AT Modernity Impacts
Modernity not the root cause of violence
Curtler 97 – PhD Philosophy, Hugh, “rediscovering values: coming to terms with postnmodernism”
44-7
The second and third concerns, though, are more serious and to a degree more legitimate. The
second concern is that "reason is the product of the Enlightenment, modern science, and Western
society, and as such for the postmodernists, it is guilty byassociation of allthe errors attributed to them,
[namely], violence, suffering, and alienation in the twentieth century, be it the Holocaust, world wars,
Vietnam, Stalin's Gulag, or computer record-keeping . . ." (Rosenau 1992, 129). Although this is a
serious concern, it is hardly grounds for the rejection of reason, for which postmodernism
calls in a loud, frenetic voice. There is precious little evidence that the problems of the
twentieth century are the result of too much reason! On the contrary. To be sure, it was
Descartes's dream to reduce every decision to a calculation, and in ethics, this dream bore fruit in
Jeremy Bentham's abortive "calculus" of utilities. But at least since the birth of the social sciences at
the end of the last century, and with considerable help from logical positivism, ethics (and values
in general) has been relegated to the dung heap of "poetical and metaphysical nonsense,"
and in the minds of the general populace, reason has no place in ethics, which is the proper
domain of feeling. The postmodern concern to place feelings at the center of ethics, and
judgment generally—which is the third of their three objections to modern reason—simply
plays into the hands of the hardened popular prejudice that has little respect for the
abilities of human beings to resolve moral differences reasonably. Can it honestly be said of
any major decision made in thiscentury that it was the result of "too much reason" and that feelings
and emotions played no part? Surely not.Can this be said in the case of any of the concerns reflected
in the list above: are violence, suffering, and alienation, or the Holocaust, Vietnam, Stalin's
Gulag, or Auschwitz the result of a too reasonable approach to human problems? No one
could possibly make this claim who has dared to peek into the dark and turbid recesses of the human
psyche. In every case, it is more likely that these concerns result from such things as sadism,
envy, avarice, love of power, the "death wish," or short-term self-interest, none of which is
"reasonable."One must carefully distinguish between the methods ofthe sciences, which are
thoroughly grounded in reason and logic, and the uses men and women make of science. The
warnings of romantics such as Goethe (who was himself no mean scientist) and Mary Shelley were
directed not against science per se but rather against the misuse of science and the human tendency
to become embedded in the operations of the present moment. To the extent that postmodernism
echoes these concerns, I would share them without hesitation. But the claim that our present
culture suffers because of an exclusive concern with "reasonable" solutions to human
problems, with a fixation on the logos, borders on the absurd.What is required here is not a
mindless rejection of human reason on behalf of "intuition," "conscience," or "feelings" in
the blind hope that somehow complex problems will be solved if we simply do whatever
makes us feel good. Feelings and intuitions are notoriously unreliable and cannot be made
the center of a workable ethic. We now have witnessed several generations of college students
who are convinced that "there's no disputing taste" in the arts and that ethics is all about feelings. As a
result, it is almost impossible to get them to take these issues seriously. The notion that we can
trust our feelings to find solutions to complex problems is little more than a false hope.We
are confronted today with problems on a scale heretofore unknown, and what is called for is
patience, compassion (to be sure), and above all else, clear heads. In a word, what is called for is
a balance between reason and feelings—not the rejection of one or the other. One need only
recall Nietzsche's own concern for the balance between Dionysus and Apollo in his Birth of Tragedy.
Nietzscheknew better than his followers, apparently, that one cannot sacrifice Apollo to Dionysus in the
futile hope that we can rely on our blind instincts to get us out of the hole we have dug for ourselves.
Must focus on the proximal
Curtler 97 – PhD Philosophy, Hugh, “rediscovering values: coming to terms with postnmodernism”
164-5
At the same time, we must beware the temptation to reject out of hand everything that stinks
of modernism and the Enlightenment. We must resist the postmodern urge to reject and
reduce in the conviction that everything Western humans thought prior to 1930 leads
inevitably to the Holocaust and its aftermath and that every exemplary work of art and literature
diminishes the human soul. In particular, we must maintain a firm hold on our intellectual
center and, while acknowledging the need for greater compassion and heightened
imaginative power, also acknowledge our need for reasonable solutions to complex issues.
Indeed, the rejection of reason and "techno-science" as it is voiced by such thinkers as JeanFrançois Lyotard seems at times little more than resentment born of a sense of betrayal: "it is no
longer possible to call development progress" (Lyotard 1992, 78). Instead, modernism has given us
Auschwitz. Therefore, we will blame reason and science as the vehicles that have brought us to
this crisis. Reason has yielded technology, which has produced nuclear weapons, mindless
diversions, and choking pollution in our cities while enslaving the human spirit. Therefore,
we reject reason. This is odd logic. Reason becomes hypostatized and is somehow guilty of
having made false promises. The fault may not lie with our tools or methods, however, but with the
manner in which we adapted them and the tasks we demanded they perform. That is to say, the
problem may lie not with our methods but with ourselves. At times, one wonders whether
thinkers such as Lyotard read Dostoyevsky, Freud, or Jung, whether they know anything about human
depravity. Science is not at fault; foolish men and women (mostly men) who have expected the
impossible of methods that were designed primarily to solve problems are at fault. We cannot blame
science because we have made of it an idol. Lyotard was correct when he said that "scientific or
technical discovery was never subordinate to demands arising from human needs. It was always
driven by a dynamic independent of the things people might judge desirable, profitable, or comfortable"
(Lyotard 1992, 83). But instead of focusing attention on the "dynamic," he chooses to reject
the entire techno-scientific edifice. This is reactionary. We face serious problems, and the
rejection of science and technology will lead us back to barbarism, not to nirvana. What is
required is a lesson in how to control our methods and make them serve our needs. Thus,
although one can sympathize with the postmodern attack on scientific myopia, one must
urge caution in the face of hysteria. There are additional problems with postmodernism,
however.
================
█ Repatriation █
================
**Red Atlantic**
Red Atlantic Repatriation 1NC
Starting at what they call the middle passage, the indigenous forced migration
across the Atlantic, perpetuates the erasure of colonialism because it ignores the
fundamental elimination that was the pre-requsite for U.S. state building. That is
the indigenous existence on land is always already being erased as a part of the
colonial project. Their focus on ocean exploration and interaction is an intellectual
manifestation of this erasure because they criticize the system but direct attention
away from how the very ground upon which we stand has been cemented by
indigenous elimination.
Smith 10
[Andrea Smith, associate professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at the
University of California, Riverside, “Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy,”
http://www.worlddialogue.org/content.php?id=488, 7/28/14]
A second pillar of white supremacy is the logic of genocide. This logic holds that indigenous
peoples must disappear. In fact, they must always be disappearing, in order to enable nonindigenous peoples’ rightful claim to land. Through this logic of genocide, non-Native
peoples then become the rightful inheritors of all that was indigenous—land, resources,
indigenous spirituality, and culture. Genocide serves as the anchor of colonialism: it is what
allows non-Native peoples to feel they can rightfully own indigenous peoples’ land. It is
acceptable exclusively to possess land that is the home of indigenous peoples because
indigenous peoples have disappeared. A third pillar of white supremacy is the logic of
orientalism. “Orientalism” was Edward Said’s term for the process of the West’s defining itself as
a superior civilisation by constructing itself in opposition to an “exotic” but inferior “Orient”.4
(Here, I am using the term “orientalism” more broadly than to signify solely what has been
historically named as the “orient” or “Asia”.) The logic of orientalism marks certain peoples or
nations as inferior and deems them to be a constant threat to the wellbeing of empire. These
peoples are still seen as “civilisations”—they are not property or the “disappeared”. However,
they are imagined as permanent foreign threats to empire. This logic is evident in the antiimmigration movements in the United States that target immigrants of colour. It does not
matter how long immigrants of colour reside in the United States, they generally become targeted
as foreign threats, particularly during war-time. Consequently, orientalism serves as the anchor of
war, because it allows the United States to justify being in a constant state of war to protect itself
from its enemies. Orientalism allows the United States to defend the logics of slavery and
genocide as these practices enable it to stay “strong enough” to fight these constant wars. What
becomes clear, then, is what Sora Han declares: the United States is not at war; the United States
is war.5 For the system of white supremacy to stay in place, the United States must always be at
war. Under the old but still dominant model, organising by people of colour was based on
the notion of organising around shared victimhood. In this model, however, we see that we are
not only victims of white supremacy, but complicit in it as well. Our survival strategies and
resistance to white supremacy are set by the system of white supremacy itself. What keeps us
trapped within our particular pillars of white supremacy is that we are seduced by the prospect of
being able to participate in the other pillars. For example, all non-Native peoples are promised
the ability to join in the colonial project of settling indigenous lands. All non-black peoples
are promised that if they conform, they will not be at the bottom of the racial hierarchy.
And black and Native peoples are promised that they will advance economically and
politically if they join US wars to spread “democracy”. Thus, organising by people of colour
must be premised on making strategic alliances with one another, based on where we are situated
within the larger political economy. Coalition work is based on organising not just around
oppression, but also around complicity in the oppression of other peoples as well as our
own. 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 white-supremacist 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. However, 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). The Disappearing Native in Race Theory With this framework in mind, I will now
explore how the failure to address the logics of genocide/colonialism negatively affects the
work of scholars who focus on racial theory. Of course, the most prominent work would be
Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s Racial Formation in the United States.7 Their
groundbreaking work speaks to the centrality of race in structuring the world. Omi and Winant
demonstrate that race cannot simply be understood as epiphenomenal to other social
formations, such as class. They further explain how race is foundational to the structure of
the United States itself. As I will discuss later, their work makes important contributions that
those engaged in Native studies will want to take seriously. At the same time, however, it
generally ignores the importance of indigenous genocide and colonialism in its analysis of
racial formations. The one instance where Omi and Winant discuss colonialism at length is in
their critique of the “internal colonialism” thesis—that communities of colour should be
understood as colonies internal to the United States. In rejecting this thesis, they do not
differentiate Native peoples from “racial minorities”. Interestingly, they judge that the
applicability of the internal colonialism thesis to the contemporary United States “with significant
exceptions such as Native American conditions ... appears to be limited”.8 But then they do not
go on to discuss what the significance of this “exception” might mean. One possible reason that
the “exception” of Native genocide is not fully explored is that it is relegated to the past. That is,
Omi and Winant argue that the United States has shifted from a racial dictatorship
characterised by “the mass murder and expulsion of indigenous peoples” to a racial
democracy in which “the balance of coercion began to change”.9 Essentially, the problem of
Native genocide and settler colonialism today disappears. This tension is then reflected in
some contradictory impulses in Omi and Winant’s analysis. On the one hand, they note that “the
state is inherently racial”.10 Their analysis of the state as inherently racial echoes Derrick Bell’s
notion of racism as permanent to society. However, they do not necessarily share his conclusions.
Bell calls on black peoples to “acknowledge the permanence of our subordinate status”.11 He
disavows any possibility of “transcendent change”.12 On the contrary, “It is time we concede
that a commitment to racial equality merely perpetuates our disempowerment.”13 The
alternative Bell advocates is resistance for its own sake—living “to harass white folks”—or
short-term pragmatic strategies that focus less on eliminating racism and more on simply
ensuring that we do not “worsen conditions for those we are trying to help”.14 While Omi
and Winant similarly argue that the United States is inherently racial, they clearly do not want to
adopt the pessimism of Bell. Consequently, they argue that a focus on institutional racism
makes it “difficult to see how the democratization of U.S. society could be achieved, and
difficult to explain what progress has been made”. The result is thus “a deep pessimism about
any efforts to overcome racial barriers”.15 Now, if the state is understood to be inherently
racial, it follows that one would not expect racial progress, but rather shifts in how racism
operates within it. Thus, under this racial realism framework, one is forced either to adopt a
project of racial progress that contradicts the initial analysis that the United States is inherently
racist, or to forgo the possibility of eradicating white supremacy. The reason for these two equally
problematic options is that this analysis presumes the permanency of the United States. Because
racial theorists often lack an analysis of settler colonialism, they do not imagine other forms
of governance that are not founded on the racial state. When we do not presume the givenness
of settler states, then it is not as difficult to recognise the racial nature of nation-states while
simultaneously maintaining a non-pessimistic approach to ending white supremacy. Many people
in Native studies believe alternative forms of governance can be developed that are not based
on nation-states. We can work towards “transcendent change” by not presuming it will happen
within the confines of the US state. This tendency for theorists of race to presume the givenness
of the settler state is not unique to Bell or Omi and Winant, and in fact appears to be the norm.
For instance, Joe Feagin has written several works on race that focus on the primacy of anti-black
racism because he argues that “no other racially oppressed group … has been so central to the
internal economic, political, and cultural structure and evolution of the North American
society”.16 He does note that the United States is formed from stolen land and argues that the
“the brutal and bloody actions and consequences of European conquests do often fit the United
Nations definition of genocide”.17 So, if the United States is fundamentally constituted
through the genocide of Native peoples, why are Native peoples not central to the development
of American society? Again, the answer is that the Native genocide is relegated to the past so
that the givenness of settler colonialism today can be presumed.18 Jared Sexton, in his
otherwise brilliant analysis in Amalgamation Schemes, also presumes the continuance of settler
colonialism.19 He describes Native peoples as a “racial group” to be collapsed into all non-black
peoples of colour. Sexton goes so far as to argue for a black/non-black paradigm that is parallel to
a “black/immigrant” paradigm, rhetorically collapsing indigenous peoples into the category of
immigrants, in effect erasing their relationship to this land and hence reifying the settler colonial
project. Similarly, Angela Harris argues for a “black exceptionalism” that defines race relations in
which Native peoples play a “subsidiary” role. To make this claim, she lumps Native peoples into
the category of racial minority and even “immigrant” by contending that “contempt for blacks is
part of the ritual through which immigrant groups become ‘American’ ”.20 Of course, what is not
raised in this analysis is that “America” itself can exist only through the disappearance of
indigenous peoples. Feagin, Sexton and Harris fail to consider that markers of “racial
progress” for Native peoples are also markers of genocide. For instance, Sexton contends that
the high rate of interracial marriages for Native peoples indicates racial progress rather
than being part of the legacy of US policies of cultural genocide, including boarding schools,
relocation, removal and termination. Interestingly, a central intervention made by Sexton is that
the politics of multiculturalism depends on anti-black racism. That is, multiculturalism exists to
distance itself from blackness (since difference from whiteness, defined as racial purity, is already
a given). However, with an expanded notion of the logics of settler colonialism, his analysis could
resonate with indigenous critiques of mestizaje, whereby the primitive indigenous subject always
disappears into the more complex, evolved mestizo subject. These signs of “racial progress”
could then be rearticulated as markers of indigenous disappearance and what Denise Ferreira
da Silva terms as racial engulfment into the white self-determining subject.21 Thus, besides
presuming the genocide of Native peoples and the givenness of settler society, these analyses
also misread the logics of anti-indigenous racism (as well as other forms of racism). As
mentioned previously, it is important to conceptualise white supremacy as operating through
multiple logics rather than through a single one. Otherwise, we may misunderstand a racial
dynamic by simplistically explaining one logic of white supremacy through another logic. In the
case of Native peoples, those with lighter skin may have greater “independence” to some extent
than black peoples, relating to their position in the colour hierarchy. However, if we look at the
status of Native peoples also through a logic of genocide, this “independence that accrues through
assimilation” in fact is a strategy of genocide that enables the theft of Native lands.22 Thus,
Andrew Jackson, the seventh US president (1829–37), justified the removal of Cherokee peoples
from their lands on the basis that they were now really “white” and hence not entitled to them.23
The Aff is the politics of recognition. Instead we need to rethink liberation outside of
the context of the white supremacist colonial state
Smith 10 [Andrea Smith, associate professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies
at the University of California, Riverside, “Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy,”
http://www.worlddialogue.org/content.php?id=488, 7/28/14, AR]
In the end, Williams’s long-term vision for Native rights does not seem to go beyond state
recognition within a colonial framework. That said, this critique is in no way meant to invalidate
the important contributions Williams does make in intersecting Native studies with critical race
theory. It may well be that the apparent contradictions in his analysis are the result less of his
actual thinking than of a rhetorical strategy designed to convince legal scholars to take his claims
seriously. Moreover, while conditions of settler colonialism persist, short-term legal and
political strategies are needed to address them. As Michelle Alexander notes, reform and
revolutionary strategies are not mutually inconsistent; reformist strategies can be movementbuilding if they are articulated as such.41 In this regard, Williams’s provocative call to overturn
the precedents established in the Cherokee nation cases speaks to the manner in which Native
sovereignty struggles have unwittingly built their short-term legal strategies on a foundation of
white supremacy. And as Scott Lyons’s germinal work on Native nationalism in X-Marks
suggests,42 any project for decolonisation begins with the political and legal conditions under
which we currently live, so our goal must be to make the most strategic use of the political and
legal instruments before us while remaining alert to how we can be co-opted by using them. But
in the end, as Taiaiake Alfred43 and Coulthard argue, we must build on this work by
rethinking liberation outside the framework of the white-supremacist, settler state. A
Kinder, Gentler Settler State? What is at stake for Native studies and critical race theory is that
without the centring of the analysis of settler colonialism, both intellectual projects fall back
on assuming the givenness of the white-supremacist, settler state. On the one hand, many
racial-justice theorists and activists unwittingly recapitulate white supremacy by failing to
imagine a struggle against white supremacy outside the constraints of the settler state, which is by
definition white supremacist. On the other hand, Native scholars and activists recapitulate
settler colonialism by failing to address how the logic of white supremacy may unwittingly
shape our vision of sovereignty and self-determination in such a way that we become locked
into a politics of recognition rather than a politics of liberation. We are left with a political
project that can do no more than imagine a kinder, gentler settler state founded on genocide
and slavery.
We must reject the affirmative’s passivist memorialization and engage in active
struggle for repatriation of indigenous land and life. It’s a necessary pre-requsite to
a deconstruction of the white supremacist state power of the same USFG they call
upon to act.
Tuck and Yang 12 [E. Tuck and K.W. Yang, SUNY New Paltz and UCal San Diego,
“Decolonization is not a metaphor,” p.19,
http://decolonization.org/index.php/des/article/download/18630/15554, AR]
Fanon told us in 1963 that decolonizing the mind is the first step, not the only step toward
overthrowing colonial regimes. Yet we wonder whether another settler move to innocence is to
focus on decolonizing the mind, or the cultivation of critical consciousness, as if it were the
sole activity of decolonization; to allow conscientization to stand in for the more
uncomfortable task of relinquishing stolen land. We agree that curricula, literature, and
pedagogy can be crafted toaid people in learning to see settler colonialism, to articulate
critiques of settler epistemology,and set aside settler histories and values in search of ethics
that reject domination and exploitation; this is not unimportant work. However, the frontloading of critical consciousness building can waylay decolonization, even though the
experience of teaching and learning to becritical of settler colonialism can be so powerful it can
feel like it is indeed making change. Until stolen land is relinquished, critical consciousness
does not translate into action that disrupts settler colonialism. So, we respectfully disagree
with George Clinton and Funkadelic (1970) andEn Vogue (1992) when they assert that if you
“free your mind, the rest (your ass) will follow.”Paulo Freire, eminent education philosopher,
popular educator, and liberation theologian,wrote his celebrated book, Pedagogy of the
Oppressed, in no small part as a response to Fanon’sWretched of the Earth. Its influence upon
critical pedagogy and on the practices of educators committed to social justice cannot be
overstated. Therefore, it is important to point outsignificant differences between Freire and
Fanon, especially with regard to de/colonization.Freire situates the work of liberation in the
minds of the oppressed, an abstract category of dehumanized worker vis-a-vis a similarly abstract
category of oppressor. This is a sharp right turn away from Fanon’s work, which always
positioned the work of liberation in the particularities of colonization, in the specific
structural and interpersonal categories of Native and settler. Under Freire’s paradigm, it is
unclear who the oppressed are, even more ambiguous who the oppressors are, and it is
inferred throughout that an innocent third category ofenlightened human exists: “those who suffer
with [the oppressed] and fight at their side” (Freire,2000, p. 42). These words, taken from the
opening dedication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, invoke the same settler fantasy of mutuality
based on sympathy and suffering. Fanon positions decolonization as chaotic, an unclean break
from a colonial condition that is already over determined by the violence of the colonizer and
unresolved in its possible futures. By contrast, Freire positions liberation as redemption, a freeing
of both oppressor and oppressed through their humanity. Humans become ‘subjects’ who then
proceed to work on the‘objects’ of the world (animals, earth, water), and indeed read the
word (critical consciousness)in order to write the world (exploit nature). For Freire, there are
no Natives, no Settlers, andindeed no history, and the future is simply a rupture from the timeless
present. Settler colonialism is absent from his discussion, implying either that it is an
unimportant analytic orthat it is an already completed project of the past (a past oppression
perhaps). Freire’s theories ofliberation resoundingly echo the allegory of Plato’s Cave, a
continental philosophy of menta lemancipation, whereby the thinking man individualistically
emerges from the dark cave of ignorance into the light of critical consciousness
Repat Key
Decolonizing the debate space fails to resolve anticolonial struggles-Repatriation key
Tuck and Yang 12 [E. Tuck and K.W. Yang, SUNY New Paltz and UCal San Diego,
“Decolonization is not a metaphor,” p.32-33,
http://decolonization.org/index.php/des/article/download/18630/15554, AR]
Incommensurability is an acknowledgement that decolonization will require a change in the
order of the world (Fanon, 1963). This is not to say that Indigenous peoples or Black and brown
peoples take positions of dominance over white settlers; the goal is not for everyone to merely
swap spots on the settler-colonial triad, to take another turn on the merry-go-round. The goal is to
break the relentless structuring of the triad - a break and not a compromise (Memmi,
1991).Breaking the settler colonial triad, in direct terms, means repatriating land to
sovereign Native tribes and nations, abolition of slavery in its contemporary forms, and the
dismantling of the imperial metropole. Decolonization “here” is intimately connected to
anti-imperialism elsewhere. However, decolonial struggles here/there are not parallel, not
shared equally, nor dothey bring neat closure to the concerns of all involved - particularly
not for settlers. Decolonization is not equivocal to other anti-colonial struggles. It is
incommensurable. There is so much that is incommensurable, so many overlaps that can’t
be figured, thatcannot be resolved. Settler colonialism fuels imperialism all around the
globe. Oil is the motor and motive for war and so was salt, so will be water. Settler sovereignty
over these very pieces of earth, air, and water is what makes possible these imperialisms. The
same yellow pollen in the water of the Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico, Leslie
Marmon Silko reminds us, is the same uranium that annihilated over 200,000 strangers in 2
flashes. The same yellow pollen thatpoisons the land from where it came. Used in the same war
that took a generation of youngPueblo men. Through the voice of her character Betonie, Silko
writes, “Thirty thousand yearsago they were not strangers. You saw what the evil had done; you
saw the witchery ranging aswide as the world" (Silko, 1982, p. 174). In Tucson, Arizona, where
Silko lives, her books arenow banned in schools. Only curricular materials affirming the
settler innocence, ingenuity, andright to America may be taught.
