethnic’‘difference.’ This
posits ‘people of color’ as single-minded,
one-dimensional caricatures and assumes that their working lives are less crucial
to their self-understanding (and survival) than is the case with their ‘white male’
counterparts.9 It also ignores ‘the fact that class is an ineradicable dimension of everybody's lives’ (Gimenez, 2001,
p. 2) and that social oppression is much more than tangentially linked to class background and the exploitative relations
of production. On this topic, Meyerson (2000) is worth quoting at length:¶ Marxism properly interpreted emphasizes the
primacy of class in a number of senses. One of course is the primacy of the working class as a
revolutionary agent—a primacy which does not render women and people of color
‘secondary.’ This view assumes that ‘working class’ means white—this division
between a white working class and all the others, whose identity (along with a
corresponding social theory to explain that identity) is thereby viewed as either primarily one of
gender and race or hybrid …[T]he primacy of class means … that building a multiracial,
multi-gendered international working-class organization or organizations should
be the goal of any revolutionary movement so that the primacy of class puts the fight against racism
and sexism at the center. The intelligibility of this position is rooted in the explanatory primacy of class analysis for
understanding the structural determinants of race, gender, and class oppression. Oppression is multiple
and intersecting but its causes are not.
AT: Libido/Fanon/Psychoanalysis
Fanon’s theory of desire is based on flawed, deterministic psychoanalysis – that
undermines agency
Gordon 1
(Paul, psycotherapist from the Philadelphia Assosiation, “Psychoanalysis and
Racism: The Politics of Defeat”, Race Class 2001 42: 17, accessed via sage //ghs-
nr)
Fanon is sometimes held up as an example ± the example perhaps ± of how to approach
racism psychoanalytically, of the value of a psychoanalytic `reading' of racism. While it is true that Fanon
wrote in the introduction to his classic text that only a psychoanalytic interpretation of `the black problem' could account
for the structure of the complex, it has to be stressed that his
psychoanalysis is a highly idiosyncratic
one.20 It is poetic, informed by philosophy, particularly phenomenology, critically
self-re exive,
̄ turned upon itself. At one point, Fanon dismisses Freud's notion of a
universal Oedipus complex, one of the fundamental tenets of psychoanalysis : Ìt
would be relatively easy for me to show', he says, `that in the French Antilles 97 per cent of families cannot produce one
Oedipal neurosis.'21 Researchers, he comments, are so imbued with the complexes of their own society that they feel
compelled to ®nd them duplicated in the people they study. Fanon, in other words, is very far from being an orthodox
follower of psychoanalysis. In his hands, psychoanalysis becomes something altogether different from the dogma that
prevailed either when he was alive or now. It is somewhat galling, therefore, to witness attempts at the incor- poration
and accommodation of this radical spirit and revolutionary man into a psychoanalytic canon, even an àlternative' one, or
his incarnation as some kind of progenitor of `cultural studies'.22¶ Contemporary psychoanalysis¶ The followers of Freud
since then have, with few exceptions, been remarkably silent on the matter of racism. As for the exceptions, their thoughts
are of little value, at best banal, at worst insulting. Thus, we
are told, racism is but a variant of group
hatred or the release of frustration against a socially permitted object or a form of
sibling rivalry or a fear of shit, and so on.23 At a more rare®ed level, the prominent French psychoanalyst Janine
Chasseguet-Smirgel ®nds the origins of the Nazi genocide in the Oedipus complex, an actualisation, albeit an extreme
one, of the supposed universal unconscious phantasy24 to strip the mother's body of its contents in order to return to that
place that one originally inhabited. It is this phantasy, Chasseguet-Smirgel claims, that lies at the heart of Nazi ideology
and, in particular, the notion of a 1,000 year Reich cleansed of Jewry.25 ¶ As for Joel Kovel's White Racism: a
psychohistory, ®rst published in 1970, one must, I think, applaud the ambitious attempt to produce a work rooted both in
psychology, psychoanalysis in particular, and in the material historical world.26 At the same time, Kovel was, at the time
he wrote the book, much too wedded to a highly orthodox reading of psychoanalysis which, at times at least,
seemed to offer no escape from a psychoanalytic fatalism or determinism. In his
preface to the 1984 edition, Kovel distanced himself from his earlier position, rejecting any notion of an innate impulse
towards aggression ± and therefore racism ± and declaring in favour of the idea of a `peculiarity in the state of being
human which makes us so prone to racism', the degree of susceptibility being socially, culturally and historically
determined.27 Whatever the limitations of his work, Kovel's remains a unique attempt to understand racism with a foot
in both camps ± that of the mind and that of society.¶ Racism, the unconscious and the body¶ But in the thirty years since
Kovel wrote, that attempt to relate mind and society has been fractured by the advent of postmodernism, with its
subsumption of the material/historical, of notions of cause and effect, to what is transitory, contingent, free- oating,
̄
evanescent. Psycho- analysis, by stepping into the vacuum left by the abandonment of all metanarrative, has
tended to put mind over society. This is particularly noticeable in the work of the Centre for New Ethnicities
Research at the University of East London, which purports to straddle the worlds of the academy and action by
developing projects for the local community and within education generally.28 But, in marrying
psychoanalysis and postmodernism, on the basis of claiming to be both scholarly and action oriented, it
degrades scholarship and undermines action, and finds in discourse analysis a language in which
metaphor passes for reality.¶ The Centre's director, Philip Cohen, who established it in 1992 as the New Ethnicities Unit,
first set out his project in systematic form in a lengthy contribution, entitled `The perversions of inheritance: studies in the
making of multi-racist Britain', to Multi-Racist Britain, a book he co-edited with Harwant Bains in 1988.29 The
crux
of Cohen's position seems to be this: racism does not become unconscious because
it is institutionalised; rather, racism becomes institutionalised because it operates
unconsciously, `behind the backs' of the subjects which it positions within these impersonal structures of power.30
His second key point has to do with ideology. Cohen acknowledges that ideologies have a
`material history', a context of political and economic forces, but he does so only to dismiss such
material history with a theoretical sweep of his hand. What he calls `the deep structure of
ideology, its generative grammar', is, he makes clear, ìn no way dependent on these factors'. It belongs, rather, to the
language of the unconscious, the `discourse of the Other, embodied in myths, rituals and fantasy'.31 ¶ Cohen's
particular psychoanalytic
framework draws heavily on post-Kleinian developments and the
idea of race as an èmpty category' put forward by Michael Rustin, a colleague of Cohen's at the Univer-
sity of East London. Rustin, a sociologist considerably in uenced
̄ by psychoanalytic thought, especially the work of
Melanie Klein and the British Kleinian tradition, argues that racism is what Kleinians call a psychotic attribute. This does
not mean that such attributes are held only or mainly by people designated psychotic, but that psychotic attributes of
mind are ùniversal, original and latent components of human mentality; never wholly banished from the self; liable to
become more salient in conditions of fear and anxiety than in more benign settings; and of course more central and
pathogenic in some individuals than in others, sometimes for explicable reasons in an individual's psychic history'.
Racism is, in this schema, the expression of `powerful doses of bad psychic stuff'. acism should be understood, Rustin
says, as a state of mind rather than in terms of its `phenomenal content' and, in this view, racist states of mind are but one
of many possible forms of irrational and negative projections of group feeling. `Race' is, as mentioned above, an empty
category which can be ®lled with whatever people want to fill it with. Like Cohen, Rustin
claims that
racism's power lies at an unconscious level and thus any attempt to challenge it
`by anti-racist teaching or propaganda' is bound to fail.32¶ For Cohen, one of the principal ways in which the
racist imagination works is through fantasies about the body. Popular racism, he writes, does not rely on theories about
society but is à behavioural ideology, one which works through everyday cultural practices to shape basic bodily images
of Self and Other'.33 In particular, Cohen
argues, racism operates through an idealised
fantasy image of the white body and, the converse, its `monstrous negation' . If I
understand him cor- rectly ± and it must be said that much of the time it is not at all clear what he is saying ± Cohen
argues that the alienation involved in labour `sets in motion' a compensatory desire for a different kind of body, one that
is self-generating and dependent on nothing outside itself. `The habitus is magically transformed into a kind of second
womb that will give birth to a new man or woman, the embodiment of living labor freed once and for all from the dead
hand of alienation.'34 What is being racialised or nationalised is the maternal body or, rather, the body in its maternal
functions related to the womb or the breast. As he says elsewhere, `the lethal aspect of racial harassment is not the
material damage done, but the hidden wounds in icted̄ as it sets in motion the ancient regression from room to womb and
turns the womb into a kind of tomb'.35
The libidinal explanation for racism removes a material problem and individualizes it –
that precludes action
Gordon 1
nr)
Given that racism works at an unconscious level, it follows, in Cohen's view, that
strategies to challenge it at a conscious level are doomed to failure. They are bound to
fail precisely because they are rational and fail to appreciate that the power of racism lies in the fact that it is unconscious.
To deinstitutionalise racism `will not in itself abolish the power of the racist
imagination' which will continue to ourish̄ through the media of popular culture long after its state forms have
withered away.42 Àll the evidence to date', Cohen writes elsewhere, `shows that the racist
imagination is not accessible to rationalist pedagogies, and almost effortlessly
resists their impact'. What is all this evidence? Certainly it is neither presented nor
cited.43 Rustin, too, claims that classroom teaching can have the effect of ìncreasing kinds of defensive organisation'.
But he cites no evidence ± other than referring to Cohen's work ± and seems to believe that all ànti- racism' in education
is a matter of seeking to change attitudes, rather than opening up new ways of looking at the world.44 In Cohen's schema,
then, racism is taken out of society and material reality and lodged very firmly in
the minds, the unconscious minds, of individual subjects. Although in his 1988 article, `The perversions of
inheritance', he distanced himself from a position that afforded absolute autonomy to the ideological, and thus ran the
risk, as he acknowledged, of `substituting changes in personal attitude or societal values for structural reforms', this is, in
fact, where he has ended up. As his work has developed, there is
less and less sense of any political
project of anti-racism and an almost exclusive concentration on dealing with the
beliefs and attitudes of racists. Ideology has become all. In placing racism in the unconscious, Cohen is
very much in line with the most orthodox of psychoanalysis which claims to ®nd ìnside' individuals (whatever that
might mean ± the notion of an ìnter- nal world' is always taken for granted and never really put into question) what
actually belongs in society, in what psychoanalysis calls `the external world'. Indeed, one
of the earliest
Marxist critiques of Freud's theories made precisely this point, accusing Freud of
rendering individual what was irredeemably social.45 In the same vein, and particularly
germane to the present discussion, the refusal of psychoanalysis to acknowledge social and political reality, to see what is
in front of it, is exempli®ed in the following story.
The application of psychoanalysis to race is false – it’s based on unverifiable

