School to prison to prison surveillance
Aff
Needs- re highlighting of the shell
1. Overview
a. Purpose of the aff-why talk about the aff and it relationship to the topic
b. Describe section with what the file sees as offense and why
c. 2ac framing ( overview and things you have to win ) ( be sure to include the
even if clause that allow you to win the aff even if they cant make the impact of
the aff go aways after the aff is done or discussed
d. Direction of the aff ( how to spin the aff to account for cap K , wilderson , give
back the land , perms )
e. Break down the AT: the aff
Shell
Potential Plan text/ student advocacy
1. The USFG should strike down No child left behind
2. We ____insert student names ____Affirm end of the school to prison pipe
3. Affirm the end surveillance of schools
4. The USFG should affirm A-PLUS
5. We ____insert student names___ call for the end of private prisons
1. Schools now ….
School teachers are disproportionately subjected increased punishment
Jeremy Adam Smith ,Teachers Of All Races Are More Likely To Punish Black Students, Huffpost
Black Voices, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/27/black-studentspunished_n_7449538.html?ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000047, 05/27/2015
In the first experiment, researchers screened teachers for explicit racial bias, among other factors. They then showed a
racially diverse group of 57 female teachers a picture of a middle school and asked them to imagine themselves working
there. The teachers then viewed a school record -- based on an actual one -- of a student who misbehaved twice.¶ Then
came the experimental trick: The students were identified with either stereotypically black
names (Darnell or Deshawn) or white ones (Greg or Jake). After reviewing each infraction, the
researchers asked:¶ How severe was the student’s misbehavior?¶ To what extent is the student hindering you from
maintaining order in your class?¶ How irritated do you feel by the student?¶ How severely should the student be
disciplined?¶ Would you call the student a troublemaker?¶ From
the first infraction to the second, teachers
were much more likely to increase punishment for Darnell than Greg, even though only the
names had been changed. A second experiment cemented this finding. Researchers recruited 204 more teachers -predominately white and female, but including men and people of other races -- to go through the same exercise. But this
time, researchers also asked them to rate the extent to which they thought the student’s misbehaviors suggested a pattern
and whether they could imagine suspending the student in the future.¶ Again, with this larger sample, racial bias emerged.
Students with black-sounding names were significantly more likely to be labeled
troublemakers and to be more harshly punished. But, as a group, the teachers were also more
likely to see the behavior as part of a pattern in the black student and to say they could
imagine suspending the student.¶ There was one more result that some might consider surprising: The two
samples were racially diverse -- and yet the researchers did not find significant differences among their responses. Black
teachers could punish black students just as disproportionately as white ones.¶ “I think that it
attests to the pervasiveness of stereotype effects,” said lead author Jason Okonofua, a Ph.D. student at Stanford, in an
email. “Research has demonstrated that exposure to media influences the stereotypical associations we all make in our
daily lives. Thus,
all teachers, regardless of race, are more likely to think a black child, as
compared to a white child, is a troublemaker.Ӧ In other words, in a society pervaded by racial
stereotypes, hiring black teachers might not necessarily reduce the number of suspensions
and expulsions of black children, or the labeling of them as troublemakers. Even rooting out
obviously racist teachers of other races is not enough.
Educational Tracking
Ability grouping or educational tracking is nothing but school house surveillance
that is used to disproportionately unequipt students with the skills and the
mark of education to have oppurntunity afterschool . In other words, equality
in the face of education has been highjacked for signifiers that are anti-black
and structurally used to underdeveloped Black America .
Grace
Kao' and Jennifer S. Thompson
RACIALA ND ETHNIC STRATIFICATIONIN EDUCATIONALA
CHIEVEMENT AND ATTAINMENT , http://www.jstor.org/stable/30036974 ,
2003
Students are stratified within schools according to ability groups or "tracks."Numerous¶
studies have shown that poor children and racial and ethnic minorities¶ are disproportionately
placed in low-ability groups early in their educational careers¶ and in non-college-bound
groupings in junior high and high school (Joseph¶ 1998, Slavin & Braddock 1993, Oakes 1985).
Likewise, research shows that lowincome¶ andm inoritys tudentsp articipatea t higherr atesi n vocationalc urriculaa nd¶ at lower
rates in academic curricula than do affluent and white students (Oakes &¶ Guiton 1995, Ekstrom et al. 1988, Oakes 1985). Recent
statistics from the Digest¶ of Education Statistics (National Center for Education Statistics 1997) report the¶ following patterns:t he
percentageo f high school seniorsw ho reportedb eing in the¶ college preparatoryo r academic track were 46% of whites, 36% of
blacks, 31%¶ of Hispanics, 51% of Asians, and 23% of Native Americans. Those reporting in¶ the general track were 43% of whites,
49% of blacks, 56% of Hispanics, 40% of¶ Asians, and 61% of Native Americans. Finally, the percentages of each race/ethnic¶ group
reporting to be in the vocational track were 11% of whites, 15% of blacks,¶ 13% of Hispanics, 9% of Asians, and 17% of Native
Americans (National Center¶ for Education Statistics 1997). These
statistics show that half of Asians and
almost¶ half of whites report being in the highest track. Blacks, Hispanics, and Native¶
Americans are more likely to be in the general track, and they also have the highest¶ numbers
in the lowest track (vocational). Similarly, another study found that¶ nonblacks were almost
three times more likely than blacks to be in the honors or¶ advanced track in English and math
(Kubitschek & Hallinan 1996). Thus, patterns¶ of racial and ethnic disadvantage in tracking
continue.¶ There is mixed evidence on whether these racial and ethnic effects on track¶ placement remain once controls, such as
ability, are added to analytic models¶ (Oakes et al. 1992). An older study found race effects disappear (blacks versus¶ nonblacks)
once test scores, academic orientation, course selection, and grades¶ were controlled for (Alexander & Cook 1982). However, a
more recent study¶ found that once academic achievement was controlled, racial and ethnic differences¶ decreased but did not
disappear (Hallinan 1994). School
track placements may also¶ be influencedb y students'm easuredE
nglish-languagea bility,s o that,f or instance,¶ otherwise talented and capable Mexican-origin
students are placed in remedial or¶ vocational tracks (Donato et al. 1991).¶ The effects of track
placement have also been extensively studied. Because¶ racial
and ethnic minorities are
disproportionatelyin lower tracks, the effects of¶ tracks will lead to differential
outcomes. The general conclusion on the effects of¶ tracks is that tracking and ability
groups have a negative effect on the achievement¶ of lower track students, a negligible
effect on students in the middle groups, and a¶ weak-to-modest positive effect on
students in the high tracks (Hallinan 1988,¶ Oakes 1985, Eder & Felmee 1984, Sorensen
& Hallinan 1986, Alexander &¶ McDill 1976, Hauser & Featherman 1976, Heyns 1974).
Further disadvantages¶ for the lower tracks include the development of negative attitudes and
behaviors¶ related to learning (Hallinan 1988). On the other hand, placement in the college¶
preparatory track in high school produces positive effects such as high academic¶ achievement
(grades, test scores), measures of motivation, and educational aspirations¶ and attainment,
even after controlling for family background and ability¶ differences (Rosenbaum 1976,
Alexander et al. 1978, Hauser & Featherman 1976,¶ Alexander& Cook 1982). Similarly,r esearchh as
shown thatu pper-tracks tudents¶ obtain higher grades, are more likely to complete college, have more positive selfconcepts,¶ and
have lower rates of misconduct and truancy, even after controlling¶ for home background variables (Ansalone 2001).¶ Just as there
are racial and ethnic differences in student track and ability group¶ placement, there are also differences in the courses students
take in high school.¶ Of course, patterns of course taking are related to placement in specific tracks.¶ The Digest of Education
Statistics (National Center for Education Statistics 1997)¶ examined the average number of Carnegie units earned in various subjects
and¶ found that Asian students had the highest number in math, science, and foreign¶ language. The Carnegie unit represents one
credit for the completion of a 1-year¶ course (National Center for Education Statistics 1997). Native Americans had the¶ lowest total
units in math and foreign language, whereas blacks had the lowest¶ in science. Blacks and Native Americans had the highest
vocational education¶ units, whereas Asians had the lowest. The Digest (National Center for Education¶ Statistics 1997) also
reported the percentages of high school graduates earning¶ various combinations of credits in different subjects. The highest level
(4-English,¶ 3-science, 3-math, 0.5-computer science, 2-foreign language) was earned by 27%¶ of whites, 20% of blacks, 28% of
Hispanics, 36% of Asians, and 13% of Native¶ Americans. Other statistics find similar patterns. Miller (1995) found that blacks¶ and
Hispanics lagged substantially behind whites in enrollment of all math and¶ science courses except Algebra I and Biology in 1982 and
1987. However, from¶ the 1980s to the 1990s, both black and white high school graduates were following¶ a more rigorousc
urriculum.Y et, black high school graduatesw ere still less likely¶ than white graduates to take advanced science and math courses or
study a foreign¶ language (U.S. Department of Education 1995, Epps 1995). Mare (1995) also¶ found an increase over time in the
total number of courses and basic academic¶ courses taken, especially among blacks and Hispanics.¶ Even
within tracks,
racial and ethnic differences in course taking persist. Within¶ the vocational area, low-income
and minority students disproportionately take¶ classes related to low-skill jobs, whereas white
and affluent students more often¶ take courses that teach general skills or include
considerable academic content¶ (Oakes 1983). On the academic side of the curriculum, lowincome and¶ non-Asian minority students disproportionately take low-level and remedial¶
courses, whereas whites and Asians tend to dominate enrollments in advanced¶ and honors
courses (Braddock 1990, Oakes 1990).¶ One reason for the differential course taking in high school is that different¶
schools offer different courses. Low-income, urban schools do not offer the same¶ range and level of
courses as their more affluent suburban counterparts. Urban¶ schools are less likely to offer
advanced courses or gifted and talented programs¶ (Garibaldi1 998). Predominantlyw hite
andw ealthys chools offerm oreh igh-ability¶ classes-two to three times as many advanced
placement courses per student as¶ low-income, predominantlym inoritys chools-and a largers
hareo f theirs tudents¶ take these advanced classes (Orfield et al. 1996). In addition,
differences in course¶ participationa re due to educators'p erceptionsa boutr ace and class
differencesi n¶ academic motivations and abilities. Students and parents also make choices about¶ course taking
(Oakes & Guiton 1995).
2. Why?Do they need probable cause or reason for suspection ?Survielance is
justify because of Innocents and safety Frames
Innocence and safety is what drives surveillance , the nexus of children, safety
and prison is the school to prison pipeline
Erica R. Meiners ,Education and Gender and Women’s Studies, Northeastern Illinois University,
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11256-011-0187-9/fulltext.html¶ Ending the School-to-Prison Pipeline/Building
Abolition Futures,
2011
. Innocence and safety (for select children only)
are repeatedly deployed to expand policing and surveillance. How many times at a meeting
having to do with education or criminal justice is the good of the children, or children’s
futures, raised? While “protection” of “innocence” (of course only available to the few) is used
to expand the carceral state, anxieties surrounding the laboring futures for “our children” are
also often a key plank of prison expansion.2 Yet, these political and economic futures are
always predicated on a particular racialized, heteronormative, gendered logic. Clearly, those
interested in prison construction are imagining futures where their sons are on the “right”
side of the prison bars, and not futures where their daughters work in an all male prison.
Childhood is at the heart of prison expansion as false promises of safety and employment,
particularly for our most “innocent” (children) are repeatedly used to expand a prison nation
Exceptionality and youth are also circulated in other arenas
The hunt / Poverty adv
Schools prove that prisons , low wages and death are reserved for the poor and
youth of color and not by chance but projects of white affirmative action that is
fostered by the nexus between surveillance and public education.
Erica R. Meiners ,Education and Gender and Women’s Studies, Northeastern Illinois University,
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11256-011-0187-9/fulltext.html¶ Ending the School-to-Prison Pipeline/Building
Abolition Futures,
2011
While the term “PIC” typically refers to connections between jails, the economy and the
political sphere, research demonstrates that education must be included in this definition.
With the increased use of surveillance and incarceration tools—for example metal detectors,
surveillance cameras, school uniforms, armed security guards, and on-site school police
detachments—urban schools look and feel a lot like detention centers. In addition, the growth
of an incarceration nation clearly impacts education, funneling the limited pool of tax dollars
from social service programs to the carceral state. Between 1984 and 2000, across all states
and the District of Columbia, state spending on prisons was six times the increase of spending
on higher education (Justice Policy Institute 2002). As budgets for corrections expand and
funding for higher education contracts, the state’s visions about the future of select youth are
clear.¶ The term “school-to-prison pipeline” aims to highlight a complex network of relations
that naturalize the movement of youth of color from our schools and communities into underor unemployment and permanent detention. This is not a novel phenomenon. Public
education in the United States has historically aggressively framed particular populations as
superfluous to our democracy yet imperative for low wage work, or jobs available after full
white employment. With First Nations residential schools, apartheid segregation, and
chronically inequitable access to state resources, public education has, and continues, to
funnel targeted non-white and poor youth towards non-living wage work, participation in the
street or the permanent war economy and prison. While these educational outcomes are not
new, the expansion of our prison nation in the U.S. over the last three decades has
strengthened policy, practice and ideological linkages between schools and prisons. White
supremacy has always been central to our nation’s public education system and to our
carceral state.
Boot strap theory fells –low income students prove that public education the
haul to survelie and track that student population who are already marked as
criminal. The promise of potenial degrees never changes the livability of those
who are most effected
Gordon Telling Poor, Smart Kids That All It Takes Is Hard Work to Be as Successful as Their
Wealthy Peers Is a Blatant Lie http://atlantablackstar.com/2015/06/03/telling-poor-smart-kids-takesTaylor
hard-work-successful-wealthy-peers-blatant-lie ,
2015
When it was revealed that low-income students face greater challenges in school and are far
less likely than their wealthier peers to attend or graduate college, the message to this
disadvantaged group of students was a simple one—work harder.¶ It was a new twist on the dreaded
“work twice as hard to have half of what your peers have” mentality but it also seemed to just be an unfortunate reality in
America.¶ But it isn’t often enough that the full picture of low-income students’ disadvantages is explored and unveiled to the very
students who are trying to navigate that reality.¶ Many
of these students do step up to the plate and work
hard to obtain the type of academic scores that exceed expectations, but even that isn’t
enough for them to overcome such daunting obstacles.¶ A 10-year study by the Department of
Education that started in 2002 revealed that not only are low-income students often left
struggling academically but even when they do excel in the classroom, their chances of
obtaining a bachelor’s degree were still bleak when compared to their wealthy counter parts.¶
Even when wealthy students had average or below average scores, they still had a better
chance of furthering their academic careers than low-income students who consistently
earned stellar academic scores.¶ A vast majority of these low-income students did move
beyond the high school halls to college campuses, but what happens after that is a often a
disheartening tale.¶ “The problem is that most don’t finish, or settle for less than a bachelor’s
degree, which of course limits their earning power later in life,” Slate’s Jordan Weissmann
reported. “Sometimes they try to save money on tuition by attending community college,
even though most two-year schools have a spotty track record when it comes to helping
students graduate. Sometimes they get lost or overwhelmed in a college’s bureaucracy, because they don’t have
educated parents who can help guide them along. Sometimes they try to work through school and simply can’t balance the
demands of a job with their academics.Ӧ Whatever
the reason may be, even when low-income
students do exactly what society has demanded of them—work harder than their peers in
attempt to match their success—they are still slipping through the cracks when it comes time
to earn a bachelor’s degree.¶ This eventually sets them up for economic disadvantages in the
future and contributes to the ever-growing wealth gap that has been looming over America
for far too long.