A focus on liberation and resistance is necessary to deconstruct the state
Ward Churchill 1996 (Professor of Ethnic Studies at University of Colorado, Boulder, BA and
MA in Communications from Sangamon State, From A Native Son pgs 85-90)
The question which inevitably arises with regard to indigenous land claims, especially in the
United States, is whether they are “realistic.” The answer, of course is, “No, they aren’t.” Further,
no form of decolonization has ever been realistic when viewed within the construct of a
colonialist paradigm. It wasn’t realistic at the time to expect George Washington’s rag-tag
militia to defeat the British military during the American Revolution. Just ask the British. It
wasn’t realistic, as the French could tell you, that the Vietnamese should be able to defeat U.S.backed France in 1954, or that the Algerians would shortly be able to follow in their footsteps.
Surely, it wasn’t reasonable to predict that Fidel Castro’s pitiful handful of guerillas would
overcome Batista’s regime in Cuba, another U.S. client, after only a few years in the mountains.
And the Sandinistas, to be sure, had no prayer of attaining victory over Somoza 20 years later.
Henry Kissinger, among others, knew that for a fact. The point is that in each case, in order to
begin their struggles at all, anti-colonial fighters around the world have had to abandon
orthodox realism in favor of what they knew to be right. To paraphrase Bendit, they accepted
as their agenda, a redefinition of reality in terms deemed quite impossible within the
conventional wisdom of their oppressors. And in each case, they succeeded in their
immediate quest for liberation. The fact that all but one (Cuba) of the examples used
subsequently turned out to hold colonizing pretensions of its own does not alter the truth of this—
or alter the appropriateness of their efforts to decolonize themselves—in the least. It simply
means that decolonization has yet to run its course, that much remains to be done. The battles
waged by native nations in North America to free themselves, and the lands upon which
they depend for ongoing existence as discernible peoples, from the grip of U.S. (and
Canadian) internal colonialism are plainly part of this process of liberation. Given that their
very survival depends upon their perseverance in the face of all apparent odds, American
Indians have no real alternative but to carry on. They must struggle, and where there is
struggle here is always hope. Moreover, the unrealistic or “romantic” dimensions of our
aspiration to quite literally dismantle the territorial corpus of the U.S. state begin to erode
when one considers that federal domination of Native North America is utterly contingent
upon maintenance of a perceived confluence of interests between prevailing
governmental/corporate elites and common non-Indian citizens. Herein lies the prospect of
long-term success. It is entirely possibly that the consensus of opinion concerning non-Indian
“rights” to exploit the land and resources of indigenous nations can be eroded, and that
large numbers of non-Indians will join in the struggle to decolonize Native North America.
Few non-Indians wish to identify with or defend the naziesque characteristics of US history. To
the contrary most seek to deny it in rather vociferous fashion. All things being equal, they are
uncomfortable with many of the resulting attributes of federal postures and actively oppose one or
more of these, so long as such politics do not intrude into a certain range of closely guarded selfinterests. This is where the crunch comes in the realm of Indian rights issues. Most non-Indians
(of all races and ethnicities, and both genders) have been indoctrinated to believe the officially
contrived notion that, in the event “the Indians get their land back,” or even if the extent of
present federal domination is relaxed, native people will do unto their occupiers exactly as has
been done to them; mass dispossession and eviction of non-Indians, especially Euro-Americans is
expected to ensue. Hence even progressives who are most eloquently inclined to condemn US
imperialism abroad and/or the functions of racism and sexism at home tend to deliver a blank
stare or profess open “disinterest” when indigenous land rights are mentioned. Instead of
attempting to come to grips with this most fundamental of all issues the more sophisticated
among them seek to divert discussions into “higher priority” or “more important” topics like
“issues of class and gender equality” in which “justice” becomes synonymous with a
redistribution of power and loot deriving from the occupation of Native North America even
while occupation continues. Sometimes, Indians are even slated to receive “their fair share” in the
division of spoils accruing from expropriation of their resources. Always, such things are
couched in terms of some “greater good” than decolonizing the .6 percent of the U.S.
population which is indigenous. Some Marxist and environmentalist groups have taken the
argument so far as to deny that Indians possess any rights distinguishable from those of their
conquerors. AIM leader Russell Means snapped the picture into sharp focus when he observed n
1987 that: so-called progressives in the United States claiming that Indians are obligated to
give up their rights because a much larger group of non-Indians “need” their resources is
exactly the same as Ronald Reagan and Elliot Abrams asserting that the rights of 250 million
North Americans outweigh the rights of a couple million Nicaraguans (continues). Leaving
aside the pronounced and pervasive hypocrisy permeating these positions, which add up to a
phenomenon elsewhere described as “settler state colonialism,” the fact is that the specter
driving even most radical non-Indians into lockstep with the federal government on
questions of native land rights is largely illusory. The alternative reality posed by native
liberation struggles is actually much different: While government propagandists are wont to
trumpet—as they did during the Maine and Black Hills land disputes of the 1970s—that an Indian
win would mean individual non-Indian property owners losing everything, the native position has
always been the exact opposite. Overwhelmingly, the lands sought for actual recovery have
been governmentally and corporately held. Eviction of small land owners has been pursued
only in instances where they have banded together—as they have during certain of the Iroquois
claims cases—to prevent Indians from recovering any land at all, and to otherwise deny native
rights. Official sources contend this is inconsistent with the fact that all non-Indian title to any
portion of North America could be called into question. Once “the dike is breached,” they argue,
it’s just a matter of time before “everybody has to start swimming back to Europe, or
Africa or wherever.” Although there is considerable technical accuracy to admissions that all
non-Indian title to North America is illegitimate, Indians have by and large indicated they
would be content to honor the cession agreements entered into by their ancestors, even
though the United States has long since defaulted. This would leave somewhere close to twothirds of the continental United States in non-Indian hands, with the real rather than
pretended consent of native people. The remaining one-third, the areas delineated in Map II to
which the United States never acquired title at all would be recovered by its rightful owners. The
government holds that even at that there is no longer sufficient land available for unceded lands,
or their equivalent, to be returned. In fact, the government itself still directly controls more
than one-third of the total U.S. land area, about 770 million acres. Each of the states also
“owns” large tracts, totaling about 78 million acres. It is thus quite possible—and always has
been—for all native claims to be met in full without the loss to non-Indians of a single acre of
privately held land. When it is considered that 250 million-odd acres of the “privately” held total
are now in the hands of major corporate entities, the real dimension of the “threat” to small land
holders (or more accurately, lack of it) stands revealed. Government spokespersons have pointed
out that the disposition of public lands does not always conform to treaty areas. While this is true,
it in no way precludes some process of negotiated land exchange wherein the boundaries of
indigenous nations are redrawn by mutual consent to an exact, or at least a much closer
conformity. All that is needed is an honest, open, and binding forum—such as a new
bilateral treaty process—with which to proceed. In fact, numerous native peoples have, for
a long time, repeatedly and in a variety of ways, expressed a desire to participate in just
such a process. Nonetheless, it is argued, there will still be at least some non-Indians “trapped”
within such restored areas. Actually, they would not be trapped at all. The federally imposed
genetic criteria of “Indian –ness” discussed elsewhere in this book notwithstanding, indigenous
nations have the same rights as any other to define citizenry by allegiance (naturalization) rather
than by race. Non-Indians could apply for citizenship, or for some form of landed alien status
which would allow them to retain their property until they die. In the event they could not
reconcile themselves to living under any jurisdiction other than that of the United States, they
would obviously have the right to leace, and they should have the right to compensation from
their own government (which got them into the mess in the first place). Finally, and one suspects
this is the real crux of things from the government/corporate perspective, any such restoration of
land and attendant sovereign prerogatives to native nations would result in a truly massive
loss of “domestic” resources to the United States, thereby impairing the country’s economic
and military capacities (see “Radioactive Colonialism” essay for details). For everyone who
queued up to wave flags and tie on yellow ribbons during the United States’ recent imperial
adventure in the Persian Gulf, this prospect may induce a certain psychic trauma. But, for
progressives at least, it should be precisely the point. When you think about these issues in this
way, the great mass of non-Indians in North America really have much to gain and almost
nothing to lose, from the success of native people in struggles to reclaim the land which is
rightfully ours. The tangible diminishment of US material power which is integral to our
victories in this sphere stands to pave the way for realization of most other agendas from
anti-imperialism to environmentalism, from African American liberation to feminism, from
gay rights to the ending of class privilege – pursued by progressive on this continent.
Conversely, succeeding with any or even all of these other agendas would still represent an
inherently oppressive situation in their realization is contingent upon an ongoing occupation of
Native North America without the consent of Indian people. Any North American revolution
which failed to free indigenous territory from non-Indian domination would be simply a
continuation of colonialism in another form. Regardless of the angle from which you view the
matter, the liberation of Native North America, liberation of the land first and foremost, is
the key to fundamental and positive social changes of many other sorts. One thing they say,
leads to another. The question has always been, of course, which “thing” is to the first in the
sequence. A preliminary formulation for those serious about achieving radical change in the
United States might be “First Priority to First Americans” Put another way this would
mean, “US out of Indian Country.” Inevitably, the logic leads to what we’ve all been so
desperately seeking: The United States – at least what we’ve come to know it – out of North
America altogether. From there it can be permanently banished from the planet. In its stead,
surely we can join hands to create something new and infinitely better. That’s our vision of
“impossible realism.” Isn’t it time we all worked on attaining it?
**Zong**
3 Pillars 1NC
In isolating the Zong as the paradigmatic point of modernity, the 1AC not only
misunderstands modern white supremacy but performs a dehistoricizing act of
colonialism. In the same way that colonialism requires the elimination of the
indigenous body for nation building, such is true in racial theory. This de-rails
survival strategies and allows co-option of resistance to white supremacy. Their
theory isn’t just non-functional it’s counterproductive
Smith 10
[Andrea Smith, associate professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at the
University of California, Riverside, “Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy,”
http://www.worlddialogue.org/content.php?id=488, 7/28/14]
Many scholars in Native studies have argued that the field has been co-opted by broader
discourses, such as ethnic studies or post-colonial studies.1 Their contention is that ethnic
studies elide Native claims to sovereignty by rendering Native peoples as ethnic groups
suffering racial discrimination rather than as nations who are undergoing colonisation.
These scholars and activists rightly point to the neglect within ethnic studies and within
broader racial-justice struggles of the unique legal position Native peoples have in the United
States. At the same time, because of this intellectual and political divide, there is insufficient
exchange that would help us understand how white supremacy and settler colonialism
intersect, particularly within the United States. In this paper, I will examine how the lack of
attention to settler colonialism hinders the analysis of race and white supremacy developed
by scholars who focus on race and racial formation. I will then examine how the lack of
attention to race and white supremacy within Native studies and Native struggles hinders the
development of a decolonial framework.¶ The Logics of White Supremacy¶ Before I begin this
examination, however, it is important to challenge the manner in which ethnic studies have
formulated the study of race relations as well as how people of colour organising within the
United States have formulated models for racial solidarity. As I have argued elsewhere, the
general premiss behind organising by “people of colour” as well as “ethnic studies” is that
communities of colour share overlapping experiences of oppression around which they can
compare and organise.2 The result of this model is that scholars or activists, sensing that this
melting-pot approach to understanding racism is eliding critical differences between groups,
focus on the uniqueness of their particular history of oppression. However, they do not
necessarily challenge the model as a whole—often assuming that it works for all groups
except theirs. Instead, as I have also argued, we may wish to rearticulate our understanding of
white supremacy by not assuming that it is enacted in a single fashion; rather, white
supremacy is constituted by separate and distinct, but still interrelated, logics. I would argue
that the three primary logics of white supremacy in the US context include: (1) slaveability/antiblack racism, which anchors capitalism; (2) genocide, which anchors colonialism; and (3)
orientalism, which anchors war.¶ ¶ One pillar of white supremacy is the logic of slavery. This
logic renders black people as inherently enslaveable—as nothing more than property. That
is, in this logic of white supremacy, blackness becomes equated with slaveability. The forms of
slavery may change, be it explicit slavery, sharecropping, or systems that regard black peoples as
permanent property of the state, such as the current prison–industrial complex (whether or not
blacks are formally working within prisons).3 But the logic itself has remained consistent. This
logic is the anchor of capitalism. That is, the capitalist system ultimately commodifies all
workers: one’s own person becomes a commodity that one must sell in the labour market while
the profits of one’s work are taken by somebody else. To keep this capitalist system in place—
which ultimately commodifies most people—the logic of slavery applies a racial hierarchy to this
system. This racial hierarchy tells people that as long as you are not black, you have the
opportunity to escape the commodification of capitalism. Anti-blackness enables people who are
not black to accept their lot in life because they can feel that at least they are not at the very
bottom of the racial hierarchy—at least they are not property, at least they are not slaveable.¶ ¶ A
second pillar of white supremacy is the logic of genocide. This logic holds that indigenous
peoples must disappear. In fact, they must always be disappearing, in order to enable nonindigenous peoples’ rightful claim to land. Through this logic of genocide, non-Native
peoples then become the rightful inheritors of all that was indigenous—land, resources,
indigenous spirituality, and culture. Genocide serves as the anchor of colonialism: it is what
allows non-Native peoples to feel they can rightfully own indigenous peoples’ land. It is
acceptable exclusively to possess land that is the home of indigenous peoples because
indigenous peoples have disappeared.¶ ¶ A third pillar of white supremacy is the logic of
orientalism. “Orientalism” was Edward Said’s term for the process of the West’s defining itself as
a superior civilisation by constructing itself in opposition to an “exotic” but inferior “Orient”.4
(Here, I am using the term “orientalism” more broadly than to signify solely what has been
historically named as the “orient” or “Asia”.) The logic of orientalism marks certain peoples or
nations as inferior and deems them to be a constant threat to the wellbeing of empire. These
peoples are still seen as “civilisations”—they are not property or the “disappeared”.
However, they are imagined as permanent foreign threats to empire. This logic is evident in the
anti-immigration movements in the United States that target immigrants of colour. It does not
matter how long immigrants of colour reside in the United States, they generally become targeted
as foreign threats, particularly during war-time. Consequently, orientalism serves as the anchor
of war, because it allows the United States to justify being in a constant state of war to
protect itself from its enemies. Orientalism allows the United States to defend the logics of
slavery and genocide as these practices enable it to stay “strong enough” to fight these
constant wars. What becomes clear, then, is what Sora Han declares: the United States is not at
war; the United States is war.5 For the system of white supremacy to stay in place, the United
States must always be at war. Under the old but still dominant model, organising by people of
colour was based on the notion of organising around shared victimhood. In this model, however,
we see that we are not only victims of white supremacy, but complicit in it as well. Our survival
strategies and resistance to white supremacy are set by the system of white supremacy itself.
What keeps us trapped within our particular pillars of white supremacy is that we are
seduced by the prospect of being able to participate in the other pillars. For example, all
non-Native peoples are promised the ability to join in the colonial project of settling
indigenous lands. All non-black peoples are promised that if they conform, they will not be
at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. And black and Native peoples are promised that they
will advance economically and politically if they join US wars to spread “democracy”. Thus,
organising by people of colour must be premised on making strategic alliances with one another,
based on where we are situated within the larger political economy. Coalition work is based on
organising not just around oppression, but also around complicity in the oppression of
other peoples as well as our own. 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 white-supremacist 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. However, 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).
The 1AC presumes the settler state as something that is always, already there as
opposed to a specific system of white supremacy, providing the pre-text for
transatlantic slavery that must be challenged. This logic turns their criticisms of
liberal notions of progress because it posits the indigenous as either never there or
not as bad.
Smith 10
[Andrea Smith, associate professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside,
“Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy,” http://www.worlddialogue.org/content.php?id=488, 7/28/14]
the failure to address the logics of
genocide/colonialism negatively affects the work of scholars who focus on racial theory. Of
With this framework in mind, I will now explore how
course, the most prominent work would be Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s Racial Formation in the United States.7 Their
groundbreaking work speaks to the centrality of race in structuring the world. Omi and Winant demonstrate that
race cannot simply be understood as epiphenomenal to other social formations, such as class. They further explain how race is
work makes important contributions that those
generally ignores the importance
of indigenous genocide and colonialism in its analysis of racial formations.¶ ¶ The one instance where
foundational to the structure of the United States itself. As I will discuss later, their
engaged in Native studies will want to take seriously. At the same time, however, it
Omi and Winant discuss colonialism at length is in their critique of the “internal colonialism” thesis—that communities of colour
should be understood as colonies internal to the United States. In rejecting this thesis, they do not differentiate Native peoples from
“racial minorities”. Interestingly, they judge that the applicability of the internal colonialism thesis to the contemporary United States
“with significant exceptions such as Native American conditions ... appears to be limited”. 8 But then they do not go on to discuss what
the “exception” of Native genocide is
not fully explored is that it is relegated to the past. That is, Omi and Winant argue that the United States has
the significance of this “exception” might mean.¶ ¶ One possible reason that
shifted from a racial dictatorship characterised by “the mass murder and expulsion of indigenous peoples” to a racial democracy in
the problem of Native genocide and settler
colonialism today disappears. This tension is then reflected in some contradictory impulses
in Omi and Winant’s analysis. On the one hand, they note that “the state is inherently racial”.10 Their
which “the balance of coercion began to change”.9Essentially,
analysis of the state as inherently racial echoes Derrick Bell’s notion of racism as permanent to society. However, they do not
necessarily share his conclusions. Bell calls on black peoples to “acknowledge the permanence of our subordinate status”.11 He
disavows any possibility of “transcendent change”.12 On
the contrary, “It is time we concede that a commitment to racial
alternative Bell advocates is resistance for its own
sake—living “to harass white folks”—or short-term pragmatic strategies that focus less on eliminating
racism and more on simply ensuring that we do not “worsen conditions for those we are trying to
equality merely perpetuates our disempowerment.”13 The
help”.14¶ ¶ While Omi and Winant similarly argue that the United States is inherently racial, they clearly do not want to adopt the
pessimism of Bell. Consequently, they argue that a focus on institutional racism makes it “difficult to see how the democratization of
U.S. society could be achieved, and difficult to explain what progress has been made”. The result is thus “a deep pessimism about any
if the state is understood to be inherently racial, it follows
that one would not expect racial progress, but rather shifts in how racism operates within it.
Thus, under this racial realism framework, one is forced either to adopt a project of racial
progress that contradicts the initial analysis that the United States is inherently racist, or to
forgo the possibility of eradicating white supremacy. The reason for these two equally
problematic options is that this analysis presumes the permanency of the United States.
Because racial theorists often lack an analysis of settler colonialism, they do not imagine other
forms of governance that are not founded on the racial state. When we do not presume the
givenness of settler states, then it is not as difficult to recognise the racial nature of nationstates while simultaneously maintaining a non-pessimistic approach to ending white
supremacy. Many people in Native studies believe alternative forms of governance can be
efforts to overcome racial barriers”.15 Now,
developed that are not based on nation-states. We can work towards “transcendent change”
by not presuming it will happen within the confines of the US state.¶ ¶ This tendency for
theorists of race to presume the givenness of the settler state is not unique to Bell or Omi
and Winant, and in fact appears to be the norm. For instance, Joe Feagin has written several
works on race that focus on the primacy of anti-black racism because he argues that “no other
racially oppressed group … has been so central to the internal economic, political, and
cultural structure and evolution of the North American society”.16 He does note that the United States is formed
from stolen land and argues that the “the brutal and bloody actions and consequences of European conquests do often fit the United
Nations definition of genocide”.17 So, if the United States is fundamentally constituted through the
genocide of Native peoples, why are Native peoples not central to the development of American
society? Again, the answer is that the Native genocide is relegated to the past so that the
givenness of settler colonialism today can be presumed.18¶ ¶ Jared Sexton, in his otherwise brilliant
analysis in Amalgamation Schemes, also presumes the continuance of settler colonialism.19 He describes
Native peoples as a “racial group” to be collapsed into all non-black peoples of colour. Sexton goes so far as to argue for a black/nonblack paradigm that is parallel to a “black/immigrant” paradigm, rhetorically collapsing indigenous peoples into the category of
immigrants, in effect erasing their relationship to this land and hence reifying the settler colonial project. Similarly, Angela Harris
argues for a “black exceptionalism” that defines race relations in which Native peoples play a “subsidiary” role. To make this claim,
she lumps Native peoples into the category of racial minority and even “immigrant” by contending that “contempt for blacks is part of
the ritual through which immigrant groups become ‘American’ ”. 20¶ ¶ Of course, what is not raised in this analysis is
that “America” itself can exist only through the disappearance of indigenous peoples.
Feagin, Sexton and Harris fail to consider that markers of “racial progress” for Native
peoples are also markers of genocide. For instance, Sexton contends that the high rate of
interracial marriages for Native peoples indicates racial progress rather than being part of
the legacy of US policies of cultural genocide, including boarding schools, relocation, removal and termination.