pseudoscience – their co-option arguments presents a one dimentional, essentialist
view of social relations
Gordon 1
nr)
Cohen's work unavoidably raises the question of the status of psychoanalysis as a
social or political theory, as distinct from a clinical one. Can psychoanalysis, in other words, apply to
the social world of groups, institutions, nations, states and cultures in the way that it does, or at least may do, to
individuals? Certainly there is now a considerable body of literature and a plethora of academic courses, and so on, claiming that
it is now a commonplace to hear of
psychoanalysis is a social theory. And, of course, in popular discourse,
nations and societies spoken of in personalised ways. Thus `truth commissions' and the like, which
have become so common in the past decade in countries which have undergone turbulent change, are seen as forms of national therapy or
catharsis, even if this is far from being their purpose. Never- theless, the question remains: does it make sense, as Michael Ignatieff puts it,
to speak of nations having psyches the way that individuals do? `Can a nation's past make people ill as we know repressed memories
sometimes make individuals ill? . . . Can we speak of nations ``working through'' a civil war or an atrocity as we speak of individuals
working through a traumatic memory or event?'47 The problem with the application of
psychoanalysis to social institutions is that there can be no testing of the claims
made. If someone says, for instance, that nationalism is a form of looking for and seeking to replace the body of the mother one has
lost, or that the popular appeal of a particular kind of story echoes the pattern of our earliest relationship to the maternal breast, how can
this be proved? The pioneers of psychoanalysis, from Freud onwards, all derived their ideas in the
context of their work with individual patients and their ideas can be examined in the everyday laboratory
of the therapeutic encounter where the validity of an interpretation , for example, is a matter for
dialogue between therapist and patient. Outside of the con- sulting room, there can be no such
verification process, and the further one moves from the individual patient, the
less purchase psychoanalytic ideas can have. Outside the therapeutic encounter, anything and everything
can be true, psychoanalytically speaking. But if everything is true, then nothing can be false and therefore nothing can be true. An
example of Cohen's method is to be found in his 1993 working paper, `Home rules', subtitled `Some re ections
̄ on racism and nationalism
in everyday life'. Here Cohen talks about taking a `particular line of thought for a walk'. While there is nothing wrong with taking a line of
thought for a walk, such an exercise is not necessarily the same as thinking. One of the problems with Cohen's approach is that a kind of
free association, mixed with deconstruction, leads not to analysis, not even to psychoanalysis, but to . . . well, just more free association, an
endless, indeed one might say pointless, play on words. This approach may well throw up some interesting associations along the way,
connections one had never thought of but it is not to be confused with political analysis. In `Home rules', anything and everything to do
with `home' can and does ®nd a place here and, as I indicated above, even the popular ®lm Home Alone is pressed into service as a story
Cohen's method also relies to no little extent on various caricatures.
about `racial' invasion.
There is the parody of an undifferentiated anti-racism which is always crude and

simplistic in its explanations, always dogmatic and authori- tarian in its prescriptions. Ìt is no longer possible',
Cohen claims at one point, `to call a spade a spade . . . because the level of connotations, which is always open to multiple associations,
including racist ones, has been shut down ``By Order''.'48 No one would deny that much that is called anti-racism has been ill-considered
or counter-productive or simple-minded, but to suggest that this is the whole story ± and this is the picture one gets from Cohen's account
± appears simply bad faith. Nor does one get any sense from his account that some forms of anti- racism have been subjected to the most
there is the distorted depiction of
rigorous critique ± from other anti-racists, notably in this journal. So, too,
teachers bearing the anti-racist message. In Cohen's world, they are always middle
class, relying on a `deficit model' of working-class culture, and engaged in a

`civilising mission', believing themselves to be `the bringers of reason and
tolerance to those gripped by unreason, prejudice and ignorance'.49 Doubtless such attitudes exist, but Cohen's
depiction is so one-dimensional; it has no room for complexity or difference . If it did,
he could not take up the position that he does, of the one who really knows. It is also a position that takes Cohen on to dangerous ground
in which, at times at least, it seems as though all authority is bad (in the language of Foucault, it is tutelary and constitutes surveillance)
and all resistance to authority good, or at least understandable.50
This is the worst form of defeatism – abandoning the potential for collective action of
the working class based on junk science makes oppression inevitable
Gordon 1
nr)
Cohen is in many ways representative of those `radicals' who, in response to the setback of the
radical political project of the 1960s and 1970s, abandoned not just the Marxist framework within
which they had worked, but anything which they saw as in any way connected to the idea of the
Enlightenment. It is here, goes the thinking, that the roots of so much that is wrong with radical politics are to be found,
for it is with the Enlightenment that men (yes, men) begin to think that they, rather than God or fate, may be able to make
history. But for the postmodernists, this is not only hubris, it is a hubris that leads inexorably to the nightmares of the
twentieth century, in particular the Holocaust and the Gulag. Cohen adds to this the claim that the very notion of
ènlightenment' (his inverted commas) is deeply impli- cated in a practice of reason which is historically rooted in certain
dominant forms of European race thinking. Reason, he appears to be saying, is racist.57 The
postmodernists'
problem is that they cannot live with dis- appointment. All the tragedies of the political
project of emancipation ± the evils of Stalinism in particular ± are seen as the inevitable product of
men and women trying to create a better society. But, rather than engage in a critical assessment of
how, for instance, radical political movements go wrong, they discard the emancipatory
project and impulse itself. The postmodernists, as Sivanandan puts it, blame modernity for having failed
them: `the intellectuals and academics have ed
̄ into discourse and deconstruction and representation ± as though to
interpret the world is more important than to change it, as though changing the interpretation is all we could do in a
changing world'.58 To justify their flight from a politics holding out the prospect of radical change
through self-activity, the disappointed intellectuals find abundant intellectual alibis for
themselves in the very work they champion, including, in Cohen's case, psychoanalysis. What Marshall
Berman says of Foucault seems true also of psychoanalysis; that it offers à world-historical alibi' for
the passivity and helplessness felt by many in the 1970s, and that it has nothing but contempt for those
naive enough to imagine that it might be possible for modern humankind to be free. At every turn for such theorists, as
Berman argues, whether in sexuality, politics, even our imagination, we are nothing but prisoners: there is no freedom in
Foucault's world, because his language forms a seamless web, a cage far more airtight than anything Weber ever dreamed
of, into which no life can break . . . There is no point in trying to resist the oppressions and
injustices of modern life, since even our dreams of freedom only add more links to our chains; however,
once we grasp the futility of it all, at least we can relax.59Cohen's political
defeatism and his conviction in the explanatory power of his new faith of psychoanalysis lead him to be
contemptuous and dismissive of any attempt at political solidarity or collective
action. For him, `communities' are always ìmagined', which, in his view, means based on fantasy, while different
forms of working-class organisation, from the craft fraternity to the revolutionary group, are
dismissed as `fantasies of self-sufficient combination'.60 In this scenario, the idea that
people might come together, think together, analyse together and act together
as rational beings is impossible. The idea of a genuine community of equals
becomes a pure fantasy, a `symbolic retrieval' of something that never existed in
the first place: `Community is a magical device for conjuring something apparently solidary out of the thin air of
modern times, a mechanism of re-enchantment.' As for history, it is always false, since `We are always dealing with
invented traditions.'61 Now, this is not only nonsense, but dangerous nonsense at that. Is history àlways false'? Did the
Judeocide happen or did it not? And did not some people even try to resist it? Did slavery exist or did it not, and did not
people resist that too and, ultimately, bring it to an end? And are communities always ìmagined'? Or, as Sivanandan
states, are they beaten out on the smithy of a people's collective struggle?Furthermore, all
attempts to legislate
against ideology are bound to fail because they have to adopt `technologies of
surveillance and control identical to those used by the state' . Note here the Foucauldian
language to set up the notion that all `surveillance' is bad. But is it? No society can function without surveillance of some
kind. The point, surely, is that there should be a public conversation about such moves and that those responsible for
implementing them be at all times accountable. To equate, as Cohen does, a council poster about `Stamping out racism'
with Orwell's horrendous prophecy in 1984 of a boot stamping on a human face is ludicrous and insulting. (Orwell's
image was intensely personal and destructive; the other is about the need to challenge not individuals, but a collective
evil.) Cohen reveals himself to be deeply ambivalent about punitive action against
racists, as though punishment or other firm action against them (or anyone else transgressing agreed social or legal
norms) precluded ùnderstand- ing' or even help through psychotherapy.It is indeed a strange kind of ànti-racism' that
portrays active racists as the `victims', those who are in need of `help'. But this is where Cohen's argument ends up. In
their move from politics to the academy and the world of `discourse', the postmodernists may have simply
exchanged one grand narrative, historical materialism, for another, psychoanalysis.62 For
psychoanalysis is a grand narrative, par excellence. It is a theory that seeks to account for the world and which recognises
few limits on its explanatory potential. And the
claimed radicalism of psychoanalysis, in the hands of the
postmodernists at least, is not a radicalism at all but a prescription for a
politics of quietism, fatalism and
defeat. Those wanting to change the world, not just to interpret it, need to look
elsewhere.
AT: Ross
It is impossible to attribute symbolic racist motives to policy and individuals in policy