Native / Boarder land /ICE advantage
Brown People on the borderlands of America are consumed for profit.
The Seattle Times
Seattle Times editorial board, Stop detaining immigrants to fill quotas in ICE facilities¶http://
www.seattletimes .com/ opinion/editorials/stop-detaining-immigrants-to-fill-quotas-in-ice-facilities/
?utm_ source= facebook&utm_ medium=social&utm_campaign=article_left ,June 16 ,
2015
A SCATHING watchdog report by the Detention Watch Network and the Center for Constitutional Rights adds fuel to the
growing criticism against exorbitant taxpayer funding for private prison contractors.¶
Detention of any civil
prisoner should be based on the severity of the alleged crimes, not on a bed quota that
guarantees private prisons make a profit at the expense of human rights of detainees.
Congress should end the practice of guaranteeing minimum profits for corporations that now
operate many U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities. The United
States spends more than $2 billion a year to detain immigrants, and there are few signs that investment improves public
safety.¶ The contracts
between ICE and the private industry lack accountability or transparency.
We do know that Congress requires ICE to operate at least 34,000 daily detention beds
nationwide, and much of that work is farmed out to for-profit prison corporations. These
contractors are paid regardless of whether the bed minimum is met. Here in Washington, the GEO Group runs the
Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma and is guaranteed a minimum of at least 1,181 beds. (ICE reports about 1,400
prisoners are currently detained there.)¶ Congress
needs to get rid of this bed quota now and start
exploring more alternatives to incarceration that have proved to reduce costs and keep
families together. Remember: Many of these detainees pose no threat to society and have
committed civil violations, such as overstaying a visa.¶ With a bed quota and discount pricing
in place, there’s no real incentive for ICE agents to explore non-prison options like community
monitoring that cost a fraction of the estimated daily $164 price tag of locking up each
detainee.” ¶ Federal elected officials also should ban a “tiered pricing” system that allows the contractors to give ICE
discounted pricing when the number of detainees exceeds minimum guarantees. The report reveals troubling
examples of how this practice leads some federal officials to pressure their employees to fill
the beds.¶ With a bed quota and discount pricing in place, there’s no real incentive for ICE
agents to explore non-prison options like community monitoring that cost a fraction of the
estimated daily $164 price tag of locking up each detainee. Last month, The Seattle Times editorial board
pushed for Congress to support a bill to end unnecessary detentions.¶ In Tacoma, reports of human-rights
abuses have lingered for months, leading to hunger strikes and prison conflicts. The GEO Group’s
contract to run the center expired in April, but it has been extended through June 30 as negotiations continue. The
company insists it meets industry standards, providing “high quality services in safe, secure and humane environments,
and … strongly refutes allegations to the contrary.”¶ Nonetheless, U.S. Rep. Adam Smith, D-Bellevue, recently wrote to
ICE Director Sarah Saldaña imploring her to consider alternatives to detention. Short of this, he appropriately encouraged
her to increase transparency in the negotiations with GEO Group and to set stricter standards that ensure human rights
are not being abused
Detainees should be more than a number to meet a quota.¶
ICE prisons are real…and everywhere for Mostly Black and Latino
J Pugliese,
oseph
25, State Violence and the Execution of Law, Biopolitical caesurae of torture, black sites, drones
,2013
According to the ACLU’s Report, this prediction has been fully borne out: ‘By¶ 2010, the average daily
population of immigration detainees stood at 31,020, ¶ more than a 50% increase over the 2001 level (and an
increase of roughly¶ 450% over the 1994 level).’ 93 As Roberto Lovato observes, ‘Like its
predecessor,¶ the military- industrial-complex, the migrant- military- industrial complex tries
to¶ integrate federal, state, and local economic interests as increasing numbers of¶
companies bid for, and become dependent on, big contracts like the Boeing¶ contract or the
$385 million DHS contract for the construction of immigrant¶ prisons.’ 94 Driven by
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), these immigration¶ prisons are holding up to
400,000 immigrants every year.¶ I want to focus on these ICE prisons as they are largely off- limits to
public¶ scrutiny and they thereby constitute the domestic aspect of the US transnational ¶ network of secret
prisons and black sites. The ICE prisons effectively interlink¶ the international war on terror with
the domestic exercise of state violence and¶ racialized punishment. The so- called
Communications Management Units of¶ these immigration prisons are also known as the ‘other
Guantánamo’: ‘an archipelago¶ of federal prisons that stretches across the country’; they house largely¶
Muslim inmates convicted on often questionable terrorism charges. 95 Within the¶ ICE prisons, the
inmates, ‘mostly Latino and black,’ are often dressed in the same¶ orange jumpsuits of their
Guantánamo equivalents. Sexual assault and various¶ forms of torture have been
documented, particularly against gay and transgender¶ detainees. 96 Moreover, ‘Unlike
people held on criminal charges, immigrant¶ detainees are not afforded the Sixth Amendment
right to legal counsel.’ 97 The¶ black site dimensions of the ICE prisons have been documented
by Jacqueline¶ Stevens, who cites James Pendergraph, former executive director of the ICE¶
Offi ce of State and Local Coordination, addressing a conference of police and¶ sheriffs: ‘ “If
you don’t have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but¶ you think he’s illegal, we
can make him disappear.” ’ 98 As Stevens explains:¶ Pendergraph knew that ICE could disappear people,
because he knew in¶ addition to the publicly listed fi eld offi ces and detention sites, ICE is also¶ confi ning
people in 180 unlisted and unmarked subfi eld sites, many in¶ suburban offi ce parks or commercial spaces
revealing no information about¶ their ICE tenants . . . Designed for confi ning individuals in transit, with no¶
beds or showers, subfi eld offi ces are not subject to ICE Detention Standards. ¶ Stevens explains how
people are can be disappeared within these prisons: ‘It’s . . .¶ not surprising that if you’re putting
people in a warehouse, the occupants become¶ inventory, inventory does not need showers,
beds, drinking water, soap, toothbrushes,¶ sanitary napkins, mail, attorneys or legal
information and can withstand¶ the constant blast of cold air.’ 99 In the context of the
sequestered suburban¶ ICE prisons, state violence and its immigration law become imbricated
with the¶ very fabric of civilian everyday life, both at the level of spaces (offi ce parks and¶
commercial buildings) and civilian subjects (the owners of the sites who hire out¶ these same
civil spaces). In other words, an invisibilized form of civil penality¶ comes into being that blurs the line
between state and civil modalities of violence. ¶ Civil penality articulates the colonizing of civilian sites by
the state; it names the¶ conversion of offi ce parks and commercial buildings into suburban extensions¶ of
the larger transnational carceral apparatus of the US state. The transposition of¶ state- sponsored
violence from offi cial prisons to secret civilian sites engenders the¶ normalization of this
violence. Within the locus of the civilian (the commercial¶ offi ce), the pain and anguish of the
immigration detainee assumes a normative¶ status as it is now experienced within the
unexceptional spaces and sites of¶ everyday civilian life. Under the jurisdiction of this regime
of civil penality, the¶ immigration detainee is riveted to the structure of a ubiquitous
carcerality where¶ what is denied is the promise of an ‘elsewhere’ (the space of the civil) that
would¶ offer refuge from ongoing imprisonment.
Women and LGBT tracking
School are violent for any bodies but especially those children who LGBT
Erica R. Meiners ,Education and Gender and Women’s Studies, Northeastern Illinois University,
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11256-011-0187-9/fulltext.html¶ Ending the School-to-Prison Pipeline/Building
Abolition Futures,
2011
As an example, I point to the scarcity of intersectional work within the school-to-prison
pipeline, specifically work that includes gender and sexuality within an analysis, or within
organizing. This is particularly problematic when sexuality and gender are central to the
movement of youth, in particular youth of color, into incarceration. Sexual and gender
violence towards girls shapes school pushout, and researchers have linked interpersonal
sexual violence as a “powerful indicator” of future incarceration for young girls (Simkins et al.
2004; Winn 2010). Sexually righteous young women, including pregnant and parenting teens,
are offered no protection for their sexual lives in school and are punished if they exceed the
state’s impoverished expectations (Fine and McClelland 2006). Not surprisingly, research
identifies that gay, bisexual and lesbian youth are more likely to be punished by courts and
schools, even though they are less likely than straight peers to engage in serious crimes, and
“consensual same-sex acts more often trigger punishments than equivalent opposite sex
behaviors” (Himmelstein and Bruckner 2011, p. 50).6 For example, in 2006, K.K. Logan, a teenaged transwoman
in Gary, Indiana, was told she could not wear a dress to her prom, only a “nice ladies pantsuit,” and in 2010 Constance McMillen was
told she could bring a same-sex date or wear a tuxedo to her Mississippi high school prom (Advocate Editors 2011; Strom 2010).
While frequently erased from mainstream media or not viewed as substantive issues, Logan and Constance offer us high-profile
examples of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered and queer (LGBTQ) and non-gender conforming youth resisting the gendered and
sexualized forms of punishment in their schools.
Scholarship and organizing on the school-to-prison nexus
must account for the myriad of ways in which schools actively discriminate, and concurrently
push out, LGBTQ and non-gender conforming youth and how sexual violence targeted at
women participates in augmenting the school-to-prison nexus.¶ My goal is not to add queer
lives and bodies, or to engage in a hierarchy of categories or oppressions, or to advance
homonormativity—but to stress how gender and sexuality are always central to how we
understand the school-to-prison nexus. In many areas of educational justice work, gender and sexuality are still
ignored, viewed as superfluous or detractors to the real issue (race or class) or as unnecessary research complications or variables
(Meiners and Quinn 2009; McCready 2004; Rofes 2005).¶ Understanding
intersectionality is incredibly
important as we think through our strategies to respond to injustices in schools and
communities. A failure to encompass an intersectional lens in our analysis of the problems or
in our intervention strategies can result in the animation of significant and longer-term
structural problems. Or, short-term good intentions can lead to unintended consequences
down the line. For example, as anti-bullying legislation and policies gain recent measures of success, specifically those that
recognize the decades-long failures to provide even a measure of “safety” for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered and queer
(LGBTQ) and gender non-conforming youth in schools, all too often these policies heavily sanction perpetrators. The
turn to a
criminalization of perpetrators of this “anti-gay” violence in schools results in more school
sanctions, more punishment and potentially more pushout in an educational context where
school disciplinary actions disproportionately harm youth of color. Our “remedies” have
collateral damages. In part, this is also the limitation of tinkering around the edges of
paradigms, and the setback of small-scale reforms, rather than structural and systemic
transformations. Intervention in the movement of youth of color from schools to prisons is intersectional work.
Black women’s Adv
Black girls matter
Kimberlé Crenshaw, Jyoti Nanda and Priscilla Ocen, BLACK GIRLS MATTER: PUSHED OUT,
OVERPOLICED AND UNDERPROTECTED, AFRICAN AMERICAN POLICY FORUM¶ http: //www
.atlanticphilanthropies. org/sites /default/files/uploads/BlackGirlsMatter_Report.pdf, 2015
¶ It
is well-established in the research literature and by educational¶ advocates that there is a link between the use of
punitive disciplinary¶ measures and subsequent patterns of criminal supervision and¶ incarceration. Commonly
understood as the “school-to-prison pipeline,”¶ this framework highlights the ways that
punitive school policies lead to¶ low achievement, system involvement, and other negative
outcomes.¶ Efforts to reverse the consequences of this pipeline have typically¶ foregrounded
boys of color, especially Black boys, who are suspended¶ or expelled more than any other
group.¶ As the cases outlined above demonstrate, punitive disciplinary policies¶ also
negatively impact Black girls and other girls of color. Yet much of¶ the existing research literature excludes
girls from the analysis, leading¶ many stakeholders to infer that girls of color are not also at risk.¶ Against the
backdrop of the surveillance, punishment, and criminalization¶ of youth of color in the United
States, Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out,¶ Overpoliced, and Underprotected seeks to increase
awareness of¶ the gendered consequences of disciplinary and push-out policies for¶ girls of
color, and, in particular, Black girls. The report developed¶ out of a critical dialogue about the various ways that
women and girls¶ of color are channeled onto pathways that lead to underachievement ¶ and criminalization. At the 2012
UCLA School of Law Symposium,¶ “Overpoliced and Underprotected: Women, Race, and Criminalization,”12¶ formerly
incarcerated women, researchers, lawyers, and advocates¶ came together to address the alarming patterns of
surveillance, criminal¶ supervision, and incarceration among women and girls of color. The¶ symposium was an effort to
investigate the specific contours of race and¶ gender in relationship to zero-tolerance policies, social marginalization,¶ and
criminalization.¶ The challenge is
real. Black girls receive more severe sentences when¶ they enter
the juvenile justice system than do members of any other¶ group of girls, and they are also
the fastest growing population in the¶ system. Despite these troubling trends, there is very
little research¶ highlighting the short and long term effects of overdiscipline and pushout¶ on
girls of color.13¶ Emerging from the 2012 symposium, it was clear that serious interventions¶
were necessary to alleviate the knowledge desert that exists around the¶ lives and
experiences of Black women and girls.
We must talk about Black women
All black people are not the same gender difference determine how you will be
snatched not that certain of us wont be snatched
Kimberlé Crenshaw, Jyoti Nanda and Priscilla Ocen, BLACK GIRLS MATTER: PUSHED OUT,
OVERPOLICED AND UNDERPROTECTED, AFRICAN AMERICAN POLICY FORUM¶ http: //www
.atlanticphilanthropies. org/sites /default/files/uploads/BlackGirlsMatter_Report.pdf, 2015
The scope of our focus groups and interviews was modest. As a result, the preliminary conclusions are not
representative of the experiences of girls across the nation. They do, however, help us to identify more
robust avenues of inquiry for future research. Overall, the observations of participants and
stakeholders in this report indicate that Black girls face obstacles both similar to and different
from those confronted by their male counterparts. Participants in the focus groups articulated
a broad range of concerns that contributed to their detachment from school, including
caretaking responsibilities, financial hardship, living circumstances, homelessness,
indifference, and the actual dislike of school. The girls also touched upon the particular
dynamics of the schools themselves, including their perceptions that discipline and order are
priorities that transcend the educational mission of the school. Other issues that contributed
to their detachment from school include doubts about the relevance of the curricula and their
teachers’ cultural competence; the poor physical condition of their schools; violence,
harassment, and abusive experiences within their schools; perceptions of unfair policies and
disinterested teachers; the lack of effective counseling, conflict resolution, and problemsolving interventions; the absence of academic support and the appropriate incentives to
complete school; and the threat of psychological and physical abuse, both within their schools
and in their neighborhoods. Stakeholders also identified these concerns and amplified them
further. They drew attention to values, attitudes, and behaviors that affect dropout rates.