Interestingly, a central intervention made by Sexton is that the politics of multiculturalism depends on anti-black racism. That is,
multiculturalism exists to distance itself from blackness (since difference from whiteness, defined as racial purity, is already a given).
However, with an expanded notion of the logics of settler colonialism, his analysis could resonate with indigenous critiques of
mestizaje, whereby the primitive indigenous subject always disappears into the more complex, evolved mestizo subject. These signs of
“racial progress” could then be rearticulated as markers of indigenous disappearance and what Denise Ferreira da Silva terms as racial
engulfment into the white self-determining subject.21 Thus,
besides presuming the genocide of Native peoples
and the givenness of settler society, these analyses also misread the logics of anti-indigenous
racism (as well as other forms of racism).¶ ¶ As mentioned previously, it is important to conceptualise
white supremacy as operating through multiple logics rather than through a single one.
Otherwise, we may misunderstand a racial dynamic by simplistically explaining one logic of
white supremacy through another logic. In the case of Native peoples, those with lighter skin may have greater
“independence” to some extent than black peoples, relating to their position in the colour hierarchy. However, if we look at the status
of Native peoples also through a logic of genocide, this “independence that accrues through assimilation” in fact is a strategy of
genocide that enables the theft of Native lands.22 Thus, Andrew Jackson, the seventh US president (1829–37),
justified the removal of Cherokee peoples from their lands on the basis that they were now
really “white” and hence not entitled to them.23
Our argument is not that anti-Blackness is not true. However, we do not think it is
something that predetermines the entire course of the world or modernity. Not only
is this an incorrect theoretical framework but the reading of the 1AC produces no
strategic use of instruments to deconstruct the white supremacist settler state. AT
BEST the only thing that can come from this 8 minute FYI is the imagination of a
kindler, gentler, oppression but in reality it just becomes another tool for white
supremacist co-optation.
Instead, we advocate an end to the white supremacist, settler state.
Smith 10
[Andrea Smith, associate professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside,
“Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy,” http://www.worlddialogue.org/content.php?id=488, 7/28/14]
In addition, I presume that Angela Harris and Jared Sexton’s interventions are primarily to draw attention to the anti-black
implications of the call to go beyond the black–white binary rather than to render a full account of the dynamics of white supremacy.
Thus, my point is not to invalidate the importance of those interventions. Rather, I think these interventions can be strengthened with
The consequence of not developing a critical apparatus for
intersecting all the logics of white supremacy, including settler colonialism, is that it
prevents us from imagining an alternative to the racial state. Our theoretical frameworks
then jointly consolidate anti-black racism rather destabilise it. This tendency affects not
only the work of race theorists, but the work within Native studies as well. In the next section, I will
some attention to settler colonialism.
focus on some of the work emerging in Native studies as it grapples with white supremacy. Whiteness in Settler Colonialism¶ As
mentioned previously, many Native studies scholars have refused engagement with ethnic studies or critical race theory because they
think such engagement relegates Native peoples to the status of racial minorities rather than sovereign nations. Yet, even as Native
studies articulate their intellectual framework around sovereignty, some strands within them also simultaneously presume the
continuance of settler colonialism. Glen Coulthard’s groundbreaking essay, “Subjects of Empire”, sheds light on this contradiction.27
He notes that in the name of sovereignty, Native nations have shifted their aspirations from decolonisation to recognition from the
settler state. That is, they express their political goals primarily in terms of having political, economic or cultural claims recognised
and/or funded by the settler state within which they reside. In doing so, they unwittingly relegate themselves to the status of “racial
minority”, seeking recognition in competition with other minorities similarly seeking recognition.¶ ¶ One such example can be found in
the work of Ward Churchill. Churchill offers searing critiques of the United States’ genocidal policies towards Native peoples and
calls for “decolonising the Indian nations”.28 Nevertheless, he contends that we must support the continued existence of the US
federal government because there is no other way “to continue guarantees to the various Native American tribes [so] that their
landbase and other treaty rights will be continued”.29 Thus, in the name of decolonisation, his politics are actually grounded in a
framework of liberal recognition whereby the United States will continue to exist as the arbiter and guarantor of indigenous claims. In
such a framework, Native peoples are then set up to compete with other groups for recognition. Thus, it is not a surprise that Churchill
opposes a politics that would address racism directed against non-indigenous peoples, arguing that Native peoples have a special
status that should take primacy over other oppressed groups.30 Such analyses do not take into account how settler colonialism is
enabled through the intersecting logics of white supremacy, imperialism, heteropatriarchy and capitalism. Consequently, when Native
struggles become isolated from other social-justice struggles, indigenous peoples are not in a position to build the necessary political
power actually to end colonialism and capitalism. Instead, they are set up to be in competition rather than in solidarity with other
groups seeking recognition. This politics of recognition then presumes the continuance of the settler state that will arbitrate claims
from competing groups. When one seeks recognition, one will define indigenous struggle as exclusively as possible so that claims to
the state can be based on unique and special status. When one wants actually to dismantle settler colonialism, one will define
indigenous struggle broadly in order to build a movement of sufficient power to challenge the system.¶ ¶ Thus, Churchill’s work
replaces a black–white binary with an indigenous–settler binary. While, as I have argued previously, this latter binary certainly exists,
our analysis of it is insufficient if not intersected with other logics of white supremacy. In particular, we need to look at how “settlers”
are differentiated through white supremacy. Much of the rhetoric of the Red Power movement did not necessarily question the
legitimacy of the US state, arguing instead that the United States just needs to leave Native nations alone.31As Native activist Lee
Maracle comments: “AIM [the American Indian Movement] did not challenge the basic character or the legitimacy of the institutions
or even the political and economic organization of America; rather, it addressed the long-standing injustice of expropriation.”32
Native studies scholars and activists, while calling for self-determination, have not necessarily critiqued or challenged the United
States or other settler states themselves. The problem arising from their position, as Maracle notes, is that if we do not take seriously
the analysis of race theorists such as Omi, Winant and Bell that define the United States as fundamentally white supremacist, then we
will not see that it will never have an interest in leaving Native nations alone. Moreover, without a critique of the settler state as
simultaneously also white supremacist, all “settlers” become morally undifferentiated. If we see peoples in Iraq simply as potential
future settlers, then there is no reason not to join the war on terror against them, because morally they are not differentiated from the
settlers in the United States who have committed genocide against Native peoples.¶ ¶ Native studies scholar Robert Williams does
address the intersection of race and colonialism as it affects the status of Native peoples. Because Williams is both a leading scholar in
indigenous legal theory, and one of the few Native scholars substantially to engage critical race theory, his work demands sustained
attention. Consequently, I consider his arguments in greater detail.¶ ¶ Williams argues that while Native nations rely on the Cherokee
nation cases33 as the basis of their claims to sovereignty, all of these cases imply a logic based on white supremacy in which Native
peoples are seen as racially incompetent to be fully sovereign. Rather than uphold these cases, he calls on us to overturn them so that
they go by the wayside as did the Dred Scot decision.¶ ¶ I therefore take it as axiomatic that a “winning courtroom strategy” for
protecting Indian rights in this country cannot be organized around a set of legal precedents and accompanying legal discourse that
views Indians as lawless savages and interprets their rights accordingly ... I ask Indian rights lawyers and scholars to consider
carefully the following question: Is it really possible to believe that the [Supreme] Court would have written [the landmark 1954 civilrights case] Brown the way it did if it had not first explicitly decided to reject the “language in Plessy v. Ferguson” that gave
precedential legal force, validity, and sanction to the negative racial stereotypes and images historically directed at blacks by the
dominant white society?34¶ ¶ Williams shows that Native peoples, by neglecting the analysis of race, have come to normalise whitesupremacist ideologies within the legal frameworks by which they struggle for “sovereignty”. Native peoples can themselves
unwittingly recapitulate the logic of settler colonialism even as they contest it when they do not engage the analysis of race. Williams
points to the contradictions involved when Native peoples ask courts to uphold these problematic legal precedents rather than overturn
them:¶ ¶ This model’s acceptance of the European colonial-era doctrine of discovery and its foundational legal principle of Indian
racial inferiority licenses Congress to exercise its plenary power unilaterally to terminate Indian tribes, abrogate Indian treaties, and
extinguish Indian rights, and there’s nothing that Indians can legally do about any of these actions.35¶ ¶ However, Williams’s analysis
also tends to separate white supremacy from settler colonialism. That is, he argues that addressing racism is a “first step on the hard
trail of decolonizing the present-day U.S. Supreme Court’s Indian law” by “changing the way that justices themselves talk about
Indians in their decisions on Indian rights”.36 The reason for this “first step” is that direct claims for sovereignty are politically more
difficult to achieve than minority individual rights because claims based on sovereignty challenge the basis of the United States
itself.37 The result is that Williams articulates a political vision containing many of the contradictions inherent in Omi and Winant’s
analysis. That is, he cites Derrick Bell to assert the permanency of racism while simultaneously suggesting that it is possible to address
racism as a simpler “first step” towards decolonisation.¶ ¶ I believe that when the justices are confronted with the way the legalized
racial stereotypes of the Marshall model can be used to perpetuate an insidious, jurispathic, rights-destroying form of nineteenthcentury racism and prejudice against Indians, they will be open to at least considering the legal implications of a postcolonial nonracist
approach to defining Indian rights under [my italics] the Constitution and laws of the United States.38¶ ¶ If the implications of Bell’s
analysis of the permanency of racism are taken seriously, it is difficult to sustain the idea that we can simply eliminate racial thinking
in US governance in order to pave the way for “decolonisation”. Consequently, Williams seems to fall back on a framework of liberal
multiculturalism that envisions the United States as fundamentally a non-racial democracy that is unfortunately suffering from the
vestiges of racism. He says: “I do not believe that the Court is a helplessly racist institution that is incapable of fairly adjudicating
cases involving the basic human rights [and] cultural survival possessed by Indian tribes as indigenous peoples. I would never attempt
to stereotype the justices in that way.”39 He seems to imply that the Supreme Court is not an organ of the racial state; it is simply a
collection of individuals with their personal prejudices.¶ ¶ In addition, the strategy of addressing race first and then colonialism second
presupposes that white supremacy and settler colonialism do not mutually inform each other—that racism provides the anchor for
maintaining settler colonialism. In the end, Williams appears to recapitulate settler colonialism when he calls for “decolonizing the
present-day U.S. Supreme Court’s Indian law” in order to secure a “measured separatism for tribes in a truly postcolonial, totally
decolonized U.S. society”.40 As we have seen, he holds out hope for a “postcolonial nonracist approach to defining Indian rights
under[my italics] the Constitution and laws of the United States”, as if the Constitution itself were not a colonial document.
Obviously, however, if the United States and its Supreme Court were “totally decolonised” they would not exist. In the end,
Williams’s long-term vision for Native rights does not seem to go beyond state recognition within a colonial framework.¶ That said,
this critique is in no way meant to invalidate the important contributions Williams does make in intersecting Native studies with
critical race theory. It may well be that the apparent contradictions in his analysis are the result less of his actual thinking than of a
while conditions of settler
colonialism persist, short-term legal and political strategies are needed to address them. As
rhetorical strategy designed to convince legal scholars to take his claims seriously. Moreover,
Michelle Alexander notes, reform and revolutionary strategies are not mutually inconsistent; reformist strategies can be movementbuilding if they are articulated as such.41 In this regard, Williams’s provocative call to overturn the precedents established in the
Cherokee nation cases speaks to the manner in which Native sovereignty struggles have unwittingly built their short-term legal
strategies on a foundation of white supremacy. And as Scott Lyons’s germinal work on Native nationalism in X-
any project for decolonisation begins with the political and legal conditions
under which we currently live, so our goal must be to make the most strategic use of the
political and legal instruments before us while remaining alert to how we can be co-opted by
using them. But in the end, as Taiaiake Alfred43 and Coulthard argue, we must build on this work by
rethinking liberation outside the framework of the white-supremacist, settler state. A Kinder,
Gentler Settler State? What is at stake for Native studies and critical race theory is that without the
centring of the analysis of settler colonialism, both intellectual projects fall back on
assuming the givenness of the white-supremacist, settler state. On the one hand, many racialjustice theorists and activists unwittingly recapitulate white supremacy by failing to imagine
a struggle against white supremacy outside the constraints of the settler state, which is by
definition white supremacist. On the other hand, Native scholars and activists recapitulate settler colonialism by failing
Marks suggests,42
to address how the logic of white supremacy may unwittingly shape our vision of sovereignty and self-determination in such a way
we become locked into a politics of recognition rather than a politics of liberation. We
are left with a political project that can do no more than imagine a kinder, gentler settler
state founded on genocide and slavery.
that
Impact/Key to Understand Slavery
The impact is epistemological extinction. In reality, understanding the native is key
to understand slaver
Carocci & Pratt 12 (Max, co-director of World Arts and Artefacts at the University of
London, and Stephanie, associate professor of Art History at the University of Plymouth, Native
American Adoption, Captivity, and Slavery in Changing Contexts, Palgrave MacMillan, page 7)
As some scholars have often remarked, the purposeful reclassification of the Native
Americans as "black" or "people of color" resulted in a "bureaucratic genocide" that today
renders difficult that reconstruction of a widespread and prolonged history of Native
American slavery, bondage, and serfdom (Herndon and Sekatau 199&). The bureaucratic
erasure of Indians from the records of history that have been trapped in a dualistic
framework that has hampered the construction of a more realistic version of the lives of those
who experienced the facts of slavery during colonial times.
The unprecedented level of interethnic relations occurring in the colonial contexts is
as important for a reassessment of issues of adoption, captivity, and slavery across ethnic
classifications as are the large movements of peoples that occurred as a result of European
governments' policies, their colonies' own economic development, and individual
entrepreneurship. All this gave rise to a complex web of relocations, resettlements, barter of
people, and involuntary migrations that crisscrossed the northern American hemisphere and the
Caribbean area throughout the eighteenth century. Both large- and small-scale movements often
led to the dissolution of ancient nations, and the creation of new social groupings that invite
us to rethink entirely the notion of "extinction" of peoples. All this had a deep impact on ethnic
an group identity as many of the Caribbean and North America enclaves such as the Westo
(Chapter three in this volume) emerged and then "disappeared " from the geohistorical's map
during this turbulent times.
As is evident from the essays in this collection, adoption practices became more widespread as
colonial powers dissolved entire populations and shipped the remnants to overseas colonies. The
rarely explored population dynamics referred to in this volume call attention to unexpected
centers of human exchange around which developed distinct local and distant peripheries. This is
a perspective that can potentially disrupt a conventional version of economic and political
geography generally concerned with the history of the Atlantic Slave Trade.
Their understanding is historically incomplete-Rooted in a black-white paradigm
that
Weaver 14
(Jace, Franklin Professor of Native American Studies and the Director of the Institute of Native American Studies at the University of
Georgia, The Red Atlantic, The University of North Carolina Press, March 17,)
Columbus brought with him a number of captives who appeared to be human.
These beings posed no cognitive dissonance for the mariner himself. He, after all,
believed that he had reached the Indies, that is to say, the islands off the coast of Asia. He died in
1506 still firm in that conviction. He was the only one.
How were these human-like beings that Columbus brought back form his voyage to
be accounted for? Biblical exegesis of the time was clear that there were only three continents,
Europe, Africa, and Asia, each of which had been populated by the progeny of a different son of
Noah after the Deluge. What was one to make of the Admiral of the Ocean Sea's
peculiar cargo? On May 4, two months after Columbus's return landfall in the Iberian
peninsula, Pope Alexander VI issued the papal bull Inter Caetera. Although the document did
nothing to address the humanity of the inhabitants of the Americas (that issue would
not be settled for years to come), it did authorize their conquest. It began, "Among other
things well pleasing to the Divine Majesty and cherished of our heart, this assuredly ranks
highest, that in our times especially the Catholic faith and the Christian religion be exalted and be
everywhere increased and spread that the health of souls be cared for and that the barbarous
nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself." This set of events - Columbus's return
from the first voyage bearing indigenous captives, the debate it engendered over the
indigenes' humanity, and the papacy's sanction of their subjugation - inaugurated
the Red Atlantic. Or, as we shall see, it is more precise to say that these events "reinaugurated" it
Native Exclusion
Their history excludes the Native. This re-instantiation of their historical otherness
is a reassertion of modernity’s erasure
Flint 09 (Kate, Provost Professor of English and Art History at USC, The Transatlantic Indian,
1776-1930, Princeton University Press, pages 23-25)
Nineteenth-century transatlantic studies are a huge and complex terrain, and their
importance is increasingly being acknowledged, despite the disciplinary binarization
that takes place on both sides of the Atlantic. Too frequently, the internal organization of
our national academies has meant that British and American studies have been regarded as
separate entities, failing to enter into sufficient dialogue with one another. This book adds to the
calls that have already been made by Joseph Roach to pay full attention to the "amplitude of
circum-Atlantic relations,"51 and by Paul Giles to acknowledge how "conceptions of national
identity on both sides of the Atlantic emerged through engagement with - and, often, deliberate
exclusion of - transatlantic imaginary."52 Focusing on the figure of the Native American in this
context brings a number of advantages with it. In the first place, it grants Indians a part not
previously fully acknowledged in relation to the field.53 They have the important roles as
subjects of fascination, as figures of dread, and as symbol of a difference that is complicated and
sometimes contradictory amalgam of national and racial components. From a British point of
view, the fact that narratives made them particularly malleable figures. As this book seeks to
show, the national Indian could be readily adapted, in a number of disparate contexts, to
demonstrate a great range of clichés, presuppositions, considered analyses, and hypotheses about
the nature both of the United States and the Americas more broadly. Most frequently, the Indian
served the role of an ahistorical Other against which various narratives of modernity could
readily be written.
But examining transatlantic relations from the single forms only part of my project,
for Indians had a varied and significant presence in Britain and were analytical, commentating
voices in their own right. They not only provided a particular slant, or slants, on British society,
but were living proof that, in their capacity to react and respond to modern life, they refused to be
cosigned to the role of the mythical and prehistorical that was so frequently assigned them.
Despite the frequent and familiar need of the modern to erect ideas of the temporal Other against
which it could define itself, this Other was also undergoing a process of transformation. Of
course, this is, in broad terms, a point made very familiar through contemporary histories of
postcoloniality. But there are some significant differences. Native American contacts with British
culture in the Victorian period demonstrate not only transformation on the part of the Indians, but
also well-articulated resistance to the process of appropriation and assimilation that equate with
cultural genocide. These Indians are quite definitely not allowing themselves to be cosigned
to oblivion, nor to occupy the mythical status of the time-less, but see themselves as members
of a race that has every intention of surviving. Engagement in this transatlantic contact
zone is unequivocally a two-way process, unfolding in a way that disrupts those apparently
neat binaries of "traditional" and "modern" on which conventional narratives of national
progress have depended. Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic,54 explores how at a slightly later
date, in the context of African American culture, we see modernities evolving on several
fronts simultaneously and at several, nonsynchronic speeds.55 Looking at the Victorian
period, we see how in what we may call the space of the Red Atlantic, the process is already
well underway.
================
█ USFG Pic █
================
Law/State Bad
The discourse of the law that they engage in is not neutral and objective but rather a
discourse of power that serves to prevent marginalized voices from grasping hold of
the levers of power.
Gordon 87
[Robert. Prof Law @ Stanford Univ. “Unfreezing Legal Reality: Critical Approaches to
Law” Florida State University Law Review, Vol 15 No 3. 1987, lexis/khirn]
Now a central tenet of CLS work has been that the ordinary discourses of law -- debates over
legislation, legal arguments, administrative and court decisions, lawyers' discussions with clients,
legal commentary and scholarship, etc. -- all contribute to cementing this feeling, at once
despairing and complacent, that things must be the way they are and that major changes
could only make them worse. Legal discourse accomplishes this in many ways. First by
endlessly repeating the claim that law and the other policy sciences have perfected a set of
rational techniques and institutions that have come about as close as we are ever likely to get to
solving the problem of domination in civil society. Put another way, legal discourse paints an
idealized fantasy of order according to which legal rules and procedures have so structured
relations among people that such relations may primarily be understood as instituted by
their consent, their free and rational choices. Such coercion as apparently remains may be
explained as the result of necessity -- either natural necessities (such as scarcity or the limited
human capacity for altruism) or social necessities. For example, in a number of the prevailing
discourses, the ordinary hierarchies of workplace domination and subordination are
explained: (1) by reference to the contractual agreement of the parties and to their relative
preferences for responsibility versus leisure, or risk taking versus security; (2) by the natural
distribution of differential talents and skills (Larry Bird earns more as a basketball player because
he is better); and (3) by the demands of efficiency in production, which are said to require
extensive hierarchy for the purposes of supervision and monitoring, centralization of investment
decisions, and so forth. There are always some residues of clearly unhappy [*199]
conditions -- undeserved deprivation, exploitation, suffering -- that cannot be explained in
any of these ways. The discourses of law are perhaps most resourceful in dealing with these
residues, treating them as, on the whole, readily reformable within the prevailing political
options for adjusting the structures of ordinary practices -- one need merely fine tune the
scheme of regulation, or deregulation, to correct them. But the prevailing discourse has its cynical
and worldly side, and its tragic moments, to offset the general mood of complacency. In this
mood it resignedly acknowledges that beyond the necessary minimum and the reformable
residues of coercion and misery there is an irreducible, intractable remainder -- due to
inherent limits on our capacity for achieving social knowledge, or for changing society
through deliberate intervention, or for taking collective action against evil without suffering
the greater evil of despotic power. These discourses of legal and technical rationality, of rights,
consent, necessity, efficiency, and tragic limitation, are of course discourses of power -- not only
for the obvious reasons that law's commands are backed by force and its operations can
inflict enormous pain, but because to have access to these discourses, to be able to use them
or pay others to use them on your behalf, is a large part of what it means to possess power.