debates
Sniderman and Tetlock ’86
[Paul M. Sniderman, Stanford University and UC Berkeley Survey Research Center, and Philip E. Tetlock, UC Berkeley,
1986, “Symbolic Racism: Problems of Motive Attribution in Political Analysis,” accessed 3/31/14]
At what point is one justified in concluding that racist motives determine a

policy preference? Not surprisingly, different groups set different thresholds of proof.
Some civil rights activists View opposition to affirmative action quotas as
inspired in large part by racism. Some conservatives see the same programs as
threats to fundamental (nonracial) values such as equality of opportunity. Dis- agreements of this
sort, of course, are the stuff of politics. One person’s reason is frequently another‘s
rationalization (cf. Mills, 1940; Tetlock, 1985). ¶ Symbolic racism theory, in its fundamental sense, is
an attempt to apply the methods of social science. to the problem of political
motive attribution. It is therefore important to consider an especially basic question: to what extent are
political debates over the “true motives" underlying racial policy preferences
resolvable through the techniques of causal analysis available to the social
sciences? ¶ The answer to this question is by no means obvious. Problems of political motive attribution may roughly
be divided into “easy” and “hard” cases. An example of the former is old-fashioned racism; of the latter, symbolic racism.
Consider old-fashioned racism: what analytical tools might the investigator draw upon to determine whether traditional
racism underlies opposition to quotas? The classical strategy is to locate attitudes toward quotas in a nomological
network of relevant constructs-—constructs that should theoretically relate to attitudes toward quotas (cf. Cronbach &
Meehl, 1955). Thus, one would explore the relations among affect toward blacks, crude stereotyping of blacks, policy
stands that contemporary American political culture would label as unambiguously racist (erg., support for segregation),
and policy stands whose meaning is politically controversial (e.g., minority job quotas). ¶ Now a case such as this,
though easy in principle, may in practice be quite hard. (What “third variables" moderate the relation between traditional
racism and opposition to quotas? To
what extent does the relationship hold when one
controls for alternative explanations such as traditional values or attitudes
toward the federal government?) Even so, a hard case, such as symbolic racism,
represents a quite different order of difficulty. The difficulty is as follows: There is no
nomological net in the case of symbolic racism. Many of the motive attributions are
contestable, not merely by the person to whom they are attributed, but also by
other analysts generally. And they are inherently contestable because the sym-
bolic racism approach begs the question—how, after all, is one to tell whether
opposition to affirmative action is racist or not when, in the case of symbolic
racism, racism is not related to an agreed-on sign of racism, for example, crude
stereotyping?¶ Lacking positive evidence of racist motivation, one might turn to negative
evidence. Perhaps one could infer racist motivation by a process of elimina- tion—by ruling out other plausible
motives for, say, opposing affirmative action. Thus, an investigator might propose that because the well-being of the
individual respondent is not directly threatened by quotas, the individual is not driven by concern for his or her self—
interest. ¶ Negative arguments, however, are inherently weak ways to resolve prob-
lems of motive attribution (cf. Tetlock & Manstead, i985). The variety of alternative motives
for taking a particular policy stand is practically endless. How exactly should one
go about operationalizing "self-interest"-objective life circumstances (the presence or
absence of a quota system in one‘s place of work), perceived life circumstances (do the respondents believe,
in competing for scarce societal
resources, they are at a comparative disadvantage by virtue of being white?), or
the perceived life circumstances of individuals or groups with whom the respondent identifies (e.g.,
friends, family, neighbors)? Moreover, self-interest is only one class of motivational counterhypothesis. Perhaps the
respondent objects out of belief that color-blind decision-making procedures provide the fairest method of guaranteeing
equality of opportunity (or social harmony) in the long run. Or perhaps the respondent perceives quota systems as one
more manifestation of an increasingly intrusive and legalistic federal bureau- cracy that restricts individual freedom and
market efficiency. ¶ Symbolic racism researchers have only skimmed the surface of such
potential motivational counter-hypotheses. But, supposing they went deeper: Is
the attribution of symbolic racism falsifiable? We believe not. The list of counter-
hypotheses is, in principle, infinite. Furthermore, the flow of causality, even when studied
by the most sophisticated statistical modeling procedures, will remain highly
ambiguous as long as symbolic racism researchers reserve the right to label a
wide range of (nonracial) values and policy preferences as racist. Suppose, for
example, that one were to find that all the variance in white opposition to
government assistance for blacks could be statistically explained as a function of
commitment to economic individualism, antipathy toward the federal government, and the belief that
market mechanisms are the most efficient method of alleviating the plight of the poor. Assume, moreover,
that affect toward blacks did not even emerge as a significant predictor of
opposition to government assistance to blacks. Would this – at first glance, quite devastating
– evidence count against the symbolic racism thesis? Not necessarily. Symbolic racism
researchers could respond that such data only buttress their case. After all, the data
reveal a connection between traditional values (support for economic individualism and
capitalism) and opposition to assistance for blacks, and these traditional values are the very essence of
symbolic racism. In short, as currently formulated, symbolic racism theory fails the fundamental
test expected of any scientific theory – falsifiability. It is unclear what evidence it would take
to convince symbolic racism researchers they are wrong.
Gender
Gender A2 Cap
Analyses of capitalism alone cannot confront gendered violence – only including
interrogations of sexism can solve
Hartmann, ’76. Heidi Hartmann. “Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Job Segregation by Sex.” Signs, Vol. 1, No. 3,
Women and the Workplace: The Implications of Occupational Segregation (Spring, 1976), pp. 137-169.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173001 – clawan
The emergence of capitalism in the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries threatened
patriarchal control based on institutional authority as it de- stroyed many old
institutions and created new ones, such as a "free" market in labor. It threatened
to bring all women and children into the labor force and hence to destroy the family and the
basis of the power of men over women (i.e., the control over their labor power in the family).2 If the theoretical tendency
of pure capitalism would have been to eradi- cate all arbitrary differences of status among laborers, to make all laborers
equal in the marketplace, why
are women still in an inferior position to men in the labor
market? The possible answers are legion; they range from neoclassical views that the process is not complete
or is hampered by market imperfections to the radical view that production requires hierarchy even if the market
nominally requires "equality."3All of these explanations, it seems to me, ignore the role of men-ordinary men,
men as men, men as workers-in maintaining women's inferiority in the labor market . The
radical view, in particular, emphasizes the role of men as capitalists in creating hierarchies in
the production process in order to maintain their power. Capitalists do this by
segmenting the labor market (along race, sex, and ethnic lines among others) and playing
workers off against each other. In this paper I argue that male workers have played and
continue to play a crucial role in maintaining sexual divisions in the labor
process. Job segregation by sex, I will argue, is the primary mechanism in capitalist
society that maintains the superiority of men over women, because it enforces
lower wages for women in the labor market. Low wages keep women dependent
on men because they encourage women to marry. Married women must perform domestic chores for their hus- bands.
Men benefit, then, from both higher wages and the domestic division of labor . This
domestic division of labor, in turn, acts to weaken women's position in the labor market. Thus, the hierarchical
domestic division of labor is perpetuated by the labor market, and vice versa.
This process is the present outcome of the continuing interaction of two
interlocking systems, capitalism and patriarchy. Patriarchy, far from being
vanquished by capitalism, is still very virile; it shapes the form modern
capitalism takes, just as the development of capitalism has transformed
patriarchal institutions. The resulting mutual accommodation between patriarchy and capitalism has created a
vicious circle for women. My argument contrasts with the traditional views of both neoclassical and
Marxist economists. Both ignore patriarchy, a social system with a material base. The neoclassical
economists tend to exonerate the capitalist system, attributing job segregation to
exogenous ideological factors, like sexist attitudes. Marxist economists tend to attribute
job segregation to capitalists, ignoring the part played by male workers and the
effect of centuries of patriarchal social relations. In this paper I hope to redress the balance. The
line of argument I have outlined here and will develop further below is perhaps incapable of proof. This paper, I hope,
will establish its plausibility rather than its incontrovertability.
Gender A2 Race
Patriarchy root cause of racism – differing gender relations causes antagonism
between racial groups
Ingraham, ’94. Chrys Ingraham, July 1994. “The Heterosexual Imaginary: Feminist Sociology and Theories of
Gender.” Sociological Theory, Vol. 12, No. 2. http://www.jstor.org/stable/201865 – clawan
Patriarchy is also historically variable, producing a hierarchy of heterogender
divisions which privileges men as a group and exploits women as a group . It
structures social practices which it represents as natural and universal and which are
reinforced by its organizing institutions and rituals (e.g., marriage). As a totality,
patriarchy organizes difference by positioning men in hierarchical opposition to
women and differentially in relation to other structures, such as race or class. Its
continued success depends on the maintenance of regimes of difference as well as on a range of material forces. It is a
totality that not only varies cross-nationally, but also manifests differently across
ethnic, racial, and class boundaries within nations. For instance, patriarchy in African-
American culture differs significantly from patriarchy in other groups in U.S.
society. Even though each group shares certain understandings of hierarchical relations between men and women, the
historical relation of African-American men to African-American women is dramatically different from that among
Anglo-European Americans. Among
African- Americans, a group which has suffered
extensively from white supremacist policies and practices, solidarity as a "racial"
group has frequently superseded asymmetrical divisions based on gender . This is
not to say that patriarchal relations do not exist among African Americans, but that they have manifested differently
among racial-ethnic groups as a result of historical necessity. Interestingly ,
racism has sometimes
emerged in relation to criticisms of African-American men for not being
patriarchal enough by Euro-American standards. As a totality, patriarchy produces structural
effects that situate men differently in relation to women and to each other according to history.
Race
Race A2 Anthro
Conceptions of racism and the racial Other provide the foundation for the oppression
and exploitation of nonhuman animals – perm is key
Eckersley, ’98. ROBYN ECKERSLEY, Professor and Head of Political Science in the School of Social and Political
Sciences, University of Melbourne, Australia. “Beyond Human Racism.” Environmental Values, Vol. 7, No. 2 (May 1998),
pp. 165-182. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30301627 – clawan
In a recent critical examination of the anthropocentrism debate, Tim Hayward has suggested that the term anthropocentrism is something of a misnomer and that
we need a more appropriate vocabulary to capture the main gist of the critique (Hayward 1997, 49). It is certainly true that the terms anthropocentrism and non-
anthropocentrism have generated as much heat as light, and critics have continued to recycle a range of familiar arguments to show that non- anthropocentrism is
impossible (how can we avoid being human-centred?), unnecessary (Human Welfare Ecology can perform all the necessary work [e.g. Wells 1993]) and
undesirable (non-anthropocentrism is an insult to humanism [e. g. Bookchin l995]).2 Obviously, we cannot avoid being anthropocentric if all it is taken to mean is,
without explanation and qualification, simply being ‘human-centred’ in the sense of perceiving and interpreting the world from a human vantage point. If it is
accepted that we cannot break out of the ‘hermeneutic circle’, then it is naive to expect that we can avoid being anthropocentric in this formal sense of the term.
Thus, one might readily accept that humans are the source and centre of meaning in the world (that we are interpreting animals), while rejecting the proposition
that this must necessarily mean that humans are the sole centre of value or agency. However, this argument about the impossi- bility of formal non-
anthropocentrism misses the main point of the substantive, moral critique of anthropocentrism. Yet the confusion is perhaps understandable, since the core term
anthropocentrism carries multiple meanings. For this reason alone (although there are other reasons as well) we should probably dispense with it and find another
The point, as Lynch himself has succinctly

