Wilderson k

[ADI 2012] maksim bugrov osa gaius-obaseki [k - Lab]

[antiblackness]

[MAST ER]
[INDEX]

-antiblackness-antiblackness-........................................................................................................1 1NC – Short.......................................................................................................... 4 1NC – Long........................................................................................................... 7 Links..................................................................................................................... 12 Hegemony.......................................................................................................... 13 Globalization.......................................................................................................................... 14 Heg Bad.................................................................................................................................. 15 Civil Society....................................................................................................... 16 World writ large ..................................................................................................................... 17 The State................................................................................................................................ 18 State of Emergency................................................................................................................ 19 Civil Society -> Coherence of White Life................................................................................20 Civil Society -> Black Positionality......................................................................................... 21 Capitalism.......................................................................................................... 22 Capitalism.............................................................................................................................. 23 Environmental Policy.......................................................................................... 24 Environmental Regulations.................................................................................................... 25 Environmental Injustice.......................................................................................................... 26 Oil..................................................................................................................... 27 Oil ->Poor Communities......................................................................................................... 28 Humanism.......................................................................................................... 29 Human Focus.......................................................................................................................... 30 Language of Race................................................................................................................... 31 Reform/Freedom.................................................................................................................... 32 Modernity............................................................................................................................... 33 Impacts................................................................................................................. 34 Social Death....................................................................................................... 35 Body/Flesh.............................................................................................................................. 36 Slave Narrative->History........................................................................................................ 37 Humans->Ontology................................................................................................................ 38 Racialization....................................................................................................... 39 Non-humans........................................................................................................................... 40 Black non -existence.............................................................................................................. 41 Ontological Barrier................................................................................................................. 42 White Supremacy............................................................................................... 43 Environment........................................................................................................................... 44 Human Rights......................................................................................................................... 45 Colonialism........................................................................................................ 46 Whiteness/Colonialism->bodily disarticulation.......................................................................47 Dispensability......................................................................................................................... 48 Symbolic Violence............................................................................................... 49 Structural->Symbolic Violence............................................................................................... 50 Alternatives.......................................................................................................... 51 Performance....................................................................................................... 52

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Spoken word.......................................................................................................................... 53 Capitalism.............................................................................................................................. 54 Scholarship Revolution........................................................................................................... 55 Art as Identity......................................................................................................................... 56 Decolonization........................................................................................................................ 57 ALT:........................................................................................................................................ 58 Paradigmatic Analysis......................................................................................... 59 Pyrotechnics........................................................................................................................... 60 Solvency............................................................................................................... 61 Paradigm Disruption............................................................................................................... 62 Civil Society Destruction........................................................................................................ 63 Black = Center....................................................................................................................... 64 Antiblack Hierarchy................................................................................................................ 65 War Position........................................................................................................................... 66 Structural Analysis................................................................................................................. 67 War->Decolonize.................................................................................................................... 68 Symbolic Decolonization........................................................................................................ 69 Framework............................................................................................................70 Institutional Analysis.............................................................................................................. 71 Policing................................................................................................................................... 72 Policing/Settler....................................................................................................................... 73 Plan Focus.............................................................................................................................. 74 State Focus............................................................................................................................. 75 Predictability.......................................................................................................................... 76 Education............................................................................................................................... 77 Fairness.................................................................................................................................. 78 Block Extensions...................................................................................................79 Humanity........................................................................................................... 80 Black Body -> Unspeakable................................................................................................... 81 American Narrative................................................................................................................ 82 Hegemony.............................................................................................................................. 83 Absolute Dereliction............................................................................................................... 84 Identity................................................................................................................. 85 ID-> Symbolic Violence.......................................................................................................... 86 White Imagination.................................................................................................87 Climate Science and Enviro Policy.......................................................................................... 88 Climate Denial........................................................................................................................ 89 White Protectionism............................................................................................................... 90 Change................................................................................................................................... 91 White Structure...................................................................................................................... 92 Climate Change Denial........................................................................................................... 93 Language..............................................................................................................94 Bodies and Language............................................................................................................. 95 A2......................................................................................................................... 96 A2 Cap.................................................................................................................................... 97 A2 Whiteness....................................................................................................................... 100 A2 Multiracialism.................................................................................................................. 101 A2 Social Death vs. Social Life............................................................................................. 108 A2 Manichean K.................................................................................................................... 109 2

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A2: Coalitional Politics.......................................................................................................... 110 A2 You cause violence.......................................................................................................... 111 A2 You’re apolitical.............................................................................................................. 112 A2 Reform............................................................................................................................ 113 A2 Patriarchy........................................................................................................................ 114 A2 Anthro............................................................................................................................. 115 A2 Perm........................................................................................................... 116 Reorientation........................................................................................................................ 117 Alt = Prior Question.............................................................................................................. 118 Aff Answers.........................................................................................................119 Capitalism........................................................................................................ 120 Capitalism K – Link............................................................................................................... 121 Capitalism K – Race Link...................................................................................................... 123 Capitalism K – Root Cause.................................................................................................... 125 Essentialism/Epistemology DA........................................................................... 126 Link: Social Death Theory..................................................................................................... 127 Link: Wilderson..................................................................................................................... 128 Link: Sexton.......................................................................................................................... 129 Link: “Social Death”............................................................................................................. 130 Link: Slave Resistance.......................................................................................................... 132 Impact: Inter-Sectionalism................................................................................................... 133 Impact: Turns Case.............................................................................................................. 134 Politicized Identity K......................................................................................... 135 Politicized Identity K - 1NC................................................................................................... 136 Politicized Identity K - Link/Impact....................................................................................... 137 Politicized Identity K – Alternative Solvency.........................................................................138 Politicized Identity K - Alternative Solvency.........................................................................140 Politicized Identity K - Community Politics Key.....................................................................141 Politicized Identity K - AT: Strategic Essentialism.................................................................142 Perm................................................................................................................ 143 Policy Permutation............................................................................................................... 144 Kritical Permutation - Diversality.......................................................................................... 148 Kritical Permutation - Diversality.......................................................................................... 149

3

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1NC – Short
State action and institutional ethics makes anti-blackness worse - erases the exploitation of the black body Wilderson, award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. He is one of
two Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress and is a former insurgent in the ANC’s armed wing, 2003 (Frank B. III “Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics” Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Strucure of U.S. Antagonisms, Pg 15-16) GG Regarding the Black position, some might ask why, after claims successfully made on the state by the Civil Rights Movement, do I insist on positing an operational analytic for cinema, film studies, and political theory that appears to be a dichotomous and essentialist pairing of Masters and Slaves? In other words, why should we think of today’s Blacks in the US as Slaves and everyone else (with the exception of Indians) as Masters? One could answer these questions by demonstrating how nothing remotely approaching claims successfully made on the State has come to pass. In other words, the election of a Black President aside, police brutality, mass incarceration, segregated and substandard schools and housing, astronomical rates of HIV infection, and the threat of being turned away en masse at the polls still constitute the lived experience of Black life. But such empirically based rejoinders would lead us in the wrong direction; we would find ourselves on “solid” ground, which would only mystify, rather than clarify, the question. We would be forced to appeal to “facts,” the “historical record,” and empirical markers of stasis and change, all of which could be turned on their head with more of the same. Underlying such a downward spiral into sociology, political science, history, and/or public policy debates would be the very rubric that I am calling into question: the grammar of suffering known as exploitation and alienation, the assumptive logic whereby subjective dispossession is arrived at in the calculations between those who sell labor power and those who acquire it . The Black qua the worker. Orlando Patterson has already dispelled this faulty ontological grammar in Slavery and Social Death, where he demonstrates how and why work, or forced labor, is not a constituent element of slavery. Once the “solid” plank of “work” is removed from slavery, then the conceptually coherent notion of “claims against the state”—the proposition that the state and civil society are elastic enough to even contemplate the possibility of an emancipatory project for the Black position—disintegrates into thin air . The imaginary of the state and civil society is parasitic on the Middle Passage. Put another way: no slave, no world. And, in addition, as Patterson argues, no slave is in the world. If, as an ontological position, that is, as a grammar of suffering, the Slave is not a laborer but an anti-Human, a positionality against which Humanity establishes, maintains, and renews it coherence, its corporeal integrity; if the Slave is, to borrow from Patterson, generally dishonored, perpetually open to gratuitous violence, and void of kinship structure, that is, having no relations that need be recognized, a being outside of 4

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relationality, then our analysis cannot be approached through the rubric of gains or reversals in struggles with the state and civil society, not unless and until the interlocutor first explains how the Slave is of the world . The onus is not on one who posits the Master/Slave dichotomy, but on the one who argues there is a distinction between Slaveness and Blackness. How, when, and where did such a split occur? The woman at the gates of Columbia University awaits an answer.

The world writ large and civil society are preconditioned on the destruction of the black positionality Wilderson, Professor UCI, 2003 (Frank B., “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent)
Scandal”, Soc Justice 30 no2 2003, Accessed 8-4-12, MR)
There is something organic to black positionality that makes it essential to the destruction of civil society. There is nothing willful or speculative in this statement, for one could just as well state the claim the other way around: There is something organic to civil society that makes it essential to the destruction of the Black body. Blackness is a positionality of "absolute dereliction" (Fanon), abandonment, in the face of civil society, and therefore cannot establish itself, or be established, through hegemonic interventions. Blackness cannot become one of civil society's many junior partners: Black citizenship, or Black civic obligation, are oxymorons .

Addressing Anti-Blackness is a prioiri – scandalizes ethicality and sets the stage for all violnece Wilderson, award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. He is one of
two Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress and is a former insurgent in the ANC’s armed wing, 2003 (Frank B. III “Chapter One: The Ruse of Analogy” Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms,) GG Two tensions are at work here. One operates under the labor of ethical dilemmas-“simple enough one has only not to be a nigger.” This, I submit, is the essence of being for the White and non-Black position: ontology scaled down to a global common denominator. The other tension is found in the impossibility of ethical dilemmas for the Black: “I am,” Fanon writes, “a slave not of an idea others have of me but of my own appearance.” Being can thus be thought of, in the first ontological instance , as non-niggerness; and slavery then as niggerness . The visual field, “my own appearance,” is the cut, the mechanism that elaborates the division between the non-niggerness and slavery, the difference between the living and the dead. Whereas Humans exist on some plane of being and thus can become existentially present through some struggle for/of/through recognition, Blacks cannot attain the plane of recognition (West 82). Spillers, Fanon, and Hartman maintain that the violence that has positioned and repetitively re-positions the Black as a void of historical movement is without analog in the suffering dynamics of the ontologically alive. The violence that turns the African into a thing is without analog because it does not simply oppress the Black through tactile and empirical technologies of oppression, like the “little family quarrels” which for Fanon exemplify the Jewish 5

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Holocaust. Rather, the gratuitous violence of the Black’s first ontological instance, the Middle Passage, “wiped out [his/her] metaphysics…his [her] customs and sources on which they are based” (BSWM 110). Jews went into Auschwitz and came out as Jews. Africans went into the ships and came out as Blacks. The former is a Human holocaust; the latter is a Human and a metaphysical holocaust. That is why it makes little sense to attempt analogy: the Jews have the Dead (the Muselmenn) among them; the Dead have the Blacks among them.¶ This violence which turns a body into flesh, ripped apart literally and imaginatively, destroys the possibility of ontology because it positions the Black within an infinite and indeterminately horrifying and open vulnerability, an object made available (which is to say fungible) for any subject. As such, “the black has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man” (110) or, more precisely, in the eyes of Humanity

The alternative is to reject the affirmative and reorient ourselves towards the world through an unflinching paradigmatic analysis Wilderson 10 [Frank B. III, Ph.D., Associate Professor at UC Irvine, former ANC member, “on
some guerilla shit”, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, pages ixx, OG] STRANGE AS it might seem, this book project began in South Africa. During the last years of apartheid I worked for revolutionary change in both an underground and aboveground capacity, for the Charterist Movement in general and the ANC in particular . During this period, I began to see how essential an unflinching paradigmatic analysis is to a movement dedicated to the complete overthrow of an existing order. The neoliberal compromises that the radical elements of the Chartist Movement made with the moderate elements were due, in large part, to our inability or unwillingness to hold the moderates' feet to the fire of a political agenda predicated on an unflinching paradigmatic analysis. Instead, we allowed our energies and points of attention to be displaced by and onto pragmatic considerations. Simply put, we abdicated the power to pose the question—and the power to pose the question is the greatest power of all. Elsewhere, I have written about this unfortunate turn of events (Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid), so I'll not rehearse the details here. Suffice it to say, this book germinated in the many political and academic discussions and debates that I was fortunate enough to be a part of at a historic moment and in a place where the word revolution was spoken in earnest, free of qualifiers and irony. For their past and ongoing ideas and interventions, I extend solidarity and appreciation to comrades Amanda Alexander, Franco Barchiesi, Teresa Barnes, Patrick Bond, Ashwin Desai, Nigel Gibson, Steven Greenberg, Allan Horowitz, Bushy Kelebonye (deceased), Tefu Kelebonye, Ulrike Kistner, Kamogelo Lekubu, Andile Mngxitama, Prishani Naidoo, John Shai, and S'bu Zulu

6

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1NC – Long
State action and institutional ethics makes anti-blackness worse - erases the exploitation of the black body Wilderson, award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. He is one of
two Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress and is a former insurgent in the ANC’s armed wing, 2003 (Frank B. III “Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics” Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Strucure of U.S. Antagonisms, Pg 15-16) GG Regarding the Black position, some might ask why, after claims successfully made on the state by the Civil Rights Movement, do I insist on positing an operational analytic for cinema, film studies, and political theory that appears to be a dichotomous and essentialist pairing of Masters and Slaves? In other words, why should we think of today’s Blacks in the US as Slaves and everyone else (with the exception of Indians) as Masters? One could answer these questions by demonstrating how nothing remotely approaching claims successfully made on the State has come to pass. In other words, the election of a Black President aside, police brutality, mass incarceration, segregated and substandard schools and housing, astronomical rates of HIV infection, and the threat of being turned away en masse at the polls still constitute the lived experience of Black life. But such empirically based rejoinders would lead us in the wrong direction; we would find ourselves on “solid” ground, which would only mystify, rather than clarify, the question. We would be forced to appeal to “facts,” the “historical record,” and empirical markers of stasis and change, all of which could be turned on their head with more of the same. Underlying such a downward spiral into sociology, political science, history, and/or public policy debates would be the very rubric that I am calling into question: the grammar of suffering known as exploitation and alienation, the assumptive logic whereby subjective dispossession is arrived at in the calculations between those who sell labor power and those who acquire it . The Black qua the worker. Orlando Patterson has already dispelled this faulty ontological grammar in Slavery and Social Death, where he demonstrates how and why work, or forced labor, is not a constituent element of slavery. Once the “solid” plank of “work” is removed from slavery, then the conceptually coherent notion of “claims against the state”—the proposition that the state and civil society are elastic enough to even contemplate the possibility of an emancipatory project for the Black position—disintegrates into thin air . The imaginary of the state and civil society is parasitic on the Middle Passage. Put another way: no slave, no world. And, in addition, as Patterson argues, no slave is in the world. If, as an ontological position, that is, as a grammar of suffering, the Slave is not a laborer but an antiHuman, a positionality against which Humanity establishes, maintains, and renews it coherence, its corporeal integrity; if the Slave is, to borrow from Patterson, generally dishonored, perpetually open to gratuitous violence, and void of kinship structure, that is, having no relations that need be recognized, a being outside of relationality, 7

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then our analysis cannot be approached through the rubric of gains or reversals in struggles with the state and civil society, not unless and until the interlocutor first explains how the Slave is of the world. The onus is not on one who posits the Master/Slave dichotomy, but on the one who argues there is a distinction between Slaveness and Blackness. How, when, and where did such a split occur? The woman at the gates of Columbia University awaits an answer.

The promotion of civil society and institutional ethics creates a state of emergency Wilderson, Professor UCI, 2003 (Frank B., “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent)
Scandal”, Soc Justice 30 no2 2003, Accessed 8-4-12, MR)

In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon makes two moves with respect to civil society. First, he locates its genuine manifestation in Europe - the motherland. Then, with respect to the colony, he locates it only in the zone of the settler. This second move is vital for our understanding of Black positionality in America and for understanding the, at best, limnitations of radical social movements in America. For if we are to follow Fanon's analysis, and the gestures toward this understanding in some of the work of imprisoned intellectuals, then we have to come to grips with the fact that, for Black people, civil society itself- rather than its abuses or shortcomings - is a state of emergency . For Fanon, civil society is predicated on the Manicheasm of divided zones, opposed to each other "but not in service of a higher unity" (Fanon, 1968: 38-39). This is the basis of his later assertion that the two zones produce two different "species," between which "no conciliation is possible" (Ibid.). The phrase "not in service of a higher unity" dismisses any kind of dialectical optimism for a future synthesis. In "The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy," Martinot and Sexton assert the primacy of Fanon's Manichean zones (without the promise of higher unity), even in the face of American integration facticity. Fanon's specific colonial context does not share Martinot and Sexton's historical or national context. Common to both texts, however, is the settler/native dynamic, the differential zoning, and the gratuity (as opposed to the contingency) of violence that accrues to the blackened position. The dichotomy between white ethics [the discourse of civil society] and its irrelevance to the violence of police profiling is not dialectical; the two are incommensurable whenever one attempts to speak about the paradigm of policing, one is forced back into a discussion of particular events - high-profile homicides and their related courtroom battles, for instance (Martinot and Sexton, 2002: 6; emphasis added).

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The world writ large and civil society are preconditioned on the destruction of those in the black positionality Wilderson, Professor UCI, 2003 (Frank B., “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent)
Scandal”, Soc Justice 30 no2 2003, Accessed 8-4-12, MR)
There is something organic to black positionality that makes it essential to the destruction of civil society. There is nothing willful or speculative in this statement, for one could just as well state the claim the other way around: There is something organic to civil society that makes it essential to the destruction of the Black body. Blackness is a positionality of "absolute dereliction" (Fanon), abandonment, in the face of civil society, and therefore cannot establish itself, or be established, through hegemonic interventions. Blackness cannot become one of civil society's many junior partners: Black citizenship, or Black civic obligation, are oxymorons .

Addressing Anti-Blackness outweighs – scandalizes ethicality and sets the stage for all violnece Wilderson, award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. He is one of
two Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress and is a former insurgent in the ANC’s armed wing, 2003 (Frank B. III “Chapter One: The Ruse of Analogy” Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms,) GG Two tensions are at work here. One operates under the labor of ethical dilemmas-“simple enough one has only not to be a nigger.” This, I submit, is the essence of being for the White and non-Black position: ontology scaled down to a global common denominator. The other tension is found in the impossibility of ethical dilemmas for the Black: “I am,” Fanon writes, “a slave not of an idea others have of me but of my own appearance.” Being can thus be thought of, in the first ontological instance , as non-niggerness; and slavery then as niggerness . The visual field, “my own appearance,” is the cut, the mechanism that elaborates the division between the non-niggerness and slavery, the difference between the living and the dead. Whereas Humans exist on some plane of being and thus can become existentially present through some struggle for/of/through recognition, Blacks cannot attain the plane of recognition (West 82). Spillers, Fanon, and Hartman maintain that the violence that has positioned and repetitively re-positions the Black as a void of historical movement is without analog in the suffering dynamics of the ontologically alive. The violence that turns the African into a thing is without analog because it does not simply oppress the Black through tactile and empirical technologies of oppression, like the “little family quarrels” which for Fanon exemplify the Jewish Holocaust. Rather, the gratuitous violence of the Black’s first ontological instance, the Middle Passage, “wiped out [his/her] metaphysics…his [her] customs and sources on which they are based” (BSWM 110). Jews went into Auschwitz and came out as Jews. Africans went into the ships and came out as Blacks. The former is a Human holocaust; the latter is a Human and a metaphysical holocaust. That is why it makes little sense to attempt 9

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analogy: the Jews have the Dead (the Muselmenn) among them; the Dead have the Blacks among them.¶ This violence which turns a body into flesh, ripped apart literally and imaginatively, destroys the possibility of ontology because it positions the Black within an infinite and indeterminately horrifying and open vulnerability, an object made available (which is to say fungible) for any subject. As such, “the black has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man” (110) or, more precisely, in the eyes of Humanity

The alternative is to reject the affirmative and reorient ourselves towards the world through an unflinching paradigmatic analysis Wilderson 10 [Frank B. III, Ph.D., Associate Professor at UC Irvine, former ANC member, “on
some guerilla shit”, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, pages ixx, OG] STRANGE AS it might seem, this book project began in South Africa. During the last years of apartheid I worked for revolutionary change in both an underground and aboveground capacity, for the Charterist Movement in general and the ANC in particular . During this period, I began to see how essential an unflinching paradigmatic analysis is to a movement dedicated to the complete overthrow of an existing order. The neoliberal compromises that the radical elements of the Chartist Movement made with the moderate elements were due, in large part, to our inability or unwillingness to hold the moderates' feet to the fire of a political agenda predicated on an unflinching paradigmatic analysis. Instead, we allowed our energies and points of attention to be displaced by and onto pragmatic considerations. Simply put, we abdicated the power to pose the question—and the power to pose the question is the greatest power of all. Elsewhere, I have written about this unfortunate turn of events (Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid), so I'll not rehearse the details here. Suffice it to say, this book germinated in the many political and academic discussions and debates that I was fortunate enough to be a part of at a historic moment and in a place where the word revolution was spoken in earnest, free of qualifiers and irony. For their past and ongoing ideas and interventions, I extend solidarity and appreciation to comrades Amanda Alexander, Franco Barchiesi, Teresa Barnes, Patrick Bond, Ashwin Desai, Nigel Gibson, Steven Greenberg, Allan Horowitz, Bushy Kelebonye (deceased), Tefu Kelebonye, Ulrike Kistner, Kamogelo Lekubu, Andile Mngxitama, Prishani Naidoo, John Shai, and S'bu Zulu

Policing/Settler societies allow for the black body to be a magnet for gratuitous violence Wilderson, Professor UCI, 2003 (Frank B., “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent)
Scandal”, Soc Justice 30 no2 2003, Accessed 8-4-12, MR)

It makes no difference that in the U.S. the "casbah" and the "European" zone are laid one on top of the other. What is being asserted here is an isomorphic schematic relation - the schematic interchangeability - between Fanon' s settler society and Martinot and Sexton's policing paradigm. For Fanon, it is the policeman and soldier (not the discursive, or hegemonic, agents) of colonialism that make one town white and the other Black. For Martinot and Sexton, this Manichean delirium manifests itself by way of the U.S. paradigm of policing that (re)produces, repetitively, the inside/outside, the civil society/Black world, by virtue of the difference between those bodies that do not magnetize bullets
10

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and those that do. "Police impunity serves to distinguish between the racial itself and the elsewhere that mandates it...the distinction between those whose human being is put permanently in question and those for whom it goes without saying" (Ibid.: 8). In such a paradigm, white people are, ipso facto, deputized in the face of Black people, whether they know it (consciously) or not. Whiteness, then, and by extension civil society, cannot be solely "represented" as some monumentalized coherence of phallic signifiers, but must first be understood as a social formation of contemporaries who do not magnetize bullets. This is the essence of their construction through an asignifying absence; their signifying presence is manifested by the fact that they are, if only by default, deputized against those who do magnetize bullets. In short, white people are not simply "protected" by the police, they are - in their very corporeality - the police. This ipso facto deputization of white people in the face of Black people accounts for Fanon's materiality , and Martinot and Sexton's Manichean delirium in America. What remains to be addressed, however, is the way in which the political contestation between civil society's junior partners (i.e., workers, white women, and immigrants), on the one hand, and white supremacist institutionality, on the other hand, is produced by, and reproductive of, a supplemental antiBlackness. Put another way: How is the production and accumulation of junior partner social capital dependent upon on an anti-Black rhetorical structure and a decomposed Black body?

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Links

12

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Hegemony

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Globalization
White supremacy is built on the practice and promotion of racism on a global level
Rabaka 2007 (Reiland Rabaka, 4 August 2007, The Souls of White Folks, W.E.B. Du Bois’s Critique of White Supremacy and
Contributions to Critical White Studies,Department of Ethnic Studies Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America (CSERA), University of Colorado-Boulder, Ketchum)
such as those that exist between certain non-white groups, is its international imperial nature and modern world-historic influence and effects. In his critique of the global aspects of white supremacy, Du Bois engaged its origins and evolution, locating its genesis, uniqueness and ubiquitousness in European imperial global expansion, domination, and colonization. What distinguished white supremacy from local, national and regional racisms,

At

the heart of the history of white supremacy, as quiet as it is kept, is a prolonged practice and promotion of an extremely acute form of cultural racism and cultural theft. For Du Bois, whites were “super-men” and “world-mastering demi-gods” with “feet of clay” (1995a, p. 456). By which he meant, whites, with all their claims of superiority and “superhumanity,” were or appeared super-strong because they built their empire(s) on the inventions and innovations, and on the cultures and contributions of the people of color they colonized (p. 457). But, as the “super-men” with “feet of clay” comment reveals, the colored and colonized were well aware of whites’ weakness(es), of their Achilles’ heel(s): Their imperial push for global domination, that is, their centuries spanning project(s) of setting up systems of oppression unwittingly and ironically created intra-imperial cultural tensions, racist sibling rivalries amongst themselves, and also created the context and laid the foundation for the very anti-imperial colored/colonized hammer that would smash the imperial white “super-men’s” “feet of clay.” In “The Souls of White Folk,” Du Bois asserted:

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Heg Bad
White Hegemony perpetuates white supremacy which destroys nonwhite peoples subjectivity
Rabaka 2007 (Reiland Rabaka, 4 August 2007, The Souls of White Folks, W.E.B. Du Bois’s Critique of White Supremacy and
Contributions to Critical White Studies,Department of Ethnic Studies Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America (CSERA), University of Colorado-Boulder, Ketchum)

Generic racism, if there is such a thing, essentially entails racial domination and discrimination.
racially oppresses in the interest of nonpareil racialized economic exploitation .

White supremacy does not simply racially oppress, as Du Bois asserts above. Being the fraternal twin (or, at the least, a sibling of some sort) of capitalism it

It symbolizes the intensification of economic exploitation by adding a racist dimension to capitalist greed and colonial gain. Hinging on a diabolical dialectic that sees whites as superior and non-whites as inferior, white supremacy consumes the world of color and claims non-whites’ contributions to human culture and civilization as European or white contributions to culture and civilization. This is so because from the white supremacist point of view, non-whites do not now and have never possessed culture and civilization and, therefore, could not possibly contribute to the (re) construction of something they do not now and have never possessed. Further, white supremacy enables and utterly encourages whites to theoretically and culturally loot the knowledge banks and cultural treasure troves of the colored world, similar to the way whites did when they established racial colonialism and colonial capitalism because it is a global system that rewards based on the embrace of white hegemonic views and values, white conquest and racialized colonization

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Civil Society

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World writ large
Modern politics dictates what is and what is not ethical. State institutions justify different forms of violence Wilderson, award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. He is one of two Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress and is a former insurgent in the ANC’s armed wing, 2010 (Frank
B. III “Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics” Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, Pg 5-6) GG
Leaving aside for the moment their state of mind, it would seem that the structure, that is to say the rebar, or better still the grammar of their demands—and, by extension, the grammar of their suffering—was indeed an ethical grammar.

their grammars are the only ethical grammars available to modern politics and modernity writ large, for they draw our attention not to the way in which space and time are used and abused by enfranchised and violently powerful interests, but to the violence that underwrites the modern world’s capacity to think, act, and exist spatially and temporally. The violence that robbed her of her body and him of his land provided the stage upon which other violent and consensual dramas could be enacted. Thus, they would have to be crazy, crazy enough to call not merely the actions of the world to account but to call the world itself to account, and to account for them no less! The woman at Columbia was not demanding to be a participant in an unethical network of distribution: she
Perhaps

was not demanding a place within capital, a piece of the pie (the demand for her sofa notwithstanding). Rather, she was articulating a triangulation between, on the one hand, the loss of her body, the very dereliction of her corporeal integrity, what Hortense Spillers

the transition from being a being to becoming a “being for the captor ” (206), the drama of value (the stage upon which surplus value is extracted from labor power through commodity production and sale); and on the other, the corporeal integrity that, once ripped from her body, fortified and extended the corporeal integrity of everyone else on the street. She gave birth to the commodity and to the Human, yet she had neither subjectivity nor a sofa to show for it. In her eyes, the world—and not its myriad discriminatory practices, but the world itself—was unethical . And yet, the world
charts as passes by her without the slightest inclination to stop and disabuse her of her claim. Instead, it calls her “crazy.” And to what does the world attribute the Native American man’s insanity? “He’s crazy if he thinks he’s getting any money out of us”? Surely, that doesn’t make him crazy. Rather it is simply an indication that he does not have a big enough gun.

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Arizona Debate Institute

The State
We cannot resolve anti-blackness through the state because of the institutions ethics and acting through the state makes antiblackness worse because it erases the existence of the black body – the state forecloses the possibility of humanity for those in the non-human positionality Wilderson, award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. He is one of two Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress and is a former insurgent in the ANC’s armed wing, 2010
(Frank B. III “Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics” Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, Pg 15-16) GG

Regarding the Black position, some might ask why, after claims successfully made on the state by the Civil Rights Movement, do I insist on positing an operational analytic for cinema, film studies, and political theory that appears to be a dichotomous and essentialist pairing of Masters and Slaves? In other words, why should we think of today’s Blacks in the US as Slaves and everyone else (with the exception of Indians) as Masters? One could answer these questions by demonstrating how nothing remotely approaching claims successfully made on the State has come to pass. In other words, the election of a Black President aside, police brutality, mass incarceration, segregated and substandard schools and housing, astronomical rates of HIV infection, and the threat of being turned away en masse at the polls still constitute the lived experience of Black life. But such empirically based rejoinders would lead us in the wrong direction; we would find ourselves on “solid” ground, which would only mystify, rather than clarify, the question. We would be forced to appeal to “facts,” the “historical record,” and empirical markers of stasis and change, all of which could be turned on their head with more of the same. Underlying such a downward spiral into sociology, political science, history, and/or public policy debates would be the very rubric that I am calling into question : the grammar of suffering known as exploitation and alienation, the assumptive logic whereby subjective dispossession is arrived at in the calculations between those who sell labor power and those who acquire it . The Black
qua the worker. Orlando Patterson has already dispelled this faulty ontological grammar in Slavery and Social Death, where he demonstrates how and why work, or forced labor, is not a constituent element of slavery. Once

the “solid” plank of “work” is removed from slavery, then the conceptually coherent notion of “claims against the state”—the proposition that the state and civil society are elastic enough to even contemplate the possibility of an emancipatory project for the Black position—disintegrates into thin air. The imaginary of the state and civil society is parasitic on the Middle Passage. Put another way: no slave, no world. And, in addition, as Patterson argues, no slave is in the world. If, as an ontological position, that is, as a grammar of suffering, the Slave is not a laborer but an anti-Human, a positionality against which Humanity establishes, maintains, and renews it coherence, its corporeal integrity; if the Slave is, to borrow from Patterson, generally dishonored, perpetually open to gratuitous violence, and void of kinship structure, that is, having no relations that need be recognized, a being outside of relationality, then our analysis cannot be approached through the rubric of gains or reversals in struggles with the state and civil society, not unless and until the interlocutor first explains how the Slave is of the world. The onus is not on one who posits the
Master/Slave dichotomy, but on the one who argues there is a distinction between Slaveness and Blackness. How, when, and where did such a split occur? The woman at the gates of Columbia University awaits an answer.