Further, they are discourses that -- although often partially constructed, or extracted as
concessions, through the pressure of relatively less powerful groups struggling from below -- in
habitual practice tend to express the interests and the perspectives of the powerful people who
use them. The discourses have some of the power they do because some of their claims sound
very plausible, though many do not. The claim, for example, that workers in health-destroying
factories voluntarily "choose," in any practical sense of the term, the risks of the workplace in
return for a wage premium, is probably not believed by anyone save those few expensively
trained out of the capacity to recognize what is going on around them. In addition, both the
plausible and implausible claims are backed up in the cases of law and of economics and the
policy sciences by a quite formidable-seeming technocratic apparatus of rational justification -suggesting that the miscellany of social practices we happen to have been born into in this
historical moment is much more than a contingent miscellany. It has an order, even if sometimes
an invisible one; it makes sense. The array of legal norms, institutions, procedures, and
doctrines in force, can be rationally derived from the principles of regard for individual
autonomy, utilitarian [*200] efficiency or wealth creation, the functional needs of social
order or economic prosperity, or the moral consensus and historical traditions of the
community. There are several general points CLS people have wanted to assert against these
discourses of power. First, the discourses have helped to structure our ordinary perceptions
of reality so as to systematically exclude or repress alternative visions of social life, both as it
is and as it might be. One of the aims of CLS methods is to try to dredge up and give content to
these suppressed alternative visions. Second, the discourses fail even on their own terms to
sustain the case for their relentlessly apologetic conclusions. Carefully understood, they could
all just as well be invoked to support a politics of social transformation instead. n3 Generally
speaking, the CLS claims under this heading are that the rationalizing criteria appealed to (of
autonomy, functional utility, efficiency, history, etc.) are far too indeterminate to justify any
conclusions about the inevitability or desirability of particular current practices; such claims,
when unpacked, again and again turn out to rest on some illegitimate rhetorical move or dubious
intermediate premise or empirical assumption. Further, the categories, abstractions,
conventional rhetorics, reasoning modes and empirical statements of our ordinary
discourses in any case so often misdescribe social experience as not to present any defensible
pictures of the practices that they attempt to justify. Not to say of course that there could be
such a thing as a single correct way of truthfully rendering social life as people live it, or that CLS
writers could claim to have discovered it. But the commonplace legal discourses often produce
such seriously distorted representations of social life that their categories regularly filter out
complexity, variety, irrationality, unpredictability, disorder, cruelty, coercion, violence,
suffering, solidarity and self-sacrifice. n4 [*201] Summing up: The purpose of CLS as an
intellectual enterprise is to try to thaw out, or at least to hammer some tiny dents on, the frozen
mind sets induced by habitual exposure to legal practices -- by trying to show how normal legal
discourses contribute to freezing, and to demonstrate how problematic these discourses are.
The USFG is an inherently violent actor, must teach against the law
Dillon 12 [Stephen Dillon, Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at the University of Minnesota,
“State of White Supremacy: Racism, Governance, and the United States” (Book Review) August
28, 2012, http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2012/08/28/book-review-state-of-white-supremacydarkmatter-journal/, AR]
Here, the first two essays discuss racial discrimination in education. George Lipsitz provides a
masterful reading of U.S. court cases (including a powerful rereading of Brown v. Board of
Education) concerning racial discrimination in education to highlight how racism continues under
the names equality, desegregation, and protection. As Lipsitz observes, the wording of Brown
allows school districts to declare non-discriminatory intentions without taking reparative action.
In this way, the state uses laws intended to end white supremacy in order to preserve it.
Thus, the law (like the citizen and the human) is a not a vehicle of liberation but a tool of
subjection. Lipsitz’s analysis of legal white supremacy authorized by Civil Rights legislation is
complemented by the work of Sanford Schram, Richard Fording, and Joe Soss on what they term
“neoliberal-paternalism.” Neoliberal paternalism apprehends the ways contemporary forms
of poverty governance resurrect older modes of population management in order to connect
them to more recent neoliberal modes of governance. Past forms of racialized state violence
become sutured to newer forms of control and punishment. As more and more poor people
of color abandoned by neoliberal restructuring are captured by an unprecedented regime of
incarceration, welfare has increasingly mimicked the penal sphere. We might add the education
system to the massive network of racialized state power outlined by Schram, Fording, and Soss.
This almost unimaginable regime of racialized management and control produces a system
where, as Joy James writes, “Whites are to be protected, and Black life is to be contained in
order to protect whites and their property (both personal and public or institutional)” (169).
These critiques of the state are powerfully extended by the work of Andrea Smith and João H.
Costa Vargas in the book’s final section. Smith continues the collection’s critique of the law by
observing that “genocide has never been against the law in the United States” because
“Native Genocide has been expressly sanctioned as the law” (231). Like Rodríguez, Smith
argues for a politics of abolition and undoing rather than reform and inclusion. In her analysis of
hate crimes legislation, Smith argues that instead of making racialized and gendered violence
illegal (given that racialized and gendered violence is already executed through the law in the
prison, reservation, and the ghetto), we must make our organizing, theorizing, and teaching
against the law. If the state is foundational to racialized, gendered, and heterosexist
violence, then the state should not be the mediator of pain and grievance because “the state
is now going to be the solution to the problem it created in the first place” (232). The work of
João H. Costa Vargas complements this analysis by making clear the ways the law produces
anti-black genocide. For Vargas, the black diaspora is a “geography of death” where the
premature and preventable deaths of black people are authorized by a “cognitive matrix”
that systematically renders black life devalued. Vargas would surely understand the
preventable deaths produced by the medical industry as a form of genocide, namely because
intent is not central to his theorization of the concept. Instead, creating or tolerating conditions
that produce mass-based uneven vulnerability to premature death is genocidal, making
white supremacy itself a genocidal project. Accordingly, genocide is at the core of our ethical
standards, is foundational to modern politics, and is central to our cognitive apparatuses
(269). To challenge genocide we must undo the epistemologies that support systems of value
and disposability and make possible the slow deaths that are the “condition of possibility for
our present subjectivities and modern politics” (269).
Law Bad-Turns Aff
Equity isn’t an end in itself-The plan’s legitimacy comes at the cost of accepting
current modes of U.S. nationalism and what’s “American”. This necessitates the
success of U.S. domination and blinds us to the linkages between the oppression of
race, neoliberalism, and the U.S. Empire-Turns solvency
Melamed 6
Assistant Professor@Marquette University’s Program in Africana Studies
(Jodi, “The spirit of neoliberalism: From Racial liberalism to neoliberal multiculturalism”, , http://socialtext.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/24/4_89/1)
It is important to note that the study’s purview is as much geopolitical as racial. As racial
liberalism incorporated antiracism and “the Negro” into the calculations of U.S.
governmentality, racial equity became a means to secure U.S. interests. Racial equity
was not an end in itself. Consequently, racial epistemology and politics were altered such
that state-recognized antiracisms would have to validate culturally powerful notions of
the U.S. nation-state and its foremost interests. Because the scope of the political in the
postwar United States precisely shields matters of economy from robust democratic
review, the suturing of liberal antiracism to U.S. nationalism, which manages, develops,
and depoliticizes capitalism by collapsing it with Americanism, results in a situation
where “official” antiracist discourse and politics actually limit awareness of global
capitalism. An American Dilemma omits from its capacious study practically any mention of
black left politics and culture, as Nikhil Singh has recently observed.10 One of its only
indications that economy has something to do with racism comes in a discussion of
employment discrimination. Thus years before red-baiting would narrow mainstream race
politics into what has been called the civil rights compromise, liberal nationalism all on
its own, without anticommunism, can be seen to bracket the global political economic
critique of race and capitalism that had pervaded anticolonial and antiracist thinking in
the first half of the twentieth century. In short, as racial liberal discourse became
hegemonic in the 1950s, not only did race disappear as a referent for the inequality of
the historical development of modern capitalism (a referentiality hard-won by earlier
antiracisms). Official antiracism now explicitly required the victory and extension of U.S.
empire, the motor force of capitalism’s next unequal development. Where placing the
United States in the history of European colonialism had energized earlier antiracist
movements led by people of color, from the “victory” of racial liberalism over white
supremacy onward, official antiracisms in the United States remain under the
injunction to take U.S. ascendancy for granted and to remain blind to global capitalism
as a race issue.
Law Bad-Negative State Action (Guam)
Their focus on what the USFG shouldn’t do trades off with formulating political
strategies about what we as individuals should do. State policies are not accidents –
they are deliberate attempts to expand violent policing and targeted killing of bodies
and regimes not aligned with US interests
Herod 2001
(James, “A Stake, Not a Mistake: On Not Seeing the Enemy,” October.
http://www.jamesherod.info/index.php?sec=paper&id=9)
I spent several years in the early sixties studying Underdevelopment. It was frustrating, in that none of the theories I examined really
seemed to explain the phenomenon. That is, the Theories of Development that were prevalent then (only in mainstream discourse, I
later learned) didn't really answer the question: Why are some countries poor? I would look at US Aid programs, only to conclude that
they didn't work, that they didn't help countries develop, and often got in the way. My response at that time was to argue, and to try to
call to the attention of US Aid administrators, that the programs weren't working, and were not achieving the results they were
supposed to. The programs were not facilitating development and economic growth in the countries they were supposed to be
benefiting. Fortunately for me, with the explosion and re-emergence of radical consciousness in late sixties, I was able to overcome
this naiveté. Unfortunately though, for much of the American Left (especially for its so-called progressive wing), this naiveté,
this bad habit of not seeing the enemy, this
tendency to think that the US government's policies and actions
are just mistakes, this seemingly ineradicable belief that the US government means well, is the most common outlook. It was
certainly the majoritarian belief among those who opposed the Vietnam War. I helped write a broad sheet once, which we distributed
at a big anti-war demonstration in Washington DC in November 1969, and which was titled "Vietnam is a Stake not a Mistake". In
this document we spelled out the imperial reasons which explained why the government was waging war, quite deliberately and
rationally, against Vietnam. In subsequent decades there has been no end to the commentators who take the 'this is a mistake' line.
Throughout the low intensity (i.e., terrorist) wars against Nicaragua and El Salvadorin the 1980s we heard
this complaint again and again. It is currently seen in the constant stream of commentaries onthe US assault on Colombia. It has
been heard repeatedly during the past two years in the demonstrations against the World Bank and theWorldTrade Organization.
Protesters complain that the WTO's policies of structural adjustment are having the opposite effect of what
they're suppose to. That is, they are hindering, not facilitating, development, and causing poverty, not alleviating it. ¶ Two years
ago, in 1999,throughout the 78 day bombing attack on Yugoslavia, much of the outpouring of progressive
commentary on the event (that which didn't actually endorse the bombing that is) argued that "this is a mistake".[1] My
favorite quote from that episode, was from Robert Hayden, Director of the Center for Russian and East European Studies at the
University of Pittsburgh, being interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, April 19, 1999. He said: "But we have the Clinton
administration that developed a diplomacy that seems to have been intended to have produced this war, and now the Clinton
administration's actions seem determined to produce a wider war." Amy Goodman: "Why would the Clinton Administration want to
produce a war?" Hayden: "Boy, you know what? You've got me there. And as I say, you have to go back to the simple principles of
incompetence. Never assume competence on the part of these guys." This was surely the bottom of the pit for the 'this is a mistake'
crowd. I could cite quotes like this by the dozen, but instead let me turn to our current "war". ¶ So what has been the response of the
'progressive community' to the bombing of Afghanistan? As usual, they just don't get it. They just can't seem to grasp the
simple fact that the government does this stuff on purpose. Endlessly, progressives talk as if the government is just making a
mistake, does not see the real consequences of its actions, or is acting irrationally, and they hope to correct the
government's course by pointing out the errors of its ways. Progressives assume that their goals -- peace, justice,
well-being -- are also the government's goals. So when they look at what the government is doing, they get alarmed and puzzled,
because it is obvious that the government's actions are not achieving these goals. So they cry out: "Hey, this policy doesn't lead to
peace!" or "Hey, this policy doesn't achieve justice (or democracy, or development)!" By pointing this out, they hope to
educate the government, to help it to see its mistakes, to convince it that its policies are not having the desired results.[2]¶
How can they not see that the US government acts deliberately, and that it knows what it is doing? How can they not see
that the government's goals are not peace and justice, but empire and profit. It wants these wars,
this repression. These policies are not mistakes; they are not irrational; they are not based on a failure of moral insight
(sincemorality is not even a factor in their considerations); they are not aberrations; they are not based on a failure to analyze the
situation correctly; they are not based on ignorance. This repression, these bombings, wars, massacres, assassinations, and
are the coldly calculated, rational, consistent, intelligent, and informed actions of a
ruling class determined at all costs to keep its power and wealth and preserve its way of life
covert actions
(capitalism). It has demonstrated great historical presence, persistence, and continuity in pursuing this objective. This
ruling
class knows that it is committing atrocities, knows that it is destroying democracy, hope, welfare,
peace, and justice, knows that it is murdering, massacring, slaughtering, poisoning, torturing,
lying, stealing, and it doesn't care. Yet most progressives seem to believe that if only they point out
often enough and loud enough that the ruling class is murdering people, that it will wake up, take
notice, apologize, and stop doing it.¶ Here is a typical expression of this naiveté (written by an author, Brian Willson,
who was in the process of introducing a list of US interventions abroad!): ¶ "Many of us are continually disturbed and grief stricken
because it seems that our U.S. government does not yet understand: (a) the historical social, cultural, and economic issues that
underlay most of the political and ecological problems of the world; (b) the need to comply with, as legally agreed to, rather than
continually defy, international law and international institutions established for addressing conflict; and (c) that military solutions,
including production, sale, and use of the latest in technological weapons, are simply ill-equipped and wrong-headed for solving
fundamental social and economic problems." [3]¶ He is wrong on all three counts. (a)The US government has an intimate, detailed
knowledge of the social, cultural, and economic characteristics of every country it intervenes in. It is especially familiar with the
ethnic, linguistic, political, and religious divisions within the country. It is not interested in how these issues "underlay most of the
political and ecological problems of the world", since it is not interested in those problems, certainly not in solving them, since it is the
main creator of those problems. Rather, it uses its expert knowledge to manipulate events within the country in order to advance its
own goals, profit and empire. (b) The US government understands perfectly that it expressly needs not to comply with international
law in order to maintain its ability to act unilaterally, unfettered by any constraints, to advance its imperial aims. The claim that the US
defies international law because of a misunderstanding is absurd. (c) Who says that the US government is trying to solve "fundamental
social and economic problems"? These are not its aims at all. The objectives that it does pursue, consciously and relentlessly, namely
profit and empire, are in fact the causes of these very "social and economic problems".Furthermore, for its true aims, military
solutions, far from being "ill-equipped and wrong-headed", work exceptionally well. Military might sustains the empire. Arming every
little client regime of the international ruling class with 'the latest in technological weapons" is necessary, and quite effective, in
maintaining the repressive apparatus needed to defend empire, in addition to raking in lots of profit for the arms manufacturers. But
evidently Mr. Willson "does not yet understand" any of these things. ¶ Let's take another example. Russell Mokhiber and Robert
Weissman, otherwise very sensible writers, complain that "bombing a desperately poor country under the yoke of a repressive regime
is a wrongheaded response [to the "unspeakable acts of violence" committed on Sept. 11]. "The U.S. bombing of Afghanistan should
cease immediately," they say. They discuss three reasons: "1. The policy of bombing increases the risk of further terrorism against the
United States. 2. The bombing is intensifying a humanitarian nightmare in Afghanistan. 3. There are better ways to seek justice." All
three statements are true of course, but irrelevant, because seeking justice, avoiding humanitarian nightmares, and
reducing the risk of terrorism do not enter into the calculations of US policy makers. Quite the contrary, US policy
makers create injustice, humanitarian nightmares, and terrorism, throughout the world, in pursuit
of the imperial objective of making profit, and this has been thoroughly documented in thousands of scholarly
studies. So for Mokhiber and Weissman to talk in this way, and phrase the problem in this way, exposes their failure to
really comprehend the enemy we face, which in turn prevents them from looking for effective strategies to
defeat that enemy, like so many other opponents of the "war". Hence all the moralizing, the bulk of which is definitely directed
at the rulers, not at the ruled. That is, it is not an attempt to win over the ruled, but an attempt to win over the rulers.[4] ¶ It's what I call
the "we should" crowd -- all those people who hope to have a voice in the formation of policy, people whose
stances are basically that of consultants to the ruling class. "We" should do this, "we" shouldn't do that,
as if they had
anything at all to say about what our rulers do. This is the normal stance among the bootlicking intelligentsia of
course. But what is it doing among progressives and radicals? Even if their stance is seen to be not exactly that of
consultants, but that of citizens making demands upon their government, what makes them think that the government
ever listens? I think this attitude --the "we should" attitude -- is rooted in part at least in the fact that most progressives still
believe in nations and governments. They believe that this is "our" country, and that this is "our" government, or at least should be. So
Kevin Danaher says that "we should get control of the government." They identify themselves as Americans, or Germans, or
Mexicans, or Swedes. So they are constantly advising and making demands that 'their' government should do this and that. If they
would reject nationalism altogether, and states and governments, they could begin to see another way.¶ A variation of the 'this is a
mistake' theme has appeared in commentaries on the present "war", on Afghanistan. Progressives argue that the US is "falling into a
trap". They argue that Osama bin Laden had hoped to provoke the US into doing just what it is doing, attacking Afghanistan. In their
view, the US government is being stupid, acting blindly, responding irrationally, and showing incompetence. That is, it is "making a
mistake".It never seems to occur to these analysts that the government may actually be awake, even alert,
or that it jumped at the opportunity offered it by the attacks of September Eleven to do what it
had wanted to do anyway -- seize Afghanistan, build a big new base in Uzbekistan, declare unending war on the enemies of
Empire everywhere, and initiate draconian repression against internal dissent in order to achieve "domestic tranquility".
“USFG Should”
They adopt this process of disassociation through surrendering oneself to the state –
the affirmative distances themselves not only from their own social privileges but
also disassociates themselves from complicity they have in participating in a process
of separating themselves from the state structures they criticize while
simultaneously embracing those same structures
Fasching and deChant
(Darrell and Dell, Prof. of Religious Studies @ University of South Florida, Prof. of Religious
Studies @ USF, Comparative Religious Ethics: A Narrative Approach, Pg. 42-43)
Interpreting our own historical situation is a risky business, for we are still too close to the events. We do not have the distance needed
to put everything into proper perspective. Nevertheless, without such an interpretation it is impossible to identify the ethical challenges
that face us, so we must risk it. In this chapter we argue that two major trends unfolded in the twentieth century that are of significance
for thinking about ethics: (1) the phenomenon of mass killing encouraged by sacred narratives that authorize "killing in order to heal,"
as symbolized by Auschwitz and Hiroshima, and (2) a cross-cultural and interreligious ethic of non-violent resistance or civil
disobedience symbolized by figures like Gandhi and King – one that functions as an ethic of audacity on behalf of the stranger. The
second, we suggest, offers an ethic of the holy in response to the sacred morality of the first. The modern period, which
began with a utopian hope that science and technology would create an age of peace, prosperity,
and progress, ended in an apocalyptic nightmare of mass death, symbolized by Auschwitz and Hiroshima, leaving us with
the task of creating a post/modern ethic that can transcend the techno-bureaucratic tribalism that
expressed itself in two world wars. Technobureaucratic tribalism occurs when sacred narratives are combined with the
technical capacity to produce mass death. While we do not pretend to offer an exhaustive explanation of the modern propensity for
mass death, we do suggest two key elements: (1) the use of sacred narratives that define killing as a form of healing, and (2) the
undermining of ethical consciousness by techno-bureaucratic organization through a
psychological process of doubling (separating one's personal and professional identities), which
enables individuals to deny that they are responsible for some of their actions. Through sacred
stories, the stranger is defined as less than human and therefore beyond the pale of ethical
obligation, as well as a threat to sacred order. At the same time, bureaucracies encourage one to
engage in a total surrender of self in unquestioning obedience to higher (sacred) authority
(whether God, religious leaders, or political leaders), so that when one acts as a professional self
on behalf of an institution (the state, the military, the church, etc.) one can say, "It is not I that
acts: a higher authority is acting through me, so I am not personally responsible." Yet, despite the
seemingly overwhelming dominance of techno- bureaucratic tribalism and mass killing in the
twentieth century, a modest but important counter-trend also emerged – a cross-cultural and interreligious ethic of audacity on
behalf of the stranger, linked to such names as Tolstoy, Gandhi, and King. The purpose of this chapter is to grasp the ethical challenge
of modernity as symbolized by Auschwitz and Hiroshima. The purpose of the remainder of this book is to examine the potential of the
ethical response to that challenge offered by the tradition of non-violent civil disobedience, symbolized by Gandhi and King, for a
cross-cultural and interreligious post/modern ethic of human dignity, human rights, and human liberation
Structural Analysis
We need a structural analysis of white supremacy to connect the dots between
various material manifestations of the racial political system. Contrary to the
dictates of traditional liberalism, our genealogy is a necessary part of intellectual
discourse
http://www.faculty.umb.edu/lawrence_blum/courses/318_11/readings/mills_revision
ist_ontologies_theorizing_white_supremacy.pdf
For "whiteness" is not natural; rather, infants of a certain genealogy or phenotype growing up in a
racist society have to learn to be white. Corre- spondingly, there have always been principled and
morally praiseworthy whites who have thrown off their socialization and challenged white supremacy, whether in the form of imperialism, slavery, segregation, or apartheid, in the name of a
color-blind humanity. Io They could be de- scribed as whites who have rejected "whiteness:' The
important point-as "race men" have always appreciated- is that a racial perspective on society can
provide insights to be found in neither a white liberalism nor a white Marxism, and when suitably
modified and reconstructed, such a perspective need not imply biological generalizations about
whites or commit the obvious moral error of holding people responsible for something
(genealogy, phenotype) they cannot help.¶ A specifically left objection, correspondingly, might be
that to see race as theoretically central implies a return to a pre-Marxist conception of the so- cial
order and ignores class.¶ To begin with, of course, in today's largely postcommunist world, Marxism's explanatory credentials are hardly unchallengeable. But in any case, the constructivist
conception of race presupposed does leave open the pos- sibility that a convincing historical
materialist account of the creation of global white supremacy can be developed. To make race
central is not to make it foundational; it is simply to take seriously the idea of an at least
partially autonomous racial political system. (For those with left sympathies, the traditional
explanatory route will be through the European Conquest, the imposition of regimes of
superexploitation on indigenous and im-¶ ported populations, and the differential motivation and
cultural/ideational power of local and metropolitan ruling classes to ensure that race crystal- lizes
as an overriding social identity stabilizing the resultant system.)ll¶ Nor does the idea of white
supremacy imply that there are no class diff- erences within the white and nonwhite populations
or that all whites are materially better off than all nonwhites. The implication is rather that whites
are differentially privileged as agroup, that whites have significantly better life chances. This
implication is compatible with the existence of poor whites and rich nonwhites. It also leaves the
way open for the Marxist case to be made that in the long term, white supremacy is of greater
politi-¶ cal and economic benefit to the white elite than to the white working class, and that though
by the baseline of existing white-supremacist capitalism,¶ white workers are better off than
nonwhites, they are poorer than they would be in a nonracial order. Since white supremacy is not
being put for- ward as denoting a comprehensive political system, it does not, as earlier
emphasized, preclude the existence of other systems of domination (based on class or gender, for
example).¶ Finally, it might be objected that the concept of global white supremacy is pitched at a
level of abstractio~J90 high to be useful. But one has to differentiate appropriate realms of
investigation. "Capitalism" as a concept has obviously been found useful by many generations of
thinkers, both lay and academic, as a general way of categorizing a certain kind of economic system with a core of characteristic traits, despite the vast differences between the capitalism of a
century ago and the capitalism of today, and among the capitalist systems of Japan, the United
States, and Jamaica. For detailed case studies, one must descend empirically to the
investigative level of the political scientist, the economist, the sociologist. But for the
purposes of supplementing the conceptual apparatus of the political philosopher, this
distance from empirical detail does not seem to me to be problematic. At this level,¶ one is
concerned with the general logic of the abstract system, the overarching commonalities of racial
subordination between, say, colonial Kenya and independent Australia, slave Brazil and the
postbellum United States, which warrant the subsumption of these radically different polities
under a general category. "White supremacy" captures these usually ignored racial realities,
and on this basis it should take its rightful place in the official vocabulary of political
theory, along with such other political abstractions as absolutism, democracy, socialism,
fascism, and patriarchy.¶ Having considered all these objections, I should point out that the great
virtue of this account is that race is no longer residual, a concern to be awkwardly shoehorned
into the structure of a theory preoccupied with other realities, but central, so that any
comprehensive mapping of the polity must register this feature. And by virtue of its socialsystemic rather than ideational focus, this analysis directs attention to the important thing, which
is how racial membership privileges or disadvantages individuals independently of the particular
ideas they happen to have. (In that qualified sense, race is objective. Even so-called white
renegades need to acknowledge that, no matter what their racial politics, they are privileged by
their social¶ classification.) The attitudinal and atomistic, individualist focus of at least some
varieties of liberalism reduces the issue to bigotry, which needs to be purged through moral
exhortation; the class-reductivist focus of some varieties of Marxism reduces the issue to a variant
of ruling-class ideology, which needs to be purged through recognition of class identity. In
neither¶ case is the system's racial character adequately registered: that it has its own dynamism
and autonomy, its own peculiar social ontology.¶ Moreover, whereas Marxism's claims about the
intrinsically exploitive character of capitalism and the viability and attractiveness of socialism as
a solution have always been - and are now more than ever - highly controversial, all good liberals
should oppose racism and should want to eradicate its legacy. If, as many now argue, the events
since 1989 have conclusively demonstrated that capitalism is the only feasible option for
humanity, then¶ what one wants is a capitalism that lives up to its advertising. Liberals as well as
radicals should therefore enthusiastically endorse rather than object to the exposure of
global white supremacy as a political system, since it clearly contravenes the ideal of a colorneutral, racially accessible market society. The Marxist anticapitalist goal is currently of
severely limited ap- peal, but in theory at least one would like to think that all people of goodwill would support the critique and ultimate elimination of white su- premacy, including the
whites privileged by it. Doubtless, then, the project¶ will be broadly supported, insofar as it
is consonant with the proclaimed values of the liberal ideology that is now triumphant
across most of the globe.