They emphasized that these rates are affected by experiences that often begin in middle
school. Particularly troubling were their observations that when girls sense that teachers do
not value them or celebrate their achievements, they are more likely to leave school.
Disability tracking
With the tactics Soft disability, Hyper policing and the crimalization of students
causes the overrepresentation of people of color in juvenile justice system.
Erica R. Meiners ,Education and Gender and Women’s Studies, Northeastern Illinois University,
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11256-011-0187-9/fulltext.html¶ Ending the School-to-Prison Pipeline/Building
Abolition Futures,
2011
Over the last decade, there has been a growth in analysis and scholarship surrounding the
school-to-prison pipeline (Duncan 2000; Browne 2003; Meiners 2007; Simmons 2009; Winn
2010). Yet, as previously noted—and this merits re-emphasizing—the targeted under or uneducation of particular populations is nothing new, and the U.S. has always tracked poor, nonwhite, non-able bodied, non-citizens and/or queers1 toward under or un-education, nonliving wage work, participation in a permanent war economy and/or permanent detention.
The School to Prison Pipeline: Structuring Legal Reform (Hewitt et al. 2010) identifies some of
the key components: special education, school discipline, criminalization of students,
monstrous resource disparities and unequal access to educational opportunities in alternative
schools. And these are interlocking: students with select “soft” disability categories are
targeted for suspension and expulsions, and these same students are often pushed into
alternative schools (because they have been suspended or expelled), or have been caught up
in schools that are hyper policed.Research has consistently documented how school
suspension and expulsion and classification as “special education” are moderate to strong
predictors of under education and future incarceration (Advancement Project 2010; Duncan
2000; Losen and Orfield 2002; Skiba et al. 2002). School suspension rates for African American
male students are consistently significantly higher than their white and female counterparts,
and scholarship documents the overrepresentation of youth of color in our nation’s juvenile
justice systems and in school-based disciplinary actions, as early as pre-school (Ayers et al.
2001; Gilliam 2005; Gregory et al. 2010; Polakow 2000; Skiba and Knesting 2002); U.S.
Department of Education). These gendered and racialized practices of removing students from an educational
setting, the most dramatic educational sanction available, starts in pre-schools, as a 2005 survey of 40 states prekindergarten programs indicates (Gilliam 2005, p. 3).¶ In
addition to radical disproportionality in school
suspension and expulsions, school-to-prison pipeline work highlights how students of color
are overrepresented in “soft” disability categories (Harry and Klingner 2006; Losen and Orfield 2002;
McNally 2003; Smith & Erevelles 2004), warranting two formal investigations (1982 & 2002) by the National Academy of
Sciences. In
Why Are There So Many Minority Students in Special Education? (2005), Harry and
Klingner document how “soft” categories—that is, categories reliant on assessment practices
that are much more subjective—are differentially interpreted across states, and researchers
have found that these categories are clearly not applied uniformly within schools and districts.
The use of each of these categories also shifts across time, a further indication of “a sign of the instability and ambiguity of
the categories themselves” (Harry and Klingner 2006, p. 4). Not
unlike the subjectivity of school-based
disciplinary actions, where disrespect or acting out move children into the category of a
disciplinary problem, a number of subjective factors are responsible for placing largely male
youth of color in these soft disability categories. Classification as special education masks
segregation, and pathologizing “students of color as disabled allows their continued
segregation under a seemingly natural and justifiable label” (Reid and Knight 2006, p. 19). An
entire special issue of Educational Researcher (2006) examined racial (and gendered) disproportionality in special
education and aimed to invite readers to think about how these flexible practices of classification educationally disqualify
certain communities.¶ Building
from critical work on how disability places students on tracks
toward under-education, related work examines schools as punishing sites within larger
economic and political structures (Anyon 1980; Saltman and Gabbard 2003; Robbins 2008).
Scholarship also analyzes the linkages between capitalism, and more currently, neoliberal policies and education,
creating punishing educational futures (Anyon 2005; Apple 2010; Kumashiro 2008; Lipman 2004). Numerous
smaller
ethnographic studies document the gendered and racialized production of disposable youth
(Ferguson 2000; López 2003; Winn 2010) and this research is inextricably linked to work that
outlines the foundational inequities of public education in the U.S. by many including James
Anderson (1988), Jeannie Oakes (1985) and William Watkins (2001). Of course, my summary is
woefully ahistoric. Significant scholarship—from Carter G. Woodson to bell hooks—continues
to identify the complex roles of white supremacy in education, highlighting the old story of
tracking and unequal access to educational opportunity for African American, First Nations,
and Latino students.
Impact and internal link for schools
being anti- black tools of surveillance
Threat construction through safety is how they justifying surveillance us all
Aman Sium “New World” Settler Colonialism: “Killing Indians,
Making Niggers”,https://decolonization.wordpress.com/2013/11/22/new-world-settler-colonialismkilling-indians-making-niggers/,
2013
“New World” settler colonialism can be described as a process of “killing Indians, making
niggers.” By this I mean that, within the visionary project of building and maintaining a settler
state, there are the immediate projects of clearing “virgin” land for industry and settlement
(“killing Indians”), as well as constructing a racial category of enslavable and otherwise
indentured labor to help cultivate it (“making niggers”). The colonial end game becomes a
world where Indigenous peoples are thought of as always dead, dying or inexplicably
disappeared. A world where black life is defined by slavability and being made the necessary
causalities of capitalist development. In many cases the “killing” or “making” plays out as the
literal removal of black and Indigenous bodies: Indigenous genocide and land theft, black
enslavement, police violence and incarceration, murdered and missing women, 60’s scoop,
forced relocation, temporary foreign worker schemes, deportation etc. In other cases, the
“killing” or “making” is more symbolic: discourses of black criminality, rage and sexual danger;
or Indigenous drunkenness, barbarism and extinction. These are just few of the ways black and Indigenous bodies become differently
marked for symbolic, but also literal, extermination. Marked for extermination by the law, on the land, and within settler
consciousness. It’s further important to point out that the ongoing theft and occupation of
Indigenous lands is foundational to all of these things. Processes of both literal and symbolic
“killing”/“making” are mutually generative. The symbolic is used to justify the real and vice
versa. Both work to reinforce and explain each other. It becomes okay for Toronto police to assassinate young black men because scripted
¶
into their blackness is the potential for sexual and criminal danger. Or, to quote former mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, assault should be understood as “the perceived threat of bodily harm,”
Since they/we’re always read as being a perceived threat to, white
women in particular, but also society at large. So when an unarmed Hugh Dawson is riddled
with 11 bullets while sitting in his car, “police are just doing their job”, “taking precautions”,
“acting in the public’s best interest”, “removing the threat”, or a slew of other excuses used to
make common sense of black death. A “nigger” isn’t something one’s born as or even what
one becomes. It’s a colonial invention meant to deny black life, but more importantly, to
make sense of black death. “Niggerhood” was invented to recast Africans as the forgotten
children of modernity. It was invented to try and fill our hearts with inadequacy, shame, and
general resentment toward our blackness. Colonial schooling and society reinforce this
resentment from a young age. As James Baldwin recalls: “When you’re called a nigger you look at your father because you think your father can rule the world placing young black men in a constant state of assault.
every kid thinks that – and then you discover that your father cannot do anything about it. So you begin to despise your father and you realize, oh, that’s what a nigger is”.¶ Like Baldwin’s “nigger”, a
figure deserving of violence without explanation, it’s similarly okay to commit unexplained violence against Indigenous women (among other groups). Indigenous women across Canada are routinely raped and
. They are deemed rapable, expendable bodies
in the colonial imagination and world – an imagination and world that we, as black and other
racialized migrants, are invited to participate and be complicit in as junior partners.
murdered under the watchful eye of RCMP and local police. In some cases by the RCMP and local police
From schools to prsion
Schools are war zones where the liberal democratic state normalizing violence
, priming these black and brown prison because of notions of security and
freedom
J Pugliese,
oseph
,2013
22, State Violence and the Execution of Law, Biopolitical caesurae of torture, black sites, drones
In his lectures on biopolitics and the critical role of liberalism in shaping the liberal democratic state, Foucault offers a valuable insight into the discursive
infrastructure that effectively enables the emergence of this diffuse and heterogeneous concept of the state. ‘Liberalism,’
he notes, ‘turns
into a mechanism continually having to arbitrate between the freedom and security of
individuals by reference to this notion of danger.’ The liberal democratic state is predicated on
‘the interplay of security/freedom.’ 81 It is precisely this interplay of security/freedom and its
charged reference to danger that has been foundational in the establishment of the
militaryindustrial complex. In his analysis of the Farewell Address in which President Dwight D.
Eisenhower popularized the term ‘military- industrial complex,’ Andrew Bacevich observes
how, by the time of Eisenhower’s speech, the arms industry and politicians had fully
capitalized on the strategic interplay of security/danger in order Post-9/11, the illegal alien,
the immigrant and the undocumented have all been scripted as posing potential threats to the
security of the state. 91 In the words of a spokesperson for the private prison industry in his address to stock analysts, ‘It is clear that since
September 11 there’s a heightened focus on detention. More people are gonna get caught. So I would say that’s positive. The federal business is the best
business for us, and September 11 is increasing that business.’ to entrench their positions of power. Bacevich concludes that, ‘In effect, by 1961,
semiwarriors – those who derived their power and influence by perpetuating an atmosphere of national security crisis – had gained de facto control of the
US government’ and effectively established ‘war . . . as the new normalcy.’ 82 The unending war on terror attests to the entrenchment of war as
normalcy. If,
as I discussed above, one of the distinguishing features of the state is its monopoly
on legitimate violence – that is, on violence that is largely sanctioned through the legitimating
imprimatur of law – then the contemporary mutation of the state with its market sectors in
the formation of the military- industrial complex has entailed a system of extending this right
to violence, and the attendant immunity to prosecution that this entails, to its military
contractors. The most infamous example of this is the issuing of a decree ‘known as Order 17, immunizing contractors in Iraq from prosecution’
by Paul Bremer, Director of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance and head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. 83 This decree, signed
by Bremer on 27 June 2004, effectively enabled the Blackwater contractors who summarily murdered civilians in Iraq to escape prosecution as it declared
that: ‘Contractors shall be immune from Iraqi legal process with respect to acts performed by them pursuant to the terms and conditions of a Contract or
any sub- contract thereto. The
liberal democratic state’s system of governance pivots on the security/
freedom/danger interplay: on the one hand, the state foments fear amongst its citizens of the
prospective dangers that pose a risk to their existence; on the other, it offers the promise of
security by deploying, via the ‘liberal art of government,’ a range of ‘procedures of control,
constraint and coercion’ that include schools, factories and prisons. 85 The biopolitical
governance of the liberal state’s population is predicated on the manner in which its muchvaunted freedoms are, in fact, ‘the correlation of apparatuses of security.’ 86 The liberal
democratic state’s emblematic apparatus of security is the prison. The US has the ‘largest
prison system in the world’ and ‘the highest incarceration rates.’ 87 These facts are not
disconnected from the war on terror and its regimes of carceral violence and torture. On the
contrary, the US state’s war on crime has served as a type of critical template for the war on
terror. James Forman has identified at least five areas constitutive of the war on crime that have supplied the discursive (language and rhetoric) and
practical (practices, techniques and technologies) infrastructure for the conduct of the war on terror: ‘(1) the scope of the prison complex, (2) prison
conditions and prisoner abuse, (3) our harsh treatment of juveniles, (4) attacks on judicial authority, and (5) undermining the role of defence counsel.’ 88
Forman proceeds to map in detail the manner in which the enormousness of the prison complex, and its massive population of inmates, has effectively
The normalization of state
violence within the prison system and the conduct of its war on crime underscore how the
violent practices that inscribe the war on terror cannot be seen as exceptional but, rather, as
constitutive of the biopolitical preoccupation with security that is attended across different
normalized a culture of carceral violence constituted by, amongst other things, torture and sexual abuse.
sites (police stations and prisons) by practices of institutionalized violence. Post-9/11 defence
contractors have further capitalized on the security/danger, freedom/coercion interplay by
securing a decisive hold on one of the state’s key apparatuses of security: the prison system. In
examining the mutation of the¶ military- industrial complex into the military- industrial-prison- security complex, I¶ want to focus on the privatization of
immigration detention prisons. The growth¶ in the privatization of prisons has been documented in detail by Angela Davis, ¶ who has underscored the
racialized dimensions of punishment in the context of¶ the US criminal- justice system. 89 As
with the military- industrialcomplex, the¶ military- industrial-prison- security complex evidences a complex enmeshment
of¶ government and defence contractors in relations of lobbying, huge fi nancial¶ campaign
contributions and consequent ‘pay offs’ in terms of the assignation of¶ lucrative contracts. In its
report on the growth of the private prison industry, the ¶ American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) underscores how ‘Leading private prison ¶ companies
essentially admit that their business model depends on high rates of¶ incarceration.’ They cite the ‘2010 Annual Report fi led with the Securities and ¶
Exchange Commission, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest ¶ private prison company,’ which states that: ‘ “The demand for our
facilities and¶ services could be adversely affected by . . . leniency conviction or parole standards ¶ and sentencing practices.” ’ 90¶ Post-9/11, the illegal
alien, the immigrant and the undocumented have all been¶ scripted as posing potential threats to the security of the state. 91 In the words of a¶
spokesperson for the private prison industry in his address to stock analysts, ‘It is ¶ clear that since September 11 there’s a heightened focus on detention.
More¶ people are gonna get caught. So I would say that’s positive. The federal business ¶ is the best business for us, and September 11 is increasing that
business.¶
Solvency / Framework
We need an intersectional approach to uncover the complexity of White
Supremacy and anti-blackness
Erica R. Meiners ,Education and Gender and Women’s Studies, Northeastern Illinois University,
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11256-011-0187-9/fulltext.html¶ Ending the School-to-Prison Pipeline/Building
Abolition Futures,
2011
An intricacy in my organizing, service providing and scholarship is the
challenge to practice and center intersectional work within a context where
our labor and analysis are often reactive, while juggling to make short-term
reforms within a landscape that requires longer-term structural and
paradigm shifts. Legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw developed the term
“intersectionality” to refer to the multiple ways that power and privilege
intersect (Crenshaw 1994). Intersectionality recognizes how identities—
ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability, race—are mutually constitutive. For
example, white supremacy is not an adequate frame to name the
oppression of black women because oppression is simultaneously
experienced based on class and gender. Thinking through white
supremacy requires an understanding of how heteronormativity and
misogyny are central to animating and reconfiguring white supremacy. An
intersectional lens, in analysis or organizing, is tough as we may
understand ourselves and how we are embodied as intersectional—for
example, as a queer black transman or as a disabled woman—but this is
not how our civil rights and justice movements and our service
organizations are typically organized.¶
Focusing on anything else but the school to prison pipe-line , makes prisons
inevitable for some always and feeds the larger system¶ The neg has the
burden to prove that their concerns could not be captured by the
discussion of school to prison to pipe line
Meiners ,
Erica R.