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Arizona Debate Institute

State of Emergency
The discussion of civil society is forever tied to the discussion of policing. The existence of a denigrated position allows and structures violence and policing – the existence of the non-human allows for the human and the world to exist Wilderson, Professor UCI, 2003 (Frank B., “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent)
Scandal”, Soc Justice 30 no2 2003, Accessed 8-4-12, MR)

Fanon makes two moves with respect to civil society. First, he locates its genuine manifestation in Europe - the motherland. Then, with respect to the colony, he locates it only in the zone of the settler. This second move is vital for our understanding of Black positionality in America and for understanding the, at best, limnitations of radical social movements in America. For if we are to follow Fanon's analysis, and the gestures toward this understanding in some of the work of imprisoned intellectuals, then we have to come to grips with the fact that, for Black people, civil society itself- rather than its abuses or shortcomings - is a state of emergency. For Fanon, civil society is predicated on the Manicheasm of divided zones, opposed to each other "but not in service of a higher unity " (Fanon, 1968: 38-39). This is the basis of his later assertion that the two zones produce two different "species," between which "no conciliation is possible" (Ibid.). The phrase "not in service of a higher unity" dismisses any kind of dialectical optimism for a future synthesis. In "The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy," Martinot and Sexton assert the primacy of Fanon's Manichean zones (without the promise of higher unity), even in the face of American integration facticity. Fanon's specific colonial context does not share Martinot and Sexton's historical or national context. Common to both texts, however, is the settler/native dynamic, the differential zoning, and the gratuity (as opposed to the contingency) of violence that accrues to the blackened position. The dichotomy between white ethics [the discourse of civil society] and its irrelevance to the violence of police profiling is not dialectical; the two are incommensurable whenever one attempts to speak about the paradigm of policing, one is forced back into a discussion of particular events - high-profile homicides and their related courtroom battles, for instance (Martinot and Sexton, 2002: 6;
In The Wretched of the Earth, emphasis added).

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Arizona Debate Institute

Civil Society -> Coherence of White Life
Slavery led to the social death of the black body which precedes the corporeal death of the black body to ensure the existence of white life – this means we are a prior question, social death precedes biological death Wilderson, Professor UCI, 2003 (Frank B., “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent)
Scandal”, Soc Justice 30 no2 2003, Accessed 8-4-12, MR) Thus, the Black subject position in America represents an antagonism or demand that cannot be satisfied through a transfer of ownership/organization of existing rubrics. In contrast, the Gramscian subject, the worker, represents a demand that can indeed be satisfied by way of a successful war of position, which brings about the end of exploitation. The worker calls into question the legitimacy of productive practices, while the slave calls into question the legitimacy of productivity itself. Thus, the insatiability of the slave demand upon existing structures means that it cannot find its articulation within the modality of hegemony (influence, leadership, consent). The Black body cannot give its consent because "generalized trust," the precondition for the solicitation of consent, "equals racialized whiteness" (Barrett, 2002). Furthermore, as Orlando Patterson (1982) points out, slavery is natal alienation by way of social death, which is to say, a slave has no symbolic currency or material labor power to exchange. A
slave does not enter into a transaction of value (however asymmetrical), but is subsumed by direct relations of force. As such, a slave

A metaphor comes into being through a violence that kills the thing such that the concept might live. Gramscian discourse and coalition politics come to grips with America's structuring rationality - what it calls capitalism, or political economy - but not with its structuring irrationality, the anti-production of late capital, and the hyper-discursive violence that first kills the Black subject, so that the concept may be born. In other words, from the incoherence of Black death, America generates the coherence of white life . This is
is an articulation of a despotic irrationality, whereas the worker is an articulation of a symbolic rationality. important when thinking the Gramscian paradigm and their spiritual progenitors in the world of organizing in the U.S. today, with their overvaluation of hegemony and civil society. Struggles over hegemony are seldom, if ever, asignifying. At some point, they require coherence and categories for the record, meaning they contain the seeds of antiBlackness.

What does it mean to be positioned not as a positive term in the struggle for anticapitalist hegemony, i.e., a worker, but to be positioned in excess of hegemony, to be a catalyst that disarticulates the rubric of hegemony, to be a scandal to its assumptive, foundational logic, to threaten civil society's discursive integrity ? In
WYhite Writing, J.M. Coetzee (1988) examines the literature of Europeans who encountered the South African Khoisan in the Cape between the 16th and 18th centuries. The Europeans were faced with an "anthropological scandal": a being without (recognizable) customs, religion, medicine, dietary patterns, culinary habits, sexual mores, means of agriculture, and most significantly, without character (because, according to the literature, they did not work). Other Africans, like the Xhosa who were agriculturalists, provided European discourse with enough categories for the record, so that, through various strategies of articulation, they could be known by textual projects that accompanied the colonial project. But the Khoisan did not produce the necessary categories for the record, the play of signifiers that would allow for a sustainable semiotics .

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Arizona Debate Institute

Civil Society -> Black Positionality
The world writ large and civil society are preconditioned on the destruction of those in the black positionality – structuring the world Wilderson, Professor UCI, 2003 (Frank B., “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent)
Scandal”, Soc Justice 30 no2 2003, Accessed 8-4-12, MR)
There is something organic to black positionality that makes it essential to the destruction of civil society. There is nothing willful or speculative in this statement, for one could just as well state the claim the other way around: There is something organic to civil society that makes it essential to the destruction of the Black body. Blackness is a positionality of "absolute dereliction" (Fanon), abandonment, in the face of civil society, and therefore cannot establish itself, or be established, through hegemonic interventions. Blackness cannot become one of civil society's many junior partners: Black citizenship, or Black civic obligation, are oxymorons.

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Arizona Debate Institute

Capitalism

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Arizona Debate Institute

Capitalism
Capitalism began through the destruction of the black body which means we have a better articulation of why capitalism exists. It’s a sequencing question, profit motive doesn’t make any sense because it would have been cheaper to get the white underclass from Europe Wilderson, Professor UCI, 2003 (Frank B., “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent)
Scandal”, Soc Justice 30 no2 2003, Accessed 8-4-12, MR) The theoretical importance of emphasizing this in the early 21st century is twofold. First, capital was kick-started by approaching a particular body (a black body) with direct relations of force, not by approaching a white body with variable capital. Thus, one could say that slavery is closer to capital's primal desire than is exploitation. It is a relation of terror as opposed to a relation of hegemony. Second, today, late capital is imposing a renaissance of this original desire, the direct relation of force, the despotism of the unwaged relation. This renaissance of slavery, i.e., the reconfiguration of the prison-industrial complex has, once again, as its structuring metaphor and primary target the Black body. The value of reintroducing the unthought category of the slave, by way of noting the absence of the Black subject, lies in the Black subject's potential for extending the demand placed on state/capital formations because its reintroduction into the discourse expands the intensity of the antagonism. In other words, the positionality of the slave makes a demand that is in excess of the demand made by the positionality of the worker. The worker demands that productivity be fair and democratic (Gramsci's new hegemony, Lenin's dictatorship of the proletariat, in a word, socialism). In contrast, the slave demands that production stop, without recourse to its ultimate democratization. Work is not an organic principle for the slave. The absence of Black subjectivity from the crux of radical discourse is symptomatic of the text's inability to cope with the possibility that the generative subject of capitalism, the Black body of the 15th and 16th centuries, and the generative subject that resolves late capital's overaccumulation crisis, the Black (incarcerated) body of the 20th and 21 st centuries, do not reify the basic categories that structure conflict within civil society: the categories of work and exploitation.

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Environmental Policy

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Arizona Debate Institute

Environmental Regulations
Environmental antiblack racism is poisoning people of color
Bullard 02 (Robert D Bullard Ph.D, Poverty, Pollution, and Environmental Racism: Strategies for Building Healthy
and Sustainable Communities,Environmental Justice Center, Clark Atlanta University, http://www.ejrc.cau.edu/PovpolEj.html)

American economic engine has generated massive wealth, high standard of living, and consumerism. This growth machine has also generated waste, pollution, and ecological destruction. The U.S. has some of the best environmental laws in the world. However, in the real world, all communities are not created equal. Environmental regulations have not achieved uniform benefits across all segments of society. [2] Some communities are routinely poisoned while the government looks the other way. People of color around the world must contend with dirty air and drinking water, and the location of noxious facilities such as municipal landfills, incinerators, hazardous waste treatment, storage, and disposal facilities owned by private industry, government, and even the military.[3] These environmental problems are exacerbated by racism. Environmental racism refers to environmental policy, practice, or directive that differentially affects
The United States is the dominant economic and military force in the world today. The or disadvantages (whether intended or unintended) individuals, groups, or communities based on race or color.

Environmental racism is reinforced by government, legal, economic, political, and military institutions. Environmental racism combines with public policies and industry practices to provide benefits for the countries in the North while shifting costs to countries in the South. [4]

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Arizona Debate Institute

Environmental Injustice
Poor communities are effected by environmental injustices Rimes 10 (Ben Rimes, Apr 14, 2010, E-waste: Dumping on the
Poor, Environment, Science, Social Studies Educator ,The tech Savy Educator, http://www.techsavvyed.net/archives/774) one way that the world, and more specifically the U.S., disposes of their electronic waste ; old computers, cell phones, digital cameras,
This month I’m sharing a short movie clip with my 5th graders about just every day. plastics, and metal found in our electronics, etc. The problem I’m presenting to them is simple. Many thousands of pieces of technology are tossed out into the garbage each and

Some communities have recycling centers and programs for dealing with the toxic materials, but many communities simple don’t know what happens to e-waste that’s just tossed in the trash. A lot of that e-waste ends up overseas, dumped in rivers (yes, computers just dumped in a body of water as a disposal method), buried in landfills, or just left in piles . While the environment suffers in these areas, it’s really the inhabitants of that area, the poorest residents that is, that actually live in a lot of that trash, or make a living by digging through that trash, and subjecting themselves to a lot of toxins and pollutants as they strip old
computer parts for valuable materials.

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Arizona Debate Institute

Oil

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Arizona Debate Institute

Oil ->Poor Communities
The demand for oil has put poor communities in constant danger.
Bullard 02 (Robert D Bullard Ph.D, Poverty, Pollution, and Environmental Racism: Strategies for Building Healthy
and Sustainable Communities,Environmental Justice Center, Clark Atlanta University, http://www.ejrc.cau.edu/PovpolEj.html)
Environmental racism also operates in the international arena between nations and between transnational corporations.

Increased globalization of the world's economy has placed special strains on the ecosystems in many poor communities and poor nations inhabited largely by people of color and indigenous peoples. This is especially true for the global resource extraction industry such as oil, timber, and minerals. [7] Globalization makes it easier for transnational corporations and capital to flee to areas with the least environmental regulations, best tax incentives, cheapest labor, and highest profit. The struggle of African Americans in Norco, Louisiana and the Africans in the Niger Delta are similar in that both groups are negatively impacted by Shell Oil refineries and unresponsive governments. This scenario is repeated for Latinos in Wilmington (California) and indigenous people in Ecuador who must contend with pollution from Texaco oil refineries. The companies may be different, but the community complaints and concerns are very similar. Local residents have seen their air, water, and land contaminated . Many nearby residents are "trapped" in their
community because of inadequate roads, poorly planned emergency escape routes, and faulty warning systems. They live in constant fear of plant explosions and accidents.Bhopal tragedy is fresh in the minds of millions of

people who live next to chemical plants. The 1984 poison-gas leak at the Bhopal , India Union Carbide plant killed thousands of people--making it the world's deadliest industrial accident . It is not a coincidence that the only place in the U.S. where methyl isocyanate (MIC) was manufactured was at a Union Carbide plant in in predominately African American Institute, West Virginia. [8] In 1985, a gas leak from the Institute Union Carbide plant sent 135 residents to the hospital. The environmental
justice movement has its roots in the United States. However, in just two decades, this grassroots movement has spread across the globe. The call for environmental justice can be heard from the ghetto of Southside Chicago to the Soweto township. The environmental justice movement has come a long way since its humble beginning in 1982 in Warren County, North Carolina where a PCB landfill ignited protests and over 500 arrests. The Warren County protests provided the impetus for a 1983 U.S. General Accounting Office study, Siting of Hazardous Waste Landfills and Their Correlation with Racial and Economic Status of Surrounding Communities. [10] That study revealed that three out of four of the off-site, commercial

hazardous waste landfills in Region 4 (which comprises eight states in the southern U.S.) were located in predominantly African-American communities, although AfricanAmericans made up only 20% of the region's population.

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Arizona Debate Institute

Humanism

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Arizona Debate Institute

Human Focus
Because the affirmatives focuses on HUMANS, they also exclude the black body from their politics and this perpetuates anti-blackness which materializes in social death and white supremacy Wilderson, award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. He is one of two Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress and is a former insurgent in the ANC’s armed wing, 2010 (Frank B. III “Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics” Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, Pg 15) GG
I have little interest in assailing political conservatives. Nor is my argument wedded to the disciplinary needs of political science, or even sociology, where injury must be established, first, as White Supremacist event, from which one then embarks upon a demonstration of intent, or racism; and, if one is lucky, or foolish, enough, a solution is proposed.

If the position of the Black is, as I argue, a paradigmatic impossibility in the Western Hemisphere, indeed, in the world, in other words, if a Black is the very antithesis of a Human subject, as imagined by marxism and/or psychoanalysis, then his/her paradigmatic exile is not simply a function of repressive practices on the part of institutions (as political science and sociology would have it). This banishment from the Human fold is to be found most profoundly in the emancipatory meditations of Black people’s staunchest “allies,” and in some of the most “radical” films. Here—not in restrictive policy, unjust legislation, police brutality, or conservative scholarship—is where the Settler/Master’s sinews are most resilient

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Arizona Debate Institute

Language of Race
The exploitation of the human metaphor leads to the affirmative’s political discourse Wilderson, award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. He is one of two Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress and is a former insurgent in the ANC’s armed wing, 2010
(Frank B. III “Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics” Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms,) GG
I am not suggesting that across the globe Humanism developed in the same way regardless of region or culture; what I am saying is that the late Middle Ages gave rise to an ontological category—an ensemble of common existential concerns—which made and continues to make possible both war and peace, conflict and resolution, between the disparate members of the human race, east and west. Senator Thomas Hart Benton intuited this notion of the existential commons when he wrote that though the “Yellow race” and its culture had been “torpid and stationary for thousands of years… [Whites and Asians] must talk together, and trade together, and marry together. Commerce is a great civilizer—social intercourse as great—and marriage greater” (The Congressional Globe. May 28,

David Eltis points out that as late as the 17th century, “[p]risoners taken in the course of European military action…could expect death if they were leaders, or banishment if they were deemed followers, but never enslavement…Detention followed by prisoner exchanges or ransoming was common” (1413). “By the seventeenth century, enslavement of fellow Europeans was beyond the limits” (1423) of Humanism’s existential commons, even in times of war. Slave status “was reserved for nonChristians. Even the latter group however…had some prospect of release in exchange for Christians held by rulers of Algiers, Tunis, and other Mediterranean Muslim powers” (emphasis mine 1413). But though the practice of enslaving the vanquished was beyond the limit of intra-West wars and only practiced provisionally in East-West conflicts, the baseness of the option was not debated when it came to the African. The race of Humanism (White, Asian, South Asian, and Arab) could not have produced itself without the simultaneous production of that walking destruction which became known as the Black. Put another way, through chattel slavery the world gave birth and coherence to both its joys of domesticity and to its struggles of political discontent; and with these joys and struggles, the Human was born, but not before it murdered the Black, forging a symbiosis between the political ontology of Humanity and the social death of Blacks.In his essay “To ‘Corroborate Our Claims’: Public Positioning and the
1846). Slavery Metaphor in Revolutionary America,” Peter Dorsey (in his concurrence with cultural historians F. Nwabueze Okoye and Patricia Bradley) suggests that, in mid- to late-18th century Ameri kca,

Blackness was such a fungible commodity that it was traded as freely between the exploited (workers who did not “own” slaves) as it was between the un-exploited (planters who did). This was due to the effective uses to which Whites could put the Slave as both flesh and metaphor. For the Revolutionaries, “slavery represented a ‘nightmare’ that white Americans were trying to avoid” (359). Dorsey’s claim is provocative, but not unsupported: he maintains that had Blacks-as-Slaves not been in the White field of vision on a daily basis that it would have been virtually impossible for Whites to transform themselves from colonial subjects into Revolutionaries: Especially prominent in the rhetoric and reality of the [Revolutionary] era, the concepts of freedom and slavery were applied to a wide variety of events and values and were constantly being defined and redefined…[E]arly understandings of American freedom were in many ways dependent on the existence of chattel slavery…[We should] see slavery in revolutionary discourse, not merely as a hyperbolic rhetorical device but as a crucial and fluid [fungible] concept that had a major impact on the way early Americans thought about their political future…The slavery metaphor destabilized previously accepted categories of thought about politics, race, and the early republic .
(355)

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Arizona Debate Institute

Reform/Freedom
Humans are stuck in self adjustment and reform – perpetuating the existence of a civil society which necessitates for black nonexistence Wilderson, award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. He is one of two Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress and is a former insurgent in the ANC’s armed wing, 2010
(Frank B. III “Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics” Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, Pg 31-32) GG

Black slavery is foundational to modern Humanism’s ontics because “freedom” is the hub of Humanism’s infinite conceptual trajectories. But these trajectories only appear to be infinite. They are finite in the sense that they are predicated on the idea of freedom from… some contingency that can be named, or at least conceptualized. The contingent rider could be freedom from patriarchy, freedom from economic exploitation, freedom from political tyranny (for example, taxation without representation), freedom from heteronormativity, and so on. What I am suggesting is that first, political discourse recognizes freedom as a structuring ontologic and then it works to disavow this recognition by imagining freedom not through political ontology—where it rightfully began—but through political experience (and practice); whereupon it immediately loses its ontological foundations . Why would anyone do
this? Why would anyone start off with, quite literally, an earth-shattering ontologic and, in the process of meditating on it and acting through it, reduce it to an earth reforming experience? Why do Humans take such pride in self-

adjustment, in diminishing, rather than intensifying, the project of liberation (how did we get from ’68 to the present)? Because, I contend, in allowing the notion of freedom to attain the ethical purity of its ontological status, one would have to lose one’s Human coordinates and become Black. Which is to say one would have to die.

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Arizona Debate Institute

Modernity
Political discourses that are rooted in slavery and suffering exploits the image of the black body Wilderson, award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. He is one of two Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress and is a former insurgent in the ANC’s armed wing, 2010

(Frank B. III “Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics” Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, Pg 26-28) GG
Again, what is important for us to glean from these historians is that the pre-Columbian period, the Late Middle Ages, reveals no archive of debate on these three questions as they might be related to that massive group of Black-skinned people south of the Sahara. Eltis suggests that there was indeed massive debate which ultimately led to Britain taking the lead in the abolition of slavery, but he reminds us that that debate did not have its roots in the late Middle Ages, the post-Columbian period of the 1500s or the Virginia Colony period of the 1600s. It was, he asserts, an outgrowth of the mid- to late-18th century emancipatory thrust—intraHuman disputes such as the French and American Revolutions—that swept through Europe. But Eltis does not take his analysis further than this. Therefore, it is important that we not be swayed by his optimism about the Enlightenment and its subsequent abolitionist discourses.

It is highly conceivable that the discourse that elaborates the justification for freeing the slave is not the product of the Human being having suddenly and miraculously recognized the slave. Rather, as Saidiya Hartman argues, emancipatory discourses present themselves to us as further evidence of the Slave’s fungibility: “[T]he figurative capacities of blackness enable white flights of fancy while increasing the likelihood of the captive’s disappearance…” (Scenes…22). First, the questions of Humanism were elaborated in contradistinction to the human void, to the African-qua-chattel (the 1200s to the end of the 17th century). Then, as the presence of Black chattel in the midst of exploited and un-exploited Humans (workers and bosses, respectively) became a fact of the world, exploited Humans (in the throes of class conflict with unexploited Humans) seized the image of the slave as an enabling vehicle that animated the evolving discourses of their emancipation, just as un-exploited Humans had seized the flesh of the Slave to increase their profits. Without this gratuitous violence, a violence that marks everyone experientially until the late Middle Ages when it starts to mark the Black ontologically, the so-called great emancipatory discourses of modernity—marxism, feminism, postcolonialism, sexual liberation, and the ecology movement—political discourses predicated on grammars of suffering and whose constituent elements are exploitation and alienation, might not have developed. Chattel slavery did not simply reterritorialize the ontology of the African. It also created the Human out of culturally disparate entities from Europe to the East.

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Impacts

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Social Death

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Arizona Debate Institute

Body/Flesh
The black body has no ontological resistance. Structured by the machinations of civil society those in the non-human positionality are relegated to the outside of the periphery Wilderson, award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. He is one of
two Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress and is a former insurgent in the ANC’s armed wing, 2010 (Frank B. III “Chapter One: The Ruse of Analogy” Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms,) GG Two tensions are at work here. One operates under the labor of ethical dilemmas-“simple enough one has only not to be a nigger.” This, I submit, is the essence of being for the White and non-Black position: ontology scaled down to a global common denominator. The other tension is found in the impossibility of ethical dilemmas for the Black: “I am,” Fanon writes, “a slave not of an idea others have of me but of my own appearance.” Being can thus be thought of, in the first ontological instance, as non-niggerness; and slavery then as niggerness. The visual field, “my own appearance,” is the cut, the mechanism that elaborates the division between the non-niggerness and slavery, the difference between the living and the dead. Whereas Humans exist on some plane of being and thus can become existentially present through some struggle for/of/through recognition, Blacks cannot attain the plane of recognition (West 82). Spillers, Fanon, and Hartman maintain that the violence that has positioned and
repetitively re-positions the Black as a void of historical movement is without analog in the suffering dynamics of the ontologically alive. The violence that turns the African into a thing is without analog because it does not simply oppress the Black through tactile and empirical technologies of oppression, like the “little family quarrels” which for Fanon exemplify the Jewish Holocaust. Rather, the gratuitous violence of the Black’s first ontological instance, the Middle Passage, “wiped out [his/her] metaphysics…his [her] customs and sources on which they are based” (BSWM 110). Jews went into Auschwitz and came out as Jews.

Africans went into the ships and came out as Blacks. The former is a Human holocaust; the latter is a Human and a metaphysical holocaust. That is why it makes little sense to attempt analogy: the Jews have the Dead (the Muselmenn) among them; the Dead have the Blacks among them. This violence which turns a body into flesh, ripped apart literally and imaginatively, destroys the possibility of ontology because it positions the Black within an infinite and indeterminately horrifying and open vulnerability, an object made available (which is to say fungible) for any subject. As such, “the black has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man” (110) or, more precisely, in the eyes of Humanity

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Arizona Debate Institute

Slave Narrative->History
Society erases the non-human and fosters fear of blackness Wilderson, award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. He is one of two Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress and is a former insurgent in the ANC’s armed wing, 2010
(Frank B. III “Chapter One: The Ruse of Analogy” Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms,)
GG
Normally, in moments such as the present (with no such mass movement in the streets), the “effect of delineating a peculiar African American historiography” (19) seems menacing and unbearable to the lone Black scholar; and so the Black scholar labors— unwittingly, Judy implies—to adjust the structure of his/her own “nonrecuperable negativity” (96) in order to tell “a story of an emerging subjectivity’s triumphant struggle to discover its identity” and thereby ascend “from the abject muteness of objectivity into productive subjectivity” (88-89). The dread under which such aspirations to Human capacity labor (a

is catalyzed by the knowledge, however unconscious, that civil society is held together by a structural prohibition against recognizing and incorporating a being that is dead, despite the fact that this being is sentient and so appears to be very much alive. Civil society cannot embrace what Saidiya Hartman calls “the abject status of the will-less object” (Scenes of Subjection 52). Explicating the rhetorical and philosophical impossibility of such an
labor of disavowal) embrace, Judy writes: The assumption of the Negro’s transcendent worth as a human presupposes the Negro’s being comprehensible in Western modernity’s terms. Put somewhat more crudely, but nonetheless to the point, the humanization in writing achieved in the slave narrative require[s] the conversion of the incomprehensible African into the comprehensible Negro. The historical mode of conversion was the linguistic representation of slavery: the slave narrative [or Black film and Black film theory]. By providing

heuristic evidence of the Negro’s humanity the slave narrative begins to write the history of Negro culture in terms of the history of an extra-African self-reflective consciousness. (Judy 92) But this exercise is as liberating, as “productive of subjectivity,” as a dog chasing its tail. For “[p]recisely at the point at which this intervention appears to succeed in its determination of a black agent, however, it is subject to appropriation by a rather homeostatic thought: the Negro” (97). And the Negro, as Fanon illustrates throughout Black Skin, White Masks, “is comparison,” nothing more and certainly nothing less, for what is less than comparison? Fanon strikes at the heart of this tail-chasing circularity and the dread it catalyzes when he writes: No one knows yet who [the Negro] is, but he knows that fear will fill the world when the world finds out. And when the world knows the world always expects something of the Negro. He is afraid lest the world know, he is afraid of the fear that the world would feel if the world knew. (BSWM emphasis mine 139)

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Humans->Ontology
We control the framing of the impacts and are a prior question because of the qualitative difference between life chances Jared Sexton 2010 (“‘The Curtain of the Sky’: An Introduction” in Critical Sociology 36; 11.
Jared Sexton, Associate Professor of African-American studied and Critical Theory at the UCIrvine.) To be sure, Humans do not live under conditions of equality in the modern world. In fact, modernity is, to a large degree, marked by societies structured in dominance: [hetero]patriarchy and white supremacy, settler colonialism and extra-territorial conquest, imperialist warfare and genocide, class struggle and the international division of labor. Yet, for Wilderson, there is a qualitative difference, an ontological one, between the inferiorization or dehumanization of the masses of people ‘in Asia …in America and the islands of the sea’, including the colonization of their land and resources, the exploitation of their labor and even their extermination in whole or in part, and the singular commodification of human being pursued under racial slavery, that structure of gratuitous violence in which bodies are rendered as flesh to be accumulated and exchanged.

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Racialization

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Non-humans
Those who are denigrated exist – are in the world but not a part of the world, they are subjects under erasure
George Ciccariello-Maher, Jan, 2010, is a Ph.D. candidate in political theory at the University of California, Berkeley,

Jumpstarting the Decolonial Engine:

In his seminal first book Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon sets out to analyze the structure of anti-Black racism and how best to confront it. Operating within-but-against a Hegelian framework (as he also operates within-but-against both psychoanalysis and phenomenology), Fanon identifies what he deems the

fundamental barrier to inter-racial recognition: racialized subjects, according to Fanon, lack what he calls "ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man."3 Black subjects are seen but not seen; they exist but they are not (human). This is what philosopher Lewis Gordon deems 4 "the hellish zone of nonbeing," "a zone neither of appearance or disappearance." Not only does this "below5 Otherness" render politics—as publicity —impossible, but the same applies for ethics: "damnation means that the black (or better, the blackened) lives the irrelevance of innocence… the absence of a Self-Other dialectic in racist situations means the eradication of ethical 6 relations. Where ethics is derailed, all is permitted." Racialization, put simply, creates a situation
which lacks the necessary reciprocity for the Hegelian master-slave dialectic to operate.7 For equality to be contemplated, for the obligation to recognize the other to have any traction at all, racialized subjects must first seize access to ontology, storming the fortified heaven of being itself.

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Black non -existence
The very appearance of denigrated is violent
George Ciccariello-Maher, Jan, 2010, is a Ph.D. candidate in political theory at the University of California, Berkeley,

Jumpstarting the Decolonial Engine:

But how can merely making oneself known constitute a violent act? Here we turn again to Gordon :the

blackened lives the both for disaster of appearance where there is no room to appear nonviolently. Acceptable being is nonexistence, nonappearance, or submergence… To change things is to appear, but to appear is to be violent since that group's appearance is illegitimate. Violence, in this sense, need not be a physical imposition. It need not be a consequence of guns and other weapons of destruction. It need simply be appearance. 20 For racialized subjects, the very act of appearing, of making oneself known, is a violent act its ontological implications and for its inevitable reception. That is, it constitutes a challenge to the prevailing structures of symbolic ontological violence—the walls of exclusion which divide being from non-being—and as a result of this disruption, black appearance historically appears as "violent" regardless of its content.21 And were it not perceived as such, for Fanon, then its
ontological shock-value might dissipate, undermining the external element of its function.And even when that content is nominally "violent," this often masks its ontological function. It is no accident that the Fanon of Black Skin, White Masks had thought it suitable to cite Sartre's The Respectful Prostitute and Richard Wright's Native Son on the same page.

"A feeling of inferiority?" he asks himself, of himself: "No, a feeling of nonexistence," he responds. The only response
to the immobility of not being able to bring oneself to kill the master is to "explode… to shatter the hellish cycle." 22 Turning away from the master (the internal function of symbolic decolonial violence), in practice, often coincides

with the realization that that most basic proof of human equality—vulnerability to death at the hands of another—also applies to whites. For this recognition to be put into practice often entails at least the threat of
actual violence as the mechanism for enforced recognition (the external function). To the symbolic ontological violence of racialization, then, Fanon seems at first to respond in kind, with a violence which is equally symbolic in its function, but one which rather than determining being undoes the exclusionary barriers of ontology. This is a symbolic violence which operates toward the decolonization of being,23 and which is utterly incommensurable in both its actual and (more fundamental) symbolic forms with the violence of the racist/colonizer.

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Ontological Barrier
The ontological barrier does not allow denigrated subjects full humanity.
George Ciccariello-Maher, Jan, 2010, is a Ph.D. candidate in political theory at the University of California, Berkeley,

Jumpstarting the Decolonial Engine:
Turning more directly to Hegel's master-slave dialectic in an appendix to Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon concludes that,

in the face of such ontological blockage, full humanity can only emerge through the effort to impose one's existence (as "subjective certainty") onto another (thereby converting it into "objective fact"). In this "quest of absoluteness," the resistance of the other yields desire, what Fanon calls "the first milestone on the road that leads to the 8 dignity of the spirit." Desire, moreover, requires that I risk my life in conflict for the object of that desire, thereby pushing me beyond bare life and toward independent self-consciousness. Historically,
however, the black slave has been granted her freedom by the former slaveholder, who "decided to promote the machine-animalmen to the supreme rank of men," and as a result access to full humanity—which can only appear by way of mutual and conflictual recognition—remained blocked:"Say thank you to the nice man," the mother tells her little boy… but we know that often the little boy is dying to scream some other, more resounding expression…. The white man, in the capacity of master, said to the Negro, "From now on you are free." But the Negro knows nothing of the cost of freedom, for he has not fought for it… The former slave needs a challenge to his humanity, he wants a conflict, a riot. But it is too late. 9Since there has been no reciprocity in the process, since blacks

turning away from the master and finding liberation in the object. Instead, lack of reciprocity leads the slave—in a gesture of internalized self-hatred —to turn toward the master and
are denied access to ontology, they have not, according to Fanon, been able to follow the Hegelian path of can already anticipate here the broad strokes of Fanon's theory of violence: for the racialized subject,

abandon the object, but this effort at mutual recognition remains unrequited, as the master desires from the slave only work. 10 We

self-consciousness as human requires symbolic violence, it requires the assertion of reciprocity within a historical situation marked by the denial of such reciprocity , and if
necessary, the provocation of conflict through the assertion of alterity. 11 Only then will the slave be freed from this two-sided blockage of the dialectic,

enforcing recognition (externally) onto the master while developing (internally) a degree of autonomy and self-confidence.