that reduces the considerable burden of explanation and qualification.
put it in another context, is ‘to establish the possibility of a human point of view -
a view of the world possible to creatures like us - which does not place anything
objectionably human at the centre of concern’ (Lynch 1996, 152). By ‘objectionably human’
I would suggest viewpoints which reveal human prejudices based on some form
of invidious comparison. Such viewpoints can serve to legitimate the domination
of both humans and nonhumans - a point which connects human emancipatory
movements with the radical ecology movement. What is common to this broader
emancipatory critique is a rejection of the view that the ‘other’ must in some way
be like us before we accord him/her/them/it any recognition or respect. ‘Human
chauvinism’ (coined by the Routleys [1979] and favoured by Hayward and many others) seems to come closest to describing the crux of the problem, although I
am suggesting here that ‘human racism’ might possibly do better (at least descriptively - analytically they are the same) since the critique of human racism (and
the particular
the defence of its corollary, nonracist humanism) is less likely to be misinterpreted as an attack on humanism per se. Moreover,
kind of prejudice that is revealed in racism, while structurally similar to (and

often linked with) the hierarchical dualisms and logic of sexism, is often directed
towards more radical forms of difference or ‘otherness’ (i.e, the differences
between particular human races and cultures can be much greater than the
differences between men and women in any given race or culture). This would
seem to be more relevant to a discussion of the even more radical forms of
difference which may be found between humans and nonhumans. Whatever descriptive label
we might choose to replace anthropocentrism - human chauvinism, human racism, human speciesism or perhaps even human colonialism -the analytical point is
the excluded groups are excluded because they lack something that is
the same. That is,
possessed and deemed by the more powerful group to be the measure of worth
(such as reason, civilisation, moral agency, or language). As Plumwood and many other ecofeminist
philosophers have pointed out, these comparisons reveal a deep structure of mastery based on
self/other dualisms ‘which create a web of incorporations and inclusions’ (Plumwood