Education and Gender and Women’s Studies, Northeastern Illinois University,
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11256-011-0187-9/fulltext.html¶ Ending the School-to-Prison Pipeline/Building
Abolition Futures,
2011
After 10+ years of this work I am in two conflicting places. I
am angry at the waste in post-secondary
institutions, or the seemingly careless ways in which we dispense our many resources—time,
labor, legitimacy, skills—and at the glacial pace of change, except when the state apparatus
morphs to appropriate our labors and to move the goalposts. But, always, I am astonished at
the ability of people, in particular those most vulnerable, to work, to learn, to have love for
themselves and each other and to build change.¶ At the risk of appearing arrogant, as 10 years of labor is a
hiccup in time when other people work their lives for justice that they do not see, after a decade I need a reality check.
Where is the movement to interrupt the school-to-prison nexus? As the university pays my
rent, this is an important question for me to ask because my aim is not simply to be a better
expert in this area. I suspect this is true for all of us who work on issues related to punishment, incarceration and
education. I have yet to meet the person who is for the school-to-prison pipeline, or is advocating for an increase in school
suspensions, or is conducting research to document why education should not be offered in prisons, or is collecting data
to demonstrate that black female youth really are inherently more violent or dangerous than white female youth, or is
writing about why we should provide school security guards tasers. Given
that some form of collective
liberation is our goal, where are we on this path? If I return to Stateville Prison in a few years, to the same
tier and the same man, what can I say I am doing or my field has achieved?¶ Following this partially confessional
preamble, this article has several aims: First, I make a case for analysis, advocacy and engagement that places prison
abolition on the horizon for those invested in educational justice who are committed to interrupting the flow of young
people toward prisons and jails. Second, I offer a somewhat unorthodox and very brief state of the field of research and
advocacy surrounding school-to-prison work. Finally, I identify four ongoing tensions within this field of work that is, by
definition, theoretically focused on social justice. I close with a push for us to continually evaluate our professional
investments, and invite us to consider how they constrain our ability, as Angela Davis often says, “to ask questions that
see beyond the given” (2005, p. 23). And,
for those of us with “safe” gigs (tenure-track labor) who
have the privilege of time and resources, what is our responsibility to participate in building
transformative schools and communities? As many other papers in this special issue have
outlined, the U.S. has the dubious distinction of locking up more people than any other
nation. With 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the total prison population, the number
of people incapacitated in the U.S. has increased since the 1970s, not because of an increase
in violence or crime, but because of policies including three strikes and you are out legislation,
mandatory minimum sentencing, and the war on drugs (Alexander 2010; Davis 2003; Gilmore
2007; Mauer 1999; Pew Center on the States, 2008). Who is harmed by this expansion of our
prison nation is not arbitrary: the over two million people locked up and warehoused in
prisons and jails across the U.S. are poor, mentally ill, under- or uneducated, non-gender
conforming, non-citizens, and/or non-white.¶ Activists, organizers, academics and those
directly impacted have popularized the term “prison industrial complex” (PIC) refers to the
creation of prisons and detention centers as a perceived growth economy in an era of
deindustrialization, and as “a set of symbiotic relationships among correctional communities,
transnational corporations, media conglomerates, guards’ unions and legislative and court
agendas” (Davis 2003. p. 107). These economic and social changes shape prison expansion,
and subsequently naturalize prisons as inevitable. I also use the term “carceral state” to
highlight the multiple and intersecting state agencies and institutions that have punishing
functions and effectively regulate poor communities: child and family services,
welfare/workfare agencies, public education, immigration, health and human services, and
more (Roberts 1997; Wacquant 2009).
2AC
Overview Basic:
We are controlling uniqueness on the surveillance of public schools and the Impact that they
have on public schools
The school system is Anti- black ,not white supremacy
Jeremy Adam Smith ,Teachers Of All Races Are More Likely To Punish Black Students, Huffpost
Black Voices, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/27/black-studentspunished_n_7449538.html?ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000047, 05/27/2015
Two students. One is black and the other is white. On Tuesday, they both refuse to complete
the math worksheet. On Wednesday, neither will stop talking during lessons.¶ Same behavior.
Will they receive the same punishment?¶ A new Stanford University study predicts that the
black student will be punished more harshly. Why? Not because of overt racism. Rather,
harsher discipline might be the result of unconscious partiality to the white student, a
phenomenon called “implicit bias” by psychologists. The study also finds that the bias might
be just as likely to come from a black teacher as a white one.¶ ¶ The significance of the
finding isn’t confined to classroom walls. When students are suspended or expelled, it
becomes much less likely that they will graduate or go to college, and much more likely they’ll
get arrested, go to jail, or even die in the hands of police. Many studies suggest that implicit
bias, not white supremacist intentions on the part of individuals, plays a role at nearly every
stage.¶ While the lifelong impact of school disciplinary policies can affect all students, black
ones are three and a half times more likely to be suspended or expelled than their white
counterparts, according to a 2012 report from the Department of Education. A study
published in the January American Sociological Review found that the damage of high
suspension rates goes beyond those pushed out of school, generating “collateral damage,
negatively affecting the academic achievement of non-suspended students.Ӧ While these bigpicture disparities are well documented, the Stanford study is the first to experimentally
suggest that unconscious bias might play a role in classroom discipline, an accumulation of
individual decisions that sweep thousands of students out of school and into jail over the
course of their lives.¶ “What we have shown here is that racial disparities in discipline can occur even when black
and white students behave in the same manner,” write Jason A. Okonofua and Jennifer L. Eberhardt in their paper,
published in April by the journal Psychological Science. (Eberhardt won a 2014 MacArthur “Genius” fellowship for her
work on implicit bias.)¶ It’s a pattern that might provide insight to interpersonal bias in criminal justice. “Just
as
escalating responses to multiple infractions committed by Black students might feed racial
disparities in disciplinary practices in K–12 schooling, so too might escalating responses to
multiple infractions committed by black suspects feed racial disparities in the criminal-justice
system,” they write.
At: effectiveness of Topical version of the aff
Federal action fail because the states didn’t and won’t listen to the Federal
government on education .Policy even on the local level fails given that policy
determines great teacher not other teach or student to teacher relationship
Lindsey M. Burke , How the A-PLUS Act Can Rein In¶ the Government’s Education Power Grab¶
http://report.heritage.org/bg2858 ¶ Produced by the Domestic Policy Studies Department ¶ The
Heritage Foundation November 14,
2013
No Child Left Behind included major policy changes, signaling a departure from the policies
codified in previous reauthorizations of ESEA. Among the major changes were “Adequate
Yearly Progress” requirements for all students to be proficient in math and reading, the
“highly qualified teacher” provision mandating additional certification requirements, and
a host of new programs and spending. ¶ Adequate Yearly Progress. The cornerstone of No Child
Left Behind is a provision known as Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). For the first time over
the course of the various reauthorizations, the law required states to test children
annually in grades three through eight, and once again in high school in math and reading.
NCLBalso required states to make information about student performance on those
assessments public via school report cards, and further required states to disaggregate
student performance data according to population subgroups: students from low-income
families, minority students, and English-language learners. NCLBstipulates that by 2014, all children are
to be proficient in math and reading. ¶ No Child Left Behind included sanctions for states that failed to achieve universal student
proficiency by 2014.
Among other things, states faced a requirement to allow students to
transfer out of underperforming public schools, and had to provide tutoring for children
in schools that failed to make AYP. One of the unintended consequences of NCLBemerged
when states began reworking their K–12 systems—not in order to infuse more rigor or
transparency—but to avoid the new federal sanctions imposed by the law. ¶ While
NCLBmandated universal proficiency, the law permitted states to define what it meant for
a student to be proficient, and for states to set their own cut scores on state tests. Some
states reconfigured the way they scored state assessments to increase the number of
students who passed state tests, while becoming less transparent about students’
academic performance.4 ¶ In what many researchers have deemed a “race to the bottom,” No Child Left Behind’s
AYP sanction was perhaps its greatest overreach—and most significant policy flaw.5 ¶ Highly Qualified Teacher. Another
major policy shift under NCLBcame in the form of new federal mandates on teacher
qualifications. NCLBmandated that states require all teachers of core academic subjects—math, English, social studies,
reading, science, foreign language, art, economics, and geography—to hold a bachelor’s degree, demonstrate subject-matter
competence, and to be state-certified (generally completing a teacher preparation program or graduating from a college of
This combination of credentials and state certification is how No Child Left
Behind defines a “highly qualified teacher.” ¶ Yet, as researchers Frederick M. Hess and
Michael J. Petrilli note, “while everyone agrees that teacher quality is the most important
school-based factor in affecting student achievement, there is sharp disagreement about
what makes for a highly qualified teacher and how we can hire more of them. ”7 Hess and
education).6
Petrilli point out that the debate is framed by the fact that, in the words of researcher Dan Goldhaber, there “does not appear
to be a strong link between many readily quantifiable teacher attributes…and teacher quality.”8 “In other words,” they
conclude that “though there is widespread agreement that good teachers matter, there is
less agreement about the training, credentials, or qualities that make a good teacher.”9 ¶
In fact, there is evidence that teacher certification has little, if any, impact on student
achievement. The Brookings Institution found that ¶ certification of teachers bears little relationship to teacher
effectiveness (measured by impacts on student achievement).… To put it simply, teachers vary considerably
in the extent to which they promote student learning, but whether a teacher is certified
or not is largely irrelevant to predicting his or her effectiveness.
Federal intervention in education will keep happening history prove and
because of this Topical version of the aff would never solve the aff but in
language only they seem to have solutions to the affs impact. But they havenst
solve nothing yet . reform alone don’t solve
Lindsey M. Burke , How the A-PLUS Act Can Rein In¶ the Government’s Education Power Grab¶
http://report.heritage.org/bg2858 ¶ Produced by the Domestic Policy Studies Department ¶ The
Heritage Foundation November 14,
2013
For nearly half a century, federal intervention in education has grown without
commensurate gains in academic achievement, or an elimination of the achievement
gap. Instead of continuing to filter billions of dollars through dozens of programs
authorized by No Child Left Behind, and instead of perpetuating the bureaucratic
compliance burden associated with those programs, Congress should allow states to
opt out of NCLB, and direct dollars and decision making to their most pressing education needs.
State and local leaders are in a better position than federal lawmakers to understand
the needs of students in their communities, and are better positioned to direct
education spending in an effective way. University of Arkansas professor Patrick Wolf
writes about this principle of subsidiarity, the concept that people in localized areas
like states, communities, schools, and families have contextual knowledge that helps
inform their decisions—knowledge that centralized administrators in far-away places
(like, say, Washington, DC) lack.… [S]mall communities more directly reap the benefits
when things go well for their members and suffer the consequences when things go
poorly, meaning community decision-makers have strong incentives to get things
right.21
NCLB prove the state cant come up with an effective response to education .
Lindsey M. Burke , How the A-PLUS Act Can Rein In¶ the Government’s Education Power Grab¶
http://report.heritage.org/bg2858 ¶ Produced by the Domestic Policy Studies Department ¶ The
Heritage Foundation November 14,
2013
Whether a teacher was certified, alternatively certified, or uncertified had no impact on her
students’ math performance.11 The NCLBauthors merely assumed that paper credentials
were the way to improve the teaching workforce. The evidence suggests the opposite: that
removing the barriers to entry into the classroom holds far more promise for attracting
promising teachers into the nation’s schools. ¶ New Spending and Programs. In addition to
the new mandates imposed on states and local school districts, NCLBcontinued a trend by
national policymakers to have a “program for every problem,” resulting in growth in federal
intervention.12 ¶ In fiscal year (FY) 2012, the federal government spent nearly $25 billion on the
dozens of programs that are authorized under No Child Left Behind.13 This wide range of
programs that falls under NCLBstrains school-level management. States and school districts
must spend time completing applications for competitive grant programs, monitoring federal
program notices, and complying with federal reporting requirements.14 According to
Representative John Kline (R–MN), Chairman of the House Education and the Workforce
Committee, “States and school districts work 7.8 million hours each year collecting and disseminating information required under Title I of federal education law. Those hours cost more
than $235 million. The burden is tremendous, and this is just one of many federal laws
weighing down our schools.”15 ¶ The number of employees working in state education
agencies provides some additional evidence of the bureaucratic compliance burden imposed
by NCLBand decades of growth in federal education programs and spending. The U.S. Census
Bureau reports that more than 16 million people are employed by state and local governments,
the majority of whom (8.9 million) work in education.16 While the bulk of the nearly 9 million
education workers are teachers and school staff, a percentage are employed by state
education agencies for largely administrative purposes. Across the country, 540 people on
average are employed in each state education agency.
Ext Boarderlands / Ice prisons
Debate round are key because ICE prison are justified because of public and
none goovement actor making decisions about property of the state .Aff
decision key
J Pugliese,
oseph
25, State Violence and the Execution of Law, Biopolitical caesurae of torture, black sites, drones
,2013
What is brought into sharp focus here is the manner in which state violence is¶ constitutive of
civic spaces and civilian life, and the fact that the state rarely operates¶ as an autonomous
entity. The capillary reach of state violence into the¶ quotidian sites of civilian life only gets
obscured by mobilizing that untenable¶ binary that pits offi cial immigration prisons against
civil sites. The deployment of¶ this binary structurally effaces the inextricable link between
the one and the other.¶ Unlike the immigration offi cials, prison guards, and police who are in
direct¶ government employ, the civilian subjects implicated in ICE’s network of secret¶
prisons operate under the guise that they are free agents whose civilian hands are¶ clean of
violence. In other words, they are marked by a disavowal of their own¶ investment in
economies of violence that cut across seemingly discrete categories,¶ sites and subjects. Civil
penality – the commercial offi ce as prison cell – demonstrates¶ the manner in which state
violence operates by diffuse strategies and¶ modalities that include non- state actors. The
diffusion of these strategies and¶ modalities of violence across diverse civil sites functions to
attenuate the point of¶ origin of this same violence. In a sober refl ection on the seeming binary
state/civil society, Foucault writes that ‘the reference to this antagonistic pair is never exempt¶ from a sort
of Manicheism, affl icting the notion of state with pejorative connotation ¶ at the same time as it idealizes
society as something good, lively, and warm.’ 100¶ As the ICE secret prisons and their human (live) stock
demonstrate, this¶ Manicheism is untenable. The ‘metapower’ of the state, Foucault adds, ‘can
only¶ take hold and secure its footing where it is rooted in a whole series of multiple and¶
indefinite power relations that supply the necessary basis for the great negative¶ forms of
power.’ 101 The ensemble of non- state actors – that includes arms manufacturers,¶ mining
companies, private prison corporations, commercial offi ce¶ companies and so on – discloses
the manner in which the production of state¶ violence is rooted in a whole series of multiple
power relations that are diffuse and¶ that, as such, problematize clear dividing lines between
two seemingly distinct¶ categories: state/non- state. The collusion between state and nonstate entities in¶ the production of invisibilized modalities of state violence – that assume a
civilian¶ front and thus cannot be read as, for example, constitutive of the state’s violent¶
penal apparatus – supplies the necessary basis for the great negative forms of¶ power. What is
brought into sharp focus here is the unpalatable (and thus disavowed) ¶ predication of certain modalities of
the civil on the very violent relations it¶ appears to stand in opposition to.