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White Supremacy

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White supremacy leads to environmental harms McCright, Associate Professor of Sociology in Lyman Briggs College, Department of Sociology, and Environmental Science and Policy Program at Michigan State University , Dulap, Regents Professor of Psychological Sciences, Sociology. In addition to
his empirical work, Dr. Dunlap regularly writes assessments of theoretical developments in the field of environmental sociology,

Environment

2011.( Aaron M., Riley E., “Cool Dudes: The Denial of Climate Change Among Conservative White Males in the United States,” Global Environmental Change, Volume 21, October 2011, Pages 1163-1172, SJH)

We do find strong evidence for a conservative white male effect on climate change denialism, whereby conservative white males are more likely than are other adults to espouse climate change denial. Further, we find that those conservative white males who self-report understanding global warming very well—confident conservative white males— express an even greater degree of climate change denial. The positive correlation between self-reported understanding of global warming and climate change denial among conservative white males is compelling evidence that climate change denial is a form of identity-protective cognition, reflecting a system-justifying tendency. While we have documented that conservative white males contribute disproportionately to climate change denial in the U.S., our results indicate that denialism is sufficiently diffuse within the American public that it obviously cannot be attributed solely to conservative white males. Even controlling for the denialism of conservative white males (and even confident
conservative white males), conservatives (and Republicans), males, more religious individuals, and those unsympathetic to the environmental movement are still more likely to report denialist beliefs than are their respective counterparts. Finally ,

what is

most sobering, especially for the scientific community and climate change communicators, is that climate change denial has actually increased in the U.S. general public between 2001 and 2010 (Newport, 2010), although primarily due to a significant increase in the
past two years which may prove abnormal in the long run (Leiserowitz et al., forthcoming).

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Human Rights
White Supremacy is the most vicious human rights violations because it stems from antiblackness which creates the condition of possibility for humans to exist in the first place by destroying the non-human
Rabaka 2007 (Reiland Rabaka, 4 August 2007, The Souls of White Folks, W.E.B. Du Bois’s Critique of White Supremacy and
Contributions to Critical White Studies,Department of Ethnic Studies Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America (CSERA), University of Colorado-Boulder, Ketchum)

Even in its mildest and most unconscious forms, white supremacy is one of the extremist and most vicious human rights violations in history because it plants false seeds of white superiority and black inferiority in the fertile ground of the future. It takes human beings and turns them into the subhuman things, making them colored means to a white imperial end. Du Bois’s critique of white supremacy then, registers as not only a radical criticism of an
increasingly illusive and nebulous racism, but an affirmation of black humanity and an epoch-spanning assertion of Africana and other oppressed peoples’ inherent right to human and civil rights. Acknowledgements

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Colonialism

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Whiteness/Colonialism->bodily disarticulation
The black body desires to participate in the world, inclusion would encroach upon the territory of whiteness which seeks the ultimate destruction of Blackness Sexton, Director, African American Studies School of Humanities, 2003 (Jared, “The
Consequence of Race Mixture: Racialised Barriers and the Politics of Desire”, Social Identities, Volume 9, Number 2, 2003,Accessed 8-4-12, MR) He goes on to speak of his own desire to refuse the dissembling (or castrating) force of the white
look, to avoid the mournful shroud of blackness, his desire for repair and resolution. ‘I did not want this revision’, he says. ‘All I wanted was to be a man among other men’.

That is, to participate in the honourable world of whiteness, to be not animal, bad, mean, and ugly. A desire to not be slashed, dissected, or cut into slices. Yet, just as it seems that Fanon is situating whiteness on the side of plentitude, wholeness, security, and integrity (and blackness on the side of lack), he offers a
white man…(Fanon, 1967, p. 160)

second statement to complicate matters. At the extreme, I should say that the Negro, because of his body, impedes the closing of the postural schema of the white man — at the point, naturally, at which the black man makes his entry into the phenomenal world of the

So it seems that the white man, too, has trouble with the solidity of his body, the demarcation of its inside and outside. Whereas the white look tears apart the black body, the black body, in turn, intrudes upon the corporeal territory of whiteness itself, disturbing its function by definition and throwing its coordinates out of alignment at the
extreme. What are we to make of this bizarre scenario of inter-penetration? How are we to think about the simultaneous description of the white look as both dissecting and,

Fanon suggests, fixing, as both scattering and imprisoning, both dislocating and objectifying? More to the point, how to contain or define something — an object, a body — that is flung about, ripped to shreds, multiplying in at least three directions? The colonial project of white supremacy, the very social and historical forces that materially and symbolically invent and reproduce the black body, also seek to destroy it. Conversely, the forces that seek to (and do!) destroy the black body also seek to maintain it, to insist that it be there, in its place, ‘within bounds…classified… tucked away’. Is it any surprise, then, that the very thing that ostensibly grants and guarantees the social existence of whiteness, i.e., blackness, is the very thing that — at the extreme, the edge, the verge — prevents it from enjoying a secure
and stable life? In short, blackness ‘gives [whiteness] its classification as seeming’.8

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Arizona Debate Institute

Dispensability
Non-human world is seen as dispensable and dispensability leads to the destruction of whole populations
Rabaka 2007 (Reiland Rabaka, 4 August 2007, The Souls of White Folks, W.E.B. Du Bois’s Critique of White Supremacy and
Contributions to Critical White Studies,Department of Ethnic Studies Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America (CSERA), University of Colorado-Boulder, Ketchum)
Du Bois, in Moving beyond a strictly materialist (politico-economic and/or class-centered) account of race and racism, and hitting at the heart of white supremacy,

“The Souls of White Folk,” queried the “colored world” and those whites who would open themselves to moral and materialist questions: “How many of us today fully realize the current theory of colonial expansion, of the relation of Europe which is white, to the world which is black and

It is the duty of white Europe to divide up the darker world and administer it for Europe’s good” (1995a, p. 459). Part of Du Bois’s critique of white supremacy reveals his
brown and yellow? Bluntly put, that theory is this: reliance on racial materialist arguments, where the other portion of his critique revolves around his own homegrown cultural nationalism, which was more often later in his life, what I will term, a cultural internationalism that sought to accent and highlight commonalities and kinships amongst people of color based on their endurances and experiences of, and struggles against European imperial expansion and all out white (cultural, social, political, legal, educational, religious, aesthetic and economic) domination and discrimination. Du Bois ’s critical comments in of his critique of white supremacy:

“The Souls of White

Folk” deserve quotation at length, as his argument is elaborated throughout several carefully constructed paragraphs that poignantly capture the crux

The European world is using black and brown men for all the uses which men know. Slowly but surely white culture is evolving the theory that “darkies” are born beasts of burden for white folk. It were silly to think otherwise, cries the cultured world, with stronger and
shriller accord. The supporting arguments grow and twist themselves in the mouths of merchant, scientist, soldier, traveler, writer, and missionary:

Darker peoples are dark in mind as well as in body; of dark, uncertain, and imperfect descent; of frailer, cheaper stuff; they are cowards in the face of mausers and maxims; they have no feelings, aspirations, and loves; they are fools, illogical idiots —“half-devil and half-child.” Such as they are civilization must, naturally, raise them, but soberly and in limited ways. They are not simply dark white men. They are not “men” in the sense that Europeans are men. To the very limited extent of their shallow capacities lift them to be useful to whites, to raise cotton, gather rubber, fetch ivory, dig diamonds—and let them be paid what men think they are worth— white men who know them to be well-nigh worthless . Such degrading of
men by men is as old as mankind and the invention of no one race or people. Ever have men striven to conceive of their victims as different from the victors, endlessly different, in soul and blood, strength and cunning, race and lineage. It has been left, however,

to Europe and to modern days to discover the eternal world-wide mark of meanness—color! Such is the silent
revolution that has gripped modern European culture in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its zenith came in Boxer times: White supremacy was all but world-wide, Africa was dead, India conquered, Japan isolated, and China prostrate, while white America whetted her sword for mongrel Mexico and mulatto South America, lynching her own Negroes the while. (p. 460)

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Arizona Debate Institute

Symbolic Violence

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Arizona Debate Institute

Structural->Symbolic Violence
Structural Institutions impose symbolic violence
George Ciccariello-Maher, Jan, 2010, is a Ph.D. candidate in political theory at the University of California, Berkeley,

Jumpstarting the Decolonial Engine:
French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is widely known for popularizing, among other concepts, that of symbolic violence, but what—if anything—does this concept share with the idea that we have seen operating in Black Skin, White Masks? For Bourdieu,

symbolic violence is a subtle and sinister violence exerted imperceptibly, breeding misrecognition in its hapless victims and serving "to impose meanings and impose them as legitimate by concealing the power relations which are at the basis of its force." When Jacques Rancière indicts the "sociologist king" Bourdieu, it is
24

precisely on the basis of the "menaced auxiliary" that this concept of symbolic violence represents. 25 Writing in the context of victorious electoral socialism, Rancière would seek to demonstrate how the concept of symbolic violence—so central to Bourdieu's seminal text Reproduction—was necessary for the self-justification of the sociologist's expertise:If rational pedagogy could tell the truth about pedagogic authority, the "hidden" of science would vanish. This violence therefore must be even more irremediable than that of domination; it must be the irreducibility of the law that leaves the agents producing it or subjected to it no means to recognize it.26Bourdieu had—like Plato and Marx before him, in Rancière's view—preordained a division of functions which ultimately undercut the autonomy of the subjected in the very process of diagnosing her subjection. And Bourdieu himself would seem to cede on this point, since the very first proposition of Reproduction asserts the semi-autonomy of symbolic violence, as a precondition for defending sociology itself. "To make the creative freedom of individuals the source of symbolic action," Bourdieu tells us, "would amount to denying the possibility of a science of sociology." 27It goes almost without saying that such a stifling understanding of

symbolic violence—as something imposed imperceptibly onto a powerless subject—is anathema to both Fanon's objectives and his method. Hence the moment of blockage or impasse—at which the
domination. Fanon's sociogenic method—which

racialized subject confronts her lack of "ontological resistance," and corresponding lack of access to reciprocity—represents merely the mid-point of Fanon's analysis. For Fanon, unlike the sociologist Bourdieu, diagnosis will not suffice, perhaps because the actual violence confronted by racialized and colonized subjects demands more than the diagnosis of the abstract and universal functions of

sees social structures as generating psychological and other disorders—entails more than just the epistemological element of sociology.
and performed—in Fanon's 1956 letter of resignation from the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria: The

28 While Fanon himself would only fully reach this conclusion some years later, sociogeny also entails interventionist praxis best summarized—

social structure existing in Algeria was hostile to any attempt [through psychiatry] to put the individual back where he belonged… The function of a social structure is to set up institutions to serve man's needs. A society that drives its members to desperate solutions is a non-viable society, a society to be 29 replaced.

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Alternatives

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Arizona Debate Institute

Performance

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Arizona Debate Institute

Spoken word
Everyones spoken word matters William-White 11(Lisa William-White, Jun 17,2011,Scholarship Revolution, California State,
Sacramento, http://qix.sagepub.com/content/17/6/534.full.pdf+html) See Grandma only had an 10th-grade education Yet she knew THAT! Could interpret her position within the social like Soledad on CNN and yet she never penned NUTHIN’ Her SPOKEN words mattered! She had no need to hold a degree To analyze or comprehend The game played under the guise of American DE-mo-cra-cy Or globally How’s that for an indigenous epistemology? Yet, she told us kids And ev’ry one else who’d listen To “use yo’ head fo’ mo’ Than a hat rack”. To perceive what’s goin’ on in America “And we got dat!” Took that organic intellectualism From the hood To the Amen corner To the Ivory Tower And back

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Arizona Debate Institute

Capitalism
Spoken word against Capitalistic greed William-White 11 (Lisa William-White, Jun 17,2011,Scholarship Revolution, California State,
Sacramento, http://qix.sagepub.com/content/17/6/534.full.pdf+html So let’s examine some FACTS And their impact All prime for examination And Spoken Word interpretation: Globalization corporate, capitalistic greed Wal-Mart-style class exploitation outsourcin’ labor needs Lack of jobs And loss of opportunity Then blame illegal immigrants For eroding our security Profit margins and gain for the privileged, upper half! Wall Street’s aim To create and sustain A PERMANENT UNDERCLASS ? Bush government policies a.k.a. de-regulation Reorganize social security? Call’d PRI-VA-TI-ZA-TION! But don’t stop there With student loans rates in the air And what about health care? Ain’t ya’ll18 aware?!? Then investment in the proliferation Of the Prison Industrial COMPLEX for landowners and state interests cuz crime is BIG business! Next, Underfund public education Use Eurocentric and scripted curriculum NCLB equals social reproductio n Cuz, that’s how it functions! Then Skew the rhetoric of diversity And Equality Protest and Throw Tea Parties yell out how “we want our country back” All because the Pres is Black? Then, Reduced health and human services spawns poverty and hopelessness Divest from domestic UPLIFT Where there is no perceived “benefit”! This equates to class division, disillusion disenfranchisement and social erosion Theory should create solutions Not aid the implosion! CAN WE GET A SCHOLARSHIP REVOLUTION? [hook] Merge critical theory discourse Activism and teachin’ Consciousness raisin’ Signifyin’, Rappin’ and Preachin’ with substance for IMPACT Currently what we, in the Academy, lack and NEED to get back Or at least GET-on-Top-of-dat!

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Scholarship Revolution
Reject the institutionthat hold you captive physically and mentally. William-White 11(Lisa William-White, Jun 17,2011,Scholarship Revolution, California State,
Sacramento, http://qix.sagepub.com/content/17/6/534.full.pdf+html) You see When one’s research content and methodology Enables one to become SUBJECT rather than OBJECT that’s empowerment! Liberatory dialogue and praxis spawns the ability to REFLECT then ACT Hence, if research lacks the promise of radical democratic practice To create change Is so esoteric that the common man can’t relate Or react, We should REJECT that! You see To be considered educated Does one have to say subaltern Subjugated Subordinated Or Subjectificated to simply say Whose oppressed? AND WHY? CAN WE GET A SCHOLARSHIP REVOLUTION! Consciousness endures Passes generationally In beauty parlors and barber shops On porch stoops From da
boombox and pews Race, gender, and class literacy Common Black folk’s daily news! Themes show up in slave hymns Work songs Gospel Bebop And Black Blues Awareness then re-emerged Sprung from urban streets When Black Arts Poets radicalized verse w-a-aa-ay before Slam, more politicized than Beats19 See In the beginning was the Spoken Word Righteous rhythm, indignation and rhyme Folks droppin’ science Subversive Outspoken Defiance

Conscious of urban decay, racism, poverty and war And by the way what the hell are we now fightin’ for? ANOTHER THEME FOR THE SCHOLARSHIP REVOLUTION! [hook] Merge critical theory discourse Activism and teachin’ Consciousness raisin’
Signifyin’, Rappin’ and Preachin’ with substance for IMPACT Currently what we, in the Academy, lack and NEED to get back Or at least GET-on-Top-of-dat! See Back in the day Youth had a “message”21 spawned noble, global emulation Raised attention Grew in influence and significance Folks still rappin’ worldwide for relevance! From Brazil to Shanghai Youth construct social space Where the lyrical And rhyme converge with talks of race And at home the messages brought awareness Verbal fluidity A dope-ass beat22 And Black linguistic acuity Gave liberal and suburban kids Somethin’ new too identity to emulate groove to vibe to Those spittin’23 verse and rhyme Get much HYPE-FAME And ACCLAIM Prodigious in influence Much bigger than any scholar’s name! And they write culture ALSO! And it’s funny MORESO cuz A PhD in anthropology or sociology Don’t merit as much Profundity Don’t get as much props In urban communities As Mos Def,24 Common,25 NAS,26 or Chuck D27 Urban griots like Immortal28 and Kweli29 Their lyrics profound prophetic visionary Some afflicated and ailing say, “Kozi healed me!”30 How’s that to the Psych D doin’ urban community therapy? [laughing]

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Arizona Debate Institute

Art as Identity
Reclaim the identity of the art! William-White 11(Lisa William-White, Jun 17,2011,Scholarship Revolution, California State,
Sacramento, http://qix.sagepub.com/content/17/6/534.full.pdf+html) Ironic too when examining it Cuz if a mix CD or bootleg tape Carried the same weight As a piece in Harvard Ed Review Then plenty a young Emcee Would be “renowned” And “scholarly” After goin’ double platinum In fact, Tupac, Eminem and Jay-Z More recognizable today than Dewey, Freire AND Vygotsky! Know what I’m sayin’? WE NEED A SCHOLARSHIP REVOLUTION! [hook] Merge critical theory discourse Activism and teachin’ Consciousness raisin’ Signifyin’, Rappin’ and Preachin’ with substance for IMPACT Currently what we, in the Academy, lack and NEED to get back Or at least GET-on-Top-of-dat! Dyson, Rose, and Kelley analyzes chagrinned street rap
Introduced to the Academy then translates it back West’s “Sketches” frames politics and Black history with rap and Spoken Word elucidation visionary

All bein’ critical Show it’s legit elevate the scholarship to those not seein’ its merit They call for more conscious hip-hop and rap Yeah we certainly need much more of that! In fact We’re overdue for reclamation And the need is significant now Cuz there’s been a movement threatening the art In this country For while And utterly significant Is deconstruction first Cause 90s hip-hop and rap evolved reppin’ gangstas and hos in verse And its gotten worse! And all this pushed conscious hip-hop underground Brothas and Sistahsnowadays Actively have to track it down now Go waaay-out-of-the-way to find the art somehow! Which raises an important set of issues NOW . . . See the music establishment establishes the canon Determines marketable use Then gives a lil change to artists Complicit in corporate hegemony and abuse So what’s their use? Even Jay Z,” Hova”45 embarrassed46 recently By some of his lyrical, musical legacy Revelation does spawn revolution

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Decolonization
Decolonize the mind William-White 11(Lisa William-White, Jun 17,2011,Scholarship Revolution, California State,
Sacramento, http://qix.sagepub.com/content/17/6/534.full.pdf+html)
recently occurred to me you see: Eventually! For him lyrics masked by Verbal fluidity a dope-ass beat and miso-gyn-is-tic absurdity not hatin’47 but . . . speakin’ what

USA capitalistic structure And economic interests Always usin’ indigenous art for profit And big business Pushin’ capitalist’s agenda As it always has Like when hymnals became spirituals Elvis’ croonin’ masquerades as Blues And BeBop emerged as Jazz Delegitimizing politics Is the scheme in this nation cuz If you control a man’s mind, He’ll accept his situation! Co-optation in this modern sense Means reimage the arts intent No resemblance To original content It’s all political! Ain’t it? Messages now commodified Appropriated Aaaaa-politicized Sanitized Globalized MORESO Ghetto-Fabulized!49 And just between you and me, Is this some sort of political conspiracy? A palatable, fashionable form of modern dispossession a.k.a. “CONQUEST” and You should know the rest For profit! IT IS TIME FOR A SCHOLARSHIP REVOLUTION! [hook] Merge critical theory discourse Activism and teachin’ Consciousness raisin’ Signifyin’, Rappin’ and Preachin’ with substance for IMPACT Currently what we, in the Academy, lack and NEED to get back Or at least GET-on-Topof-dat! pause [slower pace] Finally, a last thought has occurred to me somethin’ I’ve pondered for a while you see ideas that
should have some poignancy as we define what is scholarly . . . Is an indigenous urban, African American verse Unique enough Removed enough Distant and lyrically distinct enough Exotic and nearly EXTINCT enough To ethnopoetic scholars to be worthy of deconstruction examination reclamation elevation? Know what I’m sayin’? CAN WE GET A SCHOLARSHIP REVOLUTION?!? [hook] Merge critical theory discourse Activism and teachin’ Consciousness raisin’ Signifyin’-Rappin’ and Preachin’ with substance for IMPACT Currently what we, in the Academy, lack and NEED to get back Or at least GET-on-Top-of-dat!

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ALT:
[Performance]

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Paradigmatic Analysis

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Pyrotechnics
Because of the incoherence between the black positionality and the world itself at large our alternative is to reorient ourselves towards the end of the world. Wilderson, award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. He is one of two Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress and is a former insurgent in the ANC’s armed wing, 2010 (Frank
B. III “Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics” Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, Pg 5-6) GG

It is customary for a book like this to end with a prescriptive gesture, at least the germ of a new beginning if not a new world, a seed to be nurtured and cultivated by Lenin’s question, What is to be done? Even when such seeds were not sown throughout the book, an author might be tempted to harvest a yield, however meager, in the conclusion. Not only have such seeds not been sown in this book, but I have argued that anti-Blackness is the genome of this horticultural template for Human renewal. Given the structural violence that it takes to produce and reproduce a Slave —violence as the structure of Black life, as opposed to violence as one of many lived Black experiences—a concluding consideration of the question, What is to be done? would ring hollow. Fanon came closest to the only image of sowing and harvesting that befits this book. Quoting Cesaire, he urged his readers to start “the end of the world,” the “only thing… worth the effort of starting” (Black Skin, White Masks 96), a shift from horticulture to pyrotechnics. Rather than mime the restoration and/or reorganization dreams which conclusions often fall prey to, however unwittingly, Fanon dreams of an undoing, however implausible, for its own sake. Still, there are moments when Fanon finds his own flames to be too incendiary. So much so that he momentarily backs away from the comprehensive emancipation he calls for. Which is why one can find the Fanon of the Slave on the same page as the Fanon of the postcolonial subject. Nonetheless, I am humbled by his efforts; and though I am freighted with enough hubris to extend his ensemble of questions beyond his unintentional containment strategies, I know better than to underrate their gravitas by deigning to offer— or even hint at—a roadmap to freedom so extensive it would free us from the epistemic air we breathe. To say we must be free of air, while admitting to knowledge of no other source of breath, is what I have tried to do here.

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Solvency

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Paradigm Disruption
The criticism is a disruption of the status quo’s paradigm. Wilderson, award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. He is one of two Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress and is a former insurgent in the ANC’s armed wing , 2010
(Frank B. III “Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics” Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms,) GG

Is it still possible for a dream of unfettered ethics, a dream of the Settlement and the Slave estate’s destruction, to manifest itself at the ethical core of cinematic discourse, when this dream is no longer a constituent element of political discourse in the streets nor of intellectual discourse in the academy? The answer is “no” in the sense that, as history has shown, what cannot be articulated as political discourse in the streets is doubly foreclosed upon in screenplays and in scholarly prose; but “yes” in the sense that in even the most taciturn historical moments such as ours, the grammar of Black and Red suffering breaks in on this foreclosure , albeit like the somatic compliance of hysterical symptoms—it registers in both cinema and scholarship as symptoms of awareness of the structural antagonisms. Between 1967 and 1980, we could think cinematically and intellectually of Blackness and Redness as having the coherence of full-blown discourses. But from 1980 to the present, Blackness and Redness manifests only in the rebar of cinematic and intellectual (political) discourse, that is, as unspoken grammars. This grammar can be discerned in the cinematic strategies (lighting, camera angles, image composition, and acoustic strategies/design), even when the script labors for the spectator to imagine social turmoil through the rubric of conflict (that is, a rubric of problems that can be posed and conceptually solved) as opposed to the rubric of antagonism (an irreconcilable struggle between entities, or positionalities, the resolution of which is not dialectical but entails the obliteration of one of the positions). In other words, even when films narrate a story in which Blacks or Indians are beleaguered with problems that the script insists are conceptually coherent (usually having to do with poverty or the absence of “family values”), the non-narrative, or cinematic, strategies of the film often disrupt this coherence by posing the irreconcilable questions of Red and Black political ontology—or non-ontology. The grammar of antagonism breaks in on the mendacity of conflict.

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Civil Society Destruction
The concept of civil society must be dismantled in order to have black subjectivity Wilderson, Professor UCI, 2003 (Frank B., “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent)
Scandal”, Soc Justice 30 no2 2003, Accessed 8-4-12, MR) Whereas the positionality of the worker (whether a factory worker demanding a monetary wage, an immigrant, or a white woman demanding a social wage) gestures toward the reconfiguration of civil society, the positionality of the Black subject (whether a prison-slave or a prison-slave-in-waiting) gestures toward the disconfiguration of civil society. From the coherence of civil society, the Black subject beckons with the incoherence of civil war, a war that reclaims Blackness not as a positive value, but as a politically enabling site, to quote Fanon, of "absolute dereliction." It is a "scandal" that rends civil society asunder. Civil war, then, becomes the unthought, but never forgotten, understudy of hegemony. It is a Black specter waiting in the wings, an endless antagonism that cannot be satisfied (via reform or reparation), but must nonetheless be pursued to the death. 26

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Black = Center
Black positionality is at the center, it shapes the world Wilderson, Professor UCI, 2003 (Frank B., “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent)
Scandal”, Soc Justice 30 no2 2003, Accessed 8-4-12, MR)
Any serious musing on the question of antagonistic identity formation - a formation, the mass mobilization of which can precipitate a crisis in the institutions and assumptive logic that undergird the United State of America -

must come to grips with the contradictions between the political demands of radical social movements, such as the large prison abolition movement, which seeks to abolish the prison-industrial complex, and the ideological structure that underwrites its political desire. I contend that the positionality of Black subjectivity is at the heart of those contradictions and that this unspoken desire is bound up with the political limitations of several naturalized and uncritically accepted categories that have their genesis mainly in the works of Antonio Gramsci, namely, work or labor, the wage, exploitation,
hegemony, and civil society. I wish to theorize the symptoms of rage and resignation I hear in the words of George Jackson, when he boils reform down to a single word, "fascism," or in Assata's brief declaration, "i hated it," as well as in the Manichean delirium of

the failure of radical social movements to embrace symptoms of all three gestures is tantamount to the reproduction of an antiBlack politics that nonetheless represents itself as being in the service of the emancipation of the Black prison slave. By examining the strategy and structure of the Black subject's
Fanon, Martinot, and Sexton. Today, absence in, and incommensurability with, the key categories of Gramscian theory, we come face to face with three unsettling consequences: (1)

The Black American subject imposes a radical incoherence upon the assumptive logic of Gramscian discourse and on today's coalition politics . In other words, s/he implies a scandal. (2) The Black subject reveals the inability of social movements grounded in Gramscian discourse to think of white supremacy (rather than capitalism) as the base and thereby calls into question their claim to elaborate a comprehensive and decisive antagonism. Stated another way, Gramscian discourse and coalition
politics are indeed able to imagine the subject that transforms itself into a mass of antagonistic identity formations, formations that can precipitate a crisis in wage slavery, exploitation, and hegemony, but they are asleep at the wheel when asked to provide enabling antagonisms toward unwaged slavery, despotism, and terror. (3) We begin to see how Marxism suffers from a kind of conceptual anxiety. There is a desire for socialism on the other side of crisis, a society that does away not with the category of worker, but with the imposition workers suffer under the approach of variable capital. In other words, the mark of its conceptual anxiety is in its desire to democratize work and thus help to keep in place and insure the coherence of Reformation and Enlightenment foundational values of productivity and progress. This scenario crowds out other postrevolutionary possibilities, i.e., idleness.

The scandal, with which the Black subject position "threatens" Gramscian and coalition discourse, is manifest in the Black subject's incommensurability with, or disarticulation of, Gramscian categories: work, progress, production, exploitation, hegemony, and historical self-awareness. Through what strategies does the Black subject destabilize - emerge as the unthought, and thus the scandal of historical materialism? How does the Black subjectfunction within the "American desiring machine" differently than the quintessential Gramscian subaltern, the worker?

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Antiblack Hierarchy
Solving for anti-blackness cannot occur within the aff’s paradigm it can only happen when we get rid the human hierarchy Wilderson, award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. He is one of
two Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress and is a former insurgent in the ANC’s armed wing, 2010 (Frank B. III “Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics” Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, Pg 17-18) GG
In “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,” James Baldwin wrote about “the terrible gap between [Norman Mailer’s] life and my own” (174). It is a painful essay in which he explains how he experienced, through beginning and ending his “friendship” with Mailer, those moments when Blackness inspires White emancipatory dreams and how it feels to suddenly realize the impossibility of the inverse: “[T]he

really ghastly thing about trying to convey to a white man the reality of the Negro experience has nothing whatever to do with the fact of color, but has to do with this man’s relationship to his own life. He will face in your life only what he is willing to face in his” (175). His long Paris nights with Mailer bore fruit only to the extent that Mailer was able to say, “Me
too.” Beyond that was the void which Baldwin carried with him into and, subsequently, outside of the “friendship.” Baldwin’s condemnation of discourses that utilize exploitation and alienation’s grammar of suffering is unflinching:

“I am afraid that most of the white people I have ever known impressed me as being in the grip of a weird nostalgia, dreaming of a vanished state of security and order, against which dream, unfailingly and unconsciously, they tested and very often lost their lives” (172).
He is writing about the encounters between Blacks and Whites in Paris and New York in the 1950s, but he may as well be writing about the 18th century encounters between Slaves and the rhetoric of new republics like revolutionary France and America (Dorsey 354-359). Early in the essay, to catalyze White-to-White thought, without risking a White-to-Black encounter: “ There

Baldwin puts his finger on the nature of the impasse which allows the Black is a difference,” he writes, “between Norman and myself in that I think he still imagines that he has something to save, whereas I have never had anything to lose” (172). It is not a lack of goodwill or the practice of rhetorical discrimination, nor is it essentially the imperatives of the profit motive that prevent the hyperbolic circulation of Blackness from cracking and destabilizing civil society’s ontological structure of empathy—even as it cracks and destabilizes “previously accepted categories of thought about politics” ( Dorsey 355). The key to this structural prohibition barring Blackness from the conceptual framework of human empathy can be located in the symbolic value of that “something to save” which
Baldwin saw in Mailer. It was not until 1967/68, with such books as Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone—after he had exhausted

Baldwin permitted himself to give up hope and face squarely that the Master/Slave relation itself was the essence of that “something to save.”
himself with The Fire Next Time—that

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War Position
War with in civil society is a revolutionary movement, Wilderson, Professor UCI, 2003 (Frank, Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in
Civil Society?”, Social Identities, Volume 9, Number 2, 2003, Accessed 8-4-12, MR)
Students of struggle return, doggedly, to the Prison Notebooks for insights regarding how to bring about a revolution in a society in which state/capital formations are in some way protected by the ‘trenches’ of civil society. It is this outer perimeter, this discursive ‘trench’, constructed by an ensemble of private initiatives, activities, and an ensemble of pose-able questions (hegemony), which must be reconfigured before a revolution can take the form of a frontal assault.

But this trench called civil society is not, for Gramsci, in and of itself the bane of the working class. Instead it represents a terrain to be occupied, assumed, and appropriated in a pedagogic project of transforming ‘common sense’ into ‘good sense’ . This notion of ‘destruction-construction’ is a War of Position which involves agitating within civil society in a ‘revolutionary movement’ that builds ‘qualitatively new social relationships’ (Sassoon, 1987, p. 15): [A War of Position] is a struggle that engages on a wide range of fronts in which the
state as normally defined…is only one aspect. [For Gramsci a War of Position is the most ‘decisive’ form of engagement]

because it is the form in which bourgeois power is exercised [and victory on] these fronts makes possible or conclusive a frontal attack or War of Movement. (Sassoon, 1987, pp. 15–17)

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Critiques of white supremacy provide analysis and understanding
Martinot and Sexton, Director, critical race theorist at San Francisco State University and African American Studies School of Humanities UCI, 20 03 (Steve and Jared, "The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy", Social Identities, Volume 9, Number 2, 2003 Accessed 8-3-12, MR)
Like going to the state to protect us from the police ,

Structural Analysis

these critiques approach a variety of white ideologies and disciplines as a means of gaining insight into white supremacy. It is a project dedicated to only looking so far at race, racism, or white supremacy so as to avoid the risk of seeing oneself there, implicated as either perpetrator or victim. In effect, all of these theories remain disguises for the role of race and racism as social categorisation. Once one recognises that the power relations that categorise as such are genocidal, as Joy James has demonstrated, then the very discriminatory hierarchy that structures them must already subsume as strategies for itself the class struggles, privileges, educational facilities and juridical operations to which the left goes. The task of the critique of white supremacy is to avoid these general theoretical pitfalls and to produce new analyses, modes of apprehension, and levels of abstraction.