1993, 143). And it is therefore a ‘fatal flaw’ , as Evemden (1985, 10) calls it, for environmentalists to try to squeeze some of their moral constituency (say apes and
Conforming to the
some other mammals) into the dominant criteria, reckoning that saving some is better than saving none.
requirements and modes of rationality of the dominant culture has rarely served
the interests of diverse minority cultures. Such a strategy is even less likely to
permit the flourishing of biological diversity. Now it must be emphasised that there is nothing in the critique of
human racism which demands that we cannot celebrate the dignity of each and every human, the achievements of humankind, and what is special about the
human race, and we may (indeed ought) go to great lengths to help our own kind. But we ought not, as part of those celebrations of specialness, ‘belongingness’
and compassion for each other, thereby ignore the needs of other beings who are not like us when we have a choice, least of all persecute them, simply because
they are not of our own kind. The line between patriotism and xenophobia is sometimes a fine
one and it is likewise not always immediately obvious when the line between
humanism and human racism is crossed. This is because nowadays it is not so common to find environmental destruction
justified in terms of a Promethean model of human destiny, a hierarchy of creation or as a means of ‘enlarging human empire’ vis-a-vis the rest of nature. Just
as racism has become more subtle (for example, willful blindness or indifference towards the structural disadvantage that is
suffered by some racial minorities has tended to replace the more outlandish expressions of racial superiority of the nineteenth century), so too has
human racism become more subtle. These days, many unnecessary and
environmentally destructive developments are more usually justified as neces-
sary to create employment or improve human welfare in some way, in which
case critics of development are easily typecast as either indifferent or hostile to
the needs of the unemployed or humans generally. (Here the problem of invidious comparison takes a different
form. We no longer persecute the other because it is not like us. Instead, some of us are admonished for caring for nonhuman others because they are not like us.)
Thus destructive development is justified as ‘natural’ and inescapable, since there are no ‘viable’ alternatives. It is under circumstances such as these, when
otherwise worthy humanist sentiments are made to perform an ideological function (i.e., concealing and/or delegitimising alteratives) that humanism is
transformed into human racism. That is, it is this refusal to make an effort to acknowledge or explore alternatives which might possibly enable the mutual
fulfillment of human and nonhuman needs that should alert us to the prejudice of human racism. IS IT HUMANS PER SE OR THEIR CHARACTERISTICS? It is
noteworthy that the form of reasoning employed by Lynch and Wells to undermine non-anthropocentrism (now read ecocentrism) is exactly the reverse of the
form of reasoning that has been typically employed to undermine anthropocentrism (now read human racism). That is, critics of
anthropocentrism or speciesism, such as the Singer (1975), Routleys (1979), Regan (1983), Rodman (1977), Evemden (1985), Noske (1989), Fox
(1990), Eckersley (1992) and Plumwood ( 1993) have pointed to the self-serving way in which a human racist morality selects certain special human characteristics
or traits (language, tool making, rationality, moral sensibility or whatever) as the basis of allocating moral considerability but nonetheless fails to systematically
and consistently apply such criteria. That is, when it is shown that some members of the human community lack the requisite characteristics or that some
members of the nonhuman community possess them, there appears to be no genuine attempt to adjust practices to live up to the moral criteria. In effect, the moral
criteria is revealed to be an admit attempt to disguise what is really a basic ‘prejudice’ in favour of humans simply because of the fact of their humanness. And as
we have seen, Lynch and Wells openly and wholeheartedly embrace this so-called ‘prejudice’, this simple fact of humanness, as ‘the fundamental modality of
reject attempts to develop supposedly more ‘objective’

moral concern’. They also
characteristics of moral considerability (such as sentience), because they wish to avoid

making moral choices on the basis of the presence or absence of such
characteristics. Indeed, they point out that to exclude certain humans from moral
considerability simply because they lack particular characteristics is to introduce
a hierarchy of moral worth among humans - something that most of us would
find repugnant. It is the fact of humanness which should count. Of course, not all of the critiques of human racism mentioned above are necessarily
also suggesting that we ought to rely on ‘objective characteristics’ and thereby introduce a hierarchy of moral worth (only Singer and Regan do this). Rather, the
primary point of the exercise has been to expose the self-serving and inconsistent character of human racism. Nonetheless, defenders of ecocentrism face a real
problem here, which has recently been noted by Tim Hayward in his critical examination of the anthropocentrism debate. ‘The problem’ as Hayward puts it, ‘has
to do with a lack of concern with nonhumans but the term anthropocentrism can all too plausibly be understood as meaning an excessive concern' with humans’
(Hayward 1997, 57). Despite repeated attempts by ecocentric theorists to emphasise that non-anthropocentrism should be understood as a more inclusive ethical
orientation than humanism, critics have continued to interpret it as a perspective that is opposed to humanism and as necessarily antihumanist or misanthropic.
Why has this message been so difficult to convey? If there is a moral bedrock in western, post-Enlightenment political thought, it is the idea of the inherent dignity
and value of each and every human being. This is_ fundamental to the democratic revolution and to the doctrine of human rights. As Agnes Heller explains, the
very notion of ‘humankind’ raises the claim that there are some common or universal norms which should apply to all humans, something which links us in a
moral, rather than merely species, sense. Indeed, the very idea of humankind is constituted by such norms; it is raising the claim that humankind per se 'should
become a social cluster (Heller 1987, 37). For example, the idea of ‘crimes against humanity’ - central to the Nuremberg Trials - invokes the idea that there are
certain rights or entitlements which all humans should be free to enjoy qua humans. The verdict in those trials was widely accepted not simply as a matter of
revenge against the perpetrators but rather because it was considered just in some sublime sense - as a vindication and honouring of our commitment to the
dignity and worthiness of the human subject and to our collective moral connectedness. As Heller put it: ‘We feel it; we are aware of it; we are committed to it. But
we cannot explain it’ (Heller 1987, 37). It is this moral commitment to the community of humankind, and each of its members, which lies behind the impulse to go
to the aid of our own kind, and if necessary, save our own kind ahead of other species. It is the same commitment which often feels some resistance to the idea that
we should care more for other species, as if caring is a zero-sum game. Caring more for other species - especially in situations of scarcity and conflict- is assumed
to mean that we must care less for our own kind. It is the same commitment which lies behind the moral indignation that is so widely expressed in relation to the
idea that the pets of the affluent may be growing fat while many less fortunate humans are starving. And it is the same commitment which informs the critique of
deep ecology by social ecologists and many on the left. Bookchin’s recent book Reenchanting Human- ity is a typically feisty and eloquent reiteration of the
importance of our humanist heritage and a fierce tirade against any drift towards anything which might dilute this commitment. To Bookchin and many others,
humanism can never be ‘arrogant’, as David Ehrenfeld (1981) has suggested. However, this commitment to humanism need not be an impasse for ecocentrism, if
in
ecocentrism is understood as a moral perspective that is opposed to human racism rather than humanism per se. In any event, as Hayward (1997, 57) notes,
most cases of environmental conflict, the problem is not an excessive concern

with humans but rather a lack of concern for some humans and the rest of the
environment by a privileged minority of humans in positions of power - a point, Bookchin
and many on the left have laboured. Val Plumwood - one of the pioneers of the human chauvinist critique - has also rejected those critics of
anthropocentrism who merely condemn a blanket humanity in ways which

‘obscure the fact that the forces directing the destruction of nature and the wealth
produced from it are owned and controlled overwhelmingly by an
unaccountable, mainly white, mainly male, elite’ (Plumwood 1993, 12). Seen in this light, the primary
task of ecocentric ethics and politics should be to cast the critique of human
racism in terms which expose these power relations while also exposing the
limited moral horizons, or lack of moral inclusiveness, which informs the
exercise (or to follow Foucault, the ‘production’) of power.
Note: the term “human racism” more closely means “anthropocentrism,” not normal racism. When Eckersley uses the
term “racism” alone, she means regular xenophobia-type racism.
Contemporary movements against anthropocentrism are overwhelmingly white – only