Nothing is safe, even reservation are not safe
J Pugliese,
oseph
46-50, State Violence and the Execution of Law, Biopolitical caesurae of torture, black sites, drones
,2013
The articulation of a series of carceral and genocidal caesurae predicated on¶ biopolitically separating out
the human/culture from the animal/vestibule must ¶ be tracked back to those foundational moments of
colonial violence that continue¶ to shape and inform the US nation. Spillers’ concept of the vestibule works
to¶ articulate a defi ning feature of colonial violence; specifi cally, a seriality of power¶ that survives by
being fl exible and adaptive to different geopolitical sites and ¶ bodies. Moreover, this colonial violence
must be seen, in the context of the US’s¶ ongoing war on terror, as operating at once intra- and inter
nationally; the two¶ categories conjoined through the concept of ‘relational geographies.’ ‘Relational ¶
geographies’ is a term coined by Trevor Paglen in his detailed identifi cation and ¶ mapping of ‘black sites,’
that is, secret government and military sites that are¶ beyond public scrutiny and accountability. 56 One of
the black sites that Paglen discusses is Nellis Range, Nevada, occupying Western Shoshone land. Created
in¶ 1940, Nellis Range has been described as ‘the single largest gunnery range in the¶ world’ and ‘the single
largest “peacetime militarized zone on earth.” ’ 57 The¶ Western Shoshone peoples, the traditional owners of
this land, call the Western¶ Shoshone nation ‘the most bombed nation on earth.’ 58 In his analysis of Nellis¶
Range, which houses one of the ground control centres for the international operation ¶ of drones, Paglen
insistently draws attention to the past history of white ¶ colonial invasion and violent displacement of the
Native Americans of the region¶ and the contemporary relations of violence exercised by the US state in
their¶ ongoing persecution of Indigenous Americans attempting to claim back lands ¶ sequestered by the US
government in their establishment of black sites and areas¶ for nuclear weapons testing. 59 He describes
being welcomed into a trailer in¶ Crescent Valley, Nevada, that¶ was home to the Western Shoshone
Defense Project, and from this remote ¶ location, an elderly Native American woman named Carrie Dann
and her¶ staff of two full- timers and two part- timers take on the military, the Bureau of¶ Land
Management, mining and defense contractors, and the US government ¶ itself. Dann says that the United
States has been illegally occupying Western¶ Shoshone land for 150 years and that she has the paperwork to
prove it. 60¶ Paglen documents the repeated violent raids that Dann and her people are ¶ compelled to endure.
The US state has repeatedly attempted to charge Dann and¶ her people with trespassing on government
land. This a charge that Dann derisively¶ rejects, arguing that she cannot be accused of trespassing ‘land she
saw as¶ rightly belonging to her people’ precisely because ‘the Shoshone NEVER gave, ¶ ceded, or sold their
land to the United States government, by treaty or otherwise.’¶ 61 In the face of this defi ance, the US
government has attempted to crush¶ Western Shoshone resistance by deploying the full arsenal of state
terror, including¶ federal agents, helicopters, a plane and a fl eet of All-Terrain Vehicles: ‘ “I could¶ not help
but think of how this is how our ancestors felt when they saw the cavalry¶ coming. So many of my people
were killed on this land and now it’s happening¶ again.” The Feds rounded up Dann’s cattle and loaded
them into trucks to be sold at auction. The ranch was devastated.’ 62 Paglen connects this national exercise
of¶ contemporary colonialism and state- violence to the larger, transnational picture ¶ he has been delineating
in order to underscore the system of continuities that hold ¶ between the two: ‘For the collection of [Native
American] activists sitting in an¶ unmarked trailer in the recesses of Nevada’s vast valleys, the black world
is much¶ more than an array of sites connected through black aircraft, encrypted communications, ¶ and
classifi ed careers. It is the power to create geographies, to create¶ places where anything can happen, and to
do it with impunity.’ 63 The enormity of¶ this power to create geographies while simultaneously obliterating
others is¶ perhaps best exemplifi ed by the Pentagon’s ambitious proposal to create a virtual¶ ‘drone state’
that will further expropriate large tracts of Native American land, ¶ creating ‘the largest Joint Forces Future
Combat Systems training site in the¶ world’: 64 ‘Under this plan, 7 million acres (or 11,000 square miles) of
land in the¶ southwest corner of Colorado, and 60 million acres of air space (or 94,000 square ¶ miles) over
Colorado and New Mexico would be given over to special forces ¶ testing and training in the use of remotecontrolled fl ying machines.’ 65¶ Paglen’s concept of ‘relational geographies’ can be productively amplifi ed
by¶ conjoining it with the concept of ‘relational temporalities,’ that is, diachronic relations ¶ that establish
critical connections across historical time and diverse geographies.¶ Relational temporalities draw lines of
connection between seemingly¶ disparate temporal events: for example, the US state’s genocidal history
against¶ Native Americans and the killing of civilians in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan or ¶ Pakistan. In her
tracking of the violent history of attempted genocide against ¶ Native Americans, Andrea Smith writes: ‘the
US is built on a foundation of genocide,¶ slavery, and racism.’ 66 Situated in this context, what becomes
apparent in the¶ scripting of the 9/11 attacks as the worst acts of terrorism perpetrated on US soil¶ is the
effective erasure of this foundational history of state- sponsored terrorism¶ against Native Americans. This
historicidal act of whitewashing effectively clears¶ the ground for contemporary acts of violence against the
United States to be¶ chronologically positioned as the ‘fi rst’ or hierarchically ranked as the ‘worst’ in ¶ the
nation’s history. The colonial nation- state deploys, in the process, a type of¶ Nietzschean ‘active forgetting’
that ensures the obliteration of prior histories of¶ massacre and terror such as the catastrophic Trail of Tears
that resulted from the¶ Indian Removal Act of 1830. This Act enabled the forced removal of a number of
Native American nations and their relocation to Oklahoma; in the process, at ¶ least four thousand Native
Americans died. The Trail of Tears has been described ¶ as ‘the largest instance of ethnic cleansing in
American history.’ 67 This example of¶ state terror is what must be occluded in order to preserve the
‘innocence’ of the¶ nation so that it can subsequently claim, post 9/11, to have lost the very thing it ¶ had
betrayed long ago. Jimmie Durham remarks on the repetition of this national ¶ ruse: ‘The US, because of its
actual guilt . . . has had a nostalgia for itself since its¶ beginnings. Even now one may read editorials almost
daily about America’s “loss¶ of innocence” at some point or other, and about some time in the past when ¶
America was truly good. That self- righteousness and insistence upon innocence¶ began, as the US began,
with invasion and murder.’ 68¶ Such acts of white historicide are constituted by a double logic of takenforgrantedness¶ and obsessive repetition. Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton, in their ¶ forensic analysis of the
operations of white supremacy, articulate the seemingly¶ contradictory dimensions of this double logic:¶ It is
the same passive apparatus of whiteness that in its mainstream guise ¶ actively forgets that it owes its
existence to the killing and terrorising of those¶ it racialises for that purpose, expelling them from the
human fold in the same¶ gesture of forgetting. It is the passivity of bad faith that tacitly accepts as ‘what ¶
goes without saying’ the postulates of white supremacy. And it must do so ¶ passionately since ‘what goes
without saying’ is empty and can be held as a¶ ‘truth’ only through an obsessiveness. The truth is that the
truth is on the¶ surface, fl at and repetitive, just as the law is made by the uniform. 69¶ The it ‘goes without
saying’ is the moment in which the very ideology of white ¶ supremacy is so naturalized as to become
invisible: it is the given order of the ¶ world. Yet, in order to maintain this position of supremacy, a logic of
tireless¶ iteration must be deployed in order to secure the very everyday banality, and thus¶ transparency, of
white supremacy’s daily acts of violence. For those in a position¶ to exercise these daily rounds of state
violence, their performative acts are banal¶ because of their very quotidian repetition; yet, because their
racialized targets¶ continue to exercise, in turn, acts of resistance and outright contestation, these ¶ daily acts
of state violence must be obsessively reiterated. Underpinning such acts ¶ of white supremacist violence and
historicidal erasures is the offi cial – government,¶ media and academic – positioning of Native Americans
as a ‘permanent¶ “present absence” ’ that, in Smith’s words, ‘reinforces at every turn the conviction ¶ that
Native peoples are indeed vanishing and that the conquest of Native lands is justifi ed.’ 70 Precisely what
gets erased in the process are the contemporary Indian ¶ wars that are being fought across the body of the US
nation. These are wars that¶ fail to register as ‘wars’ because the triumphant non- indigenous polity controls
the¶ ensemble of institutions – legal, military, media and so on – that fundamentally¶ determines what will
count as a ‘war’ in the context of the nation.
Ext Disabilities
Politics is nothing without praxis Since they are not going to change over night
we need a “both and strategy of
Disable students become a causality in the heavy policed and doctor armed
inclusive schools
Erica R. Meiners ,Education and Gender and Women’s Studies, Northeastern Illinois University,
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11256-011-0187-9/fulltext.html¶ Ending the School-to-Prison Pipeline/Building
Abolition Futures,
2011
As is the case with many pressing justice issues—healthcare, housing, food—resisting on the
carceral state requires that organizers and scholars practice the “both/and”: social service and
social change. Services are desperately needed for young people who are locked up, and yet
equally important are structural and paradigmatic shifts that alter the contexts that produce
such high levels of incarceration in the U.S. I frame this tension between the need to provide
services and the need to make structural reforms as a reform/abolition tension. Or, shortterm reforms are needed to address the real conditions and real needs of actual people
caught up in the system, but this is not enough. Many, as Angela Davis writes, are raising the question of
abolition (Are prisons obsolete? 2003).¶ Critical Resistance, a national anti-prison organization, defines prison abolition as
“the creation of genuinely safe, healthy communities that respond to harm without relying on prisons and punishment”
(Critical Resistance, n.d.). Prison abolition doesn’t mean that there will be no violence. Rather, it acknowledges that
As we have
reduced or eliminated social assistance programs, and criminalized the options that poor
people possess to cope with untenable situations, the majority of those in prisons and jails are
poor people. In Illinois in 2002, 90% of women caught up in the system were locked up for non-violent crimes, largely
prisons are not a just, efficient or moral solution to the problems that shape violence in our communities.
related to poverty and addiction (Clark and Kane-Willis 2006, p. 4). As California (CA) State Senator Gloria Romero stated
(CA is the state with the world’s two largest prisons for women) “California can’t build [more prisons as] its way out of this
problem” (Romero, as cited by Braz 2006, p. 87).¶ While
abolition is not a utopian dream but a necessity,
simultaneously reform work is required because there are real bodies in need of immediate
resources. For example, in schools students are under or over diagnosed with a “behavior
disorder,” there are grotesque disproportionalities in who gets suspended and expelled, and
police presence in select urban schools has been naturalized. As longtime feminist anti-prison activist
and scholar Karlene Faith writes, this requires those invested in change to negotiate reform and structural change work: ¶
Every reform raises the question of whether, in Gramsci’s terms, it is a revolutionary reform, one that has liberatory
potential to challenge the status quo, or a reform reform, which may ease the problem temporarily or superficially, but
reinforces the status quo by validating the system though the process of improving it. (Faith 2002, p. 165)¶ Faith
reminds us of the necessity of doing the “both/and” where everyday local work may involve
engaging reforms, but it is also useful to place, understand and connect these reforms to a
larger movement. Or, if we are keeping our eyes on the prize, what is the prize? Liberation
and justice for all, including the young people in juvenile detention centers, or cleaner prisons
that have better due process? Better school suspension and expulsion policies that just
remove the “right” bad kids from schools, or communities and school systems that do not
prioritize identifying and punishing “bad” kids?¶ Building for abolition is neither clean nor
easy. It is by definition transformative and multifaceted work as scholar and anti-violence worker Beth Richie identifies:¶
The work for prison abolition is at once a policy issue, a community accountability issue, a family issue, and an issue that
must be understood to be deeply personal. It is about health, neighborhood, the environment, U.S. position in global
markets, youth empowerment, spirituality, the upcoming election, interpersonal relationships, identity politics, and many
more things. (Richie 2008, p. 24).¶ As
Richie outlines, and as this article documents, to build stronger
communities we must transform our conceptions of what makes us secure, and what makes
our lives and communities just. This has specific implications for educators.
The aff defend the world like the one the Schott Foundation
Kimberlé Crenshaw, Jyoti Nanda and Priscilla Ocen, BLACK GIRLS MATTER: PUSHED OUT,
OVERPOLICED AND UNDERPROTECTED, AFRICAN AMERICAN POLICY FORUM¶ http: //www
.atlanticphilanthropies. org/sites /default/files/uploads/BlackGirlsMatter_Report.pdf, 2015
Thus, we are pleased that the Schott Foundation has recognized the need to address the
impact of zero-tolerance policies on girls of color along with other factors that seriously
undermine their achievement and well-being. The foundation’s vision allowed us to hear
directly from young women of color about the disciplinary and push-out policies they
experience in Boston and New York City public schools. This modest but long-overdue effort
to cast light onto the lives of marginalized girls should be replicated and expanded across the
nation. Ideally, the conversation Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and
Underprotected engenders within communities and among philanthropists, policy makers,
stakeholders, and advocates will lead to the inclusion of girls in efforts to address school
discipline, push-out, and the pathways to incarceration, poverty, and low-wage work. We are
especially hopeful that ongoing efforts to resolve the crisis facing boys of color will open up
opportunities to examine the challenges facing their female counterparts. We encourage
those who are concerned about the current crisis to broaden their understanding of the ways
that gender contributes to the particular risks that students of color face, and to commit to
enhancing resources to ensure that all our youth have the opportunity to achieve.
Ext Black women
We need to look at Black women now because they are being in caged because
safety and threat model.