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War->Decolonize
War is the only way to decolonize
George Ciccariello-Maher, Jan, 2010, is a Ph.D. candidate in political theory at the University of California, Berkeley,

Jumpstarting the Decolonial Engine)

There is perhaps a simple explanation for the distinction that most make between Fanon's two major works. Violence, in Wretched of the Earth, does gain an additional aspect: whereas the external function of violence in Black Skin, White Masks was largely one of enforced recognition (which, nevertheless, entails a perceived threat of violence), in Fanon's later work he adds to this the practical function of eliminating the system of colonial privilege. It is with regard to this practical objective that Fanon's insistence on actual violence emerges, in the claim that:

"The naked truth of decolonization evokes for us the searing bullets and bloodstained knives which emanate from it. For if the last shall be first, this will only come to pass after a murderous and decisive struggle between the two protagonists." 31 Here, violence is not a strategy, but a "truth," the product of the insistence of the privileged on maintaining the colonial system from which they benefit. But isn't Fanon's claim that colonial privilege won't go without a fight relatively uncontroversial? In fact, most criticism of Fanon's theory of violence focuses not on this straightforward and practical external demand for violence, but rather on the internal side of the equation, and ironically it is here that we see more continuity than rupture vis-à-vis the more overtly symbolic function of violence in Black Skin, White Masks.

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Symbolic Decolonization
Decolonization creates humanity
George Ciccariello-Maher, Jan, 2010, is a Ph.D. candidate in political theory at the University of California, Berkeley,

Jumpstarting the Decolonial Engine:

The similarity to the ontological self-assertion of Fanon's earlier work is apparent from the outset of his discussion of violence in Wretched, since as he puts it, "decolonization
32

is the veritable creation of new men… the 'thing' which has been colonized becomes a man during the same process by which it frees itself." The violence of the colonizer—the "lines of force," the "rifle butts and napalm" which constitute
the Manichean division of the colonial world—is "claimed and taken over by the native at the moment when, deciding to embody history in his own person, he surges into the forbidden quarters." 33 But we should be clear here: what is crucial is the decision, and this is where the importance of symbolic violence becomes apparent. Elsewhere, Fanon puts it as follows :

"it is precisely at the moment he realized his humanity that he begins to sharpen the weapons with which he will secure his victory." 34 The realization of one's own humanity is prior to the sharpening of the weapons of liberation, and the mere promise
of struggle is fundamental to the affirmation of equality.

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Framework

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Institutional Analysis
We need to focus on a method that criticizes the underpinnings institutions Wilderson, award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. He is one of two Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress and is a former insurgent in the ANC’s armed wing, 2010
The difficulty of writing a book which seeks to uncover Red, Back, and White socially engaged feature films as aesthetic

(Frank B. III “Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics” Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, Pg 10-11) GG

today’s intellectual protocols are not informed by Fanon’s insistence that “ontology—once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside—does not permit us to understand the being of the black man [sic]” (Black Skin, White Masks 110). In sharp contrast to the late 60s and early 70s, we now live in a political, academic, and cinematic milieu which stresses “diversity,” “unity,” “civic participation,” “hybridity,” “access,” and “contribution.” The radical fringe of political discourse amounts to little more than a passionate dream of civic reform and social stability. The distance between the protester and the police has narrowed considerably. The effect of this upon the academy is that intellectual protocols tend to privilege two of the three domains of subjectivity, namely preconscious interests (as evidenced in the work of social science around “political unity,” “social attitudes,” “civic participation,” and “diversity,”) and unconscious identification (as evidenced in the humanities’ postmodern regimes of “diversity,” “hybridity,” and “relative [rather than “master”] narratives”). Since the 1980s, intellectual protocols aligned with structural positionality (except in the work of die-hard Marxists) have been kicked to the curb. That is to say, it is hardly fashionable anymore to think the vagaries of power through the generic positions within a structure of power relations—such as man/woman, worker/boss. Instead, the academy’s ensembles of questions are fixated on specific and “unique” experience of the myriad identities that make up those structural positions. This would fine if the work led us back to a critique of the paradigm; but most of it does not. Again, the upshot of this is that the intellectual protocols now in play, and the composite effect of cinematic and political discourse since the 1980s, tend to hide rather than make explicit the grammar of suffering which underwrites the US and its foundational antagonisms. This state of affairs exacerbates—or, more precisely, mystifies and veils—the ontological death of the Slave and the “Savage” because (as in the 1950s) cinematic, political, and intellectual discourse of the current milieu resists being sanctioned and authorized by the irreconcilable demands of Indigenism and Blackness— academic enquiry is thus no more effective in pursuing a revolutionary critique than the legislative antics of the loyal opposition. This is how Left-leaning scholars help civil society recuperate and maintain stability. But this stability is a state of emergency for Indians and Blacks.
accompaniments to grammars of suffering, predicated on the subject positions of the “Savage” and the Slave is that

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Policing
Policing justifies and hides the antiblack white supremacist racism Martinot and Sexton, Director, critical race theorist at San Francisco State University and African American Studies School of Humanities UCI, 2003 (Steve and Jared, "The Avant-Garde of
White Supremacy", Social Identities, Volume 9, Number 2, 2003 Accessed 8-3-12, MR)
This confluence of repetition and transformation, participation and subjection gets conjugated inversely so that the target becomes the aggressor and the uniformed aggressors become a priesthood, engineering a political culture whose construction is the practice of whiteness. What are wholly and essentially immanent are the structures of racist reason

that produce practices without motive. ‘Police procedures’ become pure form because they are at once both self-defined and subordinated to the implicit prerogatives of this political culture. They empty the law of any content that could be called justice, substituting murderousness and
impunity. The ‘social procedures’ that burgeon in the wake of this engineering also become pure form, emptying social exchange as the condition of white social cohesion. It flattens all ideals of political life to a Manichean structure

that it depicts as whiteness versus evil.

It is a double economy. On the one hand, there is an economy of clearly identifiable injustices, spectacular flash points of terror, expressing the excesses of the state-sanctioned system of racial categorisation. On the other, there is the structure of inarticulability itself and its imposed unintelligibility, an economy of the loss of meaning, a hyper-economy. It is this hyper-economy that appears in its excess as banal; a hyper-injustice that is reduced and dissolved in the quotidian as an aura, while it is refracted in the images of the spectacular economy itself. Between the

spectacular as the rule and the banal as excess, in each of the moments of its reconstruction, the law of white supremacist attack signifies that there is no law. This hyper-economy, with its hyper-injustice, is the problem we confront. The intractability of racism lies in its hidden and unspeakable terror, an implicate ethic of impunity. A repetition of violence as standard operating (police) procedure, an insidious common sense, renders any real notion of justice or democracy on the map of white supremacy wholly alien and inarticulable.

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Policing/Settler
Policing/Settler societies make the black body be a magnet for gratuitous violence Wilderson, Professor UCI, 2003 (Frank B., “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent)
Scandal”, Soc Justice 30 no2 2003, Accessed 8-4-12, MR)

What is being asserted here is an isomorphic schematic relation - the schematic interchangeability - between Fanon' s settler society and Martinot and Sexton's policing paradigm. For Fanon, it is the policeman and soldier (not the discursive, or hegemonic, agents) of colonialism that make one town white and the other Black. For Martinot and Sexton, this Manichean delirium manifests itself by way of the U.S. paradigm of policing that (re)produces, repetitively, the inside/outside, the civil society/Black world, by virtue of the difference between those bodies that do not magnetize bullets and those that do. "Police
It makes no difference that in the U.S. the "casbah" and the "European" zone are laid one on top of the other. impunity serves to distinguish between the racial itself and the elsewhere that mandates it...the distinction between those whose human being is put permanently in question and those for whom it goes without saying" (Ibid.: 8).

In such a paradigm, white people are, ipso facto, deputized in the face of Black people, whether they know it (consciously) or not. Whiteness, then, and by extension civil society, cannot be solely "represented" as some monumentalized coherence of phallic signifiers, but must first be understood as a social formation of contemporaries who do not magnetize bullets. This
is the essence of their construction through an asignifying absence; their signifying presence is manifested by the fact that they are, if only by default, deputized against those who do magnetize bullets. In short,

white people are not simply "protected" by the police, they are - in their very corporeality - the police. This ipso facto deputization of white people in the face of Black people accounts for Fanon's materiality, and Martinot and Sexton's Manichean delirium in America. What remains to be addressed, however,
is the way in which the political contestation between civil society's junior partners (i.e., workers, white women, and immigrants), on the one hand, and white supremacist institutionality, on the other hand, is produced by, and reproductive of, a supplemental antiBlackness. Put another way: How is the production and accumulation of junior partner social capital dependent upon on an antiBlack rhetorical structure and a decomposed Black body?

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Plan Focus
Engaging the state fails to provoke change and instead results in more of the same
Martinot and Sexton, Director, critical race theorist at San Francisco State University and African American Studies School of Humanities UCI, 20 03 (Steve and Jared, "The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy", Social Identities, Volume 9, Number 2, 2003 Accessed 8-3-12, MR) There are oppositional political movements of course; some are progressive, fewer are radical. But each encounters a certain internal limitation. For instance, there are movements seeking to make the police more accountable to legal and communal standards of conduct; but their role then becomes one of making the state work better and more efficiently. They work, perhaps unwittingly, at reconstructing and not dismantling the white state. What they fail to understand or accept is that the police are already accountable, but to something out of reach of the principles of justice or democracy. There is a (largely symbolic) multiracial or mixed race movement that understands itself to be the very transcendence of race but, in mixing and matching races supposed to really exist, it subsumes the products of racism in ways that recall many dimensions of white supremacist thinking. The ethic of retribution that legitimates the expanding prison-industrial complex in
the US and beyond is one of these products. Even political opposition to that ethic outside the prison wall falls prey to a certain acceptance of criminal law; in other words, it assumes that the prison is essential to social order. This acceptance is unacceptable from the point of view of the violence and violation engendered by the prison regime. Political (or politicised) prisoners demand an epistemology of a different order, one that challenges the internal limits of opposition in a radical way — the dream of prison abolition.

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State Focus
State Involvement perpetuates white supremacy, shifts attention away from gratuitous violence Martinot and Sexton, Director, critical race theorist at San Francisco State University and African American Studies School of Humanities UCI, 2003 (Steve and Jared, “The Avant-Garde
of White Supremacy”, Social Identities, Volume 9, Number 2, 2003 Accessed 8-13-12, MR)
whiteness must ever be re-secured in an obsessive fashion. The foundations of US white supremacy are far from stable. Owing to the instability of white supremacy, the social structures of

The process of re-inventing whiteness and white supremacy has always involved the state, and the state has always involved the utmost paranoia. Vast political cataclysms such as the civil rights movements that sought to shatter this invention have confronted the state as harbingers of sanity. Yet the state’s absorption and co-optation of that opposition for the reconstruction of the white social order has been reoccurring before our very eyes. White supremacy is not reconstructed simply for its own sake, but for the sake of the social paranoia, the ethic of impunity, and the violent spectacles of racialisation that it calls the ‘maintenance of order’ , all of which constitute its
essential dimensions. The cold, gray institutions of this society — courts, schools, prisons, police, army, law, religion, the two-party system — become the arenas of this brutality, its excess and spectacle, which they then normalise throughout the social field .

It is not simply by understanding the forms of state violence that the structures of hyperinjustice and their excess of hegemony will be addressed . If they foster policing as their paradigm —
including imprisonment, police occupations, commodified governmental operations, a renewed Jim Crow, and a re-criminalisation of race as their version of social order — then to merely catalogue these institutional forms marks the moment at which understanding

we have to understand the state and its order as a mode of anti-production that seeks precisely to cancel understanding through its own common sense. For common sense, the opposite of injustice is justice;however, the opposite of hyper-injustice is not justice. The existence of hyperinjustice implies that neither a consciousness of injustice nor the possibility of justice any longer applies. Justice as such is incommensurable with and wholly exterior to the relation between ordinary social existence and the ethic of impunity including the modes of gratuitous violence that it fosters. The pervasiveness of state-sanctioned terror, police brutality, mass incarceration, and the endless ambushes
stops. To pretend to understand at that point would be to affirm what denies understanding. Instead,

of white populism is where we must begin our theorising. Though state practices create and reproduce the subjects,discourses, and places that are inseparable from them, we can no longer presuppose the subjects and subject positions nor the ideologies and empiricisms of political and class forces. Rather, the analysis of a contingent yet comprehensive state terror becomes primary. This is not to debate the traditional concerns of radical leftist politics that presuppose (and close off) the question of structure, its tenacity,

The problem here is how to dwell on the structures of pervasiveness, terror, and gratuitousness themselves rather than simply the state as an apparatus. It is to ask how the state exists as a formation or confluence of processes with de-centred agency, how the subjects of state authority — its agents, citizens, and captives — are produced in the crucible of its ritualistic violence.
its systematic and inexplicable gratuitousness.

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Predictability
Claims of predictability create a static space in which elites control and exclude Michael Dantley 2002 (Professor at Miami University focusing on leadership, spirituality
and social justice Education and Urban Society, vol. 34 (3)) The third dynamic of positivism, technical control, meanders outside the confines of theoretical and research methodological conscription into the realm of social and power relations its tenets so ably design. It is not difficult to see how imperialist behaviors are birthed from the positivist mentality. The belief that a strict subscription to an empirical design of rationality and predictability contours the acceptable behaviors of a society that embraces its fundamental dispositions. Difference or an alternate perception becomes anathema and silenced, especially if it offers ammunition to refute the propositions the positivist position has already established. It outlines the hegemony and celebrates confirmation and corroboration of its doctrines. It is vitally important to see how the tenet of control within the positivist frame crafts the cultural thought. Control, domination, and subjugation systematically establish boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. Control propagates a cataloguing
of acceptable behaviors as well as acceptable people whose nature is to demonstrate these honored behaviors. In fact, a meritocracy emanates as clearly defined systems of rewards and sanctions are put into place. These reify the positivist position and ensure its continual influence. Therefore, there are attributes and character traits codified by those who establish the cultural thought or hegemony that describe clones of social positivism . There arises a host of binary oppositional rituals

that

systemically and systematically exclude those who differ from the hegemonic model. Appiah (1992) affirmed these notions of exclusivity as he delineated the signifiers of the modernist and postmodern ideologies. He maintained that in philosophy, postmodernism is the rejection of the hegemonic acceptance of Descartes’s through Kantian notions of logical positivism on foundationalism, which touts that there is one route to knowledge, thus representing epistemological exclusivism. Logical positivism supports the stance of metaphysical realism that purports that there is one truth resulting in exclusivity in ontology. All of this, according to Appiah, is founded on a unitary notion of reason celebrated by logical positivism.

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Education
Consciousness raisin is first step to a scholarship revolution. William-White 11(Lisa William-White, Jun 17,2011,Scholarship Revolution, California State,
Sacramento, http://qix.sagepub.com/content/17/6/534.full.pdf+html) I’M CALLIN’ FOR A SCHOLARSHIP REVOLUTION! Not to be dramaturgical or theatrical Not to be sensational or emotional but to take knowledge and make it practical [hook] Merge critical theory discourse Activism and teachin’ Consciousness raisin’ Signifyin’, Rappin’ and Preachin’ with substance for IMPACT Currently what we, in the Academy, lack and NEED to get back Or at least GET-on-Top-of-dat! WE NEED A SCHOLARSHIP REVOLUTION! One that urban griots are capable of leadin’ And emergent scholars are desperately needin’ Cuz teachin’ and research is political— It IS the practice of FREEDOM

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Fairness
White Structured institutions limits opportunity for non-whites Sexton 2009 (, Ph.D. Associate Professor and Director of the Program in African American
Studies at the University of California, Irvine Jared, “The Ruse of Engagement: Black Masculinity and the Cinema of Policing,” Project Muse, Volume 61, March 2009 pg 39-63,SJH)
Taken together, Bait (2000), Training Day (2001), and Tears of the Sun (2003) rehash an unrelenting suspicion, if not cynicism, about the possibility of a humane affective tie or social contract among blacks. From family to community to nation to continent, black sociality in this troika of Fuqua’s cinematic imagination only follows from the most repressive state intervention and seems to require gratuitous loss of life in the process.

If the white subject—embedded in the institution of family-asnation, metonym of the universal—has understood itself in the historic instance to be, both onscreen and off, under the enabling cover of the police and military, then the black subject (we must use the term under erasure) is not only prototype of that threat against which “civilization” must defend, but also that animate figure that must aspire to the very forms of existence from which it is constitutively barred. Antiblackness is best described here as a series of forced choices (we all know the imperative “your money or your life”) but choices that brook no answer—neither the compulsory allegiance demanded by whiteness for its constituency’s disciplined mobility, nor the vacillating inclusion/exclusion of the nonwhite immigrant, nor even the genocidal contest of sovereignty that structures the lived reality of American Indians. For instance: Do you want to serve an extended prison sentence or sacrifice yourself to a sting operation of the national security state (as in Bait)? Do you want to wither indefinitely in a miserable refugee camp or fall victim to a military-sponsored campaign of ethnic cleansing (as in Tears)? More simply: Do you want go home or go to jail (as in Training Day)? And where, exactly, is home, if you are black in the contemporary world? Do you want to take a trip to “the booty house” (as Detective Harris tauntingly refers to the county lockup) or languish on the streets of Los Angeles’s skid row, strung out by an addiction to crack cocaine? Or, would you rather take a knife in the eye, a bullet in the head? Or, would you prefer to bleed to death from the wounds of a vigilante attack, castrated and raped in a statesanctioned lynching? In what follows we will see that, although a chilling impetus seems to lie in the heart of our protagonist and the ensuing hazards are borne by his unguarded partner, the moral arc of the universe is short and it bends toward whiteness.

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Block Extensions

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Humanity

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Black Body -> Unspeakable
A historical Axis or Anthropological Axis key to European discourse of humanity, the black body is irrelevant/unspeakable since they have neither Wilderson, Professor UCI, 2003 (Frank B., “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent)
Scandal”, Soc Justice 30 no2 2003, Accessed 8-4-12, MR) According to Coetzee, the coherence of European discourse depends upon two structuring axes. A "Historical Axis" consists of codes distributed along the axis of temporality and events, while the "Anthropological Axis" is an axis of cultural codes. It mattered very little which codes on either axis a particular indigenous community was perceived to possess, with possession the operative word, for these codes act as a kind of mutually agreed-upon currency. What matters is that the community has some play of difference along both axes, sufficient in number to construct taxonomies that can be investigated, identified, and named by the discourse. Without this, the discourse cannot go on. It is reinvigorated
when an unknown entity presents itself, but its anxiety reaches crisis proportions when the entity remains unknown. Something unspeakable occurs.

Not to possess a particular code along the Anthropological or Historical Axis is akin to lacking a gene for brown hair or green eyes on an X or Y chromosome. Lacking a Historical or Anthropological Axis is akin to the absence of the chromosome itself. The first predicament raises the notion: What kind of human? The second predicament brings into crisis the notion of the human itself. Without
the textual categories of dress, diet, medicine, crafts, physical appearance, and most important, work, the Khoisan stood in refusal of

Thus, the Khoisan' s status within discourse was not that of an opponent or an interlocutor, but rather of an unspeakable scandal. His/her position within the discourse was one of disarticulation, for he/she did little or nothing to fortify and extend the interlocutory life of the discourse. Just as the Khoisan presented the discourse of
the invitation to become Anthropological Man. S/he was the void in discourse that could only be designated as idleness. the Cape with an anthropological scandal, so the Black subject in the Western Hemisphere, the slave, presents Marxism and American textual practice with a historical scandal.

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American Narrative
The Native Americans and Latinos unlike the black body fall within the realm of European discourse of historical Axis Wilderson, Professor UCI, 2003 (Frank B., “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent)
Scandal”, Soc Justice 30 no2 2003, Accessed 8-4-12, MR) How is our incoherence in the face of the Historical Axis germane to our experience of being "a phenomenon without analog"? A sample list of codes mapped out by an American subject's historical axis might include rights or entitlements; here even Native Americans provide categories for the record when one thinks of how the Iroquois constitution, for example, becomes the U.S. constitution. Sovereignty is also included, whether a state is one the subject left behind, or as in the case of American Indians, one taken by force and dint of broken treaties. White supremacy has made good use of the Indian subject's positionality , one that fortifies
and extends the interlocutory life of America as a coherent (albeit imperial) idea because treaties are forms of articulation discussions brokered between two groups are presumed to possess the same category of historical currency, sovereignty.

The code of sovereignty can have a past and future history, if you will excuse the oxymoron, when one considers that 150 Native American tribes have applied to the Bureau of Indian Affairs for sovereign recognition so that they might qualify for funds harvested from land stolen from them . I Immigration is another code that maps the subject onto the American Historical Axis, with narratives of arrival based on collective volition and premeditated desire. Chicano subject positions can fortify and extend the interlocutory life of America as an idea because racial conflict can be articulated across the various contestations over the legitimacy of arrival, immigration. Both whites and Latinos generate data for this category.

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Hegemony
The black body does not exist in either discussion of historical or Anthropological Axis, it will never be able to access hegenomy Wilderson, Professor UCI, 2003 (Frank B., “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent)
Scandal”, Soc Justice 30 no2 2003, Accessed 8-4-12, MR) Slavery is the great leveler of the Black subject's positionality. The Black American subject does not generate historical categories of entitlement, sovereignty, and immigration for the record. We are "off the map" with respect to the cartography that charts civil society's semiotics; we have a past, but notaheritage. To the data-generating demands of the Historical Axis, we present a virtual blank, much like that which the Khoisan presented to the Anthropological Axis . This places us in a structurally impossible position, one that is outside the articulations of hegemony. However, it also places hegemony in a structurally impossible position because - and this is key - our presence works
back upon the grammar of hegemony and threatens it with incoherence. If every subject - even the most massacred among them, Indians - is required to have analogs within the nation's structuring narrative, and the experience of one subject, upon whom the nation's order of wealth was built, is without analog, then that subject's presence destabilizes all other analogs.

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Absolute Dereliction
Blackness is the magnetization of gratuitous violence Wilderson, Professor UCI, 2003 (Frank B., “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent)
Scandal”, Soc Justice 30 no2 2003, Accessed 8-4-12, MR)
Fanon (1968: 37) writes, "decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder." If we take him at his word, then we must accept that no other body functions in the Imaginary, the Svmbolic, or the Real so

Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Real, for in its magnetizing of bullets the Black body functions as the map of gratuitous violence through which civil society is possible: namely, those bodies for which violence is, or can be, contingent. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Symbolic, for Blackness in America generates no categories for the chromosome of history,
completely as a repository of complete disorder as the Black body. and no data for the categories of immigration or sovereignty. It is an experience without analog - a past without a heritage.

Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Imaginary, for "whoever says 'rape' says Black" (Fanon), whoever says "prison" says Black, and whoever says "AIDS" says Black (Sexton) - the "Negro is a phobogenic object"
(Fanon).

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Identity

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ID-> Symbolic Violence
There is no way to escape the black identity unless we reorient ourselves towards the end of the world
George Ciccariello-Maher, Jan, 2010, is a Ph.D. candidate in political theory at the University of California, Berkeley,

Jumpstarting the Decolonial Engine:

Why should the identification of the enemy cause such a seismic ontological shift? Because to discover an enemy, and to discover it clearly, was also to turn away from the master and discover something essential about oneself: as Fanon puts it, "I had incisors to test. I was sure they were strong."13 operation of Hegel's dialectic of recognition, such a basis had to be created :

Since ontology had been denied, since there was no basis for the smooth "Since the other hesitated to recognize me, there remained only one solution: to make myself known." Fanon's
14

theory of symbolic ontological violence, then, could be summarized in these three words: making oneself known.And to make himself known meant, in the context of ontological disqualification, to seize hold of the only identity available to him, the one imposed on him through precisely this same ontological disqualification: "I resolved, since it was impossible for me to get away

from an

inborn complex,

to assert myself as a BLACK MAN." It is at this moment that Fanon, against the universal ache of every shred of his being, "buries himself in the black abyss" that he himself would criticize in no uncertain terms. 16 Hence while Fanon is relentless in his criticism of especially the most essentialist forms of Negritude (especially that of Léopold Senghor 17), he nevertheless
15

a moment of black identity as the functional content of his early symbolic decolonial violence (a function to be replaced in Algeria by national consciousness). This dialectical necessity emerges most powerfully in Fanon's scathing and heartrending indictment of Sartre, who had reduced black identity to a merely antithetical moment in a preordained dialectical progression whose resolution was the proletariat. Fanon writes:For once, that born Hegelian had
insists on the dialectical necessity of

forgotten that consciousness has to lose itself in the night of the absolute, the only condition to attain to consciousness of self… JeanPaul Sartre, in this work, has destroyed black zeal. In opposition to historical becoming, there had always been the unforeseeable. I needed to lose myself completely in negritude… at the very moment when I was trying to grasp my own being, Sartre, who remained The Other, gave me a name and thus shattered my last illusion…

Not yet white, no longer wholly

black, I was damned.

Despite Sartre's best intentions, in subsuming black identity to a closed dialectic he had shortcircuited the generativity of decolonial violence—its ability to re-build the colonized and force recognition on the colonizer—thereby blocking Fanon's access to being.19 Symbolic violence and the access to the equality of being that it promises passes—in a seeming paradox which is nevertheless held open for eventual dialectical resolution—through the realm of division and (in this case, black) identity.
18

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White Imagination

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Climate Science and Enviro Policy
Conservative white males spearhead attacks on climate science and environmental policy McCright, Associate Professor of Sociology in Lyman Briggs College, Department of Sociology, and Environmental Science and Policy Program at Michigan State University , Dulap, Regents Professor of Psychological Sciences, Sociology. In addition to
his empirical work, Dr. Dunlap regularly writes assessments of theoretical developments in the field of environmental sociology,

2011.( Aaron M., Riley E., “Cool Dudes: The Denial of Climate Change Among Conservative White Males in the United States,” Global Environmental Change, Volume 21, October 2011, Pages 1163-1172, SJH)
Our results relate back to earlier work on the political mobilization of conservative elites and organizations in the US to challenge climate science and policy (e.g., [Dunlap and McCright, 2010], [Dunlap and McCright, 2011], [Freudenburg et al., 2008], [Lahsen, 2005], [Lahsen, 2008], [McCright, 2007], [McCright and Dunlap, 2000], [McCright and Dunlap, 2003], [McCright and Dunlap, 2010], [Oreskes and Conway, 2008] and [Oreskes et al., 2008]). Conservative think tanks, conservative media,

corporations, and industry associations (especially for the fossil fuels industry)— domains dominated by conservative white males—have spearheaded the attacks on climate science and policy from the late 1980s to the present. The results presented here show that conservative white males in the general public have become a very receptive audience for these efforts. When mobilized, these conservative white males may constitute a key vector of climate change denial in their own right via their online and offline social networks and through participation in various protest and campaigning events

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Climate Denial
The Conservative White Male Effect leads to climate denial McCright, Associate Professor of Sociology in Lyman Briggs College, Department of Sociology, and Environmental Science and Policy Program at Michigan State University , Dulap, Regents Professor of Psychological Sciences, Sociology. In addition to
his empirical work, Dr. Dunlap regularly writes assessments of theoretical developments in the field of environmental sociology,

2011.( Aaron M., Riley E., “Cool Dudes: The Denial of Climate Change Among Conservative White Males in the United States,” Global Environmental Change, Volume 21, October 2011, Pages 1163-1172, SJH)
Since the mid-1990s, organized climate change denial has diffused from the US to other Anglo nations with established conservative think tanks that promote freemarket conservatism and front groups promoting industry interests, most notably Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (e.g., [Hamilton, 2010], [Hoggan and Littlemore, 2009] and [Monbiot, 2007]). This spread of climate change denial has been driven to a significant degree by key actors —and their resources, strategies, and tactics—in the U.S. climate change denial machine (e.g., Dunlap and McCright, 2011). Throughout these Anglo countries organized denial seems to be dominated by politically conservative white males (e.g., [Hoggan and Littlemore, 2009] and [Washington and Cook, 2011]), and this suggests that a similar conservative white male effect might be emerging in the general publics of these nations with regard to climate change denial. Clearly the extent to which the conservative white male effect on climate change denial exists outside the US is a topic deserving investigation.

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White Protectionism
Conservative White Males in the general public are more likely to defend the claims of conservative white male elites. McCright, Associate Professor of Sociology in Lyman Briggs College, Department of Sociology, and Environmental Science and Policy Program at Michigan State University , Dulap, Regents Professor of Psychological Sciences, Sociology. In addition to
his empirical work, Dr. Dunlap regularly writes assessments of theoretical developments in the field of environmental sociology,

2011.( Aaron M., Riley E., “Cool Dudes: The Denial of Climate Change Among Conservative White Males in the United States,” Global Environmental Change, Volume 21, October 2011, Pages 1163-1172, SJH)
Integrating insights from Kahan et al.’s (2007) identity-protective cognition thesis and [Jost et al., 2008] and [Feygina et al., 2010]) empirical work on the strong system justification tendencies of conservatives, we argued that conservative white males would be more likely than other adults in the US to express climate change denial views. Further, risk perception scholars have found that white males who report atypically low environmental risk perceptions are more conservative than are other adults (Slovic, 1999; see also [Flynn et al., 1994] and [Satterfield et al., 2004]). We offered two complementary reasons for a conservative white male effect with regard to climate change denial. On one level, conservative white males in the general public likely perceive conservative white male elites to be their in-group. Over the last twenty years, conservative white male elites have challenged the reality of climate change via conservative talk radio, websites, television news, and newspapers (e.g., Wolcott, 2007). Thus, we argued that conservative white males in the general public would be more likely than other adults to embrace and defend the claims of conservative white male elites. This follows reasoning by Kahan et al. (2007, p. 467): “ It is natural for individuals to adopt a posture of extreme skepticism, in particular when charges of societal danger are leveled at activities integral to social roles constructed by their cultural commitments.”

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Change
Conservative white males dislike change McCright, Associate Professor of Sociology in Lyman Briggs College, Department of Sociology, and Environmental Science and Policy Program at Michigan State University , Dulap, Regents Professor of Psychological Sciences, Sociology. In addition to
his empirical work, Dr. Dunlap regularly writes assessments of theoretical developments in the field of environmental sociology,

2011.( Aaron M., Riley E., “Cool Dudes: The Denial of Climate Change Among Conservative White Males in the United States,” Global Environmental Change, Volume 21, October 2011, Pages 1163-1172, SJH)
On another level, the work of [Jost et al., 2008] and [Feygina et al., 2010]) shows that conservatives—and we would extend this to

conservative white males—strongly display tendencies to justify and defend the current social and economic system. Conservatives dislike change and uncertainty and attempt to simplify complexity (Amodio et al., 2007). Further, conservative white males have disproportionately occupied positions of power within our economic system. Given the expansive challenge that climate change poses to the industrial capitalist economic system, it should not be surprising that conservative white males’ strong system-justifying attitudes would be triggered to deny climate change.

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White Structure
Issues that threaten the white identity (structure) are denied and unresolved. McCright, Associate Professor of Sociology in Lyman Briggs College, Department of Sociology, and Environmental Science and Policy Program at Michigan State University , Dulap, Regents Professor of Psychological Sciences, Sociology. In addition to
his empirical work, Dr. Dunlap regularly writes assessments of theoretical developments in the field of environmental sociology,

2011.( Aaron M., Riley E., “Cool Dudes: The Denial of Climate Change Among Conservative White Males in the United States,” Global Environmental Change, Volume 21, October 2011, Pages 1163-1172, SJH)
Among conservative white males, there is a positive correlation between self-reported understanding and climate change denial. The Gamma values range in strength from moderate (.32) to strong
(.56). Among all other adults, however, we see a weaker positive correlation (.21) on the first denial item (the effects of global warming will never happen), no correlation on the fourth denial item (seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated in the media), and negative correlations for the remaining three indicators. The positive correlations between self-

reported understanding and climate change denial among conservative white males are consistent with expectations based upon identity-protective cognition and systemjustification tendencies. Briefly, the latter expects a positive correlation between confidence in beliefs about a problem that threatens system order and denial of that very problem. This is especially the case as, with reference to identity-protective cognition, climate change denial seems to have become almost an essential component of conservative white male identity.