================
█ Red Atlantic █
================
Case 1NC
Their analysis is too locked into the domestic-This not only means they can’t solve
but it makes colonial violence on an international level inevitable
Smith 10 [Andrea Smith, associate professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at
the University of California, Riverside, “Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy,”
http://www.worlddialogue.org/content.php?id=488, 7/28/14, AR]
Thus, Churchill’s work replaces a black–white binary with an indigenous–settler binary.
While, as I have argued previously, this latter binary certainly exists, our analysis of it is
insufficient if not intersected with other logics of white supremacy. In particular, we need to
look at how “settlers” are differentiated through white supremacy. Much of the rhetoric of
the Red Power movement did not necessarily question the legitimacy of the US state,
arguing instead that the United States just needs to leave Native nations alone.31 As Native
activist Lee Maracle comments: “AIM [the American Indian Movement] did not challenge the
basic character or the legitimacy of the institutions or even the political and economic
organization of America; rather, it addressed the long-standing injustice of
expropriation.”32 Native studies scholars and activists, while calling for self-determination,
have not necessarily critiqued or challenged the United States or other settler states
themselves. The problem arising from their position, as Maracle notes, is that if we do not take
seriously the analysis of race theorists such as Omi, Winant and Bell that define the United
States as fundamentally white supremacist, then we will not see that it will never have an
interest in leaving Native nations alone. Moreover, without a critique of the settler state as
simultaneously also white supremacist, all “settlers” become morally undifferentiated. If we
see peoples in Iraq simply as potential future settlers, then there is no reason not to join the war
on terror against them, because morally they are not differentiated from the settlers in the
United States who have committed genocide against Native peoples.
Their starting point is flawed-Natives themselves owned Black slaves. This
proves even though violence against indigenous peoples is apart of the foundation of
civil society, anti-Black racism is the fulcrum of modern white supremacy
Krauthamer 07 [Barbara Krauthamer, Professor of African American History, M.A.,
Washington University, St. Louis (1994), M.A., Ph.D., Princeton (1996, 2000), Encyclopedia of
Oklahoma History and Culture,
http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/s/sl003.html, AR]
In the 1830s African American slavery was established in the Indian Territory, the region
that would become Oklahoma. By the late eighteenth century, when over half a million
Africans were enslaved in the South, the five southern Indian societies of that region
Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole had come to include both enslaved
blacks and small numbers of free African Americans. A few hundred black slaves had run
away from their white masters and sought refuge in Creek, Seminole, and Cherokee settlements,
where they were received as free people. While some Indian communities incorporated blacks
as free people, American Indians in each of the nations, except the Seminole, began to
purchase African Americans as slaves. A number of Indian farmers had large tracts of land
under cultivation and used enslaved laborers to produce cotton and surplus crops for sale and
profit. Most Indian slave owners, however, practiced subsistence agriculture, and both slaves and
masters labored side by side in the fields. By the 1830s well over three thousand African
Americans, mostly slaves, lived among the tribes. American Indians brought their slaves to the
west in the 1830s and 1840s when the federal government removed the nations from the southern
states. The Cherokee, with more than fifteen hundred, had the largest number. Slave
populations removed with the other nations ranged from approximately three hundred in
the Creek Nation to more than twelve hundred in the Chickasaw Nation. By the time the
Civil War broke out more than eight thousand blacks were enslaved in Indian Territory,
where they comprised 14 percent of the population. Slavery continued in the territory through
the Civil War, after which the five nations legally abolished the practice. In Indian Territory both
blacks and Indians endured the harsh conditions, disease, and deprivation of removal. Black
slaves performed much of the physical labor involved in removal. For example, they loaded
wagons, cleared the roads, and led the teams of livestock along the way. When the Cherokee,
Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole people settled in their new homes, they reestablished
their national governments and passed slave codes that protected owners' property rights in
enslaved people and restricted slaves' rights. Most slaves in Indian Territory were owned by
wealthy and prominent men, many of whom wielded considerable political power. Their
slaves worked primarily as agricultural laborers, cultivating both cotton for their master's profit
and food for consumption. Some slaves were skilled laborers, such as seamstresses and
blacksmiths. Indian slaveholders bought and sold slaves, often doing business with white
slaveholders in the neighboring states of Texas and Arkansas. Similarities existed between
slavery in the states and the Indian Territory. Enslaved people were considered property, and
their labor was exploited for their masters' profit. However, slavery in the Indian nations
differed in significant ways from American slavery. By most accounts, black families owned by
Indians were not sold apart and usually were permitted to live together even if individual family
members had different masters. Indian slaveholders generally did not use violence to control their
slaves, and slaves were not regarded as dehumanized beasts of burden. Despite the nations'
restrictive slave codes, blacks were allowed to gather on their own for religious services and were
usually permitted to learn to read and write. Slaves who spoke and wrote English, furthermore,
provided important services as translators for those Indians who were not fluent in English.
Because many slaves had been born and raised in the Indian nations and had long family histories
among the Indians, they shared many of the distinctive features of Indian culture and daily life.
Black women in the Creek Nation, for example, prepared food according Indian customs and
wore the same style of clothing as Creek women. Although slaves did not have lives
characterized by brutality and exploitation, they nonetheless occupied a degraded status as
unfree people in the Indian nations, and their acts of resistance highlighted their desire to
acquire freedom.
This proves their analysis is fundamentally problematic because it can’t grapple
with the way intersecting forms of power incentivize the oppressed to become
oppressors. The coexistence between Indian resistance and Black slavery proves
they can be both fighting for decolonization while engaging in the project of colonial
settling
Smith 10 [Andrea Smith, associate professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at
the University of California, Riverside, “Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy,”
http://www.worlddialogue.org/content.php?id=488, 7/28/14, AR]
Before I begin this examination, however, it is important to challenge the manner in which ethnic
studies have formulated the study of race relations as well as how people of colour organising
within the United States have formulated models for racial solidarity. As I have argued elsewhere,
the general premiss behind organising by “people of colour” as well as “ethnic studies” is
that communities of colour share overlapping experiences of oppression around which they
can compare and organise.2 The result of this model is that scholars or activists, sensing that
this melting-pot approach to understanding racism is eliding critical differences between groups,
focus on the uniqueness of their particular history of oppression. However, they do not
necessarily challenge the model as a whole—often assuming that it works for all groups
except theirs. Instead, as I have also argued, we may wish to rearticulate our understanding of
white supremacy by not assuming that it is enacted in a single fashion; rather, white supremacy
is constituted by separate and distinct, but still interrelated, logics. I would argue that the
three primary logics of white supremacy in the US context include: (1) slaveability/antiblack racism, which anchors capitalism; (2) genocide, which anchors colonialism; and (3)
orientalism, which anchors war. One pillar of white supremacy is the logic of slavery. This
logic renders black people as inherently enslaveable—as nothing more than property. That
is, in this logic of white supremacy, blackness becomes equated with slaveability. The forms of
slavery may change, be it explicit slavery, sharecropping, or systems that regard black
peoples as permanent property of the state, such as the current prison–industrial complex
(whether or not blacks are formally working within prisons).3 But the logic itself has remained
consistent. This logic is the anchor of capitalism. That is, the capitalist system ultimately
commodifies all workers: one’s own person becomes a commodity that one must sell in the
labour market while the profits of one’s work are taken by somebody else. To keep this capitalist
system in place—which ultimately commodifies most people—the logic of slavery applies a
racial hierarchy to this system. This racial hierarchy tells people that as long as you are not
black, you have the opportunity to escape the commodification of capitalism. Anti-blackness
enables people who are not black to accept their lot in life because they can feel that at least
they are not at the very bottom of the racial hierarchy—at least they are not property, at
least they are not slaveable. A second pillar of white supremacy is the logic of genocide. This
logic holds that indigenous peoples must disappear. In fact, they must always be disappearing, in
order to enable non-indigenous peoples’ rightful claim to land. Through this logic of genocide,
non-Native peoples then become the rightful inheritors of all that was indigenous—land,
resources, indigenous spirituality, and culture. Genocide serves as the anchor of colonialism: it is
what allows non-Native peoples to feel they can rightfully own indigenous peoples’ land. It is
acceptable exclusively to possess land that is the home of indigenous peoples because indigenous
peoples have disappeared. A third pillar of white supremacy is the logic of orientalism.
“Orientalism” was Edward Said’s term for the process of the West’s defining itself as a superior
civilisation by constructing itself in opposition to an “exotic” but inferior “Orient”.4 (Here, I am
using the term “orientalism” more broadly than to signify solely what has been historically named
as the “orient” or “Asia”.) The logic of orientalism marks certain peoples or nations as inferior
and deems them to be a constant threat to the wellbeing of empire. These peoples are still seen as
“civilisations”—they are not property or the “disappeared”. However, they are imagined as
permanent foreign threats to empire. This logic is evident in the anti-immigration movements in
the United States that target immigrants of colour. It does not matter how long immigrants of
colour reside in the United States, they generally become targeted as foreign threats,
particularly during war-time. Consequently, orientalism serves as the anchor of war, because it
allows the United States to justify being in a constant state of war to protect itself from its
enemies. Orientalism allows the United States to defend the logics of slavery and genocide as
these practices enable it to stay “strong enough” to fight these constant wars. What becomes
clear, then, is what Sora Han declares: the United States is not at war; the United States is war.5
For the system of white supremacy to stay in place, the United States must always be at war.
Under the old but still dominant model, organising by people of colour was based on the
notion of organising around shared victimhood. In this model, however, we see that we are
not only victims of white supremacy, but complicit in it as well. Our survival strategies and
resistance to white supremacy are set by the system of white supremacy itself. What keeps
us trapped within our particular pillars of white supremacy is that we are seduced by the
prospect of being able to participate in the other pillars. For example, all non-Native peoples
are promised the ability to join in the colonial project of settling indigenous lands. All non-
black peoples are promised that if they conform, they will not be at the bottom of the racial
hierarchy. And black and Native peoples are promised that they will advance economically
and politically if they join US wars to spread “democracy”. Thus, organising by people of
colour must be premised on making strategic alliances with one another, based on where we
are situated within the larger political economy. Coalition work is based on organising not
just around oppression, but also around complicity in the oppression of other peoples as
well as our own. 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 white-supremacist 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. However, 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).
They got history wrong-The enslavement of indigenous people wasn’t a global
conspiracy for white supremacy but rather a result of the profit drive of one man
and his men
DeWitt 03 [ Whitney DeWitt, Central Virginia Community College's Journal of Literature and
Art, “Christopher Columbus: Hero or Murderer?”
http://campuspages.cvcc.vccs.edu/polis/2003/nonfiction/whitney%20dewitt.amlit.htm, AR”
Columbus’s arrogance and exploitation regarding slavery began on his second voyage.
Ferdinand and Isabella had ordered that the natives be treated kindly. In opposition to this order,
Columbus began exporting slaves in great numbers in 1494. It was because he was not
making any real profit elsewhere on the island that he decided to exploit the one source of
income--people--he had in abundance (Fernandez-Armesto 107). When word reached him
that the crown did not want him sending more slaves, Columbus ignored it. He was
desperate to make his expeditions profitable enough for Ferdinand and Isabella's continued
support. Evidently he was not reprimanded because thousands of Indians were exported. By
the time they reached Spain, usually a third of them were dead. Bartolome de las Casas wrote that
one Spaniard had told him they did not need a compass to find their way back to Spain; they
could simply follow the bodies of floating Indians who had been tossed overboard when they died
(17). It is horrible to consider that the exportation of these natives resulted in thousands of
deaths. It is much worse when one realizes that they were caused by one man’s desire for
glory.
The reading of the 1AC creates no real, material change. The government will shut
down any real moves to decolonization
Churchill 90 [Ward Churchill, Co-director, with Glenn Morris, of the Colorado Chapter of the
American Indian Movement and coordinator of American Indian Studies with the Center for
Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America at the University of Colorado/Boulder. He has served as
a delegate of the International Indian Treaty Council to the United Nations Working Group on
Indigenous Populations and the Inter-American Indian Congress, as well as to the nations of
Libya and Cub,. “[Chapter 7] COINTELPRO - American Indian Movement (AIM)”,
http://www.whale.to/b/cointelpro_7.html, AR]
They [the Indians] are a conquered nation, and when you are conquered, the people you are
conquered by dictate your future. This is a basic philosophy of mine. If I'm part of a conquered
nation, I've got to yield to authority... [The FBI must function as] a colonial police force. Norman Zigrossi - ASAC Rapid City 1977 In this brief statement, Assistant Special Agent in
Charge Zigrossi summarized over two centuries of U.S. jurisdiction and 'law enforcement"
in Indian Country. From the country's founding through the present, U.S. Indian policy has
consistently followed a program to subordinate American Indian nations and expropriate
their land and resources. In much the same fashion as Puerto Rico (see Chapter 4), indigenous
nations within the United States have been forced to exist - even by federal definition - as
outright colonies. 1 When constitutional law and precedent stood in the way of such policy, the
executive and judicial branches, in their turn, formulated excuses for ignoring them. A product
of convenience and practicality for the federal government, U.S. jurisdiction, especially
within reserved Indian territories ("reservations"), "presents a complex and sometimes
conflicting morass of treaties, statutes and regulation." 2 The FBI in Indian Country The
entrance of the FBI in law enforcement into Indian Country began in the 1940s - under clear
congressional provisos that it should be neither primary nor permanent - as wartime funding cuts
rendered staffing levels for Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) Special Officers inadequate. 3
Initially, the Bureau offered mere "investigative assistance" to the BIA, but over time all federal
offenses came to be investigated by the FBI. By 1953: ... apparently because of FBI leadership,
most U.S. Attorneys, and U.S. District Judges, recognized the FBI as having primary
investigative jurisdiction for Federal law violations committed in Indian country, notwithstanding
the wording of Congressional appropriation acts since FY-1939 and Opinion M. 29669 dated
August 1, 1938, issued by the Solicitor, U.S. Department of the Interior [indicating that such
responsibilities were included in the duties of BIA Special Officers]. 4 {see proposed legislation,
1952} The current situation is that: The BIA has trained criminal investigators on most
reservations. These special officers conduct the initial investigation for the majority of serious
crimes which occur on Indian reservations. Most U.S. Attorneys however, will not normally
accept the findings of a BIA special officer as a basis for making a decision on whether to
prosecute. Instead, most U.S. Attorneys require that the FBI conduct an independent
investigation, often duplicative of the BIA investigation, prior to authorizing prosecution .... 5 All
law enforcement on American Indian reservations has been made to revolve around the
actions (and inactions) of the FBI. It is undoubtedly significant that while the typical BIA
police officer is Indian, FBI agents and U.S. Attorneys are overwhelmingly white. 6 Far
from enhancing law enforcement, the FBI impedes it by slow response and insistence upon
repeating the investigative work of BIA, often well after the fact. Until this process is
completed, no arrests can be made and suspects remain at large. 7,7a Once an offender has been
apprehended and charged, there is little chance they will be tried: "Precise statistics are not
maintained by Federal law enforcement agencies, but it appears that in excess of 80 percent of
major crimes cases, on the average, presented to the United States attorneys are declined for
prosecution." 8 Unlike crimes committed off-reservation, there is no other jurisdiction under
which the defendant can be tried if the U.S. Attorney declines to prosecute. The effect on
many reservations has been that defendants have a better chance of going to jail for a traffic
violation - tried in the tribal courts - than for rape or first degree murder. Indian/Indian
crimes or crimes perpetrated by non-Indians against Indians ranging from fraud to
extreme violence - have received only minimal (if any) attention from police and
prosecutors. Only those allegedly criminal acts undertaken by Indians against whites have
tended to receive attention, filling the country's prisons with a disproportionately high number of
Indians. 9,9a In this sense, it is entirely appropriate to observe that federal police functions in
Indian Country are not devoted to law enforcement per se, but rather to maintenance of the
status quo represented by Euroamerican domination and profiteering at the expense of
American Indian people. The message has been that only those who rock the politico-economic
boat risk criminal punishment. With the passage of PL-280 in 1953, state and local agenciesalso almost entirely white - assumed responsibility for on reservation law enforcement in
many instances. 10 The overall effect of these policies has been that the quality of law
enforcement in Indian Country has been egregious when measured by the standard of providing
for the safety and security of the communities. Law enforcement concerning the most serious
crimes is the responsibility of individuals who do not reside in the community and whose
attitudes toward Indian people and their customs range from ignorance to hostility and
contempt, a la Norman Zigrossi. In the case of state and local jurisdiction under PL-280, law
enforcement is provided by reservation-adjacent communities with a reputation for vehement
racism aptly summarized by an Itasca County, Minnesota, deputy sheriff. "[I]f all those Indians
would just kill each other off, we wouldn't have to go up them [to the reservation]." 11 Slow to
respond to complaints lodged by Indians, the police are viewed - justifiably - with suspicion
by the community. 12 Rise of the American Indian Movement The late 1960s saw a resurgence
of militant Indian activism focused on resistance to further depredation of Indian lands and
resources, recovery of illegally expropriated land, preservation of cultural identity and opposition
to racist attacks on Indian people and their culture. During the mid-'60s, a Cherokee college
student named Clyde Warrior founded the militant National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) and
began publishing a political broadside entitled Americans Before Columbus. 13 Even the
typically staid National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) adopted an increasingly forceful
tone under the leadership of Lakota law student Vine Deloria, Jr, who before the end of the
decade was to write the seminal Custer Died for Your Sins and We Talk, You Listen. 14 It was in
this atmosphere that the American Indian Movement (AIM) was founded in Minneapolis in 1968
by Dennis Banks and George Mitchell (both Anishinabes [Chippewas]). Patterning itself after the
Black Panther Party, AIM initially focused itself on urban issues such as combating police
harassment of Indian people. During the next two years members such as Clyde Bellecourt
(Anishinabe), Russell Means (Oglala Lakota), Herb Powless (Oneida), John Trudell (Santee
Dakota) and Joe Locust (Cherokee) changed its emphasis from a local to a national focus and
from specifically urban issues to issues of treaty rights and the preservation of traditional Indian
culture. 15 In November 1969, national attention was suddenly focused on Indian issues when a
coalition of Indian organizations, headed first by Richard Oaks (Mohawk) and later Trudell, and
calling itself Indians of All Tribes (IAT), occupied Alcatraz Island. Citing an 1882 federal statute
(22 Stat, 181) which provided for the establishment of Indian schools in abandoned federal
facilities, the protestors demanded the creation of a Center for Native American Studies and other
cultural facilities on the abandoned island. The occupation ended after nineteen months with an
assault by a task force of U.S. marshals and the arrest of the occupiers. A prior agreement by the
Department of Interior to convert Alcatraz to a national park featuring Indian themes never
materialized. However, the massive media attention and resultant public support garnered by the
Alcatraz occupation demonstrated its tactical effectiveness. 16 During the next two years, Indians
occupied other abandoned military facilities across the country and Pacific Gas and Electric sites
on Indian land in northern California. 17 AIM also engaged in a series of high-profile
demonstrations - including the occupation of the Mayflower II on Thanksgiving Day 1970 and of
Mt. Rushmore on July 4,1971 - which continued to keep Indian issues in the public eye. 18 In
January 1972 an Oglala man named Raymond Yellow Thunder was tortured and murdered by
two white men, Melvin and Leslie Hare, in the reservation adjacent town of Gordon, Nebraska.