Kimberlé Crenshaw, Jyoti Nanda and Priscilla Ocen, BLACK GIRLS MATTER: PUSHED OUT,
OVERPOLICED AND UNDERPROTECTED, AFRICAN AMERICAN POLICY FORUM¶ http: //www
.atlanticphilanthropies. org/sites /default/files/uploads/BlackGirlsMatter_Report.pdf, 2015
For girls, as with boys, the failure to receive a high school diploma often¶ places individuals on
a pathway to low-wage work, unemployment, and¶ incarceration. The imposition of harsh
disciplinary policies in public¶ schools is a well-known risk factor for stunted educational
opportunities¶ for Black and Latino boys. Such punishments also negatively affect their¶
female counterparts, as do other conditions in zero-tolerance schools.¶ Yet, the existing
research, data, and public policy debates often fail to¶ address the degree to which girls face
risks that are both similar to and¶ different from those faced by boys.¶ This silence about atrisk girls is multidimensional and cross-institutional.¶ The risks that Black and other girls of
color confront rarely receive the¶ full attention of researchers, advocates, policy makers, and
funders. As¶ a result, many educators, activists, and community members remain¶
underinformed about the consequences of punitive school policies¶ on girls as well as the
distinctly gendered dynamics of zero-tolerance¶ environments that limit their educational
achievements. Black Girls¶ Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and Underprotected endeavors to ¶ shine a
spotlight on the various factors that direct girls of color down¶ dead-end streets while obscuring their
vulnerabilities.
Our research must expand it’s scope to account for Black women
Kimberlé Crenshaw, Jyoti Nanda and Priscilla Ocen, BLACK GIRLS MATTER: PUSHED OUT,
OVERPOLICED AND UNDERPROTECTED, AFRICAN AMERICAN POLICY FORUM¶ http: //www
.atlanticphilanthropies. org/sites /default/files/uploads/BlackGirlsMatter_Report.pdf, 2015
Black girls face a variety of factors – historical, institutional, and¶ social – that heighten their risk of
underachievement and detachment¶ from school, rendering them vulnerable to the lifelong consequences ¶ of
dropping out. As with their male counterparts, the attitudes and ¶ institutional practices that limit
opportunities for girls of color have ¶ deep historical roots.¶ Research and public policy debates, however,
often fail to paint a¶ nuanced picture that addresses the degree to which girls are vulnerable¶ to many of the
same factors faced by their male counterparts. For¶ example, reports about zero-tolerance and push-out
policies frequently¶ fail to disaggregate or highlight the consequences of such policies for ¶ girls of color.
Available information about the challenges that they face ¶ in regards to suspension, expulsion, and other
disciplinary practices¶ often go underreported, leading to the incorrect inference that their ¶ futures are not
also at risk. This assumption obscures the fact that¶ all too often girls are struggling in the shadows of
public concern.¶ For instance, the suspension and expulsion rates for Black girls far ¶ outpace the rates for
other girls – and in some places, they outpace¶ the rates of most boys. Yet, efforts to understand and
respond to these¶ disparate disciplinary patterns are few and far between. In fact, many ¶ of the genderspecific factors that contribute to low achievement and ¶ the separation of girls of color from school are
often placed outside the¶ dialogue about achievement and school discipline altogether.
We must not Leave black women out in the cold
Kimberlé Crenshaw, Jyoti Nanda and Priscilla Ocen, BLACK GIRLS MATTER: PUSHED OUT,
OVERPOLICED AND UNDERPROTECTED, AFRICAN AMERICAN POLICY FORUM¶ http: //www
.atlanticphilanthropies. org/sites /default/files/uploads/BlackGirlsMatter_Report.pdf, 2015
We can no longer afford to leave young women and girls of color at the margins of our concerns with
respect to the achievement gap, the dropout crisis, and the school-to-prison pipeline. Instead, we must
develop gender and race-conscious prisms that capture the vulnerabilities they experience today. Our
limited findings suggest that Black girls in New York and Boston sometimes encounter inhospitable
conditions in institutions that are purportedly there to serve them. Like their male counterparts, many find
themselves on pathways to diminished life opportunities without the promise of public and private
interventions designed to focus on their needs. We hope that this modest report begins to cast light on the
lives of these girls. Ultimately, we hope that our effort to listen to Black girls is broadened to include other
girls of color and is replicated nationwide. Ideally the conversation that Black Girls Matter engenders –
both within communities of color and among philanthropists, stakeholders, policy makers, and advocates –
will lead to more concerted efforts to include girls in studies about school discipline, push-out, and the
pathways to underachievement, low-wage work, poverty, and incarceration. We hope that ongoing efforts
to address the crisis that faces boys of color will create opportunities to address the serious barriers facing
their female peers. We encourage all stakeholders, researchers, funders, and concerned members of the
public to broaden their understanding of the current crisis facing youth of color, and to commit to
expanding both the conversation and the resources necessary to address these concerns.
Object / Subjecthood
What is political prison prt1- these students are all political prisons thanks to
the school to prison pipeline
JOY JAMES, American ‘prison notebooks’, 38-40.
Access to communication is, of course, an essential requirement for imprisoned intellectuals who seek
to function as public intellectuals. Those caged or hunted often surreptitiously channel their
communiques to the outside world. Increased restrictions on communication in the United States
both for the incarcerated and the opponents of state violence, following September 11 and the
passage of the Patriot Act, are resulting in greater censorship of the analyses and insights of
imprisoned intellectuals. Yet voices from both the present and the past come through; they have done
so historically in times of foreign or domestic warfare and they do so today. For example, the excerpt
from Berrigan’s 1972 Letter to the Weathermen , 3 written while he was being sought by the FBI for having
burned draft cards and damaged weapons of mass destruction, still provides inspiration and instruction.
Some thirty years after Berrigan was captured and imprisoned, the US deployed a war strategy in Iraq of
dropping thousands of (cluster) bombs, mostly on civilians, to bring about a quick ‘victory’. US
radicals, in mounting resistance rather than genuflecting before ‘shock and awe’, evoked memories
of activists such as Berrigan who beat ‘swords into ploughshares’ by fighting against the imperial wars of
an earlier era. Examining intellectuals whose analyses are rarely referenced in conventional political speech
or academic discourse leads one to fragments from ‘American prison notebooks’: political writings
undertaken in opposition to state or corporate policies promoting racism, war, imperialism and
corporate globalisation. In recent US history, the writings of imprisoned intellectuals were probably
better known to society in general because social upheaval and mass movements created an urgency
for greater literacy in critical thinking and transformative politics. Prison writings that detailed and
explored resistance and repression were reinforced by rebellion and liberation praxes from the civil
rights/black power, women’s, gay/lesbian, American Indian, Puerto Rican independence, Chicano
and anti-war movements. The imprisoned intellectual seemed to be more firmly secure in embracing
a revolutionary struggle that encompassed significant segments of the general society. Today, the
general or mainstream American public constitutes a mostly hostile or indifferent readership and
respondent, yet there are multiple ‘publics’ and varied ‘civil societies’. The intent of imprisoned
intellectuals to influence ‘the public’ in its multiple formations is a complicated endeavour. No
monolithic ‘imprisoned intellectual’ exists. Despite shared anti-racist and anti-imperialist politics, US
political prisoners differ in identity, ideology and strategy. However, a general disavowal of their
political and theoretical work exists. This is partly due to its radical content, which destabilises
conventional political discourse including conventional radical discourse, and partly due to the
insistence that true intellectual production occurs within socially recognized sites of ‘respectability’ –
academia, publishing houses, conference settings. Much of what is troubling in the writings of
imprisoned activists centres on the issue of violence: violence by the state to squash dissent and
destroy dissenters; violence deployed to ‘disappear’ the incarcerated or detained; violence carried
out by dissidents and prisoners in self-defence or to wield power. Whether the work of pacifists or
militarists responding to violence and militarism, prison writings remain suspect and heatedly
debated by many in the public realm. Most Americans are more familiar with (inured to?) state
violence, particularly when it is directed against disenfranchised or racially or politically suspect
minorities. Often, for the general public, police or military violence against the ‘racially suspect’,
against the poor and immigrants or against prisoners is not as unsettling as counter-violence against
the police or military by the subaltern and incarcerated. Paradoxically, those most passionately
seeking collective liberation – from racial or economic or military dominance – are those most likely
to lose their individual freedoms. Imprisoned intellectuals, ironically the most intensely monitored
and repressed by the state’s police apparatus, may in fact be those most free of state conditioning.
Existing not merely as ‘victims’ of state responses to radical opposition, they produce analyses that
deconstruct dominant ideologies and reconstruct new strategies for humanity in reactive and
proactive readings of struggles for freedom. But who reads the works of imprisoned intellectuals, and
why? What are the shared desires and aspirations for democratic culture and civil society? Relationships
between those incarcerated and those in the ‘free world’ suggest multiple civil societies; sometimes
overlapping, sometimes segregated from each other; sometimes reinforcing, sometimes contradicting
each other. One aspect of these overlapping contradictions entails the conflicting relationships
between ‘free’ intellectuals and imprisoned intellectuals, for it is the former who usually act as
‘mules’ or couriers, relaying the messages or texts of the latter. Yet the courier – as editor, translator,
publisher, critic – wields considerable power to influence or alter the text emanating from the
incarcerated. It is likely that the incarcerated are routinely censored by their supporters on the
outside seeking to ‘mainstream’ their messages. Whether the imprisoned, as political ‘dependants’
relying upon those outside to garner support, might engage in self-censorship is less clear (and rarely
mentioned in the movements around the ‘prison industrial complex’). Potential limitations among allies
abound. Self-censorship and self conditioning work both ways: the privileged academic might hesitate
to criticise a progressive ‘folk hero’ sentenced to life or death in prison, although the repercussions of
academic criticisms seem to be fairly limited. The lack of ‘parity’ between political prisoners and
their political allies is based on the reality that, in theory and practice, the imprisoned intellectual
can be ideologically ‘frozen’ in or physically ‘freed’ by the work of non-incarcerated academics and
activists. The ‘free’ intellectual has no such dependence upon the imprisoned intellectual. It seems, then, that captivity mutates into many strange
forms.
The school to prison pipe line create political prisoners
JOY JAMES, American ‘prison notebooks’, 42-45
There is a continuum of debate over who constitutes a political prisoner. The debate is waged among
prisoners themselves and among the non- incarcerated. A political prisoner can be someone who was put
in prison for non-political reasons but who became politicised in his or her thought and action while
incarcerated. Incarceration is inherently political, but ideology plays a role. If everyone is a political
prisoner, then no one is. I reserve the use of (a somewhat awkward term) ‘political-econ’ prisoners for
those convicted of social crimes tied to property and drug-related crimes and whose disproportionate
sentencing to prison, rather than rehabilitation or community service, is shaped by the political economy
of racial and economic privilege and disenfranchisement. As a caste, political-econ prisoners can and
do develop and refine their political critiques while incarcerated. Consider that Malcolm X and George
Jackson were incarcerated for social crimes against property or people, and then politicised as radicals
within the penal site. Also, paradoxically, youths who renounced their gang memberships and social crime
in order to bring about social change through the Black Panther Party were subsequently targeted and
imprisoned for their political affiliations. Those whose thoughts of social justice lead to commitments
and acts in political confrontation with oppression acquire the standing of political prisoners. For
those who (continue to) prey on others, the status of ‘political prisoners’ is an oxymoron. Such
prisoners do not appear as liberators but exist merely as one of many sources of danger and violence
to be confronted and quelled. Victimisation by a dominant culture and aggrandising state is not
sufficient to qualify an individual as a ‘political prisoner’. If agency and morality define the political
being as engage´ , then only a fragment of the incarcerated population ( just as a fragment of
the nonincarcerated population) registers as such; that is, in active resistance to
repression and injustice. Some progressives assert that to recognise an entity called ‘political prisoners’ creates a dichotomy between a select
group and the vast majority of prisoners, and thus promotes elitism by constructing the iconic prisoner. Yet these men and women are different. They
were different before their incarceration, marked
by their critical thinking and confrontations with authoritarian
structures and policies and state violence. In addition, they were and are treated differently by the
state. Often receiving the harshest of sentences, they are frequently relegated to solitary confinement
or ‘lockdown’ in control units so that they cannot ‘infect’ – really infuse – other prisoners with their
radical politics and aspirations for freedom. In respect of US political prisoners, these political
activists for human rights will encompass both those engaged in civil disobedience who identify as
‘loyal opposition’ – and by their very dissent affirm the institutions of American democracy – and
those so alienated by state violence and government betrayals of democratic ideals that their
disaffection leads to insurrection.11 ‘Law-abiding dissent’, engaged in by the former group,
represents a political risk-taking that has broader social acceptance. This is largely due to its
adherence to principles of non-violence, civil disobedience, widely shared moral values and,
sometimes, proximity to the very ‘corridors of (institutional) power’ closed to the disenfranchised.
Such adherence spares dissenters the harshest of sentences. Hence, it is not political incarceration per
se which is stigmatized and which leads to an individual’s ‘disappearance’ from conventional society
and politics, but incarceration based on a refusal to suffer violence without resorting to armed selfdefence. Even religious pacifists, once they prove themselves disloyal to the nation state, are widely disavowed. Despite his adherence to the Christian faith and Gandhian
principles of non-violent civil disobedience, Martin Luther King, Jr – whose 1963 ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ exists as a ‘classic’ text among contemporary letters by political
What is largely condemned is
not the risk-taking that leads to incarceration, but the radicalism that rejects the validity of the
nation state itself and the legitimacy of its legal and moral standing. Through its denials that
‘political prisoners’ exist within its territories, the United States asserts a hegemonic narrative that
discredits the observations about political incarceration made by both prisoners and their advocates
prisoners – lost considerable support following his public criticisms of US capitalism, imperialism and the Vietnam War.
Mondo we Langa (David Rice), incarcerated in Nebraska prisons for decades, is one who maintains a counter-narrative to that of the state. At the time of his imprisonment, he was
Deputy Minister of Information for the Omaha Nebraska chapter of the National Committees to Combat Fascism, an organisation affiliated to the Black Panther Party. He is now
serving a life sentence for the first-degree murder of a policeman, a crime he maintains that he did not commit and for which his lawyers claim that there is no evidence implicating
him. But Mondo we Langa had been active in protesting police brutality against African American residents in Omaha and, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights, was
’: I know what I mean by ‘political prisoner’: someone who, in
the context of US laws and court system, has been falsely tried and convicted of a criminal offense as
a means of ending his or her political activities and making an example of the person for others who
are espousing, or might espouse, ideas that those in power would find offensive. By this definition, I
might be the only political prisoner in this joint. But in a broader sense, most people behind bars could be
considered ‘political prisoners,’ inasmuch as the process of lawmaking, law-enforcing, and the
criminal ‘justice’ system are all driven by a political apparatus that is anti-people of color and antipeople of little economic means. At the same time though, many, if not most of the people who are
locked up have acted in the interests of the very system that oppresses them and victimized people
who, like themselves, are oppressed.13
targeted by COINTELPRO.12 He writes in ‘Letter from the Inside
2ac Impact ext
Living while black is reason enough for murder of black flesh
by Eric
Ritskes , Eric Ritskes is the founder and Editor of Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education &
Society and a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education.