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Climate Change Denial
Conservative white males have a strong tendency to deny climate change McCright, Associate Professor of Sociology in Lyman Briggs College, Department of Sociology, and Environmental Science and Policy Program at Michigan State University , Dulap, Regents Professor of Psychological Sciences, Sociology. In addition to
his empirical work, Dr. Dunlap regularly writes assessments of theoretical developments in the field of environmental sociology,

2011.( Aaron M., Riley E., “Cool Dudes: The Denial of Climate Change Among Conservative White Males in the United States,” Global Environmental Change, Volume 21, October 2011, Pages 1163-1172, SJH)
The Gamma values for the relationship between the conservative white male dummy variable and each of the five climate change denial indicators are moderately to very strong—ranging from .44 to .68 and significant at p < .001. This is initial, but compelling, evidence that within the American public conservative white males have a strong tendency to

endorse climate change denial.13 The bottom row in the top half of Table 2 shows that a greater percentage of
conservative white males (30.4%) than of all other adults (18.0%) report that they understand global warming very well. The relatively modest Gamma value (.28) for the relationship between the conservative white male dummy variable and the full selfreported understanding variable (“not at all” to “very well”) indicates that conservative white males tend to assert somewhat greater personal understanding of global warming than do other adults. This, of course, seems an untenable self-

assessment, given that conservative white males are more likely than are other adults to reject the current scientific consensus. Yet, this pattern—where conservative white males are more confident in their knowledge of climate change than are other adults, even as their beliefs conflict with the scientific consensus—is consistent with our expectation that identity-protective cognition and system-justifying tendencies are especially strong within conservative white males. Such processes, we argue, lead them to reject information from out-groups (e.g., liberals and environmentalists) they see as threatening the economic system, and such tendencies provoke strong emotional and psychic investment, easily translating into (over)confidence in beliefs.

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Language

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Bodies and Language
Fanon argues that consciousness of the black body, the recognition of who they are, is based on negative activities like derogatory language. Sexton, Director, African American Studies School of Humanities, 2003 (Jared, “The Consequence of Race Mixture: Racialised Barriers and the Politics of Desire”, Social Identities, Volume 9, Number 2, 2003,Accessed 8-4-12, MR )
Fanon makes two very interesting statements about the construction of racialised categories and the phenomenology of those bodies supposed to be representative. He says first, in the white world, the man of colour [sic] encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. (Fanon, 1967, p. 110) This argument from the essay ‘The Fact of Blackness’ is well known by now. Many read this observation of Fanon’s (reductively I think) as a lament about the deprivations of colonial domination, about the pain of being structurally denied access to the idealised images of oneself enjoyed by whites, the pain of having to identify instead with images of monstrosity, incompleteness and, indeed, lack. Certainly, there are passages in Fanon’s text that would seem to support such a reading. For example, his description of the violence he experiences when looked at by a young white boy who utters those infamous words, ‘Look, a Negro!’ The language of castration and amputation, fading, fragmentation, and dissolution is rich: The corporeal
In Black Skin, White Masks, schema crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema… I was given not one but two, three places…I existed triply: I occupied space. I moved toward the other…and the evanescent other, hostile but not opaque, transparent, not there, disappeared. Nausea… What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood?

My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, re-coloured, clad in mourning in that white winter day. (Fanon, 1967, p. 112)
[ …]

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A2

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A2 Cap
Cap not root cause of slavery, empirically proven that it would have been easier to use white underclass Wilderson, Professor UCI, 2003 (Frank B., “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent)
Scandal”, Soc Justice 30 no2 2003, Accessed 8-4-12, MR) Capital was kick-started by the rape of the African continent, a phenomenon that is central to neither Gramsci nor Marx. According to Barrett (2002), something about the Black body in and of itself made it the repository of the violence that was the slave trade. It would have been far easier and far more profitable to take the white underclass from along the riverbanks of England and Western Europe than to travel all the way to Africa for slaves .

Because slavery is an ontological position, getting rid of capitalism cannot solve. Wilderson, award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. He is one of
two Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress and is a former insurgent in the ANC’s armed wing, 2010 (Frank B. III “Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics” Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms,) GG I raise Eltis’s counterposing of the symbolic value of slavery to the economic value of slavery in order to debunk two gross misunderstandings: One is that work—or alienation and exploitation—is a constituent element of slavery. Slavery , writes Orlando Patterson, “is the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons.” Patterson goes to great lengths to delink his three “constituent elements of slavery” from the labor that one is typically forced to perform when one is enslaved. The forced labor is not constitutive of enslavement because whereas it explains a common practice, it does not define the structure of the power relation between those who are slaves and those who are not. In pursuit of his “constituent elements” of slavery, a line of inquiry that helps us separate experience (events) from ontology (the capacities of power—or lack thereof—lodged within distinct and irreconcilable subject positions, e.g., Humans and Slaves), Patterson helps us denaturalize the link between force and labor, and theorize the former as a phenomena that positions a body, ontologically (paradigmatically), and the latter as a possible but not inevitable experience of someone who is socially dead. The other misunderstanding I am attempting to correct is the notion that the profit motive is the consideration within the slaveocracy that trumps all others. David Marriott, Saidiya Hartman, Ronald Judy, Hortense Spillers, Orlando Patterson, and Achille Mbembe have gone to considerable lengths to show that, in point of fact, slavery is and connotes an ontological status for Blackness; and that the constituent elements of slavery are not exploitation and alienation but accumulation and fungibility (Hartman): the condition of being owned and traded. As these Black writers have debunked conventional wisdom pertaining to the grammar of slave suffering, so too has David Eltis provided a major corrective on the commonsense wisdom that profit was the primary motive driving the African slave trade.

Capitalism is not the root cause of anti-blackness Wilderson, award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. He is one of
two Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress and is a former insurgent in the ANC’s armed wing, 2010 (Frank B. III “Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics” Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, )GG Both Spillers and Eltis remind us that the archive of African slavery shows no internal recognition of the libidinal costs of turning human bodies into sentient flesh. From Marx’s reports on 97

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proposed vagabond-into-slave legislation, it becomes clear that the libidinal economy of such European legislation is far too unconsciously invested in “saving” the symbolic value of the very vagabonds such laws consciously seek to enslave. In other words, the law would rather shoot itself (that is, sacrifice the economic development of the New World) in the foot than step into a subjective void where idlers and vagabonds might find themselves without contemporaries, with no relational status to save. In this way, White-on-White violence is put in check (a) before it becomes gratuitous, or structural, before it can shred the fabric of civil society beyond mending; and (b) before conscious, predictable, and sometimes costly challenges are mounted against the legislation despite its dissembling lack of resolve . This is accomplished
by the imposition of the numerous “on condition that…” and “supposing that…” clauses bound up in the word “if” and also by claims bound up in the language around the enslavement of European children: a White child may be enslaved on condition that s/he is the child of a vagabond, and then, only until the age of 20 or 24.

Slavery is the ontological experience of the black body Wilderson, award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. He is one of
two Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress and is a former insurgent in the ANC’s armed wing, 2010 (Frank B. III “Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics” Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms,) GG
During the emergence of new ontological relations in the modern world, from the late Middle Ages through the 1500s, many different kinds of people experienced slavery. In other words, there have been times when natal alienation, general dishonor, and gratuitous violence have turned individuals of myriad ethnicities and races into beings who are socially dead. But

the African, or more precisely Blackness, is the moniker for an individual who is by definition always already void of relationality. Thus, modernity marks the emergence of a new ontology because it is an era in which an entire race of people who, a priori, that is prior to the contingency of the “transgressive act” (such as losing at war or being convicted of a crime), stand as socially dead in relation to the rest of the world. This, I will argue, is as true for those who were herded onto the slave ships as it is for those who had no knowledge whatsoever of the coffles. In this period, chattel slavery, as a condition of ontology and not just as an event of experience, stuck to the African like Velcro. To the extent that we can think the essence of Whiteness and the essence of Blackness , we must think their essences through the structure of the Master/Slave relation. It
should be clear by now that I am not only drawing a distinction between what is commonly thought of as the Master/Slave relation and the constituent elements of the Master/Slave relation (Patterson 6), but I am also drawing

a distinction between the experience of slavery (which anyone can be subjected to) and the ontology of slavery, which in Modernity (the years 1300 to the present) becomes the singular purview of the Black. In this period, slavery is cathedralized. It “advances” from a word which describes a condition that anyone can be subjected to, to a word which reconfigures the African body into Black flesh. Far
from being merely the experience of the African, slavery is now the African’s access to (or, more correctly, banishment from) ontology.

Cap/Marxism does not take into consideration white supremacy, it ignores racism Wilderson, Professor UCI, 2003 (Frank, Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in
Civil Society?”, Social Identities, Volume 9, Number 2, 2003, Accessed 8-4-12, MR) Any serious consideration of the question of antagonistic identity formation —
a formation, the mass mobilisation of which can precipitate a crisis in the institutions and assumptive logic which undergird the United States of America —

must come to grips with the limitations of marxist discourse in the face of the black subject. This is because the United States is constructed at the intersection of both a capitalist and white supremacist matrix. And the privileged subject of marxist discourse is a subaltern who is approached by variable capital — a wage. In other words, marxism assumes a subaltern structured by capital, not by white supremacy. In this scenario, racism is read off the base, as it were, as being derivative of political economy. This is not an adequate subalternity from which to think the elaboration of antagonistic identity formation; not if we are truly committed to elaborating a theory
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The scandal with which the black subject position threatens Gramscian discourse is manifest in the subject’s ontological disarticulation of Gramscian categories: work, progress, production, exploitation, hegemony, and historical self-awareness. By examining the strategy and structure of the black subject’s absence in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and by contemplating the black subject’s incommensurability with the key categories of Gramscian theory, we come face to face with three unsettling consequences.
of crisis — crisis at the crux of America’s institutional and discursive strategies.

Cap can never solve for blackness since it ignores racism and white supremacy Wilderson, Professor UCI, 2003 (Frank, Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in
Civil Society?”, Social Identities, Volume 9, Number 2, 2003, Accessed 8-4-12, MR) Firstly, the black American subject imposes a radical incoherence upon the assumptive logic of Gramscian discourse. In other words, s/he implies a scandal. Secondly, the black subject reveals marxism’s inability to think white supremacy as the base and, in so doing, calls into question marxism’s claim to elaborate a comprehensive, or in the words of Antonio Gramsci, ‘decisive’ antagonism. Stated another way: Gramscian marxism is able to imagine the subject which transforms her/himself into a mass of antagonistic identity formations, formations which can precipitate a crisis in wage slavery, exploitation, and/or hegemony, but it is asleep at the wheel when asked to provide enabling antagonisms toward unwaged slavery, despotism, and/or terror. Finally, we begin to see how marxism suffers from a kind of conceptual anxiety: a desire for socialism on the other side of crisis — a society which does away not with the category of worker, but with the imposition workers suffer under the approach of variable capital: in other words, the mark of its conceptual anxiety is in its desire to democratise work
and thus help keep in place, ensure the coherence of, the Reformation and Enlightenment ‘foundational’ values of productivity and progress. This is a crowding-out scenario for other post-revolutionary possibilities, i.e. idleness.

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Indirect approaches to whiteness lead to passivity and acceptance of white supremacy and forgetting
Martinot and Sexton, Director, critical race theorist at San Francisco State University and African American Studies School of Humanities UCI, 20 03 (Steve and Jared, "The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy", Social Identities, Volume 9, Number 2, 2003 Accessed 8-3-12, MR) Leftist approaches that come as close to radical critique as any already fall short. The liberal ethos looks at racism as ignorance, something characteristic of the individual that can be solved at a social level through education and democratic procedure. For

A2 Whiteness

Marxist thought, racism is a divide-and-conquer strategy for class rule and super-exploitation. However, the idea that it is a strategy assumes that it can be counter-strategised at some kind of local or individual level rather than existing as something fundamental to class relations themselves. For anti-colonialist thinking, racism is a social ideology that can be refuted, a structure of privilege to be given up, again at the local or individual level. Where liberalism subordinates the issue of racism to the presumed potentialities of individual development, Marxism subordinates the issue of race to class relations of struggle, and anti-colonial radicalism pretends its mere existence as a ‘movement’ is the first step toward eradicating racism. But liberalism’s social democracy pretends that state

the more radical critiques subsume the issue of racism in promises of future transformations of the power relations to which de-racialisation is deferred. This stumbling back and forth between the individual and the social is even reflected in the social scientific literature
oligarchy is really interested in justice. And

on race and racism. Most theorising proceeds by either psychologising intricate political and historical processes, or by socialising questions of subjectivity and agency. The psychologising approach primarily attributes the project of white supremacy to the lurid preoccupations of (white) individual or collective psychic or biological pathologies. The socialising approach reduces white supremacy to ‘mere’ racism, a subsidiary strategy for the maintenance of social, political, and economic power by the (white) ruling class. Whereas the former locates the genesis of racism in (projected) fear and anxiety, insecurity or (repressed) desire, the latter claims that the specific pronouncements and practices of white supremacy are ideological subterfuge, rationalisations for or tactics of the political economy. For the first, remedies can always be found within liberal capitalism: from psychological counseling, moral and scientific education, legal prohibition, or even gene therapy to the self-righteous championing of human rights in nations as far away as possible. For the second, it is assumed that if racism can be made not useful to the relations of production or the security of territorial boundaries, it will fade from the social landscape like the proverbial withering away of the state . In either case,

what needs to be wrenched from the grasp of white supremacy is left entirely out of the account in the name of the epiphenomenal or the overdetermining . In both arenas a
hidden depth, a secret drive, an unfathomed animus is postulated and a procedure derived that will plumb that depth, excavate the problem, dredge out the muck that causes these aberrant behaviours that we call racism. And in both approaches an issue is skirted.

It is as if there were something at the center of white supremacy that is too adamantine, off of which the utmost of western analytic thought slides helplessly toward the simplistic, the personal or the institutional. The supposed secrets of white supremacy get sleuthed in its spectacular displays, in pathology and instrumentality, or pawned off on the figure of the ‘rogue cop’. Each approach to race subordinates it to something that is
not race, as if to continue the noble epistemological endeavour of getting to know it better. But what each ends up talking about is that other thing. In the face of this, the left’s anti-racism becomes its passion. But its passion

gives it away. It signifies the passive acceptance of the idea that race, considered to be either a real property of a person or an imaginary projection, is not essential to the social structure, a system of social meanings and categorisations. It is the same passive apparatus of whiteness that in its mainstream guise actively forgets that it owes its existence to the killing and terrorising of those it racialises for that purpose, expelling them from the human fold in the same gesture of forgetting. It is the passivity of bad faith that tacitly accepts as ‘what goes without saying’ the postulates of white supremacy. And it must do so passionately since ‘what goes without saying’ is empty and can be held as a ‘truth’
only through an obsessiveness. The truth is that the truth is on the surface, flat and repetitive, just as the law is made by the uniform.

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A2 Multiracialism
Multiculturalism claims are based on the idea that identity is not fixed and is fluid Sexton, Director, African American Studies School of Humanities, 2003 (Jared, “The Consequence of Race Mixture: Racialised Barriers and the Politics of Desire”, Social Identities, Volume 9, Number 2, 2003,Accessed 8-4-12, MR )
These epigraphs should be considered heretical to the project of the contemporary multiracial movement in the United States1 Insofar as its proponents and intellectuals speak of the ‘the end(s) of race’, the concept

of

multiraciality prides itself on the trouble it supposedly causes to the white supremacist rage for order, that is, its ostensible violation of racial discipline and its alleged threat to spurious notions of racial purity. The multiracial, as it were, cannot be fixed in place; by definition, it eludes the capture of a pernicious schema of racial classification. Nevertheless, this reputed disturbance of the colour line bears a cost. A
self that is internally heterogeneous beyond repair or resolution becomes a candidate for pathology in a society where the integration

The multiracial is, then, fundamentally convoluted — essentially difficult and complicated without end — yet the seemingly inevitable link between such radical ‘otherness’ (other even to itself) and the pathology of disintegration is, in fact, an effect of the labour of articulation . That is to say, the relation between
of self is taken to be necessary for mental health. (Alcoff, 1995, p. 261) the terms can be re-inscribed in a gesture of more thoroughgoing deconstruction or, more likely, it can be affirmed through simple inversion or reversal by the socially sanctioned desire for restoration.

Race mixture leads to multiculturalism which engages in the identity binary and exclusionary politics Sexton, Director, African American Studies School of Humanities, 2003 (Jared, “The
Consequence of Race Mixture: Racialised Barriers and the Politics of Desire”, Social Identities, Volume 9, Number 2, 2003,Accessed 8-4-12, MR) The challenge posed by the new dispensation is grave. The attention now refocused by the question of race mixture in the present conjuncture around both the pressing matter of racial oppression in America and the tenuous and ambivalent processes of racialisation , provides another opportunity for thinking critically about the production of racialised difference itself. Moreover, in the wake of the ‘biracial baby boom’ (see Root, 1992 and 1996) we are forced to engage, yet again, with the domain of sexuality as a crucial field for the historical invention of race. For it is within
of multiracial discourse to date).2 Thus,

the terms of sexual practice and predilection — which, to be sure, are never reducible to issues of reproduction — that the imaginary bounds of race are forged with the greatest intensity (even as the racialisation of sexuality remains a decidedly muted preoccupation

the emergence of a popular multiracial consciousness in the post-civil rights era in the US contains some (as yet unrealised) critical promise not only for the politics of racial identity per se, but also for sustained reflection on the vicissitudes of desire. Thus, we might say at present that any multiracial constituency whatsoever occupies quite literally a ‘pre-post’-erous space where it has to actualise, enfranchise, and empower its own ‘identity’ and coextensively engage in the deconstruction of the very logic of ‘identity’ and its binary and exclusionary politics. (my emphasis) In other words, we must carefully consider precisely against what multiracial identity asserts its actualisation and its empowerment in its purportedly affirmative moment. Anything less
than such a critical double duty ‘can only result in the formation of [multiraciality] as yet another ‘identical’ and hegemonic structure’ within the regime of white supremacy, as well as a problematical elision of sexuality in its discourse and politics (Radikrishnan, 1990, p. 50). The Body of Whiteness In Libidinal Economy, Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard offers a provocative claim in the midst of his

He states tersely: ‘capital cannot form a body’. He argues further that this lack of an organic unity for capital as a body and, moreover, for those bodies that labour within its purview ‘gives rise to two divergent movements always associated in a single vertigo’. He distinguishes these movements as, on the one
notoriously unorthodox analysis of historical capitalism. hand, a movement of flight, of plunging into the bodiless, and thus of continual invention, of expansive additions or affirmations of new pieces… a movement of tension. and, on the other, ‘a movement of [the] institution of an organism, of an organisation and of

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organs of totalisation and unification — a movement of reason’. Crucially, he writes, ‘ both

kinds of movement are there, effects as force in the non-finito…of capitalism’ (Lyotard, 1993, p. 102, my emphasis). In his view, the double duty of criticism evokes these parallels, and therefore must track, the twin forces of social formation.

Multiculturalism/Identity politics are cliché, this movement does not fully engage or understand antiblackness Sexton, Director, African American Studies School of Humanities, 2003 (Jared, “The
Consequence of Race Mixture: Racialised Barriers and the Politics of Desire”, Social Identities, Volume 9, Number 2, 2003,Accessed 8-4-12, MR)
Of course, one would be justified in reading a strong resonance between Lyotard’s schematisation of capitalism and the work of Gilles Delueze and Fe´lix Guattari in the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1985, 1987; for critical introductions and overviews of these works see Goodchild, 1996 and Holland, 1999). Indeed, his meditations in this case were largely in dialogue with the ferment of critical attention generated a` propos of the publication of the first of their co-authored books.3 A detailed discussion of their intertextual relations is, however, beyond the scope of this essay. What I would like to borrow from each is a measure of the urgent

My objective is to put such a sensibility to work in a discussion of the operations of global white supremacy (which is inextricable from but not identical to the capitalist world-system).4 My focus in this essay is the dynamics of racialisation in the post-war era United States, with particular attention to the politics of interracial sexuality in the movement for civil rights and the post-civil rights affirmation of multiracial identity. Within this historical and
attention brought to bear on this double movement of dispersion and regulation in the formation of power relations. political field, I present a critique of the emergent notion of multiraciality vis-a`-vis anti-miscegenation, a historical praxis that I take to be a component of — perhaps the fundamental feature of — white supremacist racialisation.

Such comments are offered as a preliminary rejoinder to the cliche´s of white supremacy against which the contemporary multiracial movement currently does political and ideological battle . My contention is, quite simply, that the movement to date fails to appreciate the nuance of the logic of whiteness, that is to say, how it actually works with, and not simply in opposition to, hybridity, complexity, process, movement — qualities typically attributed to the domain of interracial sexuality and multiraciality .5

Antiblackness deals with the particular and attempts to master the trauma, multiculturalism cannot be mastered Sexton, Director, African American Studies School of Humanities, 2003 (Jared, “The
Consequence of Race Mixture: Racialised Barriers and the Politics of Desire”, Social Identities, Volume 9, Number 2, 2003,Accessed 8-4-12, MR) I begin by rephrasing Lyotard’s maxim in this way: whiteness cannot form a body. However, and despite this impossibility, it continues to make attempts. In a sense, whiteness is the very attempt to form or manufacture a delimited body of a particular type. Within the social formation of white supremacy, whiteness serves as ‘a means for mastering the trauma of an experience without categories and without unity, which has no positive content’ (Shaviro, 1990, p. 3). I will refer to this experience as the event of miscegenation — the abject order of excessive and violent incoherence, traversed by affect and marked by the radical impersonality of desire at work beyond or beneath the semblance of racialised order. We feel its pressure as the outside of racialisation, so to speak. Put differently , it refers to the fact (traumatic from the point of view of a racialised social formation) that ‘we are all of mixed origin’, that the indifference (which is not simply sameness) of the human corpus cannot be mastered, that the categories of racialisation rest only upon convention. In short, the event of miscegenation is strictly coextensive with the fundamental insecurity of racist reasoning.6

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Miscegenation deals with what cannot be represented, it opens the doors to the thought behind the psychological phenomenon that deals with the break in borders Sexton, Director, African American Studies School of Humanities, 2003 (Jared, “The
Consequence of Race Mixture: Racialised Barriers and the Politics of Desire”, Social Identities, Volume 9, Number 2, 2003,Accessed 8-4-12, MR) I will state a few qualifications at the outset. First, miscegenation as event cannot be confused with miscegenation as empirical acts of interracial sex, or miscegenation as the social presence of mixed race people. Such are the lures produced by the imaginary of white supremacy and predictably mirrored by its liberal opposition . The event of miscegenation, in this more radical sense, is what cannot be represented, conceptualised, or apprehended in either the form of interracial liaison or the multiracial body (i.e., intelligible
via the grid of racialisation). Rather, it is that which prevents either figure from attaining a coherent appearance or a fixed and stable meaning, whether as object of aggression or desire.7 To be clear, I am attempting to supplement what have become commonplace assertions of race as a social category. I am emphatically not interested in how the history of sex across the colour line or the existence of people of mixed racial descent as such might trouble the fantasy of pure races or the tabulation of discrete and rigid racial categories (see Hodes, 1999; Nash, 1999). I am talking in a more basic sense about what I

believe undermines and frustrates that fantasy of transgression, the conventional fantasy of the subversive multiracial. In other words, I am interested in what wards against our thinking of interracial sex or mixed race people as things in and of themselves. To recall the epigraph from Barad: it ‘makes no sense to talk about [such] independently existing things’. In this discussion of miscegenation and antimiscegenation, then, I am introducing a critique of what Frantz Fanon refers to as that ‘psychological phenomenon that consists in the belief that the world will open to the extent to which frontiers are broken down’ (Fanon, 1967, p. 21).

Cosmic race mixture is the ultimate form of eugenics, although not drenched with white supremacy would call for the extinction of the black and other nonhuman and savage races. Sexton, Director, African American Studies School of Humanities, 2003 (Jared, “The
Consequence of Race Mixture: Racialised Barriers and the Politics of Desire”, Social Identities, Volume 9, Number 2, 2003,Accessed 8-4-12, MR) Whiteness as Anti-Miscegenation We are often told that one of the most fundamental oppositions in the racialised modern world is that between the doctrine of race purity (characteristic of North American white supremacy) (see, for instance, Pascoe, 1999 ) and some other arrangement that challenges that position by accepting or even promoting the consequence of race mixture. Davis (1995), for instance, refers to this other arrangement as the ‘Hawaiian Alternative to the One Drop Rule’. Jose´
Vasconcelos described it in his influential 1925 essay, ‘The Cosmic Race’, as an epochal battle between Anglo-Saxonism and Latinism. Where the former ‘wants exclusive domination by the Whites’, the latter ‘is shaping a new race, a synthetic race that aspires to engulf and to express everything human in forms of constant improvement’ (1997, p. 19). Some sixty years later, Gloria Anzaldu´a draws from Vasconcelos’s work in order to elabourate the concept of mestizaje in Borderlands/La Frontera. Her (admittedly critical) intellectual debt and spiritual kinship are expressed in the following passage: Jose´ Vasconcelos, Mexican philosopher, envisaged una raza mestiza, una mezcla de razas afines, una raza de color — la primera

raza sı´ntesis del globo. He called it a cosmic race, la raza co´smica, a fifth race embracing the four major races of the world. Opposite to the theory of the pure Aryan, and to the policy of racial purity that white America practices, his theory is one of inclusivity . At the confluence of two or more genetic
streams, with chromosomes constantly ‘crossing over’, this mixture of races, rather than resulting in an inferior being, provides hybrid progeny, a mutable, more malleable species with a rich gene pool . From this racial, ideological, cultural

and biological cross-pollinization, an ‘alien’ consciousness is presently in the making — a new mestiza consciousness, una conciencia de mujer. It is a consciousness of the Borderlands.
(1999, p. 99, my emphases) It would be a deliberate misreading to collapse Anzaldu´a with Vasconcelos or to conflate their intellectual work and political visions. That is not my point here. However, one must wonder about the particular

genealogy being invoked here and the pressures it exerts despite the conscious intentions of those citing it. In the space of a paragraph, we span a sixty-year divide; mestizaje, the new consciousness of the Borderlands, is rendered as the effect or echo of this early 103

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twentieth-century dream of global integration, a product of its imaginative labour. Like her predecessor, Anzaldu´a opposes race mixture to the doctrine of race purity, countering the image of the Aryan with the image of the new mestiza. However, it is important to consult the
earlier text for any additional obstacles, abstract and concrete, to this most inclusive theorisation. Is the work of this cross-pollination intended only as a corrective to the strict and devastating policies of Anglo-Saxon racial ideology or is the scope of its ‘enrichment’ cast more broadly? A word from Vasconcelos on this score: The lower types of the [human] species will be

absorbed by the superior type. In this manner, for example, the black could be redeemed, and step by step, by voluntary extinction, the uglier stocks will give way to the more handsome. Inferior races, upon being educated, would become less prolific, and the better specimens would go on ascending a scale of ethnic improvement, whose
maximum type is not precisely white, but that new race to which the white himself will have to aspire with the object of conquering the synthesis. The Indian, by grafting onto the related race, would take the jump of millions of years that separate [him] from our times, and in a few decades of aesthetic eugenics, the black may disappear… In this manner, a selection of taste would take effect, much more efficiently than the brutal Darwinist selection…[It would be] a mixture no longer accomplished by violence, nor by reason of necessity, but by the selection founded on the dazzling produced by beauty and confirmed by the pathos of love. (Vasconcelos, 1997, pp. 32– 33) By this account, the black’s disappearance is redemptive — a redemptive

self-annihilation, as it were — brought about by the dazzling call of human beautification. No longer an imposition or an assault, no longer genocide per se, the elimination of blackness (and, importantly, ‘Indianness’) has become a painless, even pleasurable duty to disappear. This edifying synthesis, no doubt a dream of ethnic cleansing, is, however, decidedly not white supremacist. That is, it does not elevate whiteness to its apex, its maximum type, or its ideal. Rather, the doctrine of white superiority is dethroned, as a new mixed race will have superseded the white, presenting itself as that select taste toward which even the former rulers of the world aspire. What is deemed most encouraging about the emergence of this new race — the fruit of ‘racial, ideological, cultural and biological cross-pollinization’ — is that it is forged in the pathos of love. Beyond violence and instrumental reason there is the cosmic force of eros, the seemingly benevolent prime mover of global integration. The mode of eugenics will have changed, but its ends remain frighteningly consistent — a ‘selection’ more efficient than a brutal Social Darwinism. Less carnage,
less coercion, and less political controversy, this appears to be ‘evolution’ at a discount. The Indian must modernise (or disappear); the black (having already modernised) must certainly disappear — too poor a gene pool, too ugly, too little malleability, in a word, deficient. The aesthetic of mestizaje is, then, marked by a profound ambivalence, a

double life. Its eugenicist impulses, ruefully unshakable, cast a long shadow over whatever threats it might present to the ‘ethnic absolutism’ 12 of Anglo-Saxon white supremacy. For in its unfolding it seeks to abolish not only the reign of whiteness, but also the existence of those ‘uglier stocks’ — ‘uneducated’, ‘inferior races’. Perhaps it cannot help itself
since, in the name of consistency, it must integrate everything and everyone — ‘ la primera raza sı´ntesis del globo’. The empowerment and enfranchisement of an emergent identity can, it seems, incur not-so-hidden expenses. More recently, historian Gary Nash (who recognises, among others, the work of Root et al. as an influence) has written a book about ‘the secret history of mixed-race America’, an account of the ‘America that could have been’. Early on he claims that ‘the union of [John] Rolfe and Pocahontas could have become the beginning of an openly mestizo — or racially intermixed — United States’ (Nash, 1999, p. 8). His extended essay is a chronicle of relatively ‘anonymous Americans [that] have taken history into their own hands and have defied the official racial ideology’ (p. 19). He finds that some Americans built racial classifications and…some Americans have defied the way society defined them and dared to dream of a mixed-race nation. (p. viii) According to Nash’s logic, one may defy the so-called official racial ideology of the US (an ideology that supposedly aspires ‘to keep people apart’) by joining ‘a long line of rebels and idealists’, thereby becoming one of the many ‘daring boundary crossers’.