by integrating a discussion of race and countering racism can the neg’s movement
succeed
Hamanaka and Basile, ’05. Sheila Hamanaka is a children’s book author and illustrator. She has studied
anti-racism with The People’s Institute and is a member of the Justice and Unity Campaign of WBAI. Her books include
Grandparent’s Song, All the Colors of the Earth, and The Journey: Japanese Americans, Racism and Renewal. She is
currently working on an animal liberation novel for children. Tracy Basile is a freelance journalist who also teaches animal
and nature courses at Purchase College, SUNY, and Pace University. June/July 2005. “Racism and the Animal Rights
Movement.” Satya Magazine, A Magazine of Vegetarianism, Environmentalism, and Animal Advocacy.
http://www.satyamag.com/jun05/hamanaka.html – clawan
We love animals. We hate racism. So what’s to talk about? In fact, two South Asian activists I
interviewed both felt that they had not experienced any overt racism in the animal rights (AR) movement.
Yet, like the peace and environmental movements, the AR movement is predominantly white and
middle class. Andrew Rowan, a VP at the Humane Society of the U.S., said surveys indicate the AR movement is
“less than three percent” people of color. In April, 316 people from over 20 states attended the first Grassroots AR
Conference in NYC, but the people of color caucus numbered only eight. If no one is racist, why is the movement largely
segregated? Is it “us” or “them”? Most of us want to be inclusive. But why? Is it because it is the “right” thing to do?
Because then our march would look like a beautiful rainbow? Because we have to be diverse to get funding? Pattrice
Jones, a white AR activist who has a page about racism at bravebirds.org states, “The fact is that a
predominantly
white movement will not and indeed cannot bring about animal liberation.” Jim
Mason, a well-known white AR activist and author of An Unnatural Order (reprinted by Lantern Books, 2005) which
looks at the history of racism as part of “dominionism,” agrees. He feels the
imbalance “keeps AR from
being a mass movement. It adds to the perception that it is just another trivial
concern of the comfortable classes, which repels people who might otherwise be
involved.” But is it just looking white that keeps people of color away from the movement? Or are white activists
who lack awareness making people of color feel uncomfortable? Patrick Kwan, founder and Executive Director of the
Student Animal Rights Alliance, said, “At the first demonstration I went to someone asked me ‘Do you speak English?’—
and that was in New York City!” He’s gotten these comments from white staffers of “pretty big AR organizations”: “I
can’t believe how Asians treat animals” and “I don’t like Asians.” Kris, an African American activist, describes how it
feels to experience tokenism: “They
haven’t done outreach to the community, but they call
—‘Hey we need a black face at the protest.’ I go, but it’s not a unifying way, it’s a
marginalizing way of organizing. You’re not one of us, but we need you.” Are AR
Organizations Serious About Outreach? According to Patrick, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is the
only major group doing active outreach into communities of color. A PETA employee concurs, “PETA…with its outreach
to Hispanics, African Americans, and Indians, has made fantastic inroads into those communities.” PETA assigns several
staff members to this work and has two separate websites, one in Spanish and another, PETAWorld.com, geared toward
African Americans. On the other hand, Kris calls it “lip service” when one organization failed to put the “human capital”
and provide enough leadership into their efforts to reach the African American community. “Large organizations have no
excuse,” says Patrick. Do People of Color Care About Animals? According to Patrick, there
is a preconception
that people of color do not care about animals. But, he says, surveys have shown
that African Americans are actually more likely to consider vegetarianism than
whites after being informed about the plight of farmed animals. Surveys of Latinos and
Asians also show positive attitudes toward animal protection. Olivia, who grew up in the projects and lives in Spanish
Harlem, reports that people eagerly take her flyers. Another African American activist found people snapped up samples
of vegan cooking. A young white woman active in the PETA KFC campaign noticed that “older white men never take our
flyers. The people who show the most interest in talking to us are African American men and women and Latino men and
women, and young white people.” Another self-defeating attitude is that people of color are too busy organizing around
civil rights or other issues. But, as in the white communities, only a small percentage of people are active. There are still
millions of others out there. The Big Picture It’s one thing for a white person to pass out vegan flyers. But attempts
by white AR activists to set the agenda for other cultures bears an uncomfortable
resemblance to the historical pattern of suppression by dominant nations.
Instead of exporting “democracy,” AR activists are exporting their cultural
concepts of the proper relationship between human and nonhuman animals . Let’s
step back for a moment from what may seem to outsiders like a tempest in a teapot. Okay, the AR movement needs to be
more diverse, but what’s all the fuss about? Can’t we all just get along? I opened with a quote from Sun Tzu because as
we see it, we are engaged in a battle for life. For the compassionate, it begins with the lives
of more than 52 billion land animals slaughtered globally every year, and
expands to the lives of millions of humans lost to the wars and privations of a
vastly unequal society where “darker” and “poorer” are often synonymous.
Causing or benefiting from this situation are powerful militarized states,
multinational corporations, and an intricate web of civil and penal institutions so
heartlessly interlocked they are often referred to in popular culture as one entity: “The
Machine.” It’s an unequal battle. Animals have no power. Defending them are
pockets of Indigenous peoples and a small AR movement. The same could be said for every
injustice: small groups confronting gargantuan tasks, and sometimes, each other. Indian writer Arundhati Roy sagely
notes what she calls “the N-G-O-ization of the movement.” (NGO = Non-Governmental Organization.) Governments and
corporations, lacking roots in communities but needing to stem social unrest, toss out thousands of carrots to activists
who otherwise might have channeled their anger into revolutionary movements. Closer to the ground and quicker on
their feet, they can perform social services more efficiently than huge government bureaucracies. They tend to the sores of
social injustice like overworked allopathic doctors: treating the symptoms while, some observe, the patient dies. “Racism
= Racial Prejudice + Power” — The People’s Institute Given
the sheer might of “The Machine,”
you’d think everyone would be talking about how to get power. After all, it is
power that keeps animals oppressed. But is power just a numbers game? When a million people
demonstrated for peace in New York in February 2003 I was struck by two things: how white the crowd was, and how the
next day everyone was gone and the war in Iraq proceeded. David Billings, a white anti-racist trainer with The People’s
Institute and historian of the grassroots movement says, “Nowadays we know how to mobilize, but not how to organize.”
Racism is a powerful tool of disorganization that has been used against potential
allies for centuries. It justified the European invasion, enslavement and genocide of Native Americans and
Africans. Many immigrant European workers and landless peasants traded their
class consciousness for the fabricated notion of “whiteness” and were rewarded
with land grants and a chance to share in the profits of slavery. Even now
textbooks hide the long history of African, Indigenous, and multiracial rebellion.
The mid-19th century saw the rise of the Abolitionist movement as whites joined
in; a few privileged whites also formed the humane movement, which advocated
for animals but ignored the plight of slaves. Historically humane education was upheld as a means
of cultivating moral values amongst white children, especially boys who would become tomorrow’s leaders. Is today’s
liberal commitment to help those less fortunate rooted in this same racist, missionary tradition? Well-meaning
whites, sometimes armed with the comment “I do not see color”— which often causes
people of color to smile inwardly—continue to build essentially segregated organizations
because to them overcoming racism is still about cultivating moral values and
not sharing power. Whereas to oppressed peoples of color, race has always been
about power. They do not fight for social justice to make white people feel better about themselves. “The
Machine” also understands that race is about power, and its generals also read Sun Tzu.
Much the way the suffering of animals is invisibilized, so too is the suffering of
peoples of color and Indigenous peoples. Beneath the radar of mainstream media, these groups more
often get the stick instead of the carrot. David Hilliard, one of the founders of the Black Panther Party, recounted in his
April ‘04 interview with Satya, “some 40 are still in prison, 28 of us were murdered.” They were killed because they were
black and wanted “Power to the People,” not because they were vegetarian. In Colombia, almost 4,000 labor organizers
have been murdered in the last 15 years. In one state in India, 4,000 farmers committed suicide between 1999-2004 in
desperation over free trade and privatization policies. This is a far cry from most
large AR organizations,
which model themselves after corporations and in fact are characterized by the
same “institutional racism”: no matter how colorful their brochures, the vast majority of
positions of power are held by white people, albeit nice ones who like animals. According to one
activist, outreach to communities of color is approached like a marketing challenge,
not as a desire to share power. A corporation is a legal person, but without a mind. As such, no one is
accountable for de facto segregation unless someone is stupid enough to use the “n” word. The People’s Institute, in its
Undoing Racism workshops, asks social workers and other participants “Do you make money off the poor?” One by one,
people nod their heads. Is it possible that AR workers—from the CEOs of large nonprofits who may make a third of a
million dollars, to grassroots grunts who make minimum wage—are making money off of animals? The People’s Institute
states: Any organization that is not intentionally anti-racist inevitably benefits white people. Where Will We Find Power?
Language to the contrary, white people are the “minority” on the planet. As the minority it only makes sense to want to
hook up with the majority with great urgency, as if billions of lives, and the future of the earth itself, were at stake. Global
agribusiness, which feeds “The Machine” will only be undone by a powerful global movement. The truth hidden by
Eurocentric media is that some of the most dynamic, holistic political organizing on the planet is happening in the
“developing” world. You should know these names: Vandana Shiva, Wangari Maathai, Alfredo Palacio, Evo Morales,
Lula da Silva. Twelve thousand landless peasants recently marched in Brazil. The 2004 World Social Forum (WSF) in
Mumbai, India drew 200,000 people. Across the street was another forum for groups excluded from the WSF for political