He tweets regularly at @eritskes, The Fleshy Excess of Black Life: Mike Brown, Eric Garner and
Tamir Rice , https://decolonization.wordpress.com/2015/01/02/the-fleshy-excess-of-black-life-mikebrown-eric-garner-and-tamir-rice/
,2015
Black life, Blackness, “Black holding on, Black making a way out of no way” is always in excess
of the antiblack settler colonial state. And, in its excess, it is always threatening to the order
and sense making of the state.¶ This excess is carried in and on the bodies of Black peoples, it
is embodied and illegible to the state, unable to be incorporated into Whiteness, and is thus
always present before, beyond and against the state. Blackness as excess is, as Alex Weheliye
explains, a fleshy excess. It spills over and protrudes; it cannot be contained. It is always
escaping. It is always already too much.¶ In each of three most recent cases of Black death to garner mass
mainstream media attention – the deaths of Mike Brown, Eric Garner and Tamir Rice – the bodily excess of the victims
was used as a reason for their murder, as justification for their death. This excess
was not articulated as the
excess of their Blackness – which becomes unspeakable (and unthought) in the antiblack state
– but through their physical size, the sheer embodied physicality of their presence, through
how much literal space they occupied. Not only did their physical size exceed normative White
body standards, but it became one way to speak of the excess of their Black bodies and how,
through their excess, they were justifiably murderable.
Black life is justifiable murder- because they are taking up too much space
discursively, materially, and literally
by Eric Ritskes , Eric Ritskes is the founder and Editor of Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education &
Society and a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education.
He tweets regularly at @eritskes, The Fleshy Excess of Black Life: Mike Brown, Eric Garner and
Tamir Rice , https://decolonization.wordpress.com/2015/01/02/the-fleshy-excess-of-black-life-mikebrown-eric-garner-and-tamir-rice/
,2015
These three bodies were each deemed in excess and, in their excess, justifiably murderable. As
Black males, occupying public spaces (the street, the sidewalk, the park) not meant for their
presence, they were always already out of place and in excess, occupying spaces not meant
for their lives, occupying spaces built on Black death. Their excess size came to be a stand in
for what was unspeakable within the antiblack colonial nation-state – that, in fact, it was their
Blackness that was in excess. They were each discursively, materially, and literally taking up
too much space. Their bodies, already in excess through their Blackness, were also more
visible, were more obviously taking up space, were more obviously Black. As Wilderson and
Hartman note, White supremacy is caught up with the visuality of Black life: “visually, the
threat of Blackness is somehow heightened.Ӧ They were each too heavy, too big, too visible. They were
larger than life and, in fact, too large for life. They were too fleshy.¶ Fleshiness, as Alex
Weheliye writes – working from Hortense Spillers’ writings – is both the dehumanizing
precedent ascribed to the less than human racialized other within the antiblack colonial state,
but also, in its fleshy excess, a “stepping stone towards new genres of human” beyond
colonial recognition. Flesh, for Weheliye, is both embedded in the ontology of colonial Man,
but is also always already the physical. Blackness, then, in its excess, always already extends
beyond the limits of the state and the limits of the discursive. It incarnates alternate modes of
being beyond inclusion, modes that inherently threaten colonial regimes of knowing and
being; hence, the criminalization and fear of Black fleshiness.¶ J. Kameron Carter, in a talk given in the
wake of the Grand Jury verdicts regarding Mike Brown and Eric Garner’s murders, similarly illustrates how Black life, the
Black social life that exists beyond state articulated humanity – the fleshiness – exists always in excess of the state. It is
this radical relationality and different genre of being, symbolized within the excess fleshiness of Blackness, which precedes
the criminalization and ultimate death of these three bodies by the antiblack colonial state. There is
more to the
fleshiness than what can be seen or understood within colonial modes of sense making. The
fleshiness of their bodies represents something that exists beyond the body itself and,
importantly, beyond the state itself.¶ The fleshy threat of Blackness also extends beyond
death. Even as Eric Garner gasps for his very life breath, or as Mike Brown throws his hands up
and shouts “Don’t shoot!”, the excess of their flesh remains a threat. As Keguro notes, their
Blackness renders their gasps, shouts and raised hands illegible, their Blackness is “the
disposability that renders the gesture[s] irrelevant.” For Kajieme Powell, another Black man shot by police
in St Louis shortly after Mike Brown, even in his death, post-ten-bullets-in-his-body, he was still deemed threat enough
for police to handcuff him.¶ Similarly, as Tamir Rice lay on the ground in the park, shot down but still alive, his 14-yearold sister rushed to his side and, in her mere movement and in her inability to articulate ‘calmness’ in the wake of seeing
her brother gunned down, she too was deemed an excessive threat and handcuffed, placed into the confinement of a police
cruiser.
The demand to remain calm in the face of colonial violence is part of the normative
violence of the state. As Weheliye notes, the flesh of Blackness is violated not just in death,
but in the normative violences of the everyday, most often enacted on Black women. As the
recent police murder of Tanisha Anderson reminds us (among many others), Black women and
girls are also murdered by the police. But as Joy James notes, recognizing the spectrum of
violence against the flesh is important in evading the capture of the spectacle, in resisting the
folding of Black female trauma into the spectacle of ‘Black suffering/death’.
At: Framework
Clash debates are anti- black
Dillard-Knox, AGAINST THE GRAIN: THE CHALLENGES OF BLACK DISCOURSE WITHIN¶
INTERCOLLEGIATE POLICY DEBATE, 2014
Tiffany Yvonne
This process began in 2000 when Dr. Ede Warner, then Director of Debate at the¶
University of Louisville, had a vision to bring Debate to Black students. Successfully¶
recruiting a new cohort of Black students in Debate, Warner found that these students¶
were frustrated with being forced to assimilate into the traditional norms of the activity
in¶ order to be successful. The culture of Debate was not inclusive of the values and¶
perspectives of his students. Thus, in order to retain Black students, challenges to the¶ norms
and procedures of debate were necessary. Warner and his students were not only¶ successful
in challenging traditional norms and procedures but they were also innovative¶ in the
successful creation of alternative methods that are most representative of the lives¶ that they
experience. The success of this new model of Debate has led to increased¶ tensions and
hostilities throughout Debate in what is now called the clash of civilizations. ¶ An examination
of the clash of civilizations debates is not only necessary for the¶ recruitment and retention of
the Black student population but Debate at large. This new¶ model of debate, alternative
debate, has been instrumental in the recruitment of other¶ diverse groups, such as: Latinos,
Native Americans, disabled populations, and LGBT¶ students. Additionally, the inclusion of
different values and perspectives adds another¶ level of training for the future movers and
shakers of society. If debaters are trained to¶ make policy for diverse populations, then
understanding the difference in cultures, values¶ and perspectives of these groups is an
invaluable experience. Ultimately, these¶ standpoints are necessary for the growth and
development of every member of the Debate¶ community. Unfortunately, the backlash to
alternative debate has overshadowed the¶ 73¶ benefits of including alternative debate for
much of the community. Therefore, research¶ on the clash of civilization debates is an
essential and timely endeavor.¶ The speech community model of analysis has been a
productive model for¶ examining the ways in which the prioritizing of traditional debate
norms and procedures¶ has served to exclude Black discourse, values, and perspectives.
While it is not always¶ an intentional act of exclusion, the effects can often be just as
injurious. The debate¶ about Debate, that has been ongoing within Intercollegiate Policy
Debate, has provided¶ an excellent opportunity to examine how the exclusion of different
discourse strategies¶ can ultimately lead to the exclusion of an entire culture, their values,
and their¶ experiences.¶ With the recent growth of the Black student population in Debate,
the community¶ has been introduced to new methods of debate. As a result of the increased
use of¶ alternative methods, the discussions regarding the community’s best practices have¶
become a site of contention for many of its members. The hostility surrounding the¶ debate
about Debate is at an all-time high and the community is split along the lines of¶ stylistic
choice. Additionally, this split has also segregated the community along lines of¶ race. The
effects of this conflict have left these Black students stigmatized and¶ constantly fighting to
be recognized as valuable members of the Debate community. In¶ this regard, the Debate
community has failed to become the open and inclusive¶ community that it prides itself on
being. Not only are these Black debaters negatively¶ affected, but the entire community risks
losing the potential benefits that come from the¶ inclusion of alternative perspectives.
Framework- The under class is germane to every discussion about the Future of
this country every aff has the burrdern to account for the under class
Mills 94 (Charles W., Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy @ Northwestern), “Under
Class Under Standings,” Ethics Iss. 104, pp 855-881
Few social issues of the last decade have generated as much acrimonius popular and academic debate as the question of the “underclass” and what (if
anything) to do about it.’ The problem has, in fact, become a kind of ideological touchstone for sorting
different domestic agendas—liberal, conservative, radical—for the future of the country, and
the place envisaged in it for the nonwhite poor. The two books under review here—Bill Lawson’s edited collection, The Underclass
Question, and Christopher Jencks’s Rethinking Social Policy: Race, Poverty, and the Underclass—nicely complement one another in their treatment of the subject. Jencks’s book
is a highly empirical work by a sociologist well known for his previous research on issues of social inequality. This is a collection of six essays, the first three of which originally
appeared in the New York Review of Books, focused, respectively, on discussions of Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, competing explanations of crime, William Julius Wilson, the
growth of the underclass, and current policies toward single mothers on welfare. The Lawson collection, in contrast, is a set of essays by African-American philosophers
addressing various conceptual and normative questions in the debate, the contributors being Lawson himself, Bernard Boxill, Leo nard Harris, Howard McGary, Jr., Tommy Lott,
Anita Allen, Albert Mosley, Frank Kirkland, and Cornel West. (Since so much of the controversy has centered on William Julius Wilson’s work The Truly Disad van&2ged, he has,
appropriately enough, a brief foreword.) Based on papers originally given at a 1989 conference at the University of Delaware, this book is particularly noteworthy, since; as far as
I know, it is the first collective written intervention on a specific topic by black philosophers in U.S. history. As such, it is a welcome sign—along with other recent publications
and developments—that the number of African-American philosophers in the profession, though still woefully small, may be approaching the “critical mass” that would enable
them to start to make the difference in helping to reconceptualize the discipline, and contributing to the national dialogue, that women philosophers have done with feminist
theory. The politics of all the authors are generally left of center. Jencks, it is true, is hard to pin down, in keeping with his dictum, as expressed in the introduction, that
traditional ideological distinctions oversimplify: “most ideological arguments depend on facts as well as value’ (p. 11). He describes himself as committed to “cultural
conservatism [favoring traditional norms of behavior], economic egalitarianism [more material equality], and incremental reform [skepticism about “revolutionary” solutions]”
(p. 21). The black philosophers in the Law son collection1 however, are all unambiguously liberal to radical, with not a conservative in their ranks. This orientation is made
the existence of [the
underclass] is a by-product of the normal functioning of a capitalist economy and that
proposals to eliminate the underclass without addressing fundamental social change are ...
doomed to failure” (p. 5). For many of the contributors, however, what really seems to be
involved is not the Marxist/socialist conclusion this might seem to suggest, but the more
optimistic position, classically associated with social democracy, that a capitalist economy tends to produce such a class,
but that this tendency can be overcome through enlightened state intervention. In discussing these books, I myself will be writing, somewhat selfconsciously, from a philosophical perspective doubly minoritarian: racially—as an African-American
in a largely white profession—and theoretically—as somebody who, despite everything, still considers himself a Marxist (albeit
in some appropriately hyphenated and qualified sense whose details I have yet to work out). So I will be taking this opportunity to make
some general points about moral-political theory and race, and the possible insights provided
by a “black,” or at least racially informed, Marxism.4 My claim will be that race is much more central to the polity than
is standardly recognized in philosophy, should accordingly be much more central to our
theorizing than it currently is, and that this can be explained by (a modified) historical
materialism. I will focus on the following four topics: (1) the “under class” as a category, (2) race and class, (3) moral obligation and motivation, and (4) the political
explicit (though a bit exaggerated) in Lawson’s opening statement, where he asserts that all the authors “agree that
spectrum of diagnoses and solutions.
Ext: solvency
Incarceration and education most direct link come at black males directly . The
numbers prove that this is not a question of capital or profit but instead a
project of pure capture. And even thought this is big issue that policy or one
plan can solve by its self but by exspoliating the complexity of education and
incretion we are able to arm the next wave of youth-lead community activist
and future politicians.
Meiners ,
Erica R.
Education and Gender and Women’s Studies, Northeastern Illinois University,
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11256-011-0187-9/fulltext.html¶ Ending the School-to-Prison Pipeline/Building
Abolition Futures,
2011
Investigations in overlapping fields also identifies that incarceration and education are directly
linked. Decreases in education correlate with higher rates of incarceration, most dramatically
for African American males (Petit and Western 2004). Research suggests that just one more year of high school
would significantly reduce incarceration (and crime) rates, and raising the male high school graduation rate by one percent would result in
the nation saving, by one economist’s analysis, $1.4 billion (Lochner and Moretti 2004). Numerous
studies demonstrate
that education, in particular higher education while locked up, reduces recidivism (Fine et al.
2001; Steurer et al. 2001; Taylor 1992; U.S. Department of Education 1995), yet Pell Grants
were removed in 1994 for people incarcerated. The Illinois Consortium on Drug Policies has
calculated that, in 2002, if post-secondary programs were offered to incarcerated men and
women, then Illinois could have saved “between $11.8 and $47.3 million” from the reduced
recidivism rates (Kane-Willis et al. 2006, p. 4).¶ Networks and organization have emerged to focus research and
resources around the school-to-prison pipeline, to convene high-profile meetings and to translate research into more accessible materials
for mainstream audiences: Advancement Project (http:// www. advancementproje ct. org http:// www. stopschoolstojai ls. org/ ); American
Civil Liberties Union (http:// www. aclu. org/ racial-justice/ school-prison-pipeline); Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice
(http:// www. charleshamiltonh ouston. org/ Projects/ Project. aspx? id= 100005); Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles (http://
www. civilrightsproje ct. ucla. edu/ ); Dignity in Schools (http:// www. dignityinschools . org/ ); and Southern Poverty Law Center (http://
www. splcenter. org/ what-we-do/ children-at-risk). Advocacy organizations that work on juvenile and educational justice issues in many
states have developed initiatives, for example the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana’s Schools First! Project (http:// jjpl. org/ new/ ?
page_ id= 19) centering the school-to-prison pipeline as an organizational focus.¶ Grassroots
and youth-centered
community groups across the U.S. have placed interrupting the schoolhouse-to-jailhouse track
on their advocacy agenda. Youth-led projects including Chicago’s Blocks Together, teacherfacilitated journals such as Rethinking Schools and smaller conferences such as Educational for
Liberation have all provided leadership, analysis and movement building around challenging
discriminatory educational policies at the local and state level that track youth to prisons.