Advocates for racial mixing/cosmic race argue that once race distinctions are gone so will white supremacy. Sexton, Director, African American Studies School of Humanities, 2003(Jared, “The
Consequence of Race Mixture: Racialised Barriers and the Politics of Desire”, Social Identities, Volume 9, Number 2, 2003,Accessed 8-4-12, MR) This general conceptual distinction holds as a frame of intelligibility for thinking about racialised difference in the US (and the West more generally): border policing vs. border crossing, the heated obsessions of race purity vs. the cool flexibility of mestizaje, hateful prohibition vs. the noble defiance of ‘forbidden love’. 13 It takes on an additional urgency in the post-war era alongside the fabrication of a concept of global community.14 As we will see, articulations of this pervasive heuristic can be read in the political 104

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rhetoric of the Civil Rights Movement and its traces noted in the discourse of the contemporary multiracial movement as well. The hegemonic conception of the problem of white supremacy in the US is, as a result, cast as some version of ‘the racial divide’ or ‘a crisis of national identity’. The proposed solution is, accordingly, ‘a closer drawing together of the… races in America’. The post-war, post-civil rights United States is, in this way, imagined as the land of the coming cosmic race (and not just the white ethnic ‘melting pot’), the proper title now usurped from Latin America. (Vasconcelos is, I suspect, rolling over in his grave upon this development, unsure of whether he resents the North for stealing the thunder, so to speak). In the present moment, after the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws, this national restoration entails an explicit recognition of multiracial people and an open tolerance for, if not a refreshing celebration of interracial dating and marriage as signs of an historical triumph over the racism of old. Those who have looked to America as a place of freedom and opportunity can see the rise of the idea of a mixed-race America where interraciality is becoming something to regard as a national strength. (Nash, 1999, p. 183) (Yet Nash submits a telling caveat: ‘few argue that universal intermarriage is needed to bring us together’.) 15 This is not a novel ideology of progress, of course, as the historical example of Vasconcelos indicates. In fact, before him in the early nineteenth-century US, there were small bands of radical ‘amalgamationists’ who agitated for the abolition of slavery while proposing universal intermixture as the gateway to ‘biracial democracy’ (Nash, 1999, pp. 84–89). Nearly a century later, a number of prominent scholars associated with the Chicago School of Sociology, including the work of its founder, Robert Park, and Vasconcelos himself (who was in residence for several years), insisted that racism would exist so long as supposedly visible markers of racialised difference persisted . Rose Hum Lee, for instance, the first woman and first Chinese American to head a sociology department in any US university, was one of the most insistent on this point. A proponent of ‘complete integration’ in the face of virulent white racism, she claimed that ‘the final objective of integration is a culturally homogenous population’. Yet, she postulated, ‘the [ultimate] barrier to complete integration is racial distinctiveness’ (quoted in Yu, 1999, p. 456). Today, as Nash’s comments suggest, those who write in the recently founded field of multiracial studies usually take a more moderate position (‘Few argue that universal intermarriage is needed to bring us together’). Nonetheless, most do agree that increasing rates of intermarriage do indicate a progressive development, namely, the erosion of racialised barriers and a waning of racist sentiments. Even then President Bill Clinton, in the 1997 commencement address to the University of California at San Diego, noted rising levels of intermarriage as an encouraging symbol of our progress as a nation, a multiracial population moving toward ‘One America’. All of this optimism (however cautious) implies that white racism in the US is (still) measured in important ways in its relation to degrees and types of race mixture. In a sense, these approaches set up interracial sexuality as the final frontier, the last hurdle in the American race for freedom, justice, and equality. The ‘multiracial question’, in other words, is at the heart of the politics of racial formation.

Prominent blackness scholars argue that sexual racism/ interracial are structured through antiblackness Sexton, Director, African American Studies School of Humanities, 2003 (Jared, “The
Consequence of Race Mixture: Racialised Barriers and the Politics of Desire”, Social Identities, Volume 9, Number 2, 2003,Accessed 8-4-12, MR) In his contribution to a recent collection of essays on Fanon, cultural theorist Kobena Mercer refers to ‘sexual politics as the Achilles heel of black liberation’. As he puts it, ‘My sense is that questions of sexuality have come to mark the interior limits of decolonisation, where the utopian project of [black] liberation has come to grief’ (Mercer, 1994, p. 116, my emphasis). Among these questions of sexuality, the figure of the interracial looms large.16 This is so not only because, especially in the Anglophone world, 105

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whites (and others) have been so profoundly repulsed by (and attracted to) the image of intimate relations with black people. But also because, as Mercer’s statement in part reminds us, the final frontier of white supremacy overlaps in peculiar ways with the interior limits of black liberation. More than ten years after Fanon first published Black Skin, White Masks (but two years before its English translation), the text which provides the centre of attention for Mercer’s critical meditation, sociologist and literary critic Calvin Hernton penned a soon-to-be best-selling book of essays bearing a remarkable similarity (of structure and object) to Fanon’s. Hernton’s book, Sex and Racism in America, originally published in 1965, became an instant classic, and was eventually translated into a half dozen languages and reprinted at least three times. In response to his admittedly polemical (though no less serious and thoughtful) commentary, literary personalities the likes of Langston Hughes raved that Hernton exhibited an unparalleled temerity to ‘frankly tackle that old bugaboo S-E-X as it relates to life, liberty, and the pursuit of [racial] integration’. In what came to be known as his founding scholarly achievement, Hernton claimed to explicate, in condensed form, the fundamental relation of racism and sexuality in the United States. He dubbed his conceptual centerpiece ‘sexual racism’, the sentiment of anti-miscegenation. 17 Doubtless, none would dispute his central thesis, ‘that all race relations tend to be, however subtle, sex relations’, or put differently, that ‘the race problem is inextricably connected with sex’ (Hernton, 1988, p. 6). We can grant by this point that race is unavoidably sexualised, that its operation always involves a sexual politics, and that, concomitantly, sexualities in the modern world are always already racialised (see Dyer, 1997). But for our purposes it will be necessary to do more than reiterate theoretical and historical insights that, taking James Weldon Johnson 18 as a reference, are nearly a century old (and much older if one considers the archive of colonial discourse) (see McClintock, 1995; Said, 1979; Stoler, 1995; Zantopp, 1997 ). Having established these deep structural connections in broad strokes, I want to focus now upon one particular aspect of Hernton’s work as part of the larger effort to illuminate the intricate entanglement of race and sexuality. Though Hernton is quite sure that race relations are always already in some sense sex relations, the nature of the relation between the relations, as it were, presents itself as a persistent enigma (as is the case for Fanon and Johnson before him). Early in his text, Hernton describes the historical sexual involvement of whites and blacks in the US as ‘at once real and vicarious…so immaculate and yet so perverse, so ethereal and yet so concrete’ (Hernton, 1988, p. 6). He marvels at the ways in which an apparition of sexual encounter in the social formation mediates the sacred and the profane, the virtual and the actual. This powerful and mysterious realm of interracial sexuality, a historical relation that, as Hernton notes, ‘is not always recognised when it shows at the surface’, serves as the paradoxical object of sexual racism. As material as the bodies in question and as intangible as a spook, the interracial occult gives the lie to the certainty of the colour line and the boundaries demarcating inside from out. Sexual racism and the spectre of interracial sexuality it both constructs and contains forces, then, a recognition of sexuality as a point of access to complexity — in the sense that eros arises from chaos… [That is to say,] sexuality as that which constantly worries and troubles anything supposedly fixed as an identity. (Mercer, 1994, p. 119) Hernton further describes sexual racism as involving as ‘the most degenerate and perverse form of sexual turnon’ (Hernton, 1988, p. xiii). It is, in his words, ‘distorted desire’. One cannot help but hear echoes of Fanon here, particularly the Fanon who describes (sexual) racism as ‘anomalies of affect’, or the Fanon who writes, ‘I believe in the possibility of love; that is why [in this socio-diagnostic of racism] I endeavor to trace its imperfections, its perversions’ (Fanon, 1967, p. 42). The imperiled possibility of interracial love, its fragile balance and potential perfection, square off nobly against the degenerate forces of racism and sexual perversion, or, more precisely, racism as a form of sexual perversion. Says Fanon, ‘if one wants to understand the racial situation psychoanalytically… considerable importance must be given to sexual phenomena’ (p. 160). What is the link between the disturbance of identity engendered by the complexity of 106

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sexuality and the ascribed perversity of sexual racism, taken here as the desire to regulate sexuality in the service of a paranoid politics of identity ?

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A2 Social Death vs. Social Life
Black social life and agency is within social death Sexton 11 (Jared, PhD, Director, African American Studies Dept., UC Irvine, “The Social Life of Social Death: On
Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism”, InTensions, Vol 5, http://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/notefromtheeditor/notefromtheeditor.php, Accessed: 01/22/12, OG)
[24] social life as black social death, black social life in black social death—all of

To speak of black social life and black social death , black social life against black social death, black this is to find oneself in the midst of an argument that is also a profound agreement, an agreement that takes shape in (between) meconnaissance and (dis)belief. Black optimism is not the negation of the negation that is afro-pessimism, just as black social life does not negate black social death by inhabiting it and vitalizing it. A living death is as much a death as it is a living. Nothing in afro-pessimism suggests that there is no black (social) life, only that black life is not social life in the universe formed by the codes of state and civil society, of citizen and subject, of nation and culture, of people and place, of history and heritage, of all the things that colonial society has in common with the colonized, of all that capital has in common with labor—the modern world system. Black life is not lived in the world that the world lives in, but it is lived underground, in outer space. This is agreed. That is to say, what Moten asserts against afro-pessimism is a point already affirmed by afro-pessimism, is, in fact, one of the most polemical dimensions of afro-pessimism as a project: namely, that black life is not social, or rather that black life is lived in social death. Double emphasis, on lived and on death. That’s the whole point of the enterprise at some
level. It is all about the implications of this agreed- upon point where arguments (should) begin, but they cannot (yet) proceed.

Negating anti-Blackness is an affirmation of agency and social life – a blackened world Sexton 11 (Jared, PhD, Director, African American Studies Dept., UC Irvine, “The Social Life of Social Death: On
Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism”, InTensions, Vol 5, http://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/notefromtheeditor/notefromtheeditor.php, Accessed: 01/22/12, OG)

the grammar of suffering that undergird afro-pessimism is not a sign of pathology in the moral register, but rather a matter of the apprehension of psychic—and political— reality in the properly psychoanalytic sense: an effect of misrecognition, a problem of register and symbolization, an optical illusion or echo that dissimulates the source and force of the propagation. It is a confusion of one for two and two for one, the projection of an internal differentiation onto an external surface, the conversion of impossibility into prohibition. Wilderson’s is an analysis of the law in its operation as “police power and racial
[32] What I take to be a certain aggression, or perhaps anxiety, in the deconstruction of the structure of vulnerability and prerogative both under and after slavery” (Wagner 2009: 243). So too is Moten’s analysis, at least that just-less-than-half of the intellectual labor committed to the object of black studies as critique of (the antiblackness of) Western civilization. But Moten

is just that much more interested in how black social life steals away or escapes from the law, how it frustrates the police power and, in so doing, calls that very policing into being in the first place. The policing of black freedom, then, is aimed less at its dreaded prospect, apocalyptic rhetoric notwithstanding, than at its irreducible precedence. The logical and ontological priority of the unorthodox self-predicating activity of blackness, the “improvisatory exteriority” or “improvisational immanence” that blackness is, renders the law dependent upon what it polices. This is not the noble agency of resistance. It is a reticence or reluctance that we might not know if it were not pushing back, so long as we know that this pushing back is really a pushing forward. So you see, in this perverse sense, black social death is black social life. The object of black studies is the aim of black studies. The most radical negation of the antiblack world is the most radical affirmation of a blackened world. Afro-pessimism is “not but nothing other than” black optimism.xvii 108

Arizona Debate Institute

A2 Manichean K
Resisting anti-Blackness is an active life affirming process – accepting and flipping pathology Sexton 11 (Jared, PhD, Director, African American Studies Dept., UC Irvine, “The Social Life of Social Death: On
Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism”, InTensions, Vol 5, http://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/notefromtheeditor/notefromtheeditor.php, Accessed: 01/22/12, OG)
[23] Elsewhere, in a discussion of Du Bois on the study of black folk, Gordon restates an existential phenomenological conception of the antiblack world developed across his first several books: “Blacks here suffer the phobogenic reality

posed by the spirit of racial seriousness. In effect, they more than symbolize or signify various social pathologies—they become them. In our antiblack world, blacks are pathology” (Gordon 2000: 87). This conception would seem to support Moten’s contention that even much radical black
studies scholarship sustains the association of blackness with a certain sense of decay and thereby fortifies and extends the interlocutory life of widely accepted political common sense. In fact, it would seem that Gordon deepens the already problematic association to the level of identity. And yet, this is precisely what Gordon argues is the value and insight of

Fanon: he fully accepts the definition of himself as pathological as it is imposed by a world that knows itself through that imposition, rather than remaining in a reactive stance that insists on the (temporal, moral, etc.) heterogeneity between a self and an imago originating in culture. Though it may appear counterintuitive, or rather because it is counterintuitive, this acceptance or affirmation is active; it is a willing or willingness, in other words, to pay whatever social costs accrue to being black, to inhabiting blackness, to living a black social life under the shadow of social death. This is not an accommodation to the dictates of the antiblack world. The affirmation of blackness, which is to say an affirmation of pathological being, is a refusal to distance oneself from blackness in a valorization of minor differences that bring one closer to health, to life, or to sociality.
Fanon writes in the first chapter of Black Skin, White Masks, “The Black Man and Language”: “A Senegalese who learns Creole to pass for Antillean is a case of alienation. The Antilleans who make a mockery out of him are lacking in judgment” (Fanon 2008: 21). In a

world structured by the twin axioms of white superiority and black inferiority, of white existence and black nonexistence, a world structured by a negative categorical imperative—“ above all, don’t be black” (Gordon 1997: 63)—in this world, the zero degree of transformation is the turn toward blackness, a turn toward the shame, as it were, that “resides in the idea that ‘I am thought of as less than human’” (Nyong’o 2002: 389).xiv In this we might create a transvaluation of pathology itself, something like an embrace of pathology without pathos.

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A2: Coalitional Politics
Social movement need to include the subject positional of the black body as well as their social death Wilderson, Professor UCI, 2003 (Frank B., “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent)
Scandal”, Soc Justice 30 no2 2003, Accessed 8-4-12, MR) Indeed, it means all those things: aphobogenic object, apast withoutaheritage, the map of gratuitous violence, and a program of complete disorder. Whereas this realization is, and
should be, cause for alarm, it should not be cause for lament, or worse, disavowal - not at least, for a true revolutionary, or for a truly

If a social movement is to be neither social democratic nor Marxist, in terms of structure of political desire, then it should grasp the invitation to assume the positionality of subjects of social death. If we are to be honest with ourselves, we must admit that the "Negro" has been inviting whites, as well as civil society's junior partners, to the dance of social death for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps . They have been, and remain today - even in the most anti-racist movements, like the prison abolition movement - invested elsewhere. This is not to say that all oppositional political desire today is pro-white, but it is usually anti-Black, meaning it will not dance with death.
revolutionary movement such as prison abolition.

Black Liberation feared because it causes complete disorder, desire to take down the country Wilderson, Professor UCI, 2003 (Frank B., “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent)
Scandal”, Soc Justice 30 no2 2003, Accessed 8-4-12, MR) Black liberation, as a prospect, makes radicalism more dangerous to the U.S. This is not because it raises the specter of an alternative polity (such as socialism, or community control of existing resources), but because its condition of possibility and gesture of resistance function as a negative dialectic: a politics of refusal and a refusal to affirm, a "program of complete disorder." One must embrace its disorder, its incoherence, and allow oneself to be elaborated by it, if indeed one's politics are to be underwritten by a desire to take down this country. If this is not the desire that underwrites one's politics, then through what strategy of
legitimation is the word "prison" being linked to the word "abolition"? What are this movement's lines of political accountability? There is nothing foreign, frightening, or even unpracticed about the embrace of disorder and incoherence.

The desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by disorder and incoherence is not anathema in and of itself. No one, for example, has ever been known to say "gee-whiz, if only my orgasms would end a little sooner, or maybe not come at all." Yet few so-called radicals desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by the disorder and incoherence of Blackness - and the state of political
movements in the U.S. today is marked by this very Negrophobogenisis: "gee-whiz, if only Black rage could be more coherent, or maybe not come at all." Perhaps there is something more terrifying about the joy of Black than there is in the joy of sex (unless one is talking sex with a Negro). Perhaps coalitions today prefer to remain in-orgasmic in the face of civil society - with hegemony as a handy prophylactic, just in case. If, through this stasis or paralysis they try to do the work of prison abolition, that work will fail, for it

on behalf of a position of incoherence of the Black subject, or prison slave. In this way, social formations on the Leftremain blind to the contradictions of coalitions between workers and slaves. They remain coalitions operating within the logic of civil society and function less as revolutionary promises than as
is always work from a position of coherence (i.e., the worker) crowding out scenarios of Black antagonisms, simply feeding our frustration.

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A2 You cause violence
War/Violence is GOOD.
George Ciccariello-Maher, Jan, 2010, is a Ph.D. candidate in political theory at the University of California, Berkeley,

Jumpstarting the Decolonial Engine:

Hence the colonial world is shaken, but not by a bomb blast and not by a bloody massacre. Rather, this is the shaking of ontological categories—of the walls which separate being from non-being—by the native's refusal to passively accept a position of
inferiority, to refuse to see herself through the eyes of the oppressor. Put differently, the native has discovered all of these things within herself, "one step" prior to battle. If, as Fanon tells us, "the settler's work is to make even dreams of liberty impossible for the native," then this affirmation of equality first takes the form of a dream, and it is this dream which makes possible the turning away from the master and finding liberation in work. 36Having unearthed the symbolic and ontological function of Fanon's decolonial violence, we are now in a better position to consider his controversial discussion of the positive, generative, and cathartic functions of violence. As he puts it:for the colonized people this violence, because it constitutes their only work, invests their characters with positive and creative qualities. The practice of violence binds them together as a whole, since each individual forms a violent link in the great chain, a part of the great organism of violence which has surged upward in reaction to the settler's violence in the beginning. The groups recognize each other and the future nation is already indivisible. 37In this crucial passage, three observations are in order. Firstly, we can see the basis for much of the confusion regarding what Fanon understands as "violence," specifically, his reference to the binding function accomplished by the "practice of violence." But once we tie this to Black Skin, we can see the complexities of such a practice, and its symbolic nature and function. Secondly, while decolonial violence here emerges "in reaction

decolonial violence, as we have seen, is a breaking down of the ontological walls of being, constructed to exclude certain persons from full access to the category "human," and can share little in substantive terms with the force that builds those very walls. To judge all "violences" as equal
to" the violence of the colonizer, it is neither merely reactive nor categorically comparable: would be to fall into a severe formalism which is both useless and erroneous: useless through neglect of the functional content of different violences and erroneous through neglect of the fact that formal characterization as "violent" is always-already tainted by symbolic function.38 Thirdly, if we were tempted to deny the relevance of Fanon's early Hegelian framework in the colonial context, Fanon himself is quick to remind us: inter-group recognition is the first achievement of this Manichean violence, one which is accomplished long prior to formal liberation through the colonized turning away from the colonizing master and toward " their only work."39It is here that we see the relationship between violence and the two stages that Fanon identifies in the decolonization process. For Fanon, the Manichean violence of the first (formal) stage—tinged as it is with racialism, intolerance, and the elimination of heterogeneity—is the necessary stepping-stone toward the creation of national identity, just as the black identity of which he was similarly critical represented a necessary stepping-stone to self-respect and mutual recognition in Black Skin, White Masks.40 What the "great organism of violence" first accomplishes is its very existence as an organism:

the war of liberation creates the collective basis for national identity; it creates a national past and dreams of a national future. And this collective task has a parallel effect on the individual, for whom "violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self respect." Crucially, this effect is present "even if the armed struggle has been symbolic and the nation is demobilized through a rapid movement of decolonization." It is only on the basis of this individual and collective identity that the second stage of more substantive decolonization—"that of the building up of the nation," its revolutionary anode socialistic institutional transformation—can move forward, "helped on by the existence of this
41

cement which has been mixed with blood and anger."42

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A2 You’re apolitical
We repolicitize the sphere Wilderson, award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. He is one of
two Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress and is a former insurgent in the ANC’s armed wing, 2010 (Frank B. III “Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics” Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms,7-8) GG
Soon it will be forty years since radical politics, Left-leaning scholarship, and socially engaged feature films began to speak the unspeakable. In the 1960s and early 1970s the questions asked by radical politics and scholarship were not “ Should the

U.S. be overthrown?” or even “Would it be overthrown?” but rather when and how—and, for some, what—would come in its wake. Those steadfast in their conviction that there remained a discernable quantum of ethics in the U.S. writ large (and here I am speaking
of everyone from Martin Luther King, Jr., prior to his 1968 shift, to the Tom Hayden wing of SDS, to thebn Julian Bond and Marion Barry faction of SNCC, to Bobbie Kennedy Democrats) were accountable, in their rhetorical machinations,

to the paradigmatic zeitgeist of the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, and the Weather Underground. Radicals and progressives could deride, reject, or chastise armed struggle mercilessly and cavalierly with respect to tactics and the possibility o f “success,” but they could not dismiss revolution-as-ethic because they could not make a convincing case—by way of a paradigmatic analysis—that the U.S. was an ethical formation and still hope to maintain credibility as radicals and progressives. Even Bobby Kennedy (a U.S. attorney general and presidential candidate) mused that the law and its enforcers
had no ethical standing in the presence of Blacks. One could (and many did) acknowledge America’s strength and power. This seldom, however, rose to the level of an ethical assessment, but rather remained an assessment of the so-called “balance of forces.”

The political discourse of Blacks, and to a lesser extent Indians, circulated too widely to credibly wed the U.S. and ethics. The raw force of COINTELPRO put an end to this trajectory toward a possible hegemony of ethical accountability . Consequently, the power of Blackness and Redness to pose the question—and the power to pose the question is the greatest power of all—retreated as did White radicals and progressives who “retired” from struggle. The question’s echo lies buried in the graves of young Black Panthers, AIM Warriors, and Black Liberation Army soldiers, or in prison cells where so many of them have been rotting (some in solitary confinement) for ten, twenty, thirty years, and at the gates of the academy where the “crazies” shout at passers-by. Gone are not only the young and vibrant voices that affected a seismic shift on the political landscape, but also the intellectual protocols of inquiry, and with them a spate of feature films that became authorized, if not by an unabashed revolutionary polemic, then certainly by a revolutionary zeitgeist.

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A2 Reform
The institution does not allow for reform, the only resort is Revolution.
Rabaka 2007 (Reiland Rabaka,
4 August 2007, The Souls of White Folks, W.E.B. Du Bois’s Critique of White Supremacy and Contributions to Critical White Studies,Department of Ethnic Studies Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America (CSERA), University of Colorado-Boulder, Ketchum)

Everything considered, the title to the universe claimed by White Folk is faulty” (1995a, p. 454). Long before the recent discourse on racism and critical white studies, Du Bois called into question white superiority and white privilege,
and the possibility of white racelessness and/or white racial neutrality and universality. He was one of the first theorists to chart the changes in race relations from de jure to de facto forms of

white supremacy, referring to it, as early as 1910, as “the new religion of whiteness” (454). White supremacy would or will not end unless and until the values and views endemic to it and associated with it were or are rejected and replaced by radical— and, I am wont to say, following Peter McLaren, “revolutionary”—multicultural and uncompromising ethical views and values McLaren
1994, 1997, 1999a, b; see also Goldberg 1994; May 1999). The rejection of white supremacy and the replacement of white supremacist

the Emancipation Proclamation, Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights movement indicate, changes in the law and its interpretation and application do not always translate into racial justice and social transformation (Berry 1994; Higginbotham 1978, 1996; D. King 1995). White supremacist social views and values linger long after amendments have been made McLaren 1994, 1997, 1999a, b; see also) and laws changed. Therefore, law-focused critical white studies and critical race theory provide at best only part of the picture .
views and values involves not only blacks and other people of color, but whites as well. As the examples of

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A2 Patriarchy
Antiblack white supremacy serves as the glue to racism to colonialism, racism to capitalism, and patriarchy
Rabaka 2007 (Reiland Rabaka, 4 August 2007, The Souls of White Folks, W.E.B. Du Bois’s Critique of White Supremacy and
Contributions to Critical White Studies,Department of Ethnic Studies Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America (CSERA), University of Colorado-Boulder, Ketchum)
The conception and critique of white supremacy that I develop here does not seek to sidestep socio-legal race discourse as much as it intends to supplement it with the work of Du Bois and others in radical politics and critical social theory (Rabaka 2002, 2003a,b,c,d, 2005a,b,c). One of the main reasons this supplemental approach to critical white studies (and critical race theory) is important is because typically legal studies of race confine theorists to particular national social and political arenas, which is problematic considering the fact that white supremacy is an international or global racist system (Mills

1999; Rabaka 2006a,b,c). “whitenessis the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!” (1995a, p. 454). Here he is sardonically hinting at the cardinal difference between white supremacy and most other forms of

White supremacy serves as the glue that connects and combines racism to colonialism, and racism to capitalism. It has also been illustrated that it exacerbates sexism by sexing racism and racing sexism, to put it unpretentiously. Thus, white supremacy as a global racism intersects and interconnects with sexism, and particularly patriarchy as a global system that oppresses and denies women’s human dignity and right to be humanly different from men, the ruling gender (Davis 1981, 1989; hooks 1981, 1984, 1991, 1995; J.A. James 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999;
racism: its worldwide historical, cultural, social, political, legal, and economic influence and impact. Lorde

1984, 1988; Rabaka 2003e, 2004).

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A2 Anthro
White Supremacy robs the denigrated their rights to be human
Rabaka 2007 (Reiland Rabaka, 4 August 2007, The Souls of White Folks, W.E.B. Du Bois’s Critique of White Supremacy and
Contributions to Critical White Studies,Department of Ethnic Studies Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America (CSERA), University of Colorado-Boulder, Ketchum)

The “civilized” (read: whites) are simultaneously a race in a socio-cultural and politico-economic sense, though they do not think of themselves in racial terms, and they throw temper tantrums when they are thought of in racial terms or, as being racialized or raced. They can steal and kill the “uncivilized” (read: people of color) without regard to rank or reason, and they can at any moment change the rules of the racial hierarchy and racial history because they alone are decidedly and definitively the authors of human culture and civilization , and most certainly the architects of science and technology. As Du Bois demonstrates above, white supremacy is not simply about racial domination and discrimination. Which is to say , white supremacy cannot quickly be reduced to racism, and especially as it is understood in contemporary racial discourse. Much more, white supremacy robs the raced or people of color of their right to be human, of their right to self-definition and selfdetermination. It reduces human beings to the status of things, which is one of the reasons, as Frantz
Fanon observes in academic,

people of color are referred to, (re) presented and (re)imagined in “zoological terms”—in the terms in which animals are discussed, dissected and dominated. In fact, the terms the [white colonial] settler uses when he mentions the native [the raced, or the colored] are zoological terms. He speaks of the yellow man’s reptilian motions, of the stink of the native quarter, of breeding swarms, of foulness, of spawn, of gesticulations. When the settler seeks to describe the native fully in exact terms he constantly refers
1968, p. 42) Critical White Studies and the Riddle(s) of Critical Race Theory Du Bois’s critique of “They [the colored and colonized] are not simply dark white men. They are not ‘men’ in the sense that Europeans are men.” Whiteness and maleness are prerequisites for
to the bestiary. (Fanon white supremacy also hits head-on the issue of white personhood and black (or people of color) subpersonhood. He asserted: personhood in the world that modernity made. A person, in this world, is one who is rational, self-directing and morally and legally equal with a white male.

The Wretched of the Earth, when they are discussed in the discursive arenas of the white world, both academic and non-

Since white males created the laws of this world, none but white males are equal and given moral, legal and extralegal consideration. Therefore, as the Dred Scott decision demonstrates, “a black man has no rights which a white man is legally bound to respect” (see Dred Scott 1857, pp. 403–407). White rights are intimately intertwined with the denial of black rights. Or, to put it another way, white personhood is inextricable from black subpersonhood. In The Racial
Contract, Charles Mills contends:

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A2 Perm

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Reorientation
The theoretical aphasia, the lack of an unflinching paradigmatic analysis means the permutation will fail – they’re flinchin when they perm. The criticism of antiblackness is a world structuring criticism which means we are in control of the framing of the world and the permutation would only attempt to co-opt radical black politics. We were the first to find the power to pose the question – which is the greatest power of them all Wilderson 10 [Frank B. III, Ph.D., Associate Professor at UC Irvine, former ANC member, “on
some guerilla shit”, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, pages ixx, OG] STRANGE AS it might seem, this book project began in South Africa. During the last years of apartheid I worked for revolutionary change in both an underground and above-ground capacity, for the Charterist Movement in general and the ANC in particular. During this period, I began to see how essential an unflinching paradigmatic analysis is to a movement dedicated to the complete overthrow of an existing order. The neoliberal compromises that the radical elements of the Chartist Movement made with the moderate elements were due, in large part, to our inability or unwillingness to hold the moderates' feet to the fire of a political agenda predicated on an unflinching paradigmatic analysis. Instead, we allowed our energies and points of attention to be displaced by and onto pragmatic considerations. Simply put, we abdicated the power to pose the question—and the power to pose the question is the greatest power of all. Elsewhere, I have written about this unfortunate turn of events (Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid), so
I'll not rehearse the details here. Suffice it to say, this book germinated in the many political and academic discussions and debates that I was fortunate enough to be a part of at a historic moment and in a place where the word revolution was spoken in earnest, free of qualifiers and irony. For their past and ongoing ideas and interventions, I extend solidarity and appreciation to comrades Amanda Alexander, Franco Barchiesi, Teresa Barnes, Patrick Bond, Ashwin Desai, Nigel Gibson, Steven Greenberg, Allan Horowitz, Bushy Kelebonye (deceased), Tefu Kelebonye, Ulrike Kistner, Kamogelo Lekubu, Andile Mngxitama, Prishani Naidoo, John Shai, and S'bu Zulu.

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Alt = Prior Question
We must attempt to understand how whiteness and blackness are entangled with each other inorder to challenge the norm Sexton, Director, African American Studies School of Humanities, 2003 (Jared, “The
Consequence of Race Mixture: Racialised Barriers and the Politics of Desire”, Social Identities, Volume 9, Number 2, 2003,Accessed 8-4-12, MR)
However, there are a number of ways to specify the fluid metaphysics of race within the Manichaean delirium of colonial and postcolonial contexts. It is not my objective here to simply restate an axiom of deconstruction by recalling that categories cannot maintain any absolute difference from each other, that their respective regimes of sense are mutually implicated in an open structure of difference and deferral. This much is vital but insufficient to a social theory of racialisation. Fanon points the way here, contrary to truncated images of his work as exhausted by the rhetoric of binary conflict. Despite the many de-contextualised glosses on fantasies of violent reversal ascribed to Fanon (and recall that he is often accused of prescribing such when he is attempting to describe and critique political tendencies), he is among those thinkers who encourage us to understand the

complex entanglement of seemingly opposing terms. 9 ‘In an age when sceptical doubt has taken root in
the world’, he writes, when…it is no longer possible to find the sense of non-sense, it becomes harder to penetrate to a level where the categories of sense and nonsense are not yet invoked. (Fanon, 1967, p. 9, my emphasis) It is precisely this level of

analysis that we must attend to if we are to unhook ourselves from the oppositionist dynamics of the law and a transgression that remains passionately complicit with it .10 Moreover, we must challenge the conservative temptations of political quietude that are often (if wrongly) assigned to deconstruction. In order to map out the countervailing forces of white supremacy, we must examine the affective terrain before the conceptual dichotomy, theoretically prior to the either-or distinction of racialised difference, where there are not yet objects, but only processes that produce the one in the other. We must, to speak in a Deleuzian register, map the traces of multiplicity, the smooth spaces of becoming that white supremacy both striates and unleashes in its attempt to capture the social forces of desiring-production and institute itself as being .11 To this end, I discuss three points. First, the law of antimiscegenation as the founding gesture of whiteness; second, the contemporary transgression of this law through the re-valorised deployment of racialised sexuality (referred to alternately as multiraciality, mestizaje, or antiantimiscegenation); finally, ‘the event of miscegenation’ as that which provokes and exceeds both anti-miscegenation and its opposition.