When it became clear that local law enforcement agencies intended to take no action against
Yellow Thunder's murderers, a force of over 1,000 Indians - mostly from the nearby Pine
Ridge and Rosebud Reservations - headed by AIM leaders Dennis Banks and Russell Means,
occupied Gordon for three days. 19 The result of the occupation was that Yellow Thunder's
assailants were charged and jailed, a police officer suspended, and Gordon's authorities forced to
take a stand against discrimination toward Indians. The effect of this action was described by
historian Alvin Josephy, Jr.: "Although discrimination continued, AIM's reputation soared among
reservation Indians. What tribal leaders had dared not to do to protect their people, AIM had
done." 20 According to those FBI documents assembled by the Bureau in its reading room, it was
at this juncture that agents were first assigned to keep close tabs on "AIM and related militant
Indian nationalist organizations." In the light of growing public and reservation support, the AIM
leadership met at the home of Brule Lakota spiritual leader Leonard Crow Dog's home called Crow Dog's Paradise - on the Rosebud Reservation in July of 1972 to plan their next
action. From this meeting emerged the concept for The Trail of Broken Treaties. Caravans from
reservations across the country would travel to Washington, D.C., arriving immediately before
the November presidential elections. AIM hoped that given the timing and attendant press
coverage, the Nixon administration might be willing to enter into negotiations to resolve
Indian grievances. 21 The Trail began in San Francisco and Seattle in October and gathered
support from reservations along its route as it moved eastward. A list of proposed federal actions
for redressing grievances and restructuring the relationship between Indian nations and the U.S. known as the "Twenty Points" - was formulated during a stopover in St. Paul, Minnesota. 22
When the caravan reached Washington, D.C. on November 3, a series of events rapidly led to the
Indians seizing the national BIA headquarters and occupying it until November 5. 23 The
unplanned confrontation ended when the administration - embarrassed by sensational news
reporting - formally agreed to review and respond to the Twenty Points, as well as to nonprosecution of the occupiers and provision of $66,650 in travel expenses for caravan participants
to return home. 24 When the government recovered the BIA building, they discovered that a
large number of "confidential" documents - primarily concerned with the low-yield leasing of
reservation land - had been removed by the occupiers. One of the Trail's leaders, Hank Adams
(Assiniboin/Lakota), volunteered to recover the documents and return them in batches, as they
were copied and provided to the Indians to whom they pertained. After returning two loads of
material, he was set up by an FBI provocateur named Johnny Arellano and arrested by the FBI in
the process of returning another. 25 While the government made much in the media of the
damage allegedly done to the building by caravan participants: Later events would indicate that
the federal government had a substantial number of agents among the protesters, and some
were so militant and destructive that they were awarded special Indian names for their
involvement in the protest. It became apparent why the government had been so willing to agree
not to prosecute the Indians: The presence of agent-provocateurs and the intensity of their work
would have made it extremely difficult for the government to have proven an intent by the real
Indian activists to destroy the building. 26 It was thus during and immediately following the
Trail of Broken Treaties that evidence emerges of the initiation of a counterintelligence
program to neutralize AIM and its perceived leadership. An FBI document released to
journalist Richard LaCourse under the FOIA reveals a program which closely parallels that
directed against RAM in Philadelphia (see Chapter 5). It recommends that "local police put
[AIM] leaders under close scrutiny, and arrest them on every possible charge until they
could no longer make bail." 27 This tactic was immediately implemented against activists
returning home from Washington, D.C. For instance, on November 22 1972, Trail security
coordinator Leonard Peltier was attacked in a Milwaukee restaurant by two off-duty policemen;
he was beaten severely and then arrested and charged with the attempted murder of one of his
assailants. Peltier was eventually acquitted when trial testimony revealed that one of the cops had
shown his girlfriend a picture of Peltier and boasted of "help[ing] the FBI get a big one." 28 At
about the same time, in South Dakota: As Russell Means led the Oglala Sioux remnants of the
Trail of Broken Treaties through the town of Pine Ridge, the seat of government of the Oglala
reservation, he may have noticed a stir of activity around police headquarters. Unknown to
Means, tribal president Richard Wilson had secured a court order from the Oglala Sioux tribal
court prohibiting Means or any other AIM member from speaking or attending any public
meeting ... Since the Oglala Sioux Landowners Association was meeting in Pine Ridge, Means, a
member of this group, decided to attend and report what had actually happened in Washington.
Before he had a chance to speak his mind, he was arrested by BIA special officer Delmar
Eastman for violating this court order ... The arrest was a blatant violation of the First
Amendment, for it denied Means freedom of speech on the reservation where he was born and
was an enrolled member. 29 Early report showing intensive surveillance of Denver AIM chapter.
The "100" coding prefix at bottom of page indicates an "Extremist Matters" investigation. Early
teletype demonstrating distribution of intelligence information on AIM within the international
arena. Heavy deletion results from "National Security" classification. Documents released
through the FOIA, such as the accompanying January 12, 1973 report from the Denver field
office, show that the Bureau was compiling detailed profiles of AIM members and leaders as part
of an "Extremist Matters" investigation. As is demonstrated in the accompanying January 10
teletype, almost entirely deleted under a national security classification, the Bureau was (for
reasons which have never been specified) keeping the U.S. embassy in Ottawa apprised of AIM
activities. On January 14, Russell Means and several other AIM members were arrested on
fabricated charges in Scottsbluff, Nebraska while participating in a Chicano-Indian Unity
Conference with the Denver-based Crusade for justice. That night, Means' cell door was
unlocked, a gun was placed in his cell and he was told by the police to "make a break for it." As
the AIM leader later put it, "They wanted to off me during an escape attempt." When a complaint
was filed on the incident, police claimed that Means had not been "properly searched" when he
was booked and that the weapon was found in his cell. The accompanying January 15, 1973
teletype from the Omaha ASAC to the director proves the Bureau was well aware of the situation,
but - in a manner reminiscent of the FBI's handling of police abuses against SNCC and other civil
rights activists in Mississippi during the early '60s local agents did absolutely nothing to
intervene. Bureau records also show the unity conference was heavily surveilled and infiltrated.
30 During the meeting in Scottsbluff, AIM received word that a 20-year-old Oglala, Wesley Bad
Heart Bull, had been brutally stabbed to death by a white man, Darld Schmitz, in the reservationadjacent town of Buffalo Gap, South Dakota. When Schmitz was charged with only the relatively
minor offense of second degree manslaughter, AIM national coordinator Dennis Banks arranged
a meeting with Custer County state's attorney Hobart Gates to discuss upgrading the charge to
murder. Banks issued a call for Indians to assemble at the county courthouse in Custer to
demonstrate support during the February 6 meeting. Two days prior to the event, however, a
mysterious caller - believed to have have been an agent assigned to the Rapid City (South
Dakota) resident agency - engaged in a COINTELPROstyle telephone conversation with Rapid
City journal reporter Lyn Gladstone claiming the action had been "canceled due to bad weather,"
an untruth which appeared in the paper on February 5. 31 Teletype concerning police attempt to
murder Russell Means. As a result - and in sharp contrast to the massive turnout in Gordon
concerning the Yellow Thunder case only a few months before - only about 200 AIM members
and supporters turned out to caravan to Custer. 32 Once there, they were confronted by an equal
number of riot-equipped local police and county deputies, a state riot squad, representatives of the
South Dakota Division of Criminal Investigation and the FBI. 33 Although county officials had
agreed to an open meeting with the Indian community, they now insisted they would meet with
only Banks, Means and Utah AIM leader Dave Hill (Choctaw); although the courthouse was a
public building, the remainder of the group was not allowed inside, and was forced to remain
outdoors in a heavy blizzard. The AIM leaders found prosecutor Gates to be adamantly against
upgrading the charges. After insisting that justice was already being done, he declared the
meeting at an end and told the AIM delegation to leave. When they refused, police attempted to
forcibly evict them and a melee broke out which quickly spread to the crowd waiting outside as
riot police attacked them with clubs and tear gas. The courthouse and nearby chamber of
commerce building were set ablaze by teargas cannisters and 27 Indians were arrested on charges
such as "incitement to riot." Among those beaten by police and arrested was Sarah Bad Heart
Bull, the victim's mother. She ultimately served five months in jail on charges resulting from the
Custer police assault, while her son's murderer never served a day. 34 The violence and
perversion of justice directed at the AIM group in Custer did not result from happenstance or
mere "overreaction" on the part of local officials. As shown in the accompanying excerpt from a
January 31, 1973 teletype sent to FBI headquarters by Minneapolis SAC Joseph Trimbach, the
Rapid City office was by this point actively coordinating the activities of state and local police,
state's attorneys in western South Dakota, and agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms (BATF), with regard to "AIM activities." The excerpted teletype also demonstrates that
local police - with full knowledge of the FBI - had stonewalled U.S. Justice Department
Community Relations Service representatives who were attempting to defuse the situation
because the latter "appeared to favor AIM's cause." By early 1973 the Bureau had, with the
enthusiastic cooperation of area police, set out to effect the physical repression of AIM while
deliberately squelching attempts from both governmental and dissident quarters - to achieve
peaceful resolution of the racial/political conflicts around Pine Ridge, and elsewhere in Indian
Country. Wounded Knee The smoke and tear gas had barely cleared from the streets of Custer
when the next round of confrontation between AIM and the federal government began. This
time the locus of activity centered on Pine Ridge itself, and concerned a struggle between the
"progressive" administration of the Oglala Sioux tribal president, Dick Wilson - who had already
imposed an illegal ban on AIM members speaking or participating in meetings within what he
apparently considered to be his private domain - and grassroots Indians on the reservation.
Wilson, who had already held an office and been accused of having used the position to embezzle
tribal funds, had been ushered into office with substantial government support in 1972. 35 Almost
immediately, he had been bestowed with a $62,000 BIA grant for purposes of establishing a
"tribal ranger group" - essentially his own private army - an entity which designated itself as
"Guardians of the OgIala Nation" (GOONs or GOON Squad). 36 The Indian bureau also allowed
him to hire his relatives into the limited number of jobs available through the tribal government,
as well as to divert the virtual entirety of the tribal budget into support for his immediate
followers rather than the Oglala Lakota people as a whole. 37 When traditionalist Oglalas
complained, Wilson dispatched his GOONs. When victims attempted to seek the protection of the
BIA police, they quickly discovered that perhaps a third of its roster - including its head, Delmar
Eastman (Crow), and his second-in-command, Duane Brewer (OgIala) - were doubling as GOON
leaders or members. 38 For their part, BIA officials - who had set the whole thing up consistently turned aside requests for assistance from the traditionals as being "purely internal
tribal matters," beyond the scope of BIA authority. Exerpt from a January 31, 1973 teletype
falsely suggesting AIM was equipping itself with automatic weapons and delineating FBI
collaboration with South Dakota police in preparing for AIM's arrival in Custer. By mid-year, the
quid pro quo attending federal support to the regime emerged. In exchange for being allowed
to run Pine Ridge as a personal fiefdom, Wilson was to sign over title to the northwestern oneeighth of the reservation - an area known as the Sheep Mountain Gunnery Range - to the National
Park Service (which, like the BIA, is part of the Department of Interior). 39 Thus faced not only
with Wilson's continued financial malfeasance and outright terrorizing of opponents, but
with a significant loss of their already truncated landbase as well, the traditionals attempted
to avail themselves of their legal right to impeach the corrupt official. The BIA responded
by naming Wilson to serve as chair of his own impeachment proceedings, and the Justice
Department dispatched a 65-member U.S. Marshals Special Operations Group (SOG) to Pine
Ridge, to "maintain order."
2NC Agency Arg
We understand the importance of exposing history, but the 1AC’s image is an
incomplete one. Their starting point is the suffering native this not only makes
agency impossible but perpetuates colonialism. Instead we need counterstories that
highlight the resistance of native peoples
Lyons No Date
Scott Lyons, Leech Lake storytelling was poor journalism,
http://www.bluecorncomics.com/stype446.htm
By now it should be obvious that the three-part series "The Lost Youth of Leech Lake" (Star
Tribune, April 25-27) struck a nerve, particularly among Leech Lake Ojibwe and other
Minnesota Natives. When was the last time you heard about a newspaper story inspiring
public demonstrations and conferences? By my count, objections to the series have basically
centered on the way it 1) focused on the worst of the worst, 2) completely ignoring happy,
healthy (not to mention law-abiding) teenagers at Leech Lake; 3) generalizing the sorry
state of affairs to an entire community, thus 4) contributing to another generation of
stereotypes of drunken Indians, deadbeat parents and dangerous teens. Since the series also
called into question the wisdom of the Indian Child Welfare Act (without discussing its
historical legislative purpose) and hinted that "federal funding" is mishandled by the tribe
(without offering any proof), we can add that the stories 5) implicitly attacked the
sovereignty and self-determination of Leech Lake and other Indian nations. It is reasonable
to insist upon accurate, balanced and hopeful representations of one's group. No community
wants to be characterized in essentially negative fashion, much less have its youth lumped
together as "lost." But the problem is compounded when the group represented is American
Indians, who have suffered under the weight of negative imagery for over 500 years. From
"soulless heathen" to "bloodthirsty savage" to "noble savage" to "drunken Indian" to "lost
youth," the parade of imagery crafted by the dominant group — and we must admit that
these images never originate from Native sources — is relentless. In other words, from the
Indian perspective, this latest round is nothing new. Just relentless. It is also typical.
Consider the way the series was composed as a tragedy. (I'm talking about literary form
now, so think back to your old high school English class.) As a particular type of narrative,
with certain features and forms, a tragedy like "Hamlet" or "Death of a Salesman" is meant
to elicit strong emotions from its audience — Aristotle identified them as pity and fear — by
presenting a human being facing insurmountable odds and ending up in certain defeat. The
protagonist is undone by his "tragic flaw" — the Greeks called this hamartia, and one
example would be hubris or pride — usually a bad decision made somewhere that comes
back to haunt the hero. Tragedy's appeal to audiences lies in its ability to produce catharsis,
the purging of emotions, which is why people enjoy crying at sad movies. One appreciates
tragedy for its ability to arouse feelings of pity and fear as the tragic tale unfolds, while
simultaneously feeling reassured that the world isn't going to change. That last component
is crucial: With the tragic hero dead in the end, there's no impending change. Audiences are
just supposed to feel bad ... which actually feels good ... then reflect upon "values." The Lost
Youth were composed as classically tragic figures, and they appealed directly to the
emotions of pity and fear. One pitied Sierra Goodman, who only wanted loving parents, and
feared Jesse Tapio, who drank, listened to Tupac Shakur, picked fights, and called his victims
"white boy" and "whitey." Tragic flaws included the decision of teens to drink or take drugs
(the principal antagonist of every single story in the series), the consumption of youth
culture (rap, heavy metal, goth, etc.), and the suspiciously ubiquitous presence of Fetal
Alcohol Syndrome (passed on by apparently evil mothers). In the stories, the past
functioned as a backdrop — not as history, but as Fate. Thus, there's no need for serious
investigation of how things came to be the way they are (i.e., the dams, the trees, the land,
the disenfranchisement). Root causes? Irrelevant. Historical explanations? Unnecessary.
Non-Indian responsibility? Forget about it! No, the "Lost Youth" are simply doomed because
of cruel fates and tragic flaws. So dry your eyes, purge that emotion, and pass the popcorn.
Oh, and by the way, the Indian Child Welfare Act is bad, because Indian parents are bad, and
federal funding can offer no help to a community of poverty. Probably best to ban alcohol on
the reservation and start praying for help. Let's discuss values. What a wonderful tragedy!
But poor journalism. It would be a mistake to assume that, just because the series was based
on real people and actual events, it depicted "reality." Most of Shakespeare's plays were
based on "real" things too, but no one reads them as fact. The crucial point is to recognize
that the series was written, put down in words by a writer, sitting at a computer,
surrounded by scads of paper, who had to take all of his interviews, data, reports and the
like, and fashion them into a readable story for his audience. What Larry Oakes ended up
fashioning — that is, writing — was a tragedy. Representing Indians in the tragic mode is
nothing new — think "Last of the Mohicans" or "Dances with Wolves" — because the
"Vanishing Indian" was never meant to have a future in the first place. This is how culture
has always supported colonialism. To the extent that Natives are perceived as perched on
the brink of extinction, settlers can feel secure in their knowledge that this really was an
"empty continent," thus justifying their presence on it. Purging one's emotions over the
awful effects of colonization is part of the process of justification — hence, the persistent
proliferation of tragic narratives. Indian protest to these representations, however, is the
telling of a different tale. This counterstory is about people who refuse to be defined out of
existence or blamed for their own victimization. It tells of a real community rich and
complex in experience: living life, raising children, dealing with problems, and deserving
respect. It would be good if mainstream publications started listening to that story instead
of rehearsing old tragedies. In addition to producing fewer protests, it would also have the
virtue of showing some respect for Native teenagers, who these days are finding it in very
short supply.
AT: Black/White Binary-Wrong Understanding
Don’t give this argument more weight than it deserves-A shift doesn’t solve their
impacts and only hurts our understanding of white supremacy
Smith 10 [Andrea Smith, associate professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at
the University of California, Riverside, “Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy,”
http://www.worlddialogue.org/content.php?id=488, 7/28/14, AR]
Thus, Churchill’s work replaces a black–white binary with an indigenous–settler binary.
While, as I have argued previously, this latter binary certainly exists, our analysis of it is
insufficient if not intersected with other logics of white supremacy. In particular, we need to
look at how “settlers” are differentiated through white supremacy. Much of the rhetoric of the
Red Power movement did not necessarily question the legitimacy of the US state, arguing
instead that the United States just needs to leave Native nations alone.31 As Native activist
Lee Maracle comments: “AIM [the American Indian Movement] did not challenge the basic
character or the legitimacy of the institutions or even the political and economic
organization of America; rather, it addressed the long-standing injustice of expropriation.”32
Native studies scholars and activists, while calling for self-determination, have not
necessarily critiqued or challenged the United States or other settler states themselves. The
problem arising from their position, as Maracle notes, is that if we do not take seriously the
analysis of race theorists such as Omi, Winant and Bell that define the United States as
fundamentally white supremacist, then we will not see that it will never have an interest in
leaving Native nations alone. Moreover, without a critique of the settler state as
simultaneously also white supremacist, all “settlers” become morally undifferentiated. If we
see peoples in Iraq simply as potential future settlers, then there is no reason not to join the war
on terror against them, because morally they are not differentiated from the settlers in the United
States who have committed genocide against Native peoples. Native studies scholar Robert
Williams does address the intersection of race and colonialism as it affects the status of Native
peoples. Because Williams is both a leading scholar in indigenous legal theory, and one of the
few Native scholars substantially to engage critical race theory, his work demands sustained
attention. Consequently, I consider his arguments in greater detail. Williams argues that while
Native nations rely on the Cherokee nation cases33 as the basis of their claims to sovereignty, all
of these cases imply a logic based on white supremacy in which Native peoples are seen as
racially incompetent to be fully sovereign. Rather than uphold these cases, he calls on us to
overturn them so that they go by the wayside as did the Dred Scot decision. I therefore take it as
axiomatic that a “winning courtroom strategy” for protecting Indian rights in this country cannot
be organized around a set of legal precedents and accompanying legal discourse that views
Indians as lawless savages and interprets their rights accordingly ... I ask Indian rights lawyers
and scholars to consider carefully the following question: Is it really possible to believe that the
[Supreme] Court would have written [the landmark 1954 civil-rights case] Brown the way it did
if it had not first explicitly decided to reject the “language in Plessy v. Ferguson” that gave
precedential legal force, validity, and sanction to the negative racial stereotypes and images
historically directed at blacks by the dominant white society?34 Williams shows that Native
peoples, by neglecting the analysis of race, have come to normalise white-supremacist
ideologies within the legal frameworks by which they struggle for “sovereignty”. Native
peoples can themselves unwittingly recapitulate the logic of settler colonialism even as they
contest it when they do not engage the analysis of race. Williams points to the contradictions
involved when Native peoples ask courts to uphold these problematic legal precedents rather than
overturn them: This model’s acceptance of the European colonial-era doctrine of discovery and
its foundational legal principle of Indian racial inferiority licenses Congress to exercise its
plenary power unilaterally to terminate Indian tribes, abrogate Indian treaties, and extinguish
Indian rights, and there’s nothing that Indians can legally do about any of these actions.35
However, Williams’s analysis also tends to separate white supremacy from settler
colonialism. That is, he argues that addressing racism is a “first step on the hard trail of
decolonizing the present-day U.S. Supreme Court’s Indian law” by “changing the way that
justices themselves talk about Indians in their decisions on Indian rights”.36 The reason for this
“first step” is that direct claims for sovereignty are politically more difficult to achieve than
minority individual rights because claims based on sovereignty challenge the basis of the United
States itself.37 The result is that Williams articulates a political vision containing many of the
contradictions inherent in Omi and Winant’s analysis. That is, he cites Derrick Bell to assert the
permanency of racism while simultaneously suggesting that it is possible to address racism as a
simpler “first step” towards decolonisation. I believe that when the justices are confronted with
the way the legalized racial stereotypes of the Marshall model can be used to perpetuate an
insidious, jurispathic, rights-destroying form of nineteenth-century racism and prejudice against
Indians, they will be open to at least considering the legal implications of a postcolonial nonracist
approach to defining Indian rights under [my italics] the Constitution and laws of the United
States.38 If the implications of Bell’s analysis of the permanency of racism are taken seriously, it
is difficult to sustain the idea that we can simply eliminate racial thinking in US governance
in order to pave the way for “decolonisation”. Consequently, Williams seems to fall back on a
framework of liberal multiculturalism that envisions the United States as fundamentally a non‑
racial democracy that is unfortunately suffering from the vestiges of racism. He says: “I do not
believe that the Court is a helplessly racist institution that is incapable of fairly adjudicating cases
involving the basic human rights [and] cultural survival possessed by Indian tribes as indigenous
peoples. I would never attempt to stereotype the justices in that way.”39 He seems to imply that
the Supreme Court is not an organ of the racial state; it is simply a collection of individuals with
their personal prejudices. In addition, the strategy of addressing race first and then
colonialism second presupposes that white supremacy and settler colonialism do not
mutually inform each other—that racism provides the anchor for maintaining settler
colonialism. In the end, Williams appears to recapitulate settler colonialism when he calls for
“decolonizing the present-day U.S. Supreme Court’s Indian law” in order to secure a “measured
separatism for tribes in a truly postcolonial, totally decolonized U.S. society”.40 As we have
seen, he holds out hope for a “postcolonial nonracist approach to defining Indian rights under [my
italics] the Constitution and laws of the United States”, as if the Constitution itself were not a
colonial document. Obviously, however, if the United States and its Supreme Court were
“totally decolonised” they would not exist.