reasons. Some were militant revolutionary groups, some weren’t. The 2005 WSF in Porto Alegre, Brazil heard Hugo
Chavez, the President of Venezuela. Chavez, a former military officer, is an advocate for the poor and landless. If the AR
movement wants power, it should study how President Chavez got it. It should join in on the ground floor of the global
people’s movement, which is inherently anti-agribusiness, to become part of the agenda. Maybe, just maybe, power lies
with the powerless. Asked how he would build a united front with Indigenous cultures that might eat animals but who
live in balance with nature, Jim Mason replied: “I would start with campaigning to insure their survival—the survival of
their native lands, their natural habitat, their traditional ways of living. The dominant cultures that are destroying the
living world will—if they ever wake up—need to draw from the older cultures to make the changes in thinking needed to
stop the destruction and develop a culture of balance with nature.” The dominant
white culture also
writes humane history. It starts with European philosophers and reform movements. Native concepts
of human equality with, or even inferiority to, animals are omitted. Indigenous cultures
which do not divide humans and animals into classes, into exploiter and exploited, do not have the need for the concept
of “animal rights.” Tiokasin Ghosthorse, producer of “First Voices” (WBAI, 99.5FM Thursdays at 10 a.m.) calls for “nature
rights.” Onondaga elder Oren Lyon says the term “human rights” is a misnomer. In 1999, AR activists tried to physically
stop the Makah people in the Pacific Northwest from resuming their whale hunting after an endangered species ban was
lifted. Kent Lebsock, Executive Director of the American Indian Law Alliance, said non-Indian activists focused not on
commercial whalers but on people who were reclaiming their traditional way of life. It was taken as a racist act of cultural
suppression. “They showed a lack of understanding of what we have experienced in the last 500 years.” Lebsock said,
“During the incident, every Indian person I spoke to thought the Makah were right.” This
bitter, complex
dispute has many lessons. One is that there is a potential for alliances with
progressive, traditionalist groups which already exist within these communities ,
and which could use the access to media, etc. that privileged whites often have.
Because racism in the movement goes unaddressed, we all lose and the animals
lose.
Race A2 Fem
Color-blind critiques of patriarchy will inevitably fail – only by evaluating the effects of
racism can feminists movements succeed
Roberts, ‘92. DOROTHY E. ROBERTS, Associate Professor, Rutgers University School ofLaw-Newark. B.A. 1977,
Yale Col- lege;J.D. 1980, Harvard Law School. “RACISM AND PATRIARCHY IN THE MEANING OF MOTHERHOOD.”
JOURNAL OF GENDER & THE LAW. http://www.wcl.american.edu/journal/genderlaw/01/roberts.pdf – clawan
Understanding the connection between racism and patriarchy expands the
feminist project. Its goal cannot be to eliminate the sub- ordination of women,
divorced from issues of race. Racism subordinates women.198 "If feminism is to be
a genuine struggle to improve the lives of all women, then all feminists must
assume re- sponsibility for eliminating racism ."' 99 The struggle against racism is
also a necessary part of uniting women in political solidarity. Ra- cism divides women. 20 0
Some feminists may find their motivation to oppose racism within the dreams of feminism: "It can spring from a heartfelt
desire for sisterhood and the personal, intellectual realiza- tion that racism among women undermines the potential
radicalism of feminism. ' 2 I I do not mean that feminists should see anti-racism as an important extra-curricular project.
Because racism is part of the structure of patriarchy in America, anti-racism is
critical to dismantling it.202 Difference is such a pleasant word. It applies to everyone. It does not call anyone
to action. We need only acknowledge that it exists, and then move on with our preconceived plans. Racism is quite
different. It destroys. It condemns. It speaks of power. It demands a response . Adrienne
Rich calls on feminists to use the word, racism: If black and white feminists are going to speak of
female accounta- bility, I believe the word racism must be seized, grasped in our bare
hands, ripped up out of the sterile or defensive consciousness in which it so often grows, and
transplanted so that it can yield new insights for our lives and our movement .... I
thought of trying to claim other language in which to describe, specifically, the white woman's problem in encountering
the black woman; the differences that have divided black and white women; the misnam- ing or denial of those
differences in everyday life. But I am con- vinced that we must go on using that sharp, sibilant word; not to paralyze
ourselves and each other with repetitious, stagnant doses of guilt, but to break it down into its elements, comprehend it as
a female experience, and also to understand its inextricable connections with gynephobia.203 Acknowledging
each other's differences is not enough.2 0 4 Rela- tionshipsofpowerproduceourdifferences.205 We
must face the awful history and reality of racism that helps create those differ-
ences. We do not need to focus less on gender; we need to understand how
gender relates to race. If we see feminism as a "liberation project" that seeks the
emancipation of all women, then we must address the complexity of forces that
bind us.2 0
Contemporary feminism fails to take into account matters of race – that eliminates
space for black female identity
Carby, ‘82. Hazel V. Carby is professor of African American Studies and of American Studies at Yale University.
“White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood.”
https://crabgrass.riseup.net/assets/163126/versions/1/carby%20white%20woman%20listen.pdf – clawan
Much contemporary debate has posed the question of the relation between race
and gender, in terms that attempt to parallel race and gender divisions. It can be argued that as processes, racism
and sexism are similar. Ideologically for example, they both construct common sense through
reference to "natural" and "biological" differences . It has also been argued that the categories of
race and gender are both socially constructed and that, therefore, they have little internal coherence as concepts.
Furthermore, it is possible to parallel racialized and gendered divisions in the sense that the possibilities of amelioration
through legislation appear to be equally ineffectual in both cases. Michele Barrett, however, has pointed out that it is not
possible to argue for parallels because as soon as historical analysis is made, it becomes obvious that the institutions
which have to be analyzed are different, as are the forms of analysis needed. We would agree that the construction of
such parallels is fruitless and often proves little more than a mere academic exercise; but there are other reasons for our
dismissal of these kinds of debate. The experience of black women does not enter the parameters of parallelism. The fact
that black women are subject to the simultaneous oppression of patriarchy, class, and "race" is the prime reason for not
employing parallels that render their position and experience not only marginal but also invisible. In arguing that
most contemporary feminist theory does not begin to adequately account for the
experience of black women, we also have to acknowledge that it is not a simple question of their absence,
and consequently the task is not one of rendering their visibility. On the contrary we will have to argue that
the process of accounting for their historical and contemporary position does, in
itself, challenge the use of some of the central categories and assumptions of
recent mainstream feminist thought. We can point to no single source for our oppression. When
white feminists emphasize patriarchy alone, we want to redefine the term and
make it a more complex concept. Racism ensures that black men do not have the
same relations to patriarchal/capitalist hierarchies as white men. In the words of the
Combahee River Collective: We believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as
pervasive in Black women's lives as are the politics of class and race. We also often find
it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simul-
taneously. We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual,
e.g., the history of rape of Black women by white men as a weapon of political repression. Although we are feminists and
lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalisation that white women who
are separatists demand. Our
situation as Black people necessitates that we have solidarity
around the fact of race, which white women of course do not need to have with white men, unless it is their
negative solidarity as racial oppressors. We struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also struggle with
Black men about sexism. (Combahee River Collective 1983, 213) It is only in the writings by black feminists that we can
find attempts to theorize the interconnection of class, gender, and race as it occurs in our lives, and it has only been in the
autonomous organizations of black women that we have been able to express and act upon the experiences consequent
upon these determinants. Many
black women had been alienated by the nonrecognition
of their lives, experiences, and herstories in the Women's Liberation Movement
(WLM). Black feminists have been and are still demanding that the existence of
racism must be acknowledged as a structuring feature of our relationships with
white women. Both white feminist theory and practice have to rec- ognize that white
women stand in a power relation as oppressors of black women. This
compromises any feminist theory and practice founded on the notion of simple
equality.
Race A2 Irigaray
Irigaray’s critique ignores the role of race in shaping gender relations – whiteness
takes the place of masculinity
Hom, ’13. SABRINA L. HOM, Lecturer of Philosophy at Georgia College. “Between Races and Generations:
Materializing Race and Kinship in Moraga and lrigaray.” Hypatia vol. 28, no. 3 (Summer 2013) – clawan
Mary Bloodsworth-Lugo argues that “to claim an ontological status for sexual difference is to construct sexual difference
as unmarked by race” (Bloodsworth-Lugo 2007, 45); this claim is plausible only if sexual difference is taken as fixed rather
than dynamic, and it fails to acknowledge the ways in which race is materialized on and through the sexed body. With
Irigaray and Seshadri-Crooks, I
will take sex as an irreducible, ontological difference, but I
will argue that it is marked and transformed through racialization. Seshadri-Crooks
argues for a Lacanian conception of race that at once acknowledges the intricate relation between race and sex and
recognizes important differences between the workings of the two. She acknowledges that race is not like sex in that sex
“is indeterminate and exceeds language” (Seshadri-Crooks 2000, 4) and is “in the Real,” sexual difference is significant
and existent in human bodies before cultural meaning is imposed upon them, as humans are always generated on the
condition of the existence of at least two sexes of human being, and 426 Hypatia always already marked by this
difference. Whereas
Irigaray argues persuasively that we should take sex as
irreducible difference, the genesis of race in the history of colonialism attests
obviously to its arbitrariness.3 As theorists like Evelynn Hammonds and Sander Gilman demonstrate, race
is attributed through sexed means such as the miscegenation taboo and the myth of black hypersexuality (among other