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Aff Answers

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Capitalism

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Capitalism K – Link
Theorizing anti-Blackness through a Marxist lens is key – focusing on raciality impairs struggle and bifurcates movements McLaren and D’Anniballe 4 (Peter, Professor at the Graduate School of Education at
UCLA, and Valerie “Class Dismissed? Historical materialism and the politics of ‘difference’”, Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia) 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 class struggle 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. 121

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Capitalism K – Race Link
Using race as a starting point shatters class based coalitions and replicates racism A. Darder and R. Torres, 1999.Darder is a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Professor of Educational Policy Studies and Latino/a Studies, Torres is Professor of Planning, Policy, and Design, Chicano/Latino Studies, and Political Science. “Shattering the Race Lens: Towards a Critical Theory of Racism.” Critical Ethnicity. P. 174-6 [W]e work with raced identities on already reified ground. In the context of domination, raced identities are imposed and internalized, then renegotiated and reproduced. From artificial to natural, we court a hard-to-perceive social logic that reproduces the very conditions we strain to overcome. Jon Cruz (1996)8.Over the last three decades, there has been an overwhelming tendency among a variety of critical scholars to focus on the concept of “race” as a central category of analysis for interpreting the social conditions of inequality and marginalization.9 As a consequence, much of the literature on subordinate cultural populations, with its emphasis on such issues as “racial inequality,” “racial segregation,” “racial identity,” has utilized the construct of “race” as a central category of analysis for interpreting the social conditions of inequality and marginalization. In turn, this literature has reinforced a racialized politics of identity and representation, with its problematic emphasis on “racial” identiy as the overwhelming impulse for political action. This theoretical practice has led to serious analytical weaknesses and absence of depth in much of the historical and contemporary writings on racialized populations in this country . The politics of busing in the early 1970s provides an excellent example that illustrates this phenomenon.Social scientists studying “race relations”concluded that contact among “Black” and “White” students would improve “race relations” and the educational conditions of “Black” students if they were bused to “White” (better) schools outside their neighborhoods.10 Thirty years later, many parents and educators adamantly denounce the busing solution (a solution based on the discourse of “race”) as not only fundamentally problematic to the fabric of African American and Chicano communities, but an erroneous social policy experiment that failed to substantially improve the overall academic performance of students in these communities. Given this legacy, it is not surprising to find that the theories, practices, and policies that have informed social science analysis of racialized populations today are overwhelmingly rooted in a politics of identity, an approach that is founded on parochial notions of “race” and representation which ignore the imperatives of capitalist accumulation and the existence of class divisions within racialized subordinate populations. The folly of this position is critiqued by Ellen Meiksins Wood11 in her article entitled “Identity Crisis,” where she exposes the limitations of a politics of identity which fails to contend with the fact that capitalism is the most totalizing system of social relations the world has ever known. Yet, in much of the work on African American, Latino, Native American, and Asian populations, an analysis of class and a critique of capitalism is conspicuously absent. And even when it is mentioned, the emphasis is primarily on an undifferentiated plurality of identity politics or an “intersection of oppressions,” which, unfortunately, ignores the overwhelming tendency of capitalism to homogenize rather than to diversify human experience . Moreover, this practice is particularly disturbing since no matter where one travels around the world, there is no question that racism is integral to the process of capital accumulation. For example, the current socioeconomic conditions of Latinos and other racialized populations can be traced to the relentless emergence of the global economy and recent economic policies of expansion, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement 123

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(NAFTA). A recent United Nations report by the International Labor Organization confirms the negative impact of globalization on racialized populations. By the end of 1998, it was projected that one billion workers would be unemployed . The people of Africa, China, and Latin America have been most affected by the current restructuring of capitalist development.12 This phenomenon of racialized capitalism is directly linked to the abusive corporations as Coca Cola, Walmart, Disney, Ford Motor Company, and General Motors. In a recent speech on “global economic apartheid,” John Cavanagh,13 coexecutive director of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., comments on the practices of the Ford Motor Company. “The Ford Motor Company has its state-of-the-art assembly plant in Mexico… where because it can deny basic worker rights, it can pay one-tenth the wages and yet get the same quality and the same productivity in producing goods…. The same technologies by the way which are easing globalization are also primarily cutting more jobs than they’re creating.” The failure of scholars to confront this dimension in their analysis of contemporary society as a racialized phenomenon and their tendency to continue treating class as merely one of a mulitiplicity of (equally valid) perspectives, which may or may not “intersect” with the process of racialization, are serious shortcomings . In addressing this issue, we must recognize that identity politics, which generally gloss over class differences and/or ignore class contradictions, have often been used by radical scholars and activists within African American, Latino, and other subordinate cultural communities in an effort to build a political base. Here, fabricated constructions of “race” are objectified and mediated as truth to ignite political support, divorced from the realities of class struggle. By so doing, they have unwittingly perpetuated the vacuous and dangerous notionthat the political and economic are separate spheres of society which can function independently- a view that firmly anchors and sustains prevailing class relations of power in society.

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Capitalism K – Root Cause
Capitalism is the primary condition of possibility of anti-Blackness – produced Black social death qua slavery Selfa 2 (Lance, “Slavery and the Origins of Racism, International Socialist Reviw, Issue 26,
http://www.isreview.org/issues/26/roots_of_racism.shtml) IT IS commonly assumed that racism is as old as human society itself . As long as human beings have been around, the argument goes, they have always hated or feared people of a different nation or skin color. In other words, racism is just part of human nature. Representative John L. Dawson, a member of Congress after the Civil War, insisted that racial prejudice was
“implanted by Providence for wise purposes.” Senator James Doolittle of Wisconsin, a contemporary of Dawson’s, claimed that an “instinct of our nature” impelled us to sort people into racial categories and to recognize the natural supremacy of whites when compared to people with darker skins.1 More than a century later, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray produced The Bell Curve, an 800-page statistics-laden tome that purported to prove innate

Today’s racists might don the mantel of science to justify their prejudices, but they are no less crude or mistaken then their 19th century forebears. If racism is part of human nature, then socialists have a real challenge on their hands . If racism is hard-wired into human biology, then we should despair of workers ever overcoming the divisions between them to fight for a socialist society free of racial inequality . Fortunately, racism isn’t part of human nature. The best evidence for this assertion is the fact that racism has not always existed. Racism is a particular form of oppression . It stems from discrimination against a group of people based on the idea that some inherited characteristic, such as skin color, makes them inferior to their oppressors. Yet the concepts of “race” and “racism” are modern inventions. They arose and became part of the dominant ideology of society in the context of the African slave trade at the dawn of capitalism in the 1500s and 1600s. Although it is a commonplace for academics and opponents of socialism to claim that Karl Marx ignored racism, Marx in fact described the processes that created modern racism. His explanation of the rise of capitalism placed the African slave trade, the European extermination of indigenous people in the Americas, and colonialism at its heart. In Capital, Marx writes: The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of the continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of black skins are all things that characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production .2 Marx connected his explanation of the role of the slave trade in the rise of capitalism to the social relations that produced racism against Africans. In Wage Labor and Capital, written twelve years before the
racial differences in intelligence. American Civil War, he explains: What is a Negro slave? A man of the black race. The one explanation is as good as the other. A Negro is a Negro. He only becomes a slave in certain relations. A cotton spinning jenny is a machine for spinning cotton. It only becomes capital in certain relations. Torn

Marx shows no prejudice to Blacks (“a man of the black race,” “a Negro is a Negro”), but he mocks society’s equation of “Black” and “slave” (“one explanation is as good as another”). He shows how the economic and social relations of emerging capitalism thrust Blacks into slavery (“he only becomes a slave in certain relations”), which produce the dominant ideology that equates being African with being a slave . These
away from these conditions, it is as little capital as gold by itself is money, or as sugar is the price of sugar.3 In this passage, fragments of Marx’s writing give us a good start in understanding the Marxist explanation of the origins of racism. As the Trinidadian historian of slavery Eric Williams put it: “Slavery

was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery.”4 And, one should add, the consequence of modern slavery at the dawn of capitalism . While slavery existed as an economic system for thousands of years before the conquest of America, racism as we understand it today did not exist.

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Essentialism/Epistemology DA

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Link: Social Death Theory
Their use of social death and absolute dereliction as epistemological frameworks is bankrupt and debilitating - we should instead theorize blackness as stolen life Moten 8 (Fred, Ph.D, Helen L. Bevington Professor of Modern Poetry, Duke University, “The
Case of Blackness”, Criticism, Volume 50, Number 2, Spring, Project Muse, Accessed: 11/5/11, OG)
lies between subjects and objects), So I'm interested in how the ones who inhabit the nearness and distance between Dasein and things (which is off to the side of what

the ones who are attained or accumulated unto death even as they are always escaping the Hegelian positioning of the bondsman, are perhaps best understood as the extra-ontological, extra-political constant—a destructive, healing agent; a stolen, transplanted organ always eliciting rejection; a salve whose soothing lies in the abrasive penetration of the merely
typical; an ensemble always operating in excess of that ancient juridical formulation of the thing (Ding), to which Kant subscribes, as

the impure, degraded, manufactured (in) [End Page 186] human who moves only in response to inclination, whose reflexes lose the name of action. At
that to which nothing can be imputed, the same time, this dangerous supplement, as the fact out of which everything else emerges, is constitutive. It seems to me that

this special ontic-ontological fugitivity of/in the slave is what is revealed as the necessarily unaccounted for in Fanon. So that in contradistinction to Fanon's protest, the problem of the inadequacy of any ontology to blackness, to that mode of being for which escape or apposition and not the objectifying encounter with otherness is the prime modality, must be understood in its relation to the inadequacy of calculation to being in general. Moreover, the brutal history of criminalization in public policy, and at the intersection of biological, psychological, and sociological discourse, ought not obscure the already existing ontic-ontological criminality of/as blackness. Rather, blackness needs to be understood as operating at the nexus of the social and the ontological, the historical and the essential. Indeed, as the
ontological is moving within the corrosive increase that the ontic instantiates, it must be understood that what is now meant by ontological requires special elucidation.

What is inadequate to blackness is already given ontologies. The lived experienced of blackness is, among other things, a constant demand for an ontology of disorder, an ontology of dehiscence, a para-ontology whose comportment will have been (toward) the ontic or existential field of things and events. That ontology will have had to have operated as a general critique of calculation even as it gathers diaspora as an open set—or as an openness disruptive of the very idea of set—of accumulative and unaccumulable differences, differings, departures without origin, leavings that continually defy the natal occasion in general even as they constantly bespeak the previous. This is a Nathaniel Mackey formulation whose full implications will have never been fully
explorable.12 What Fanon's pathontological refusal of blackness leaves unclaimed is an irremediable homelessness common to the colonized, the enslaved, and the enclosed. This is to say that what is claimed in the name of blackness is an undercommon disorder that has always been there, that is retrospectively and retroactively located there, that is embraced by the ones who stay there while

"Black(ness) is a country" (and a sex) (that is not one).13 Stolen life disorders positive value just as surely as it is not equivalent to social death or absolute dereliction.
living somewhere else. Some folks relish being a problem. As Amiri Baraka and Nikhil Pal Singh (almost) say,

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Link: Wilderson
Wilderson is wrong, reductionist, and essentialist Ellison 11 (Mary, PhD, Fellow, African American and Indian American history and culture,
Keele University, “Review of: Red, White and Black: cinema and the structure of US antagonisms” http://rac.sagepub.com/content/53/2/100.full.pdf+html?rss=1, Acc: 8/5/12, og)
Fanon and Jacques Lacan. Frank

These are two illuminating, but frustratingly flawed books. Their approaches are different, although both frequently quote Frantz

Wilderson utilises the iconic theoreticians within the context of a study that concentrates on a conceptual ideology that, he claims, is based on a fusion of Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism and psychology . He uses a small number of independent films to illustrate his theories. Charlene Regester has a more practical framework. She divides
her book into nine chapters devoted to individual female actors and then weaves her ideological concepts into these specific chapters. Both have a problem with clarity. Regester uses less complex language than Wilderson, but still manages to be obtuse at times. Wilderson starts from a position of using ontology and grammar as his main tools, but manages to consistently misuse or misappropriate terms like fungible or fungibility. Wilderson writes as an intelligent and challenging author, but is often frustrating. Although

his language is complicated, his concepts are often oversimplified . He envisions every black person in film as a slave who is suffering from irreparable alienation from any meaningful sense of cultural identity. He believes that filmmakers, including black filmmakers, are victims
who effectively investigate the issues of black structural non-communicability.

of a deprivation of meaning that has been condensed by Jacques Lacan as a ‘wall of language’ as well as an inability to create a clear voice in the face of gratuitous violence. He cites Frantz Fanon, Orlando Patterson and Hortense Spiller as being among those theorists

His own attempts to define ‘what is black?’, ‘a subject?’, ‘an object?’, ‘a slave?’, seem bound up with limiting preconceptions, and he evaluates neither blackness nor the ‘red’ that is part of his title in any truly meaningful way.

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Link: Sexton
Sexton epistemology is erroneous and prevents inter-sectional progress Spickard 9
(Paul, professor of history and Asian American studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (review)”, American Studies, Volume 50, Number 1/2, Spring/Summer 2009, pp. 125-127 – Project Muse) With Amalgamation Schemes, Jared Sexton is trying to stir up some controversy . He presents a facile,

sophisticated, and theoretically informed intelligence, and he picks a fight from the start. His title suggests that the study of multiraciality is some kind of plot, or at the very least an illegitimate enterprise. His tone is angry and accusatory on every page. It is difficult to get to the grounds of his argument, because the cloud of invective is so thick, and because his writing is abstract,

For Sexton (as for the Spencers and Gordon) race is about Blackness, in the United States and around the world. That is silly, for there are other racialized relationships. In the U.S., native peoples were racialized by European intruders in all the ways that Africans were, and more: they were nearly extinguished. To take just one example from many around the world, Han Chinese have racialized Tibetans historically in all the ways (including slavery) that Whites have racialized Blacks and Indians in the United States. So there is a problem with Sexton’s concept of race as Blackness. There is also a problem with his insistence on monoraciality. For Sexton and the others, one cannot be mixed or multiple; one must choose ever and only to be Black. I don’t have a problem with that as a political choice, but to insist that it is the only possibility flies in the face of a great deal of human experience, and it ignores the history of how modern racial ideas emerged.
referential, and at key points vague.

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Link: “Social Death”
Social death epistemology is ahistorical and debilitates our understanding of Blackness Brown 2009 – professor of history and of African and African American Studies specializing in
Atlantic Slavery (Vincent, “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,” http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/documents/brown-socialdeath.pdf)
But this was not the emphasis of Patterson’s argument. As a result, those he has inspired have often conflated his exposition of slaveholding ideology with a description of the actual condition of the enslaved. Seen as a state of being, the

concept of social death is ultimately out of place in the political history of slavery. If studies of slavery would account for the outlooks and maneuvers of the enslaved as an important part of that history, scholars would do better to keep in view the struggle against alienation rather than alienation itself. To see social death as a productive peril entails a subtle but significant shift in perspective, from seeing slavery as a condition to viewing enslavement as a predicament, in which enslaved Africans and their descendants never ceased to pursue a politics of belonging, mourning, accounting, and regeneration. In part, the usefulness of social death as a concept depends on what
scholars of slavery seek to explain—black pathology or black politics, resistance or attempts to remake social life? For too long, debates about whether there were black families took precedence over discussions of how such families were formed; disputes about whether African culture had “survived” in the Americas overwhelmed discussions of how particular practices mediated slaves’ attempts to survive; and scholars felt compelled to prioritize the documentation of resistance over the examination of political strife in its myriad forms. But of course, because slaves’ social and political life grew directly out of the violence and dislocation of Atlantic slavery, these are false choices. And we may not even have to choose between tragic and romantic modes of storytelling, for history tinged with romance may offer the truest acknowledgment of the tragedy confronted by the enslaved: it took heroic effort for them to make social lives. There is romance, too, in the tragic fact that although scholars may never be able to give a satisfactory account of the human experience in slavery, they nevertheless continue to try. If scholars were to emphasize the efforts

of the enslaved more than the condition of slavery, we might at least tell richer stories about how the endeavors of the weakest and most abject have at times reshaped the world. The history of their social and political lives lies between resistance and oblivion, not in the nature of their condition but in their continuous struggles to remake it. Those struggles are slavery’s bequest to us.

Social death epistemology wrong – ignores and effaces slave resistance Brown 2009 – professor of history and of African and African American Studies specializing in
Atlantic Slavery (Vincent, “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,” http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/documents/brown-socialdeath.pdf) African American history has grown from the kinds of people’s histories that emphasize a progressive struggle toward an ultimate victory over the tyranny of the powerful. Consequently, studies that privilege the perspectives of the enslaved depend in some measure on the chronicling of
heroic achievement, and historians of slave culture and resistance have recently been accused of romanticizing their subject of study.42 Because these scholars have done so much to enhance our understanding of slave life beyond what was imaginable a scant few generations ago, the allegation may seem unfair. Nevertheless, some of the criticisms are helpful. As the historian Walter Johnson has argued, studies of slavery conducted within the terms of social history have often

taken “agency,” or the self-willed activity of choice-making subjects, to be their starting point.43 Perhaps it was
inevitable, then, that many historians would find themselves charged with depicting slave communities and cultures that were so resistant and so vibrant that the social relations of slavery must not have done much damage at all. Even if this particular accusation is a form of caricature, it contains an important insight, that the agency of the weak and the power of the

strong have too often been viewed as simple opposites. The anthropologist David Scott is probably
correct to suggest that for most scholars, the power of slaveholders and the damage wrought by slavery have been “pictured principally as a negative or limiting force” that “restricted, blocked, paralyzed, or deformed the transformative agency of the slave.”44 In this sense, scholars who have emphasized slavery’s corrosive power and those who stress resistance and resilience share the same assumption. However, the violent domination of slavery generated political action;

it was not antithetical to it. If one sees power as productive and the fear of social death not as incapacity but as a generative force—a peril that motivated enslaved activity— a different image of slavery slides into view, one in which the object of slave politics is 130

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not simply the power of slaveholders, but the very terms and conditions of social existence.

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Link: Slave Resistance
Social Death erases the history slave resistances that occurred on the slave ship and permanently destroys the slaves agency – the lack of analysis of the funerals and resistance that occurred makes social death perpetual Vincent Brown 2009 (professor of history and of African and African American Studies “Social
Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,” http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/documents/brown-socialdeath.pdf)

In fact, the funeral was an attempt to withstand the encroachment of oblivion and to make social meaning from the threat of anomie. As a final rite of passage and a ritual goodbye, the ceremony provided an outlet for anguish and an opportunity for commiseration. Yet it also allowed the women to publicly contemplate what it meant to be alive and enslaved. The death rite thus enabled them to express and enact their social values, to articulate their visions of what it was that bound them together, made individuals among them unique, and separated this group of people from others. The scene thus typifies the way that people who have been pronounced socially dead, that is, utterly alienated and with no social ties recognized as legitimate or binding, have often made a social world out of death itself. The funeral was an act of accounting, of reckoning, and therefore one among the multitude of acts that made up the political history of Atlantic slavery. This was politics conceived not as a conventional battle between partisans, but as a struggle to define a social being that connected the past and present. It could even be said that the event exemplified a politics of history, which connects the politics of the enslaved to the politics of their descendants. Although the deaths of slaves could inspire such active and dynamic practices of social reconnection, scholars in recent years have made too little of events like the funeral aboard the Hudibras and have too often followed Orlando Patterson’s monumental Slavery and Social Death (1982) in positing a metaphorical “social death” as the basic condition of slavery. In a comparative study of sixty-six slaveholding societies ranging from ancient Greece and Rome to medieval Europe, precolonial Africa, and Asia, Patterson combined statistical analysis and voluminous research with brilliant theoretical insights drawn from Marxian theory, symbolic anthropology, law, philosophy, and literature in order to offer what he called a “preliminary definition of slavery on the level of personal relations. ” Recognizing violence, violations of personhood, dishonor, and namelessness as the fundamental constituent elements of slavery, Patterson distilled a transhistorical characterization of slavery as “the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons.” In this way the institution of slavery was and is a “relation of domination,” in which slaveholders annihilated people socially by first extracting them from meaningful relationships that defined personal status and belonging, communal memory, and collective aspiration and then incorporating these socially dead persons into the masters’ world. As a work of historical sociology concerned primarily with the comparative analysis of institutions, the book illuminated the dynamics of a process whereby the “desocialized new slave” was subsumed within slave society.5

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Impact: Inter-Sectionalism
Inter-sectionalism key to solve oppression – turns their argument Smith 10
(Andrea, associate professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at UC Riverside, GLOBAL DIALOGUE 12:2, http://www.worlddialogue.org/content.php?id=488) It is important to note that these pillars of white supremacy are best understood as logics rather than categories signifying specific groups of people . Thus, the peoples entangled in these logics may shift through time and space. Peoples may also be implicated in more than one logic simultaneously, such as peoples who are black and Indigenous. This model also destabilises some of the conventional categories by which we often understand either ethnic studies or racial-justice
organising—categories such as African American/Latino/Asian American/Native American/Arab American. For instance, in the case of Latinos, these logics may affect peoples differently depending on whether they are black, Indigenous, Mestizo, etc. Consequently, we may want to follow the lead of Dylan Rodriguez, who suggests that

rather than organise around categories based on presumed cultural similarities or geographical proximities, we might organise around the differential impacts of whitesupremacist logics. In particular, he calls for a destabilisation of the category “Asian American” by contending that the Filipino condition may be more
specifically understood in conjunction with the logic of genocide from which, he argues, the very category of Filipino itself emerged.6 In addition, these logics themselves may vary depending on the geographic or historical context. As outlined here, these logics reflect a United States–specific context and may differ greatly in other places and times.

the point I am trying to argue is that analysing white supremacy in any context may benefit from not presuming a single logic but assessing how it might be operating through multiple logics (even as these multiple logics may vary).
However,

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Impact: Turns Case
Their epistemological framework is essentialist and totalizing – effaces the possibility for African communal politics BÂ 11 (SAËR MATY, teaches film at Portsmouth University, “The US Decentred From Black
Social Death to Cultural Transformation”, hthttp://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/csrj/article/view/2304/2474, Acc: 8/3/12, og)
—WILDERSON’S WHITE WATCH SEES RED ON BLACK: SOME WEAKNESSES¶ A few pages into Red, White and Black, I feared that it would just be a matter of time¶ before Wilderson’s black‐as‐social‐death idea and multiple attacks

on issues and¶ scholars he disagrees with run (him) into (theoretical) trouble . This happens
in¶ chapter two, ‘The Narcissistic Slave’, where he critiques black film theorists and¶ books. For example, Wilderson declares that Gladstone Yearwood’s Black Film as¶ Signifying Practice (2000) ‘betrays a kind of conceptual anxiety with respect to the¶ historical object of study— ... it clings, anxiously, to the film‐as‐text‐as‐legitimateobject¶ of Black cinema.’ (62) He then quotes from Yearwood’s book to highlight ‘just¶ how vague the aesthetic foundation of Yearwood’s attempt to construct a canon can¶ be’. (63)¶ And yet Wilderson’s highlighting is problematic because it overlooks the¶ ‘Diaspora’ or ‘African

Diaspora’, a key component in Yearwood’s thesis that,¶ crucially, neither navel‐gazes (that is, at the US or black America) nor
pretends to¶ properly engage with black film. Furthermore, Wilderson separates the different¶ waves of black film theory and approaches them, only, in terms of how a most recent¶ one might challenge its precedent. Again, his approach is

problematic because it¶ does not mention or emphasise the inter‐connectivity of/in black film theory. As a¶ case in point, Wilderson does not link Tommy Lott’s mobilisation of Third Cinema¶ for black film theory
to Yearwood’s idea of African Diaspora. (64) Additionally, of¶ course, Wilderson seems unaware that Third Cinema itself has been fundamentally¶ questioned since Lott’s 1990s’ theory of black film was formulated. Yet another¶ consequence of

ignoring the African Diaspora is that it exposes Wilderson’s corpus¶ of films as unable to carry the weight of the transnational argument he attempts to ¶ advance. Here, beyond the US‐centricity or ‘social and political specificity of [his] ¶ filmography’, (95) I
am talking about Wilderson’s choice of films. For example,¶ Antwone Fisher (dir. Denzel Washington, 2002) is attacked unfairly for failing to¶ acknowledge ‘a grid of captivity across spatial dimensions of the Black “body”, the¶ Black “home”, and the Black “community”’ (111) while films like Alan and Albert¶ Hughes’s Menace II Society (1993), overlooked, do acknowledge the same grid and,¶ additionally, problematise Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention Act (STEP)¶ policing. The above examples expose the fact of Wilderson’s dubious and¶ questionable conclusions on black film.¶ Red, White and Black is particularly

undermined by Wilderson’s propensity for¶ exaggeration and blinkeredness. In chapter
nine, ‘“Savage” Negrophobia’, he writes:¶ The philosophical anxiety of Skins is all too aware that through the Middle¶ Passage, African culture became Black ‘style’ ... Blackness can be placed¶ and displaced with limitless frequency and across untold territories, by¶ whoever so chooses. Most important, there is nothing real Black people¶ can do to either check or direct this process ... Anyone can say ‘nigger’¶ because anyone can be a ‘nigger’. (235)7¶ Similarly, in chapter ten, ‘A Crisis in the Commons’, Wilderson addresses the issue of¶ ‘Black time’. Black is irredeemable, he argues, because, at no time in history had

it¶ been deemed, or deemed through the right historical moment and place. In other ¶ words, the black moment and place are not right because they are ‘the ship hold of ¶ the Middle Passage’: ‘the most coherent temporality ever deemed as Black time’ but¶ also ‘the “moment” of no time at all on
the map of no place at all’. (279)¶ Not only does Pinho’s more mature analysis expose this point as preposterous¶ (see below), I also wonder what Wilderson makes of the countless historians’ and¶ sociologists’ works on slave ships, shipboard insurrections and/during the Middle¶ Passage,8 or of groundbreaking jazz‐studies books on cross‐cultural dialogue like¶ The Other Side of Nowhere (2004). Nowhere has another side, but once Wilderson¶ theorises blacks as socially and ontologically

dead while dismissing jazz as¶ ‘belonging nowhere and to no one, simply there for the taking’, (225) there seems to¶ be no way back. It is therefore hardly surprising that Wilderson ducks the need to¶ provide a solution or alternative to both his sustained bashing of blacks and anti‐¶ Blackness.9 Last but not least, Red, White and Black ends like a badly plugged¶ announcement of a bad Hollywood film’s badly planned sequel : ‘How does
one¶ deconstruct life? Who would benefit from such an undertaking? The coffle¶ approaches with its answers in tow.’ (340)

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Politicized Identity K

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Politicized Identity K - 1NC
Utilizing politicized identities and categories such as Black or White results in endless violence – we should instead embrace a community-based politics of mere existence Enns 7 (Diane, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Philosophy and Peace Studies, McMaster
University, “Political Life Before Identity”, Theory & Event 10:1, Project Muse, og)
That we need to extricate ourselves not only from the worldview of the perpetrator, but also that of the victim, is the claim I turn to in the remainder of the paper. I will argue, as Mahmood Mamdani does, that

once an economy of violence has evolved out of a binary logic of victim and perpetrator, political transformation cannot occur on the basis of identity.5 It is crucial then, that we engage with those thinkers who attempt to refuse the politicization of identities to begin with -- who articulate a sense of political life before it becomes named or names itself by identifying with this or that category. Arendt, Agamben and Fanon give us some clues as to how to reconceive politics and community in radical ways that disrupt the association between politics and identity, community and the common, sovereign power and mere existence . Several noteworthy points of resonance can be found especially between Agamben and Fanon; both of whom express an affirmation of life lived in an altered relation to politics and to other living beings.

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Politicized Identity K - Link/Impact
Affirming racial identity – victim or perpetrator - causes genocide and prevents progress Enns 7 (Diane, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Philosophy and Peace Studies, McMaster
University, “Political Life Before Identity”, Theory & Event 10:1, Project Muse, og) In his formidable analysis of the Rwandan genocide, Mahmood Mamdani concludes that political identities are artifacts. This does not mean there are not real victims or real perpetrators, but that continuing to act in the name of an identity once an economy of violence has sprung out of the binary logic of victim and perpetrator, or friend and enemy, does not enable political transformation, but prevents it. The great crime of colonialism, from this perspective, went beyond the expropriation of the native; "the greater crime was to politicize indigeneity in the first place ."6 Mamdani includes in
this politicization both the negative libeling of the native by the settler, as well as the positive self-assertion of the native response to this libel, a

The 1994 genocide in Rwanda -occurred in the context of a political world set in motion by Belgian colonialism: a world divided into natives and settlers. The genocide was a natives' genocide, Mamdani argues, a struggle by the majority, the Hutu, to cleanse the country of a threatening "alien"
perspective remarkably similar, as we shall see, to Fanon's position in Black Skin White Masks. unprecedented for its massive civilian participation in the massacre of the Tutsi population -presence, the minority Tutsi, a group with a privileged relation to power before colonialism. This was a violence not of neighbors against neighbors then,

a violence therefore that sought to eliminate a foreign presence from home soil. Rather than focusing on the origin of a racial or ethnic difference, the
as it is generally portrayed, he contends, but against a population viewed as a foreigner;

crucial task, according to Mamdani, is to ask when and how Hutu was made into a native identity and Tutsi into a settler identity, and to understand how

It is not merely the settler's or perpetrator's worldview we need to break out of, but that of the victim as well, for they stand or fall together.
violence is the key to sustaining the relationship between them.7

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Politicized Identity K – Alternative Solvency
We should affirm mere existence – identity affirmation produces violence Enns 7 (Diane, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Philosophy and Peace Studies, McMaster
University, “Political Life Before Identity”, Theory & Event 10:1, Project Muse, og)
Giorgio Agamben's work is increasingly invoked in the task of articulating a politics and ethics of "whatever singularity" or bare life, concepts that have sparked a flurry of attention, especially on the part of those concerned with what these terms imply for political resistance. Drawing out the practical implications of what are often highly abstract formulations is proving to be a challenge.3 I will attempt to meet this challenge by bringing Arendt and Agamben into a discussion concerning race, racism, and victimhood; a particularly salient site for investigating questions of identity and its relation to politics, as well as a timely one, given the new global forms of racism we are currently

proliferation of violent conflicts around the world , whatever their origins -has rendered even the most strategic of strategic essentialisms problematic. I will argue that a focus on what is variously described by Arendt and Agamben as bare life, the pure fact of being human, biological life, or the human-as-such, holds promise for a political thought and practice attempting to extricate itself from the determinations of politicized identities. This is not the promotion of a universal category or community of the human -- not therefore, an abstract universal subject -- but an appeal to the significance of the singularity of life; the bare life or "mere existence" that is included in the realm of politics, power, and rights, only by way of its exclusion.
witnessing.4 It is my contention that the perpetuated by the fear and hatred of an enemy whose identity is never in question --

Embracing mere existence allows for a politics predicated on love and friendship which affirms the humanity of other apart from politicized identity categories Enns 7 (Diane, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Philosophy and Peace Studies, McMaster
University, “Political Life Before Identity”, Theory & Event 10:1, Project Muse, og)
While this mere existence does not constitute an enviable condition for Arendt, she betrays some ambivalence towards it. She protests that inalienable human rights and the dignity that they confer, must be independent of human plurality and remain valid even for those expelled from the human community (OT 298). Whether it is possible, Arendt states, to articulate a sphere of human rights that is above the nation, guaranteed by humanity itself, is open to question. She argues that some kind of organized political community is necessary for all human individuals, yet nevertheless commits herself to thinking about the possibility of rights guaranteed by this naked condition of life beyond law, rights and polities -- for human rights must remain valid for mere existence, she states, the right to have rights must be guaranteed by humanity itself (OT 298). Thus while she considers naked life to pose a great danger to the common, political world -- it perhaps threatens our political life in an even more terrifying way than the wildness of nature once threatened man-made cities -- and even asserts that the production of such mere existence forces people into conditions of savagery and barbarism (OT 302), she alludes to the potentially affirmative

mere existence, that is, all that which is mysteriously given us by birth and which includes the shape of our bodies and the talents of our minds, can be adequately dealt with only by the unpredictable hazards of friendship and sympathy, or by the great and incalculable grace of love , which says with Augustine, "Volo ut sis (I want you to be)," without being able to give any particular reason for such supreme and unsurpassable affirmation. (OT 301) In Agamben's notion of bare life, we again find a certain ambivalence; one that I will argue can only be understood in the context of a
conditions of this status when she relates it to love and friendship: This revised understanding of the meaning of politics. Like Arendt in the above passage, Agamben opens his series of texts on political life, community and sovereign power, by referring to a singular relationship between mere existence and love. He writes that "

love is never directed toward this or that property of the loved one (being blond, being small, being tender, being lame), but neither does it neglect the properties in favor of an insipid generality (universal love): The lover wants the loved one with all of its predicates, its being such as it is."28 It is this "being-such" that is always hidden when we consider relations of belonging to this or that property or class. In other words, when we think of an individual as defined by this particular identity or that, as black or white, male or female, Muslim or Christian, what is denied or hidden is this being-such with all of its predicates. What happens in friendship and love that alters the tendency (and sometimes the imperative) to simplify and essentialize the identity categories to which we belong? In friendship we cease to see the other as white or as black, as gay or straight, able or disabled, female or male. At least, we are aware of these particular identifying categories of a companion, but exist in relation with him or her in a state of "forgetfulness" of, or "indifference" to, this reduction to one singular category. It is when pushing a wheelchair-bound friend into an airport and noting
with annoyance the infantilizing treatment to which one's intelligent and dignified friend is subjected by well-intentioned airport employees, that she becomes disabled. This is not to deny the unique obstacles her disability places before her on a daily basis, but to acknowledge how devastating this lack of the state of forgetfulness can be, as the loved one with all of her predicates becomes reduced to one identifiable category. In using such terms as forgetfulness or indifference, I am attempting to find a language to describe this effect of loving or seeing the other with all of her predicates, her being such as it is -- an "I want

It isn't blindness to disability, color, or gender, but recognition of and appreciation for the bare existence or life of the other, against which the skin color, genitalia or degree of muscle coordination responsible for designating us as this or that identity become relatively insignificant. Insignificant for the love we bear him or
you to be" without reason.