Extension-Anti Black = Fulcrum
Anti-black racism is the fulcrum of modern white supremacy. The aff has provided
no other explanation for white supremacy, meaning they can’t foster revolution or
consciousness. They have a counterproductive understanding of oppression
Nakagawa 13 [Scot Nakagawa, part of the Coalition for Human Dignity, an organization
formed to combat vigilante white supremacist, hate groups in the Pacific, “Why I, An Asian Man,
Fight Anti-Black Racism,” Northwesthttp://mediadiversified.org/2013/08/01/why-i-an-asianman-fight-anti-black-racism/, August 1, 2013, AR]
I’m often asked why I’ve focused so much more on anti-black racism than on Asians over the
years. Some suggest I suffer from internalized racism. That might well be true, since who doesn’t
suffer from internalized racism? I mean, even white people internalize racism. The difference is
that white people’s internalized racism is against people of color, and it’s backed up by those who
control societal institutions and capital. But some folk have more on their minds. They say that
focusing on black and white reinforces a false racial binary that marginalizes the experiences of
non-black people of color. No argument here. But I also think that trying to mix things up by
putting non-black people of color in the middle is a problem because there’s no “middle.”
So there’s most of my answer. I’m sure I do suffer from internalized racism, but I don’t think that
racism is defined only in terms of black and white. I also don’t think white supremacy is a simple
vertical hierarchy with whites on top, black people on the bottom, and the rest of us in the middle.
10liptak.600 So why do I expend so much effort on lifting up the oppression of black people?
Because anti-black racism is the fulcrum of white supremacy. A fulcrum is defined by
Merriam-Webster as “the support about which a lever turns” or, alternatively, “one that
supplies capability for action.” In other words, if you want to move something, you need a pry
bar and some leverage, and what gives you leverage is the fulcrum – that thing you use so the pry
bar works like a see-saw. The racial arrangement in the U.S. is ever changing. There is no
“bottom.” Different groups have more ability to affect others at different times because our roles
are not fixed. But, while there’s no bottom, there is something like a binary in that white
people exist on one side of these dynamics – the side with force and intention. The way they
mostly assert that force and intention is through the fulcrum of anti-black racism.
segregation Hang in there with me for a minute and consider this. Race slavery is the historical
basis of our economy. Yes, there was/is a campaign of “Indian removal” in order to capture
natural resources and that certainly is part of the story. But the structure of the economy is
rooted in slavery. Our Constitution was written by slave owners. They managed to muster
some pretty nice language about equality, justice, and freedom for “men” because they
considered Africans less than human. Our federal system is based on a compromise
intended to accommodate slavery. Our concept of ownership rights, the structure of our
federal elections system, the segregated state of our society, the glut of money in politics, our
conservative political culture, our criminal codes and federal penitentiaries all evolved
around or were/are facilitated by anti-black racism. And this is not just about history. Fear of
black people drives our national politics, from the fight over Jim Crow in the 50s and 60s, to
Willie Horton and the Chicago Welfare Queen in the 80s, and the War on Drugs, starting in 1982
right up to the present. Since 2001, the U.S. has spent about 1.3 trillion dollars on war. Since
1982 we’ve spent over 1 trillion dollars on the drug war. About 82% of drug busts are for
possession, while about 18% are for trafficking. Sound like an irrational way to wage a war on
drugs? Not if it’s a war on black people. According to Human Rights Watch, black males are
incarcerated at a rate more than six times that of white males resulting in one in 10 black
males aged 25-29 being held in prison or jail in 2009. The same report states: Blacks constitute
33.6 percent of drug arrests, 44 percent of persons convicted of drug felonies in state court, and
37 percent of people sent to state prison on drug charges, even though they constitute only 13
percent of the US population and blacks and whites engage in drug offenses at equivalent rates.
And why a war on people? The war on drugs is the cornerstone of the “tough on crime”
messaging campaign that is key to the Republican Southern Strategy. It suggests that extending
civil rights to African-Americans resulted in the crime wave of the 1970s, (and not the baby
boom as is suggested by sociologists) in order to drive white Southerners into the Republican
Party. And that “tough on crime” thing, that’s not just against black people. It’s a propaganda
war that is weakening civil rights and civil liberties for all of us.
================
█ Black Atlantic/Middle Passage/Zong (Mike)
█
================
Case 1NC
Baucom fails to engage with the politics of the enslaved. Not only is their account
functionally incomplete but it erases all Black political activity
Brown 9
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)
Specters of the Atlantic is a compellingly sophisticated study of the relation between the
epistemologies underwriting both modern slavery and modern capitalism, but the book’s
discussion of the politics of anti-slavery is fundamentally incomplete. While Baucom
brilliantly traces the development of “melancholy realism” as an oppositional discourse
that ran counter to the logic of slavery and finance capital, he has very little to say about
the enslaved themselves. Social death, so well suited to the tragic perspective, stands in
for the experience of enslavement. While this heightens the reader’s sense of the way
Atlantic slavery haunts the present, Baucom largely fails to acknowledge that the
enslaved performed melancholy acts of accounting not unlike those that he shows to be a
fundamental component of abolitionist and human rights discourses, or that those acts
could be a basic element of slaves’ oppositional activities. In many ways, the effectiveness of
his text depends upon the silence of slaves—it is easier to describe the continuity of structures
of power when one downplays countervailing forces such as the political activity of the
weak. So Baucom’s deep insights into the structural features of Atlantic slave trading and its afterlife come with a cost.
Without engagement with the politics of the enslaved, slavery’s history serves as an
effective charge leveled against modernity and capitalism, but not as an uneven and
evolving process of human interaction, and certainly not as a locus of conflict in which
the enslaved sometimes won small but important victories.11
Can’t just focus on social death, focusing on resistance better
Brown 9
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 not simply the power of slaveholders, but the very terms and conditions of
social existence.
Their essentialism silences any understandings of freedom
Brown 9
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)
WRITING THE HISTORY OF SLAVERY in a way that emphasizes struggles against
social alienation requires some readjustment in commonplace understandings of culture
and politics. Historians and social scientists have often debated the question of slave cultures and the cultures of slavery through
residual Victorian understandings of culture as the civilizational achievements of “the West,” “Africa,” or various other groups, to
be attained, lost, or re-created. The meanings attributed to things are often taken to indicate complete and integrated systems of
belief and behavior, even identities, that corresponded to distinct population groups. This approach has been subjected to critical
scrutiny in a number of disciplines.45 While culture may still refer to what William Sewell, Jr. has called “the particular shapes
and consistencies of worlds of meaning in different places and times” that somehow fit together despite tension and conflict, the
fluidity of this definition would suggest that practices of meaning are better seen as tools to be used than as possessions to be
lost.46 And though
culture is still sometimes portrayed as a holistic set of worldviews or
should begin from a different point
of departure, highlighting instead particular meanings as situational guides to
consequential action—motivations, sometimes temporary, that are best evaluated in terms of how
they are publicly enacted, shared, and reproduced. The focus would be less on finding an
integrated and coherent ethos among slaves and more on the particular acts of
communication that allowed enslaved people to articulate idioms of belonging, similarity,
and distinction. The virtues of this method are on display in James Sidbury’s Becoming African in America: Race and
attitudes commensurate with circumscribed populations, historical writers
Nation in the Early Black Atlantic, which shows how Anglophone black people expressed their sense of being African “in tension
with, and in partial opposition to, memories and experiences of the indigenous cultures of Africa, rather than directly out of
meaning of the category “African” was not merely a reflection of cultural
tenacity but the consequence of repeated acts of political imagination.
them.”47 The
Their understanding of the diaspora is not just a fatalistic understanding of history
but it is a tool of demobilization. There is no move between their theorizations and
alleviating anti-Blackness. YES this evidence is about Wilderson, but it sill applies
to your aff
Ba 11
BÂ 2011 – Portsmouth University (SAËR MATY, “The US Decentred: From Black Social Death to Cultural Transformation,”
Cultural Studies Review, volume 17 number 2 September 2011)
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)
Nihilism Impact
Nihilism turns and outweigsh their args
Miah 94
Malik Miah, is an editor of the US socialist organization Solidarity's magazine Against the
Current. He is a long-time activist in trade unions and a campaigner for Black rights and
works as an aircraft mechanic in San Francisco, Cornel West's Race Matters, June 1994,
http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/3079
In the chapter, “Nihilism in Black America,” West observes “The liberal/conservative
discussion conceals the most basic issue now facing Black America: the nihilistic threat to
its very existence. This threat is not simply a matter of relative economic deprivation and
political powerlessness -- though economic well-being and political clout are requisites for
meaningful Black progress. It is primarily a question of speaking to the profound sense of
psychological depression, personal worthlessness, and social despair so widespread in
Black America.” (12-13) “Nihilism,” he continues, “is to be understood here not as a
philosophic doctrine ... it is, far more, the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying
meaningless, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness.” (14) “Nihilism is not new in
Black America. . . . In fact,” West explains,”the major enemy of Black survival in America has
been and is neither oppression nor exploitation but rather the nihilistic Threat -- that is, loss
of hope and absence of meaning. For as long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the
possibility of overcoming oppression stays alive. The self-fulfilling prophecy of the nihilistic
threat is that without hope there can be no future, that without meaning there can be no
struggle.” (14-15) So nihilism is our number one problem as Blacks. Defeating white
supremacy, of course, must be our central goal. To fight national oppression, African
Americans must regain our hope and self-love. This is the main direction of West's book,
and I can agree with that. However, he fails to explicitly show the link between nihilism and
the need to organize the fight to end oppression and exploitation. The lack of self-love is
directly related to oppression. Thus West analysis tends to minimize the role of capitalism
(i.e. oppression and exploitation, the role of classes in maintaining racial and national
divisions). The strength of his view is that he takes on taboo subjects (including Black antiSemitism, sexism in the Black community, and homophobia) and demands a critical look at
how to reverse Black degradation and remove the color line.
The Olmecs
Africa before the European cataclysm has been written out of history
Sertima 83
Ivan Van Sertima, Guyanese-born associate professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers University
in the United States,The Lost Sciences of Africa: An Overview, 1983
http://www.christinaproenza.org/BlacksInScience.html
It is important to understand this if we are understand how a science or technology may
rise and fall with a civilziation, whey the destruction of a center could lead to the almost
instant evaporation of disappearance of centuries of knowledge and technical skills. Thus a
nulear war could shatter the primary centers of 20th century technology in a matter of days.
The survivors on the periphery, although they would remember the aeroplanes and the
television sets, the robots and the computors, they space machines now circling our solar
system, would not be able for centuries to reproduce that technology. Apart from the
almost wholesale slaughter of the technocratic class, the interconnection between those
shattered centers and the equally critical interdependecy between those shattered centers
and their peripheries, would be gone forever. It would be like the strands of a web which
once stretched across the world, left torn and dangling in a void. A dark age would certainly
follow. Centuries afterwards, the technological brilliance of the 20th century would seem
dream-like and unreal. Until archeology began to pick up the pieces, those of us to follow in
the centuries to come willl obviously doubt what had been achieved in the centuries
preceeding the disaster. This has happened before in the world. Not in the same way, of
course, but with the same catastropic effect. It happened in Africa. No human disaster, with
the exception of the Flood (if that biblical legend is true) can equal in dimension of
destructiveness the cataclysm that struck Africa. We are all familiar with the slave trade and
the traumatic effect of this on the transplanted black but few of realize what horrors were
wrought on Africa itself. Vast populations were uprooted and displaced, whole generations
disappeared, European diseases descended like the plague, decimating both cattle and
people, cities and towns were abandoned, family networks disintegrated, kingdoms
crumbled, the threads of cultural and historical continuity were so savagely torn asunder
that henceforth one would have to think of two Africas: the one before and the one after the
Holocaust. Anthopologists have said that eighty percent of traditional African culture
survived. What they mean by traditional is the only of culture we come to accept as African
-- that of the primitive on the periphery, the stunned survivor. The African genius, however,
was not remain buried forever. Five centuries later, archeologists, digging among the ruins,
began to pick up some of the pieces.
The foundations of the modern world are always traced to the Greeks, etc. Africans
explored the Atlantic before Columbus
Blatch 13
Sydella Blatch, Assistant Professor of Biology School of the Sciences, February 2013, Great
achievements in science and technology in ancient Africa,
http://www.asbmb.org/asbmbtoday/asbmbtoday_article.aspx?id=32437
Most of us learn that Europeans were the first to sail to the Americas. However, several
lines of evidence suggest that ancient Africans sailed to South America and Asia hundreds
of years before Europeans. Thousands of miles of waterways across Africa were trade
routes. Many ancient societies in Africa built a variety of boats, including small reed-based
vessels, sailboats and grander structures with many cabins and even cooking facilities. The
Mali and Songhai built boats 100 feet long and 13 feet wide that could carry up to 80 tons.
Currents in the Atlantic Ocean flow from this part of West Africa to South America.
Genetic evidence from plants and descriptions and art from societies inhabiting South
America at the time suggest small numbers of West Africans sailed to the east coast of
South America and remained there. Contemporary scientists have reconstructed these
ancient vessels and their fishing gear and have completed the transatlantic voyage
successfully. Around the same time as they were sailing to South America, the 13th century,
these ancient peoples also sailed to China and back, carrying elephants as cargo. People of
African descent come from ancient, rich and elaborate cultures that created a wealth of
technologies in many areas. Hopefully, over time, there will be more studies in this area and
more people will know of these great achievements.
The Olmecs were from Africa-One of the great accomplishments of imperial
African civilizations was to cross the atlantic to the Americas-Our restating of this
history is good
Barton 02
Paul Barton, A History Of The African-Olmecs, February 04, 2002,
http://www.raceandhistory.com/historicalviews/04022002.htm
WHO WERE THE OLMECS The ancient Olmecs of Mexico and Central America were a
facinating people. Upon the discovery of collosal stone heads in Mexico during the early
part of the twentieth Century, there was no doubt that the facial features and hair texture
(including cornrows) represented in the collosal Olmec sculpture represented Africoid
people. Yet, for many decades, some archeologists and scientists have described what is
obviously Negroid-featured sculpture as "baby-faced," "South-East Asian" "Jaguar-featured,"
and other terms used to cover-up their African Negroid identity. WHY THE DENIAL OF
BLACK HISTORY Some historians and scientists, archeologists and others have for centuries
covered up and made insignificant historical findings that show an African creation or
connection to many of the world's first civilizations. Such has been the case in Egypt,
Mesopotamia, India, Moorish Spain, Shang and Shia China, and Mexico. The denial of the
contributions to ancient civillizations and the systematic cover-up was and is based on the
maintainance of the myth of Black/African inferiority which was established in Europe and
the Americas to make slavery acceptable, and established in India by the infiltrators of the
ancient civilization of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro in order to claim that the ancestors of
India's Black Dalits (Untouchables) had no civilization (see "The Black Untouchables of
India," by Y.N. Kly, V.T. Rajshekar and Runoko Rashidi: Clarity Press, Atlanta, Georgia).
Today, the denial of Black history and achievements to world culture continues through
propaganda techniques such as accusing Black historians and Afro-centric writers as being
"politically correct," if they refuse to accept the notion developed during the period of
colonialism and slavery, that Blacks have no history. Yet, the facts when presented seem to
have no effect on the distractors, including those who had to admit they made errors when
they attempted to deny what was and is the obvious and overwhelming evidence of the
creation and contributions to culture and civilization by Africans/Blacks around the world.
Prefer Olmec Reps
Representations of Africa before slavery are key. The affirmative’s starting at
slavery replicates the erasure of African agency and ascribes a perpetual
victimization
Shahadah 08
[ Owen Shahadah, Director, writer, and Pan-Africanist scholar“AFRICA BEFORE
SLAVERY,” http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/africa%20before%20slavery.htm,
AR]
Africa's history did not begin in slavery, and despite the peculiarity, horror, and duration of
enslavement of Africans, slavery occupies a minor timeframe in the 120,000 years of
African history (0.5% of African history). In the last 50 years much has been done to combat the
false and negative views about the history of Africa and Africans, which were developed in
Europe in order to justify the Transatlantic Slave Trade and European colonial rule in Africa that
followed it. Unfortunately the Eurocentric take on Africa and Eurocentric linguistics has
distorted how some African scholars see Africa. Even those claiming to be progressive,
discuss Africa as history's perceptual victim—without any agency. Many people have this
view of Africa sitting still and being imposed up from outside. They forget that Africa was
an active trade partner with Arabia, and China. There is even a special section in Israel for
Orthodox Christian Ethiopian monks for 100's of years for when they make pilgrimage.
Africans have been to China before the European-- not as slaves--but as partners. Africans
discovered Europe before Europe "discovered" us (Islamic Spain etc). History, right now,
needs to be put in perspective. Many have been draining the African historical record by boxing
in what is, and what does not constitutes an authentic African experience. Eurocentric
terminologies place certain concepts outside of the African domain with this habit of
"tribalizing" Africa; dark, pagan, licentious, unorganized, base and emotive. The legacy of
washing out Africa's historical record can be summed up by the racist words of the Scottish
philosopher David Hume: am apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the Whites.
There scarcely ever was a civilized nation of that complexion, nor even any individual, eminent
either in action or in speculation. No ingenious manufacture among them, no arts, no sciences. In
the nineteenth century the German philosopher Hegel simply declared ‘ Africa is no historical
part of the world. ' This openly racist view, that Africa had no history, was repeated by Hugh
Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor of History at Oxford University , as late as 1963. The legacy of
the African Holocaust has made a profound effect on African studies, where the default
attitude is to deny African have contributed anything to what is considered civilization.
Africans are playing on a chessboard where all the pieces are white. The volumes of publish
works by the Hitler's of the African Holocaust is impossible for Africans to gain any foothold and
authorities stance in their history." So Ethiopia is a great civilization so it must be "outside of
African origin", Great Zimbabwe, Ancient Egypt, Moorish Islamic Spain are categorically
denied as having anything African in them. Africa had a history, long before the Europeans
came to our shores. But the Europeans came to our shores and because they were attracted by
what those who came first found (in our case it's gold), and the first European establishment
which established in Ghana was established at a place called El Mina, (The Mine), because gold
was so abundant and they came with their manufacturing products in exchange for gold. So the
Europeans initially came to our country to trade! As partners. It is perhaps the error of the
slave trade which changed the perceptions of Europeans about Africans, when our own
people were regarded as commodities. Africa produced a plethora of advanced civilizations.
The most notable of these is the Nile Valley civilization From 3,000 BCE (founding of the First
Dynasty), all the way until it was conquered by Persia around 525 BCE. So about 2,500 years.
This was followed by the great civilizations of Axum and D'mt, and later by the great
Islamic civilizations of the Sahel (Mali, Songhai, and the last in the later Sokoto). The famous
Hajj of Mansa Musa in the 13th century was so profound it altered the currency of every
country he passed through with his entourage. Later the Sokoto Caliphate is an Islamic
spiritual community in Northern Nigeria, led by the Sultan of Sokoto . It was founded during the
Fulani War in 1809 by Usman dan Fodio. Throughout the 1800s, it was one of the largest and
most powerful empires in sub-Saharan Africa until British conquest in 1903. Despite the new
wave of myths regarding Nubia and Kemet (Ancient Egypt) It is clear that Kemet and Nubia were
neighboring African Civilizations just as Aksum and Nubia. Difference does’t mean Nubia was a
‘black race’ and Kemet wasn’t. Both groups were ethnic groups of indigenous African origin. The
ethnic differences were no more significant than Ethiopians versus Kenyans. The largest empire
in Ancient African history was the Songhai empire with its iconic leader Askia. The Aksum
empire was the 3rd largest African empire at 1.25 million sq km. In the sixth century, the
kingdom of Aksum (Axum) was doing what many elsewhere had been doing: pursuing trade and
empire. Its exports of ivory, glass crystal, brass and copper items, and perhaps slaves, among
other things, had brought prosperity to the kingdom. The people of Africa' is more than a
name, it is linked to indigenous rights and issues of sovereignty. 'Blackness' fails at every
level in both the historical and political context. Africans are the natural people of Africa:
The hair, the skin, are all specific adaptations to living in the African landscape. The
Motherland of these adaptations and the cultures is primarily Africa; hence the relevance of the
name. [2] Black history is the history of enslavement, African history is the history of
humanity. If there are no White people, could there be Black people? For over 100,000
years there were only native people of Africa on the planet, and since there were no
"White" people there could not have been Black people, since everyone would have been
"Black." And if all the "White people" vanished from the Earth, would the remaining
"Black" people still be Black? So the older group must define itself relative to the European
newcomers? Would it not make far more logical, historically, linguistically, and social to
describe people by their land of origin. Negro = Negroid = Colored = Nigger = Black (all
associated with color, none are connected to a continent). Now compare this to Asiatic,
Caucasoid, and Mongoloid (all are tied to land, all can be located on a map-- but not so
Negroid/Black). Black and White are therefore debunked as regressive incomplete terms for
describing people. For all of recorded history we see in every conflict a central theme -- that of
"land." So critical as humans need land to grow crops on, to source water from (see Golan
Heights), they need a place to build cities and a place to harvest mineral wealth from. So
attaching your identity to land makes sense: Attaching your identity to an abstract color,
does not. Black and African are not interchangeable in any logical sense.