means) (Gilman 1985; Hammonds 1994). We should note, then, that Seshadri-Crooks agrees with the first clause of
Irigaray’s notoriously problematic claim in I Love to You that sexual difference
“is an immediate natural given ... the problem of race is a secondary problem ”
(Irigaray 1995, 47). It is the second claim, that race can then be analytically separated
from sex and subordinated as a problem, that fails to comprehend the ways that
racialization morphs the sexed body. Seshadri-Crooks argues that race should be
understood both as functioning through sexual difference and as a consolation
for the disappointments of sex (or, more precisely, that whiteness is a consolation
for the disappointments of masculinity) (Seshadri-Crooks 2000, 43; 59).4 Seshadri-Crooks and I follow
theorists such as Lacan in taking phallogocentric and racial dominance to be rooted in the specular; sexual and racial
hierarchies depend largely on visible differences, always read as lacks. In classical psychoanalytic thought, the woman is
always marked by the nothing to see, the visible lack of a phallus. Sexual difference offers an inferior other that promises
to shore up the male ego, but since the spectacle of castration is simultaneously anxiety- producing (as castration looms as
a threat to masculinity) and mysterious (since the female sex is marked not by a lack but by a genuine difference, one that
may not be immediately visible but that is nonetheless present as a troubling excess to the phallic system), sexual
difference is not fully successful as a means of assuring male wholeness and
value. Where language necessarily fails to capture the excess of sex, racial
differen- tiation and the logic of colonialism promise to present an other who can
be wholly mastered. Although the phallic ideal of power and hardness is
ultimately impossible to sustain even for a man, whiteness is posited as a new
form of specular assurance. Here whiteness signifies precisely the wholeness,
value, and purity that, as Irigaray argues, the imperfectly flat mirror of woman
fails to project (Irigaray 1985). Femininity represents lack because to specular logic women have nothing to see;
the enigma of the female sex, however, which would be better said to exceed the gaze, can of course be reappropriated as
a threat to phallic specularity. The rhetoric of race as visibility, however, promises an
unambiguous visual signifier of inferiority in the other; the inade- quacy of the
non-white subject is to be immediately and fully disclosed to the eye .5 Rather than
taking race as a secondary adjunct or perfect analog to sex, Seshadri- Crooks argues that whiteness
functions as a master signifier in its own right, signifying civilization,
dominance, reason, beauty, value, wholeness, and purity. This argument
demands that psychoanalytic feminists theorize race as well as sex , and that that these
differences be theorized intersectionally rather than assimilated to a single axis of hierarchy (that is to say, a logic of the
same). Clearly the addition of an other so-called phallus to the hierarchy of sexual difference is transformative to the
work of post-Lacanian theorists like Irigaray; as with the recognition of other axes of difference, the hierarchy and array of
subject positions produced therein are greatly multiplied and complicated. Sabrina L. Hom 427 At least in our
time, cognizant of our colonial location, we cannot speak of women, for instance,
or of relations between men and women, without recognizing that race and sex
together shape these in ways that exceed Irigaray’s account. Although many axes
of difference similarly index the field of sexual difference, probably few will do
so as deeply as does race, which at least in the current understanding has a stronger claim than, say, class to
be in the body not only as a visible mark but as a heritable quality in the blood.6 This,
after all, is the truth of any con- ventional description of racial passing: he may look
and act white, but he’s really not —that is to say, one or both of his parents were non-white, and this
characteristic is inherited in his blood if not on his skin. Hence the importance of the rhetoric
of purity as an element of whiteness (Haney-Lopez 2006); this rubric is sometimes used to disavow and disinherit the
children of mixed-race relationships under the one-drop rule, at other times to juridically “whiten” mixed children (see
Lawrence 2003). At any rate, it
functions, along with the miscegenation taboo, to make
sense of the otherwise obscure truth of blood that is, in the colonial context,
always already mixed. These legal conventions, along with the tortuous
discourse around authentic race in the blood, demonstrate that racialization is
dependent on controlling and rationalizing blood.
Race A2 “Education”
Current education privileges the white perspective and undermines the success of
nonwhite people
Marable, ’98. Manning Marable. “Racism and Sexism,” chapter 16 in Race, Class, and Gender in the United States.
6th edition. http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=9I7ExPk-
What are some other characteristics of the new racism we are now encountering? What
we see in general is a
duplicitous pattern that argues that African Ameri- cans and other people of
color are moving forward, whereas their actual material conditions are being
pushed back. Look at Americas education system. The number of doctoral degrees being
granted to Blacks, for example, is falling. The Reagan administration initiated
budget cuts in education, replacing government grants with loans, and deliberately escalated
unemployment for low-income people, making it difficult to afford tuition at
professional schools. Between 1981 and 1995, the actual percentage of young African American adults between
the ages eighteen and twenty-six enrolled in colleges and universities declined by more than 20 percent. A similar crisis
is occurring in our public school systems. In many cities, thedropout rate for nonwhite high school
students exceeds 40 percent. Across the United States, more than fifteen hundred
teenagers of color drop out of school every day. And many of those who stay in
school do not receive adequate training to prepare them for the realities of todays
high-tech labor market. Despite the curricular reforms of the 1970s and 1980s, American education
re- tains a character of elitism and cultural exclusivity. The overwhelming
majority of faculty at American colleges are white males: less than 5 percent of all college fac-
ulty today are African-Americans. The basic pattern of elitism and racism in colleges
conforms to the dynamics of Third World colonialism. At nearly all white academic
institutions, the power relationship between whites as a group and people of color is unequal. Authority is
invested in the hands of a core of largely white male administrators, bureaucrats,
and influential senior faculty. The board of trustees or regents is dominated by
white, conservative, affluent males. Despite the presence of academic courses on minorities, the vast
majority of white students take few or no classes that explore the heritage or
cultures of non-Western peoples or domestic minorities. Most courses in the
humanities and social sciences focus narrowly on topics or issues from the
Western capitalist experience and minimize the centrality and importance of
non-Western perspectives. Finally, the university or college divorces itself from the
pressing concerns, problems, and debates that relate to Blacks, Hispanics, or
even while working-class people. Given this structure and guiding philosophy, it shouldn’t surprise us
that many talented nonwhite students fail to achieve in such a hostile
environment.
Straight-up Affs A2 Race
Political action is key to confront institutionalized racism – individual rejections fail to
address forms of oppression such as drug policy
Marable, ’98. Manning Marable. “Racism and Sexism,” chapter 16 in Race, Class, and Gender in the United States.
6th edition. http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=9I7ExPk-
What else intensifies racism and inequality in the 1990s? Drugs. We are witnessing
the complete disintegration of America's inner cities , the home of millions of Latinos and
Blacks. We see the daily destructive impact of gang violence inside our neighborhoods and communities, which is
directly attributable to the fact that for
twenty years the federal government has done little
to address the crisis of drugs inside the ghetto and the inner city. For people of
color, crack addiction has become part of the new urban slavery, a method of disrupting
lives and regulating masses of young people who would otherwise be demanding jobs, adequate health care, better
schools, and control of their own communities. Is it accidental that this insidious cancer has been
unleashed within the very poorest urban neighborhoods, and that the police
concentrate on petty street dealers rather than on those who actually control
and profit from the drug traffic? How is it possible that thousands and
thousands of pounds of illegal drugs can be transported throughout the country ,
in airplanes, trucks, and automobiles, to hundreds of central distribution centers with thousands of employees, given
the ultra-high-tech surveillance and intelligence capacity of law enforcement
officers? How, unless crack presents a systemic form of social control? The struggle we
have now is not simply against the system. It's against the kind of insidious violence and oppressive behavior that people
of color carry out against each other. What I’m talking about is the convergence between the
utility of a certain type of commodity-addictive narcotics-and economic and
social problems that are confronting the system. That is, the redundancy, the unemployment of
millions of people of color, young women and men, living in our urban centers. The criminal justice
system represents one time of social control. Crack and addictive narcotics
represent another. If you’re doing organizing within the Black community, it
becomes impossible to get people and families to come out to your community center when there are crack houses all
around the building. It
becomes impossible to continue political organizing when
people are afraid for their own lives. This is the new manifestation of racism in
which we see a form of social control existing in our communities , the
destruction of social institutions, and the erosion of people's ability to fight
against the forms of domination that continuously try to oppress them .

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Explanation

A radical political economy framework is crucial since various ‘culturalist’

The application of psychoanalysis to race is false – it’s based on unverifiable

There is the parody of an undifferentiated anti-racism which is always crude and

class, relying on a `deficit model' of working-class culture, and engaged in a

It is impossible to attribute symbolic racist motives to policy and individuals in policy

At what point is one justified in concluding that racist motives determine a

The point, as Lynch himself has succinctly

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self/other dualisms ‘which create a web of incorporations and inclusions’ (Plumwood

reject attempts to develop supposedly more ‘objec- tive’

characteristics of moral considerability (such as sentience), because they wish to avoid

most cases of environmental conflict, the problem is not an excessive concern

anthropocentrism who merely condemn a blanket humanity in ways which

Contemporary movements against anthropocentrism are overwhelmingly white – only

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