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her, which is not the same as saying insignificant in the sense that another's struggle to live with dignity in the face of discrimination is ignored.

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Politicized Identity K - Alternative Solvency
Communal politics based on mere existence allows us to transcend racial binaries while avoiding humanism’s flaws and juridico-political terror Enns 7 (Diane, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Philosophy and Peace Studies, McMaster
University, “Political Life Before Identity”, Theory & Event 10:1, Project Muse, og) I would like to bring two notions together by way of concluding: "the prevention of catastrophe" by intercepting the politicization of identity categories, and the notion of a politics that has as its subject a living being not separated from the characteristics that give or deny it political value. I have tried to show that Fanon demonstrates this interception of identity by evoking the simple need to be considered a human life worthy of another's human response . Speaking of the Vietnamese resistance movement during the French Indochina war, Fanon writes: "It is not because the Indo-Chinese has discovered a culture of his own that he is in revolt. It is because 'quite simply' it was, in more than one way, becoming impossible for him to breathe." He adds: If the question of practical solidarity with a given past ever arose for me, it did so only to the extent to which I was committed to myself and to my neighbor to fight for all my life and with all my strength so that never again would a people on the earth be subjugated. It was not the black world that laid down my course of conduct. My black skin is not the wrapping of specific values.42 There is a concept of political life in these words that arises from a dissociation of politics as we know it, and identity. It is at once practical, immediate and urgent, as well as hopeful. Through it, we could understand politics as occurring in this "pre-identitied" space, always admitting the potential to succeed and fail at political projects, to communicate and fail at communicating, and to introduce "invention into existence."43 This is not an appeal to a new, all-inclusive identity category of humanity, which is what makes it difficult to conceptualize. But we would not have to go as far as Agamben does in his choice of the most abject embodiments of bare life, or in his absolute division between actuality and potentiality; we could think of political life as this community of singular living beings who are often grouped arbitrarily. As Balibar puts it, relying on Herman van Gunsteren, all political communities are "communities of fate": They are communities that already include difference and conflict, where heterogeneous people and groups have been 'thrown together' by history and economy, in situations where their interests or cultural ideals cannot spontaneously converge, but also cannot completely diverge without risking mutual destruction (or common elimination by external forces). 44 If every individual needs a place in the world where he or she is recognized as a citizen, van Gunsteren argues, then, adds Balibar, this place has to be "any place where individuals and groups belong, wherever they 'happen' to live and therefore work...'"45 Politics does not need to be thought in terms of the determinations we impose on such life. Between Arendt and Agamben we can articulate a radically revised notion of politics. We need political communities of belonging which protect a human being's right to have rights, but neither of these terms -- political or community -- remain static when viewed from the perspective of mere existence or bare life. The political realm is not separated from the existence of bare life; bios is its own zoe, meaning political life is inseparable from natural life. Yet, this is not a politics of sovereignty, a juridico-political order in which citizenship is tied to nationality -- not, that is, a current version of "the personal is political" -- but a politics that expresses itself before the division between public and private, before the determinations of identification with this or that category. A politics, therefore, affirming the life of the child indifferent to the color of her classmate's skin, or of a community unbound to a name or a celebrated past.46 140

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Politicized Identity K - Community Politics Key
Affirming black identity foreclosures progress – only communal politics solves Enns 7 (Diane, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Philosophy and Peace Studies, McMaster
University, “Political Life Before Identity”, Theory & Event 10:1, Project Muse, og) If the aspiration to be white is one problematic response to this doubled consciousness of the black man, the aspiration to be black is another. Fanon states famously that "what
is often called the black soul is a white man's artifact" (BS 14) and throughout this impassioned text he remains critical of even a temporary emphasis on the racialized identity that Du Bois recommends. If Fanon understands the black man's need to assert himself as a black man, and betrays some ambivalence himself with respect to this need, he maintains a critical posture against the Negritude poets who conjure a "Magical Negro culture" characterized by an essentialized Negro sensitivity, intuition, poetry and rhythm (BS 123-128). In what is perhaps an autobiographical gesture, Fanon writes of the educated Negro, "slave of the spontaneous and cosmic Negro myth" who feels at a certain point that his race no longer understands him, or that he no longer understands his race: And it is with rage in his mouth and abandon in his heart that he buries himself in the vast

the refuge sought in an absolute black identity -- however justified by the injury of injustice -- forecloses a future. There is thus for Fanon no future possible in clinging to the identities -- native or settler, victim or perpetrator -- forged in a colonial past through the imposition of violent, Manichean relations. His anti-dote to this renunciation of a future -- however ambivalent and oblique in this text -- is not to dedicate himself "to the revival
black abyss. We shall see that this attitude, so heroically absolute, renounces the present and the future in the name of a mystical past. (BS 14) It is a forceful claim: of an unjustly unrecognized Negro civilization" (BS 226) not to remain a slave of the slavery that dehumanized his ancestors (BS 230), not to accept the amputation of his victimization (BS 140), but to claim his future in the name of mere existence or simple being in relation to other beings. "Superiority? Inferiority?" Fanon asks, "

why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself?" (BS 231). It is an alternative solution to the separation between black and white imposed by the European that implies a radical restructuring of the world (BS 81-2). Fanon calls
this solution "disalienation," which in his well-known essay "Concerning Violence" written in 1961, nearly a decade after Black Skin, White Masks, includes a recourse to violence against the colonizer; a violence that originates in the settler and is turned back on him in the name of reclaiming the humanity and subjectivity from which the native was alienated. Here, however, disalienation is described in a series of negative assertions: it is accomplished neither in the celebration of a black identity, nor in the attempt to be white, for both of these are projects defined within the framework of white colonialism. Fanon frames these assertions in the language of rights; rights that he does not have as a man of colour, such as the right to hope the white man will feel guilt; the right to destroy white pride, to claim reparations, or to "cry out his hatred at the white man" (BS 228-9).

The only right Fanon does claim is "that of demanding human behavior from the other" (BS 229). It is a profound statement about the bare bones of political community; the responsibility one has to the other, both to demand and to bestow compassion on the basis of human life, rather than on recognition for the other's identity or even subject status.

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Politicized Identity K - AT: Strategic Essentialism
No justification for Manichean identification – causes genocidal and regressive politics Enns 7 (Diane, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Philosophy and Peace Studies, McMaster
University, “Political Life Before Identity”, Theory & Event 10:1, Project Muse, og)
My argument is premised on a disagreement with Alcoff, who worries that the focus on such places as Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia in discussions on identity, misses the "obviously different nature" of problems in the United States, a country not constituted by multiple ethnic groups with long histories of border disputes, but rather by forced immigrants and a history of slavery.21 Certainly there are social, political and historical contingencies that must not be

overlooked in discussions of the politics of identity occurring in various locations, within a nation or state as well as without, but there is a similar underlying logic -- a binary economy of victim vs. perpetrator that essentializes identity categories into one camp or the other -- that should make us pause. We don't have to argue that what happened in the
former Yugoslavia could happen in the United States or Canada (although this of course could be argued) to find reasons to critique the politicization of identity. We need only ask what are the effects of such a politics? What kind of political future is created when we operate within the same binary that functioned in the selection, segregation, and victimization of individuals and groups to begin with? How should we define violence in this instance? Thus, I would argue that while forceful arguments continue

to be made for the necessity of identifying with this or that politicized category -even if temporarily -- in the face of global sites of violence perpetuated in the name of identity it is becoming harder to justify even the most strategic of strategic essentialisms.

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Perm

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Policy Permutation
Policy focus is key to challenge structures of white supremacy Themba-Nixon 00, Executive Director of The Praxis Project, a nonprofit organization helping communities use media
and policy advocacy Makani, July 31, Colorlines, Changing the Rules: What Public Policy Means for Organizing, Vol 3.2) “This is all about policy," a woman complained to me in a recent conversation. "I'm an organizer." The flourish and passion with which she made the distinction said everything .

Policy is for wonks, sell-out politicians, and ivory-tower eggheads. Organizing is what real, grassroots people do. Common as it may be, this distinction doesn't bear out in the real world. Policy is more than law. It is any written agreement (formal or informal) that specifies how an
institution, governing body, or community will address shared problems or attain shared goals. It spells out the terms and the consequences of these agreements and is the codification of the body's values-as represented by those present in the policymaking process.

Given who's usually present, most policies reflect the political agenda of powerful elites. Yet, policy can be a force for change-especially when we bring our base and community organizing into the process. In essence, policies are the codification of power relationships and resource allocation. Policies are the rules of the world we live in. Changing the world means changing the rules. So, if organizing is about changing the rules and building power, how can organizing be separated from policies? Can we really speak truth to power, fight the right, stop corporate abuses, or win racial justice without contesting the rules and the rulers, the policies and the policymakers? The answer is no-and double no for people of color. Today, racism subtly dominates nearly every aspect of policymaking. From ballot propositions to city funding priorities, policy is increasingly about the control, de-funding, and

disfranchisement of communities of color. Take the public conversation about welfare reform, for example. Most of us know it isn't really about putting people to work. The right's message was framed around racial stereotypes of lazy, cheating "welfare queens" whose poverty was "cultural." But the new welfare policy was about moving billions of dollars in individual cash payments and direct services from welfare recipients to other, more powerful, social actors. Many of us were too busy to tune into the welfare policy drama in Washington, only to find it washed up right on our doorsteps. Our members are suffering from workfare policies, new regulations, and cutoffs. Families who were barely getting by under the old rules are being pushed over the edge by the new policies. Policy doesn't get more relevant than this. And so we got involved in policy-as defense. Yet we have to do more than block their punches. We have to start the fight with initiatives of our own. Those who do are finding offense a bit more fun than defense alone. Living wage ordinances, youth development initiatives, even gun control and alcohol and tobacco policies are finding their way onto the public agenda, thanks to focused community organizing that leverages power for community-driven initiatives. - Over 600 local policies have been passed to regulate the tobacco industry. Local coalitions have taken the lead by writing ordinances that address local problems and organizing broad support for them. - Nearly 100 gun control and violence prevention policies have been enacted since 1991. - Milwaukee, Boston, and Oakland are among the cities that have passed living wage ordinances: local laws that guarantee higher than minimum wages for workers, usually set as the minimum needed to keep a family of four above poverty. These are just a few of the examples that demonstrate how organizing for local policy advocacy has made inroads in areas where positive national policy had been stalled by conservatives. Increasingly, the local policy arena is where the action is and where activists are finding success. Of course, corporate interests-which are usually the target of these policies-are gearing up in defense. Tactics include front groups, economic pressure, and the tried and true: cold, hard cash. Despite these barriers, grassroots organizing can be very effective at the smaller scale of local politics. At the local level, we have greater access to elected officials and officials have a greater reliance on their constituents for reelection. For example, getting 400 people to show up at city hall in just about any city in the U.S. is quite impressive. On the other hand, 400 people at the state house or the Congress would have a less significant impact. Add to that the fact that all 400 people at city hall are usually constituents, and the impact is even greater. Recent trends in government underscore the importance of local policy. Congress has enacted a series of measures devolving significant power to state and local government. Welfare, health care, and the regulation of food and drinking water safety are among the areas where states and localities now have greater rule. Devolution has some negative consequences to be sure. History has

lack of clear federal standards and mechanisms for accountability lead to uneven enforcement and even discriminatory implementation of policies. Still, there are real opportunities for advancing progressive initiatives in this
taught us that, for social services and civil rights in particular, the more localized environment. Greater local control can mean greater community power to shape and implement important social policies that were heretofore out of reach. To do so will

require careful attention to the mechanics of local policymaking and a clear blueprint of what we stand for. Much of the work of framing what we stand for takes place in the shaping of demands. By getting into the policy arena in a proactive manner, we can take our demands to the next level. Our demands can become law, with real consequences if the agreement is broken. After all the organizing, press work, and effort, a group should leave a decisionmaker with more than a handshake and his or her word. Of course, this work requires a certain amount of interaction with "the suits," as well as struggles with the bureaucracy, the technical language, and the all-too-common resistance by decisionmakers. Still, if it's worth demanding, it's worth
having in writing-whether as law, regulation, or internal policy. From ballot initiatives on rent control to laws requiring worker protections, organizers are leveraging their power into written policies that are making a real difference in their communities. Of course,

policy work is just one tool in our box. 144

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The Perm Solves- overstating the effect of race ensures solidifies racial identities- ensures the alt doesn’t solve Jane Carey (Postcolonialism Researcher, Monach U), Leigh Boucher (School of Modern History &
PLS, Marquarie U), and Katherine Ellinghaus (School of Hist Studies, Monach U), Re-Orienting Whiteness (B) 2009
(p3-4) Arneson was not alone, as the flurry of similarly dissatisfied reviews indicated." Although not as scathing, Peter Kolchin, for example, also expressed uneasiness at the "elusive, undefined nature of whiteness," the lack of "historical grounding" of many contemporary studies, and the "over-reliance on whiteness in explaining the American past." 2° In assigning such

overarching explanatory power to whiteness, he suggested, the field is prone to overstatement and overgeneralization, coming close to "portraying race as a ubiquitous and unchanging transhistorical force rather than a shifting and contingent 'construction.'" 21 Kolchin also briefly observed that one of the "most striking features" of whiteness studies is the "assumption—sometimes asserted and sometimes unspoken—that the racism they describe is uniquely American and that American whiteness can be understood in isolation." 22 The most influential U.S. scholarship, particularly that by labor historians, locates the creation of white identity
entirely within historical circumstances quite specific to the United States, namely black chattel slavery and, later, mass immigration. 23 While this narrow national focus has not emerged as a prominent concern within existing critiques of the field, we

is in fact of central importance. Much historical work on whiteness is even more narrowly positioned. As John Munro has outlined, it largely represents another in the series of U.S. labor history projects
argue that it that have sought to answer the question Werner Sombart posed in 1906, "Why is there no socialism in the United States?," and is primarily concerned with finding "a usable past upon which an anti-capitalist and antiracist future can be envisioned." 24 This in part explains why it has largely ignored wider scholarship that does not share these, very

particular, interests, and why many objections to whiteness studies have simply joined the long history of attempts to assert the primacy of class over race. 25 Despite pretensions to an almost universal applicability, distinct U.S. academic debates, as well as specific political projects and disavowals (particularly of the settler-colonial underpinnings of the United States), silently orient the field. In many ways, debates about whiteness have primarily reflected a turf war over leadership in the field of labor history in the United States. The issues at stake are far too important to allow them to be subsumed within such parochial concerns.

Their understanding of whiteness leaves whites with one option – insurgency and repudiation. This is bound to fail—liberal actions creates a representation of “whiteness” that faciliates rearticulating a positive, and anti-racist white racial formation. Howard Winant Sociology @ UCSB ’97 Behind Blue Eyes: Contemporary White Racial Politics
http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/winant/whitness.html Nevertheless, the neoliberal project does undertake a crucial task: the construction of a transracial political agenda, and the articulation of white and minority interests in a viable strategic perspective. This is something which has been missing from the US political scene since the

enactment of civil rights legislation thirty years ago. THE ABOLITIONIST PROJECT Drawing their inspiration from W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin, the social historians who have provided the core insights of the abolitionist project stress the "invention of whiteness" as a pivotal development in the rise of US capitalism. They have begun a process of historical reinterpretation which aims to set race -- or more properly, the gestation and evolution of white supremacy -- at the center of US politics and culture. Thus far, they have focused attention on a series of formative events and processes: the precedent of British colonial treatment of the Irish (Allen 1994, Ignatiev 1995); the early, multiracial resistance to indentured servitude and quasi-slavery, which culminated in the defeat of Bacon's Rebellion in late 17th century Virginia; the self-identification of "free" workers as white in the antebellum North (Roediger 1991); and the construction of a "white republic" in the late 19th century (Saxton 1990). These studies, in some cases quite prodigious intellectual efforts, have had a significant impact on how we understand not only racial formation, but also class formation and the developing forms of popular culture in US history. What they reveal above all is how crucial the construction of whiteness was, and remains, for the development and maintenance of capitalist class rule in the US. Furthermore, these studies also show how the meaning of whiteness, like that of race in general, has time and again proved flexible enough to adapt to shifts in the capitalist division of labor, to reform initiatives which extended democratic rights, and to changes in ideology and cultural representation.

The core message of the abolitionist project is the imperative of repudiation of white 145

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identity and white privilege, the requirement that "the lie of whiteness" be exposed .
This rejection of whiteness on the part of those who benefit from it, this "new abolitionism," it is argued, is a precondition for the establishment of substantive racial equality and social justice -- or more properly, socialism -- in the US. Whites must become "race traitors," as the new journal of the abolitionist project calls itself. Its motto: "Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity." How is this rejection of whiteness to be accomplished? Both analytical and practical measures are envisioned. On the intellectual level, the abolitionist project invites us to contemplate the emptiness, indeed vacuity, of the white category: It is not merely that whiteness is oppressive and false; it is that whiteness is nothing but oppressive and false.... It is the empty and terrifying attempt to build an identity based on what one isn't and on whom one can hold back (Roediger 1994, 13; emphasis original). In short, there is no white culture, no white politics, no whiteness, except in the sense of distancing and rejection of racially-defined "otherness." On the practical level, the argument goes, whites can become "race traitors" by rejecting their privilege, by refusing to collude with white supremacy. When you hear that racist joke, confront its teller. When you see the police harassing a nonwhite youth, try to intervene or at least bear witness. In short, recognize that white supremacy depends on the thousands of minute acts that reproduce it from moment to moment; it must "deliver" to whites a sense of their own security and superiority; it must make them feel that "I am different from those "others." Single gestures of this sort, Race Traitor's editors say, ...would [not] in all likelihood be of much consequence. But if enough of those who looked white broke the rules of the club to make the cops doubt their ability to recognize a white person merely by looking at him or her, how would it affect the cops' behavior (Editorial 1993, 4-5)? Thus the point is not that all whites recognize the lie of their privilege, but that enough whites do so, and act out their rejection of that lie, to disrupt the "white club's" ability to enforce its supremacy. It is easy to sympathize with this analysis, at least up to a point. The postwar black movement, which in the US context at least served as the point of origin for all the "new social movements" and the much-reviled "politics of identity," taught the valuable lesson that politics went "all the way down." That is, meaningful efforts to achieve greater social justice could not tolerate a public/private, or a collective/individual distinction. Trying to change society meant trying to change one's own life. The formula "the personal is political," commonly associated with feminism, had its early origins among the militants of the civil rights movement (Evans 1980). The problems come when deeper theoretical and practical problems are raised. Despite their explicit adherence to a "social construction" model of race (one which bears a

theorists of the abolitionist project do not take that insight as seriously as they should. They employ it chiefly to argue against biologistic conceptions of race, which is fine; but they fail to consider the complexities and rootedness of social construction, or as we would term it, racial formation. Is the social
significant resemblance to my own work), construction of whiteness so flimsy that it can be repudiated by a mere act of political will, or even by widespread and repeated acts aimed at rejecting white privilege? I think not; whiteness may not be a legitimate cultural identity in the sense of having a discrete, "positive" content, but it is certainly an overdetermined political and cultural category, having to do with socioeconomic status, religious affiliation, ideologies of individualism, opportunity, and citizenship, nationalism, etc. Like any other complex of

beliefs and practices, "whiteness" is imbedded in a highly articulated social structure and system of significations; rather than trying to repudiate it, we shall have to rearticulate it. That sounds like a daunting task, and of course it is, but it is not nearly as impossible as erasing whiteness altogether, as the abolitionist project seeks to do. Furthermore, because whiteness is a relational concept, unintelligible without reference to nonwhiteness -- note how this is true even of Roediger's formulation about "build[ing] an identity based on what one isn't" -that rearticulation (or reinterpretation, or deconstruction) of whiteness can begin relatively easily, in the messy present, with the recognition that whiteness already contains substantial nonwhite elements. Of course, that recognition is only the beginning of a large and arduous process of political labor, which I shall address in the concluding section of this paper. Notwithstanding
these criticisms of the abolitionist project, we consider many of its insights to be vital components in the process of reformulating, or synthesizing, a progressive approach to whiteness. Its attention is directed toward prescisely the place where the neo-liberal racial project is weak: the point at which white identity constitutes a crucial support to white supremacy, and a central obstacle to the achievement of substantive social equality and racial justice. CONCLUDING NOTES: WHITENESS AND CONTEMPORARY POLITICS In a situation of racial dualism, as Du Bois observed more than 90 years ago, race operates both to assign us and to deny us our identity. It both makes the social world intelligible, and simultaneously renders it opaque and mysterious. Not only does it allocate resources, power, and privilege; it also provides means for challenging that allocation. The contradictory character of race provides the context in which racial dualism -or the "color-line," as Du Bois designated it, has developed as "the problem of the 20th century." So what's new? Only that, as a result of incalculable human effort, suffering, and sacrifice, we now realize that these truths apply across the board. Whites and whiteness can no longer be exempted from the comprehensive racialization process that is the hallmark of US history and social structure. This is the present-day context for racial conflict and thus for US politics in general, since race continues to play its designated role of crystallizing all the fundamental issues in US society. As always, we articulate our

anxieties in racial terms: wealth and poverty, crime and punishment, gender and sexuality, nationality and citizenship, culture and power, are all articulated in the US primarily through race. So what's new? It's the problematic of whiteness that has emerged as the principal source of anxiety and conflict in the postwar US. Although this situation was anticipated or prefigured at earlier moments in the nation's past -- for example, in the
"hour of eugenics" (Stepan 1991, Kevles 1985, Gould 1981) -- it is far more complicated now than ever before, largely due to the present unavailability of biologistic forms of racism as a convenient rationale for white supremacy.[7] Whiteness -- visible whiteness, resurgent whiteness, whiteness as a color, whiteness as difference -- this is what's new, and newly problematic, in contemporary US politics. The reasons for this have already emerged in my discussion of the spectrum of racial projects and the particular representations these projects assign to whiteness. Most centrally, the problem of the meaning of whiteness appears as a direct consequence of the movement challenge posed in the 1960s to white supremacy. The battles of that period have not been resolved;

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they have not been won or lost; however battered and bruised, the demand for substantive racial equality and general social justice still lives. And while it lives, the strength of white supremacy is in doubt. The racial projects of the right are clear efforts to resist the challenge to white supremacy posed by the movements of the 1960s and their contemporary inheritors. Each of these projects has a particular relationship to the white supremacist legacy, ranging from the far right's efforts to justify and solidify white entitlements, through the new right's attempts to utilize the white supremacist tradition for more immediate and expedient political ends, to the neoconservative project's quixotic quest to surgically separate the liberal democratic tradition from the racism that traditionally underwrote it. The biologistic racism of the far right, the expedient and subtextual racism of the new right, and the bad-faith antiracism of the neoconservatives have many differences from each other, but they have at least one thing in common. They all seek to maintain the long-standing association between whiteness and US political traditions, between whiteness and US nationalism, between whiteness and universalism. They all seek in different ways to preserve white identity from the particularity, the difference, which the 1960s movement challenge assigned to it. The racial projects of the left are the movements' successors (as is neoconservatism, in a somewhat perverse sense). Both the neoliberal racial project and the abolitionist project seek to fulfill the movement's thwarted dreams of a genuinely (i.e., substantively) egalitarian society, one in which significant redistribution of wealth and power has taken place, and race no longer serves as the most significant marker between winners and losers, haves and have nots, powerful and powerless. Although they diverge significantly -- since the neoliberals seek to accomplish their ends through a conscious diminution of the significance of race, and the abolitionists hope to achieve similar ends through a conscious reemphasizing of the importance of race -- they also have one very important thing in common. They both seek to rupture the barrier between whites and racially-defined minorities, the obstacle which prevents joint political action. They both seek to associate whites and nonwhites, to reinterpret the meaning of whiteness in such a way that it no longer has the power to impede class alliances. Although the differences and indeed the hostility -- between the neoliberal and abolitionist projects, between the reform-oriented and radical conceptions of whiteness -- are quite severe, we consider it vital that adherents of each project recognize that they hold part of the key to challenging white supremacy in the contemporary US, and that their counterpart project holds the other part of the key.

Neoliberals rightfully argue that a pragmatic approach to transracial politics is vital if the momentum of racial reaction is to be halted or reversed . Abolitionists properly emphasize

challenging the ongoing commitment to white supremacy on the part of many whites. Both of these positions need to draw on each other, not only in strategic terms, but in theoretical ones as well. The recognition that racial identities -- all racial identities, including whiteness -- have become implacably dualistic, could be far more liberating on the left than it has thus far been. For neoliberals, it could permit and indeed justify an acceptance of race-consciousness and even nationalism among racially-defined minorities as a necessary but partial response to disenfranchisement, disempowerment, and superexploitation. There is no inherent reason why such a political position could not coexist with a strategic awareness of the need for strong, class-conscious, transracial coalitions. We have seen many such examples in the past: in the anti-slavery movement, the communist movement of the 1930s (Kelley 1994), and in the 1988 presidential bid of Jesse Jackson, to name but a few. This is not to say that all would be peace and harmony if such alliances could come more permanently into being. But there is no excuse for not attempting to find the pragmatic "common ground" necessary to create them. Abolitionists could also benefit from a recognition that on a

pragmatic basis, whites can ally with racially-defined minorities without renouncing their whiteness. If they truly agree that race is a socially constructed concept, as they claim, abolitionists should also be able to recognize that racial identities are not either-or matters, not closed concepts that must be upheld in a reactionary fashion or disavowed in a comprehensive act of renunciation. To use a postmodern language I dislike: racial
identities are deeply "hybridized"; they are not "sutured," but remain open to rearticulation. "To be white in America is to be very black. If you don't know how black you are, you don't know how American you are" (Thompson 1995, 429).

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Kritical Permutation - Diversality
Perm solves best – intersecting different perspectives is compatible with destroying Western hegemony Mignolo 2K [Walter D., William H. Wannamaker Professor of Romance Studies and
professor of literature and cultural anthropology at Duke University, “The Many Faces of Cosmopolis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism” Public Culture 12.3, http://www.wun.ac.uk/external/incaps/seminars/2006_07%20program/documents/walkowitz/Mign olo1.pdf, Acc: 8/5/12, og] Finally, my argument intended to be from a subaltern perspective (which ¶ implies not inferiority but awareness of a subaltern position in a current geopolitical distribution of epistemic power). In a sense, it is an argument for globalization from below; at the same time, it is an argument for the geopolitically¶ diversal—that is, one that conceives diversity as a (cosmopolitan) universal project. If you can imagine Western civilization as a large circle with a series of satellite circles intersecting the larger one but disconnected from each other, diversality will be the project that connects the diverse subaltern satellites appropriating¶ and transforming Western global designs. Diversality can be imagined as a new¶ medievalism, a pluricentric world built on the ruins of ancient, non-Western cultures and civilizations with the debris of Western civilization. A cosmopolitanism that only connects from the center of the large circle outward, and leaves ¶ the outer places disconnected from each other, would be a cosmopolitanism from ¶ above, like Vitoria’s and Kant’s cosmopolitanism in the past and Rawls’s and ¶ Habermas’s cosmopolitanism today, and like the implications of human rights¶ discourse, according to which only one philosophy has it “right.”

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Kritical Permutation - Diversality
Perm solves – combining oppressed perspectives creates a diversal politics that solves the K and prevents oppositional violence – this is a prerequisite to alternative solvency Mignolo 2K [Walter D., William H. Wannamaker Professor of Romance Studies and
professor of literature and cultural anthropology at Duke University, “The Many Faces of Cosmopolis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism” Public Culture 12.3, http://www.wun.ac.uk/external/incaps/seminars/2006_07%20program/documents/walkowitz/Mign olo1.pdf, Acc: 8/5/12, og] The abstract universal is what hegemonic perspectives provide , be they¶ neoliberal or neo-Marxist. The perspective from the colonial difference (illustrated in the dilemma formulated by An-Na’im and further developed with the ¶ example of the Zapatistas) instead opens the possibility of imagining border¶ thinking as the necessary condition for a future critical and dialogic cosmopolitanism . Such a critical and dialogic cosmopolitanism itself leads toward “diversality,” instead of toward a new universality grounded (again) “on the potential of¶ democratic politicization as the true European legacy from ancient Greece¶ onward” (Ziˇ¶ ˇ zek 1998: 1009). A new universalism recasting the democratic potential of the European legacy is not necessarily a solution to the vicious circle¶ between (neo)liberal globalization and “regressive forms of fundamentalist¶ hatred” (Zizek 1998: 1009). It is hard to imagine that the entire planet would ¶ endorse the democratic potential of “the European legacy from ancient Greece ¶ onward.” The entire planet could, in fact, endorse a democratic, just, and cosmopolitan project as far as democracy and justice are detached from their “fundamental” European heritage, from Greece onward, and they are taken as connectors around which critical cosmopolitanism would be articulated. Epistemic¶ diversality shall be the ground for political and ethical cosmopolitan projects. In¶ other words, diversity as a universal project (that is, diversality) shall be the aim¶ instead of longing for a new abstract universal and rehearsing a new universality¶ grounded in the “true” Greek or Enlightenment legacy. Diversality as the horizon¶ of critical and dialogic cosmopolitanism presupposes border thinking or border¶ epistemology grounded on the critique of all possible fundamentalism (Western¶ and non-Western, national and religious, neoliberal and neosocialist) and on the¶ faith in accumulation at any cost that sustains capitalist organizations of the¶ economy (Mignolo 2000). Since diversality (or diversity as a universal project)¶ emerges from the experience of coloniality of power and the colonial difference,¶ it cannot be reduced to a new form of cultural relativism but should be thought¶ out as new forms of projecting and imagining, ethically and politically, from subaltern perspectives. As Manuel Castells (1997: 109) puts it, the Zapatistas, American militia, and Aum Shinrikyo are all social movements that act politically ¶ against globalization and against the state. My preference for the Zapatistas and ¶ not for the other two is an ethical rather than a political choice. Diversality as a¶ universal project, then, shall be simultaneously ethical, political, and philosophical. It cannot be identified, either, with oppositional violence beyond the European Union and the United States . And of course, by definition, it cannot be¶ located in the hegemonic global designs that have been the target of critical ¶ reflections in this essay. As John Rawls would word it in his explorations on the “law (instead of the right) of peoples,” diversality as a universal project shall be ¶ identified with “the honest non-

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liberal people (Rawls 1999: 90, see also 89–¶ 128). But also with “the honest non-Western people or people of color” that¶ Rawls, following Kant, doesn’t have in his horizon.

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