2NC-Resistance Starting Point Better
Our starting point is better
Brown 9
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.
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█ AfroFuturism (Sam) █
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**Mothering/Fem**
Fem 1NC
Their representation of the Drexlians simultaneously centers and erases Black women. That
is, Black women are only present and relevant in their stories so far as they are mothers.
This is sutured to flaws notions of motherhood as a precondition to the privileges of “true
womanhood”
Lurkins 8
Nancy Lurkins, of Brownstown, Illinois wrote paper for Dr. Martin Hardeman in History 5160, The ¶ Origins of the Civil Rights
Movement, in the fall of 2007. A member of Phi Alpha Theta, she earned ¶ her M.A. in History in spring, 2008.
(“You are the Race, You are the Seeded Earth:” Intellectual Rhetoric, American Fiction, and Birth Control in the Black Community”
http://castle.eiu.edu/historia/archives/2008/Historia2008Lurkins.pdf)
The white devaluation of the black woman was rooted in racial stereotypes as well as the white
belief “that notions about the ‘ideal woman’ did not apply to black women because the
circumstances of slavery had prevented them from developing qualities that other women
possessed and from devoting their lives to wifehood and motherhood.”9 As a contemporary
historian has noted concerning this phenomenon, “[t]he slave master felt few compunctions to
model the black family after the cult of domesticity.” Therefore, black women’s “inherent” racial
characteristics cancelled out the exceptional feminine qualities allegedly held by white women.
For much of white society, what defined a black woman was first and foremost her blackness, as
quite literally the classification “black woman” implies The lack of chastity among black women
was thought by many to be “one of the causes of the degraded home life among blacks.”
Similarly, their frequent sexual deviance was perceived as having disastrous effects for the
morality of the entire black race. Accordingly, women bore the responsibility for “keeping the
race pure” in the minds of both blacks and whites.11 Some prominent black males, such as
DuBois and Alexander Crummell, the Episcopalian minister and intellectual, chose to respond to
the relentless white attacks on black women’s sexual conduct by developing a philosophy of
black communal pride and consequently promoted the ideology of “true black womanhood.” This
new dialogue promoted by black men, especially DuBois, asserted that the because of their
“’history of insult and degradation,’ the black woman has emerged as a model of ‘efficient’ and
strong womanhood.” Many other black male leaders shared DuBois’ views and they came not to
revere the black woman but more specifically the black mother Indeed, these men “designated
motherly devotion to one’s own children as an opportunity and privilege, not a stifling duty.”
Moral motherhood came to be understood as a privilege because women were responsible for
upholding the morality of the family, and as a result, they were depended upon to uplift the entire
black race. Using images taken from contemporary publications such as The Crisis and The New
Negro, English professor Anne Stavney demonstrates the pervasiveness of the image of “a certain
type of mother, a woman morally and sexually pure. Although many pictures from the period
portray a tranquil mother cradling her child, Stavney notes “these black, male authored works
rarely attend to the actual social and economic conditions encountered by most black women of
their era”.
To demonstrate the conflict between the ideology of true black womanhood and the realities of
black women’s lives, she notes blacks’ recently lowered fertility rates as evidence of women’s
ambivalent view of motherhood. As this description of black “true womanhood” reveals, a
striking similarity exists between it and white true womanhood. This should come as no surprise,
however, when considering the premeditation of the ideology and its raison d’être: it was formed
as a response to white society thus it had to meet white society on the levels of respectability they
determined.
This props up a masculine politics of respectability that seek to lock the full
complexity and humanity of Black women in a box through static notions of
womanhood. It’s both a replication of intraracial oppression and the internalization
of white supremacist notions of Black life
Lurkins 8
Nancy Lurkins, of Brownstown, Illinois wrote paper for Dr. Martin Hardeman in History 5160, The ¶ Origins of the Civil Rights
Movement, in the fall of 2007. A member of Phi Alpha Theta, she earned ¶ her M.A. in History in spring, 2008.
(“You are the Race, You are the Seeded Earth:” Intellectual Rhetoric, American Fiction, and Birth Control in the Black Community”
http://castle.eiu.edu/historia/archives/2008/Historia2008Lurkins.pdf)
English professor Farah Jasmine Griffin researches DuBois’ intellectual agenda as it relates to
both gender and race in “Black Feminists and DuBois: Respectability, Protection, and Beyond.”
In addressing previous scholarly works that both “applaud his efforts on behalf of black women”
and note DuBois’ “chivalric idealization of female sexuality,” Griffin resolves the contradiction
by explaining that DuBois “would have believed himself to be a champion of black women and
progressive on issues of importance to their advancement.” At the same time as noting DuBois’
limitations, she argues that he did much to advance our understanding of the oppression of black
women. Of particular importance is her discussion of the politics of respectability where she says
it “emerged as a way to counter the images of black Americans as lazy, shiftless, stupid, and
immoral.” But, she notes the paradoxical nature of this politics of respectability in that its
adoption exposes an “acceptance and internalization” of the very images they sought to combat.
Griffin’s analysis thus aids our understanding of why black true womanhood so closely
resembled white true womanhood. She concludes that, while DuBois (and others, such as
Crummell) sought “to protect the name and image of black women,” the manner in which this
was done emphasizes individuals’ behavior and less so the structural forms of oppression at the
root of the problem, such as racism, sexism, and poverty.
Certainly the discourse of protection materialized from genuine concerns about the situation of
black people, but it also suggests the power struggle between the men of both races and the
intraracial power struggle between black men and black women. According to Griffin, a promise
of protection served as a component of the politics of respectability and attends to important
concerns of black nationalism: it restores black men with a sense of masculinity while issuing a
privilege of femininity on black women. However, in the end it did not allow room for those who
did not so nicely fit into the ideology. As I will show below, works of fiction show that the
narrow representations of women forwarded by the newly emerging ideology) did not allow for
their ‘full complexity and humanity.” As historians, we can better account for black women’s
unique experience related to birth control and sexuality by analyzing works of fiction, especially
those authored by black females.
While Hart’s use of writings by DuBois and Garvey show black men dominated contraceptive
debates, she parallels Anne Stavney’s argument that men not only dominated discussions of black
female sexuality but created the prevailing ideology. Stavney’s article, “’Mothers of Tomorrow:’
The New Negro Renaissance and the Politics of Maternal Representation” focuses on early
twentieth-century discourses surrounding black women's sexuality and how such discussions
impacted black communities. Although explicit discussion of birth control does not surface in her
analysis, Stavney incorporates DuBois’ writings into her study of the crucial role played by
“ideological and iconographic forces” as a way to uncover the intraracial tensions that occurred
during the period. Stavney examines black women’s lives during the Harlem Renaissance, with
particular attention on how black women, such as Nella Larsen, participated in this cultural
movement. Works by Nella Larsen and Jessie Fauset serve as the foundation to Stavney’s
argument that some black women resisted their “assigned motherly roles” and that “1920s black
women writers attempted to create a geographic and discursive space for sexual yet childless
black women.” Stavney’s investigation of definitions of black womanhood proves a very valuable
study as she analyzes female responses to the black, male-dominated discussions of black female
sexuality. She makes excellent use of sources, such as images presented on the covers of popular
black publications, and Nella Larsen’s novel Passing to show the dominance of the ideology of
true black womanhood.
Race, sexuality, and gender have been mutually constituting in terms of propping
up white supremacy and patriarchy. Justifying a unique spectrum of violence
against black women which turns the aff
Martinot 7
[Steven, “Motherhood and the Invention of Race,” Hypatia 22.2]
The creation of matrilineal servitude status, the insidious division of women against one
another in the interests of wealth and property, expressed nothing more actual or exigent
than colonial greed. Antmiscegenation statutes extended racial categories to the human
body as property. Together, the legislation of motherhood and sexuality transformed
property by extending the body as property to the body as production. The two
coalesced as slavery and a structure of racialization, by which the English derogated
people of color and defined themselves as white. Structurally, these enactments together engendered a cyclic
process. Sexuality, seized as property in Africans and desexualized as propriety for the English, extended the body as production
to commodified personhood. Commodified
personhood formed the grounds for the codification of
slavery and the transformation of colonial allegiance (through paranoia and enforced social solidarity)
into a structure of racialization whose ultimate product was white social identity. Slavery, the ultimate extension of
the body as property, gives all interpersonal relations a commodified character that through racialization renders all forms of
whiteness, and white supremacy, in
which political enactment, paramilitary activity, the use of economic and financial
power, and the instrumentalization of women have always been deployed together.
Throughout their many redefinitions, race, sexuality, gender, and nation have been mutually
conditioning in the production of American whiteness and in the construction of a white
nation. As Roberts argues, at the confluence of motherhood, race, and white supremacy, the
state’s persecution of a black woman will not only extend its control over childbearing,
but reinstate the biologization of race at the same time (1997, 20). What colonial white society did to
personhood a matter of property. This cycle continually reproduces race,
African women through matrilineal statues (to construct structures of racialization), contemporary white society does to
Regina McKnight[’s] through charges of murder. Her personhood and motherhood are not
violently divided against each other legally because the state is rehearsing or
reconstituting a form of matrilinearity; the violence done to her is in the service of
reenacting the structures of white supremacy that emerged from matrilinearity. For the
state to have provided medical care or humane labor conditions would have been
unintelligible for it. Instead, the state imprints outlaw status and servitude on
McKnight’s body to sanctify its withholding of humane conditions, as the reconstitution
of a white social consensus. Because the state could repeat this cycle with respect to McKnight, it could use her and
other black women (through the instrumentalization of black motherhood) to reinscribe social racialization and its own white
identity. In this sense, the McKnight case is the direct legacy of the seventeenth-century 96 Hypatia invention of race itself.
Repeating the redefinition of gender and sexuality of three hundred years earlier, the condemnation of McKnight echoes the
colonial condemnation of the black pregnant body—restructuring
race through a paranoia (the threat of
criminalized black people), white solidarity (allegiance to the law), and practices of
arbitrary and gratuitous violence.
We must place intersectionality at the center of our politics. In this case, black
feminist theorizing is key to problematize dominant understandings of oppression in
order to produce the most holistic model of change
Violet Eudine Barriteau 6 [Feminist Africa 7: Diaspora Voices; Issue 7: December 2006; First
published by the African Gender Institute; University of Cape Town; “The relevance of black
feminist scholarship: a Caribbean perspective;
http://www.feministafrica.org/Feminist_Africa_7.pdf
A foundational contribution of black feminist scholarship is its exposure and problematizing of
race/racism as a social relation, which simultaneously complicates and is complicated by other
social relations of domination. The intellectual and activist work of black feminists reveals
hierarchies of power within categories of race, class, gender, patriarchal relations, sexuality and
sexual orientation. Black feminism demonstrates that white or other feminist theorizing that
refuses or fails to recognize race as a relation of domination within feminism and society,
facilitates the continued oppression of black women within the feminist movement and within
society. This is a very powerful argument, and many of the dynamics of power and privilege
crystallize around this.
Barbara Ransby notes that one of the strongest ideological tenets around which black feminists
have organized “is the notion that race, class, gender and sexuality are co-dependent variables
that cannot readily be separated and ranked in scholarship, in political practice, or lived
experience” The insertion and simultaneous theorization of race and racism changes what
constitutes feminist theory and what could be its subject matter. Radical, socialist and liberal
feminists had examined other oppressive social relations, but none had made race central to their
analysis. Black feminist theory exposes racism and the politics of exclusion and denial embedded
in feminist knowledge production in the same way that black feminist activism confronts racism
in everyday life.
Link ungender
Focusing on the race marked body obviates the gendered body:the denaturalization of
motherhood was the precondition for racial hierarchy. Sexual diffrenece shapes our
understanding of whiteness, and constructs our understanding of difference
Martinot (Steve, Steve Martinot is Instructor Emeritus at the Center for Interdisciplinary Programs at San
Francisco State University. He is the author of The Rule of Racialization: Class, Identity, Governance and
Forms in the Abyss: A Philosophical Bridge between Sartre and Derrida (both Temple). He is also the
editor of two previous books, and translator of Racism by Albert Memmi. He has written extensively on the
structures of racism and white supremacy in the United States, as well as on corporate culture and
economics, and leads seminars on these subjects in the Bay Area.) 07
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~marto/mother.htm
The state’s control of women’s pregnant bodies has a strong racial component—black women’s
bodies are, and have always been, used in the United States as a mechanism to reconstitute the state as
white. In Killing the Black Body, Dorothy Roberts offers a meticulous history of the control of black
childbearing imposed by various forms of white power throughout the history of the United States (slavery,
Jim Crow, sterilization campaigns, the war on drugs, and so on). Roberts lists a number of cases where the
state’s discovery of a pregnant black woman’s drug use becomes an excuse to demand abortion by
threatening the mother with a jail sentence.[1] She argues that, with a few exceptions, black pregnant
women were drug tested and reported to the district attorney by hospitals, while white pregnant women
were not (1997, 158). And these cases serve as a precedent for all women: what the state does to black
women it can do to all women.As amnesia it disguises its historical antecedents in order to obviate
recognition of former injustices, such as social structures called slavery or segregation, in order to open
space to set legal precedents. Thus, it reduces history to a background template by which to establish a
sense of familiarity for its injustices, to make them appear acceptable. But at the same time, it reveals the
historical sources of its own structure of thought, its sense of the permissible, the internal cultural logic of
the white mind that understands these injustices as acceptable. In discounting McKnight’s arguments, her
condition, her very being beyond the scope of argument, data, or morality, the state renders her an
instrument for itself. The cultural logic of its operations takes on a proprietary value. No amount of data or
argumentation for the rights of black mothers and other women of color will challenge this structure or
prevent its reenactment. Indeed, it is only by erasing or dismissing data that might challenge the state’s
claims that the state bestows validity on its indictment, and its unobstructed call to an unspoken historical
logic.
Here, I want to investigate the nature and meaning of the structures that make the injustices against
McKnight both recognizable and permissible to the white state. McKnight must be criminalized in order to
decriminalize the state’s maintenance of brutal labor conditions. What I wish to investigate is the relation of
the hegemonic white male mind to history, in order to reveal what lies behind its self-valorization, its
ability to dispense with argument, and to reside in the emptiest of statements while discounting (through
criminalization) any defense against itself. The state is not white by fiat; it is white as a cultural condition
given by events that reconstitute its history in the present. To fully understand the structure of the relation
between the state’s actions and the devaluation and criminalization of black bodies, we must revisit not
only the historical legacy these contemporary actions repeat but also the cultural logic that historical legacy
created and maintained.
We are not speaking of the historical repetition of racism here, but of something more profound.
The fact that the state picks out black people to victimize is a pragmatic use of racism. However, for the
state to decriminalize itself through the criminalization of its victims becomes a question of social identity,
and of a certain social sanctity acquired through that identity. It is the construction of a sanctity for
whiteness, and for white racialized consciousness that goes beyond racism, and empowers it. In the eyes of
that consciousness, a sense of justice or humanity toward McKnight as a black woman would be an
unrecognizable act. What gives the state’s injustice familiarity is a structure of racialization, whereby the
state renders itself white by its acts against black people in general and black women in particular. This
structure of racialization threads its way through U.S. history against people of color as a cultural norm.
The modes of impunity and the form of criminalization of the victims may change, but the underlying
structure remains the same.
Link ungendered slavery
Focusing on the race marked body obviates the gendered body:the denaturalization of
motherhood was the precondition for racial hierarchy. Sexual diffrenece shapes our
understanding of whiteness, and constructs our understanding of difference
Martinot 7
(Steve, Steve Martinot is Instructor Emeritus at the Center for Interdisciplinary Programs at San
Francisco State University. He is the author of The Rule of Racialization: Class, Identity,
Governance and Forms in the Abyss: A Philosophical Bridge between Sartre and Derrida (both
Temple). He is also the editor of two previous books, and translator of Racism by Albert Memmi.
He has written extensively on the structures of racism and white supremacy in the United States,
as well as on corporate culture and economics, and leads seminars on these subjects in the Bay
Area.) 07
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~marto/mother.htmThe act’s first part, which established
matrilinearity and stipulated that children of indentured English would follow their mother’ s
contractual release date, symbolized the Colonial Council’s decision to shift its plantation labor
force to Africans and move swiftly toward perpetual servitude for Africans. The law’s focus was
clear: it was designed both to enhance plantation wealth through the potential childbearing
capacity of African women and to extend the commodification of the African people through
sexuality deployed in the interests of wealth. English bond-laborers working alongside Africans
did not benefit from this measure and they could not escape its effects. The differentiation
imposed on motherhood initiated an extension of the juridical difference between bond-labor and
free labor to a definition of African and English as social categories, through the categorization of
women.
The statute violated the fundamental English legal principle of patriarchal descent. In this respect,
it represented a severe identity crisis in the colony posed by the presence of Africans to English
society. In order to remain purely English, colonial society had been, from the beginning, insular
with respect to indigenous communities, excluding them after failing to enslave them. The
decision to shift the labor force to Africans not only disturbed that insularity but also created a
dilemma between the colony’s desire to hold people in perpetual servitude as capital and its
desire to preserve its moral stature (as civilized). Reversing the English common law of descent,
in which children had inherited the status of the father, freed the plantation owners somewhat
from this dilemma. Servitude could be considered under the heading of patriarchal domination
rather than in conflict with patriarchal right. The English could abjure any release date for African
bond-laborers and still feel good about themselves. Thus, the law both nudged the colony toward
a slaveholding system and opened a fracture of identification between the colony and England.
Impact
They entrench the root cause of racism and further entrench violence against
women. Their conception of race obscures the “microrelations of power” which
makes biopolitical violence inevitable.
Feder 7 [Emily, “The Dangerous Individual(‘s) Mother: Biopower, Family, and the Production of Race,”
Hypatia 22.2]
In a series of lectures delivered at the Collège de France in 1975–1976, Foucault took up explicitly
for the first time in his work the function of racism in the state and the specific techniques of power
associated with it. In his summary lecture, he considered the development of the two different
sorts of power he had undertaken to study in the course. The first was the power of the sovereign:
from the early modern period, the power embodied by the sovereign is a “right of life and death”
over his subjects (the right “to take life or let live”). In the nineteenth century, this power
underwent a transformation into what Foucault described as a “right to make live and to let
die” (1997/2003, 240–41). But this characterization does not yet fully describe the power of the
racist state, or, rather, the functioning of this power in the racist state depends on another
level, namely, the “microrelations of power” (Foucault 1977/1980, 199). This level of power is
most closely associated in Foucault’s work with the disciplinary power he examined in Discipline
and Punish (1977/1995). According to Foucault, a kind of power emerged in the mid-eighteenth
century that significantly differed from, but nonetheless dovetailed with, disciplinary power. While
disciplinary power was applied to individual bodies, to train and make use of them, this other kind
of power exists “at a different level, [functions] on a different scale . . . and makes use of very
different instruments” (Foucault 1997/2003, 242). This power, which he called here and in the first
volume of The History of Sexuality “biopower” (1976/1990), is “applied not to man-as-body [as
disciplinary power is,] but to the living man, to man-as-living-being; ultimately . . . to man-asspecies” (242). Biopower, Foucault argued, “inscribes [racism] in the mechanisms of the state”
(254). Biopower creates the distinctions—the “biological” distinctions—within the population that
form the hierarchy whereby “certain races are described as good and . . . others, by contrast, are
described as inferior” (255). This standard is that on which a new conception of “normalization,” or
what Foucault here called “regularization,” is established. In this way, biopower—like the
disciplinary power from which it developed—is founded upon a gathering of knowledge; it is a
power that is grounded upon, made possible by, this knowledge; at the same time, this accumulated
knowledge is made to count as knowledge, in virtue 64 Hypatia of power. Among the
generalized mechanisms of which the biopolitical state makes use is the
measurement of biological processes of the populace—rates of birth, death,
and fertility. These are, Foucault said, biopolitics’ “first objects of knowledge
and the targets it seeks to control” through natalist policy, for example, but also
through efforts to contain disease (243).
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█ Cap Links (Mike) █
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Cap/NeoLib Links
The aff’s approach to knowledge which privileges subjectivity and uncertainty
denies the objectivity in class relations and the oppression that is produced from
capital accumulation
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/article/College-Literature/16408664.html
The denial of the objective suffering that capitalism naturalizes violence and makes
us indifferent toward limitless annihilation
“What is obscured in this representation of the non-dialogical is, of course, the violence of the
dialogical. I leave aside here the violence with which these advocates of non-violent
conversations attack… justifiable, and naturalized.”
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/article/College-Literature/16408664.html
The focus on race becomes an alibi for acquiescence of class struggles – they obscure
the logic of capital and ensure repetition of oppression
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/article/College-Literature/16408664.html
“Post-al logic is marked above all by its erasure of "production"… divided by two antagonistic classes" (see
my Theory and its Other)”