Notably, the “schools not jails” movement was initially a staunchly youth-led movement, with
a fierce critique of the “status quo of schooling”—including non-relevant curriculum and a
sharp analysis of the unequal forms of schooling available to urban youth—yet some of this
analysis gets lost in more mainstream scholarship on the relationships between education and
incarceration that simply posits schooling as the antidote to carceral expansion, without
linking the two structures (Acey 2000).
Performance
Link for the Black teams we can change the debate space.
academia ‘s neoliberal grounding allows for any political project that is
bounded by institution of debate to fail and be hijacked by capitalism
Joy James, The Dead Zone: Stumbling at the Crossroads of Party Politics, Genocide, and Postracial Racism 475-76,
2009
The academy’s neoliberal mandate underscores black and Africana studies as well as other critical
studies (ethnic, women and gender, queer, community engagement). Africana thought that circulates
as intellectual property is largely produced and disseminated in university or college programs and
departments, part of the government or corporate sectors, or all of the above. Given the endowments of
elite colleges and universities, Congress has increasingly questioned whether such schools deserve
taxexempt status. Of course, state universities are extensions of the government and are regulated as
such. Africana studies and thought may function as political parties in an academic environment with our
own versions of the Republican National Committee, the Democratic National Committee, and the centrist
Democratic Leadership Council, which attempts to emulate the past victories of archconservatives and
reactionaries in the Grand Old Party. Academics embedded in “political parties” (that is, political
agents operating only within the confines of systems dominated by elites) often do not reject
achievement or Mbiti’s “concept of history moving forward towards a future climax.” In the absence
of an intellectual promise or progress culminating in tangible liberation, there is no apparent
(political) purpose or mission statement for Africana thought, outside of gathering more data for
those dedicated to alleviating suffering, intellectual investigations, or “opportunities” and career
advancement. Grappling with the issue of black genocide outside of a liberal framework is seen as the
kiss of death for career-minded academics. The real and symbolic battles waged during the 2008
primaries have spun out symbolic gestures and performances that captivate a global audience and inspire
loyal followers. Yet how do the loyalists—the new political class—perceive and respond to antiblack
genocide in all of its nuanced and blatant manifestations? Sacrifices and struggles to create,
institutionalize, and preserve Africana studies would promise, one hopes, a future, stable ground for
further movement toward liberation. Yet we might be living in a sci-fi novel, one in which—as in the
works of Butler, whose stumble on a Bay Area curb yielded yet another ancestor—we find the
convergence of the scientific and the imaginative, of the empirical and the theoretical. All have the
possibility of fashioning freedom. Resisting party politics and postracial racism, Africana thought
may (re)invent itself acknowledging a past that cannot be fully celebrated, a present that cannot be
adequately explained in conventional terms, and a future that cannot be fully trusted to promise
anything like a utopia. Dystopia? As Butler’s work suggests, dystopia is entirely possible. Yet in terms of
liberation in the pursuit of (re)invention, we shall find that it is impossible to adequately
contextualize any of this if, as Some of Us Are Brave asserts, the invisible woman sitting squarely in
the crossroads remains unseen. Admittedly, this essay stumbles. The intersection is unlit. The center,
corners, curbs, and crossing lines are shadowed. In those shadows reside presidential party politics
and genocidal policies. In full circle, “historical antecedents” offer both departure and arrival points
as we repeatedly cross our own past while projecting a real and imagined future as critical thought
radically invents meaningful engagement.
Native / Boarder land advantage
Brown People on the borderlands of America are consumed for profit.
The Seattle Times
Seattle Times editorial board, Stop detaining immigrants to fill quotas in ICE facilities¶http://
www.seattletimes .com/ opinion/editorials/stop-detaining-immigrants-to-fill-quotas-in-ice-facilities/
?utm_ source= facebook&utm_ medium=social&utm_campaign=article_left ,June 16 ,
2015
A SCATHING watchdog report by the Detention Watch Network and the Center for Constitutional Rights adds fuel to the
growing criticism against exorbitant taxpayer funding for private prison contractors.¶
Detention of any civil
prisoner should be based on the severity of the alleged crimes, not on a bed quota that
guarantees private prisons make a profit at the expense of human rights of detainees.
Congress should end the practice of guaranteeing minimum profits for corporations that now
operate many U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities. The United
States spends more than $2 billion a year to detain immigrants, and there are few signs that investment improves public
safety.¶ The contracts
between ICE and the private industry lack accountability or transparency.
We do know that Congress requires ICE to operate at least 34,000 daily detention beds
nationwide, and much of that work is farmed out to for-profit prison corporations. These
contractors are paid regardless of whether the bed minimum is met. Here in Washington, the GEO Group runs the
Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma and is guaranteed a minimum of at least 1,181 beds. (ICE reports about 1,400
prisoners are currently detained there.)¶ Congress
needs to get rid of this bed quota now and start
exploring more alternatives to incarceration that have proved to reduce costs and keep
families together. Remember: Many of these detainees pose no threat to society and have
committed civil violations, such as overstaying a visa.¶ With a bed quota and discount pricing
in place, there’s no real incentive for ICE agents to explore non-prison options like community
monitoring that cost a fraction of the estimated daily $164 price tag of locking up each
detainee.” ¶ Federal elected officials also should ban a “tiered pricing” system that allows the contractors to give ICE
discounted pricing when the number of detainees exceeds minimum guarantees. The report reveals troubling
examples of how this practice leads some federal officials to pressure their employees to fill
the beds.¶ With a bed quota and discount pricing in place, there’s no real incentive for ICE
agents to explore non-prison options like community monitoring that cost a fraction of the
estimated daily $164 price tag of locking up each detainee. Last month, The Seattle Times editorial board
pushed for Congress to support a bill to end unnecessary detentions.¶ In Tacoma, reports of human-rights
abuses have lingered for months, leading to hunger strikes and prison conflicts. The GEO Group’s
contract to run the center expired in April, but it has been extended through June 30 as negotiations continue. The
company insists it meets industry standards, providing “high quality services in safe, secure and humane environments,
and … strongly refutes allegations to the contrary.”¶ Nonetheless, U.S. Rep. Adam Smith, D-Bellevue, recently wrote to
ICE Director Sarah Saldaña imploring her to consider alternatives to detention. Short of this, he appropriately encouraged
her to increase transparency in the negotiations with GEO Group and to set stricter standards that ensure human rights
are not being abused
Detainees should be more than a number to meet a quota.¶
They kill natives in particulat in with these prsion and surveileance technologies
J Pugliese,
oseph
53, State Violence and the Execution of Law, Biopolitical caesurae of torture, black sites, drones
,2013
As the trophy of a triumphant colonialism, Geronimo revenant embodies the ¶ incomplete death of Native
Americans surviving ongoing regimes of economic,¶ cultural and political expropriation and ecological
devastation, as a form of¶ ecocide, that contemporizes the traditional genocidal practices of the colonial ¶
state. 84 The ecocide that has been visited upon Native Americans assumes the ¶ form of weapons testing,
mining and the dumping of the toxic waste of the colonizers ¶ on their lands and in their rivers. Within the
ecologically devastated spaces¶ that now constitute the lands of the Western Shoshone nation called Newe ¶
Sogobia, the biopolitical caesura of human/animal positions its captive subjects ¶ along a violent hierarchy
of life and death. In the words of an Owens Valley¶ Paiute elder, Native Americans are viewed by white
authorities as ‘nonpeople’¶ and thus, through the deployment of a form of ‘environmental racism,’ they are ¶
scripted as expendable by both the US government and the various corporations¶ that conduct their ecocidal
operations on their land. The extensive picture of the nuclear testing program that has unfolded in the ¶ lands
of Newe Sogobia includes the exposure of the Western Shoshone to the ¶ toxic fallout of the tests: the
experimental use of live pigs, dressed in army uniforms ¶ to see how they would withstand the blast, fi lmed
by ‘the remote- controlled¶ camera [that] captured the pigs writhing and squealing as they died,’ and a
‘herd¶ of horses that wandered east onto the Sheahan lands with their eyes burnt out, left ¶ empty sockets by
a blast.’ 86 These haunting images of useless suffering evidence¶ the disposable lives of those subjects
violently cut off from ‘the culture’ and positioned ¶ in the lethal vestibule of the colonizer. In this exercise of
state violence, the¶ targets of the state’s speciesism (immolated pigs and blinded horses) and
raciospeciesism¶ (Native Americans as ‘nonpeople’) live and die under the decree of the ¶ biopolitical
caesura. For Carrie Dann and her sister Mary, the lived violence of ¶ this biopolitical categorization and
partitioning is encapsulated by the fact that, as ¶ Native Americans, they are ‘under the jurisdiction of a
department that otherwise¶ manages “natural resources” – trees, animals, parks, and so forth.’ The Dann ¶
sisters spell out the ramifi cations of this biopolitical assignation and its attendant ¶ caesura: ‘I don’t know if
we’re the human species or some other kind of species,’ ¶ says Dann, to which her sister Mary sardonically
replies: ‘Endangered species.’ 87¶ The US policies of colonial appropriation of Indian lands and the
sequestration¶ of Native Americans into camps were conducted under the imprimatur of territorial ¶ laws
guaranteed by what Charles Venator Santiago terms ‘the anti- democratic¶ nature of the US Constitution.’
These territorial laws have enabled the US state ¶ to appropriate Indigenous lands and to legitimate the
governance of the resulting¶ ‘distinct spaces in an anomalous manner’ so that freedoms, rights and so on
can¶ be effectively suspended. 88 The US colonial state’s biopolitical regime of governance¶ was
underpinned by at least three key features: imperial westward expansion, ¶ as formally proclaimed by the
doctrine of Manifest Destiny, a doctrine¶ crucially underpinned by the violence of that biopolitical caesura
which effectively¶ ‘determined that natives of the world are as animals and therefore have no human ¶
rights’; 89 the consequent coercive relocation of Native Americans onto lands¶ rejected by white America
because they were arid, remote and barren; and the¶ spectacular growth of the US military during the course
of the twentieth century.¶ As Gregory Hooks and Chad Smith note, ‘This contingent intersection of Indian ¶
conquest and the rise of the Pentagon placed Native Americans at great risk of¶ exposure to noxious
military activity’ 90 – precisely because they were located on those very lands that were contiguous to
military installations that practised the ¶ full range of toxic and environmentally destructive activities. This
genocidal form¶ of governance of Native Americans has been critically enabled by the state’s ¶ deployment
of a biopolitical caesura that, in its lethal human/animal division, has ¶ ensured that Indigenous peoples can
be left to die within the ecocidal landscapes¶ generated by the military- industrial complex and its
economies of war.¶
External Impact 2ac/1ar add on– the
quality of life for the surveilied is bare if
not raw
They trying give us the flush like the waste they suggesting we are .Is cause a
snow balling effects so not only do we have to fight off disease because of
water cut out but also marked with debt when businesses and government
owe more in water bills stay on .
Teddy Wilson, Reporting Fellow, RH Reality Check, Baltimore, Detroit ‘Criminalizing’ Low-Income
People, Shutting Off Their Water, http:// rhrealitycheck.org /article/2015/ 05/21/ baltimore-detroitcriminalizing-low-income-people-shutting-water/, May 21, 2015
The Baltimore Department of Public Works (DPW) was preparing to shut off water to homes
around the city during the uprising over the death of Freddie Gray, a young Black man who
died while in police custody. The shutoffs would disproportionately affect many of the people
in racially segregated, economically distressed communities embroiled in conflicts with law
enforcement.¶ The DPW water shutoff crackdown focused on households, while businesses,
government offices, and nonprofits accounted for the vast majority of the unpaid water fees.¶
City officials announced in March that upwards of 25,000 residents would receive notices that their water services may be shut off.
The notices would be sent to customers who have outstanding water bills of $250 or more, and residents would have ten days to pay
the entire bill before service was shut off.¶ More than 1,600 Baltimore residents have had their water shut off in the past six
weeks,according to the Baltimore Sun.
The vast majority of the notices were sent to residences in
predominantly Black neighborhoods in the city.¶ “We want to make sure all of our citizens pay their fair share,”
Department of Public Works Director Rudy Chow said in an interview. “When we don’t collect the necessary revenues, it causes us to
raise water rates as a result. The citizens who are paying their bills are, in effect, subsidizing those who are not paying.” ¶ Less than
half of the $40 million in delinquent water bills are from residents. Unpaid bills from 369 businesses account for more than $15
million and government offices and nonprofits account for another $10 million of the unpaid water bills, according to an investigation
by theBaltimore Sun.¶ Since the shutoffs began, the city has collected about $5 million in overdue water bill payments, reports the
Baltimore Brew. Only about $1 million has been collected from commercial customers. None
of those commercial
customers have had their water shut off. Only residential customers have had their water
service suspended, according to a review of public records by the Baltimore Sun.¶ A private firm is
conducting a financial audit of the DPW and four other Baltimore city agencies. The audit was in response to mounting evidence that
suggested the DPW has been over-billing customers. It is the first time city agencies have been audited in 25 years. ¶ The
water
shutoffs, leaving many in the city’s low-income communities without water, could have
serious public health consequences. Mary Grant, a researcher with Food and Water Watch,
told ThinkProgress that the water shutoffs could allow for diseases to propagate throughout
densely-populated neighborhoods.¶ “There is direct risk associated with lack of access to
water,” Grant said. “When you lose your water service, you lose water to wash your hands to
flush the toilet, there is risk of disease spreading.Ӧ Another issue facing residents: those who
rent homes are seeing landlords shift the burden of paying water bills onto tenants who have
outright not paid water bills for rental properties. The city refuses to open new water accounts
for anyone who isn’t a property owner, reports the Baltimore Sun.¶ Activists have protested
the policy as “inhuman,” charging that the policy punishes people living in poverty.¶ “We’re in a
state of shock and outrage,” Sharon Black, an activist with the People’s Power Assembly, told the Baltimore Sun during a protest
outside city hall in March. “People aren’t paying their water bills, because they can’t afford to.” ¶ Residents who
have
delinquent accounts could face action by the city in the form of a tax sale. Property could face
foreclosure if an owner owes at least $500. Baltimore city officials have said they are planning to hire an
ombudsman to help residents avoid such measures.The city put 8,278 properties up for tax sale in 2014.
Anti- black tactics like cutting off a communities water , not only marks them
for death Baltimore and Detroit proven it don’t matter if protest or just poor
living while we are Black is enough feel and see murder before we have to
succumb to it .
Teddy Wilson, Reporting Fellow, RH Reality Check, Baltimore, Detroit ‘Criminalizing’ Low-Income
People, Shutting Off Their Water, http:// rhrealitycheck.org /article/2015/ 05/21/ baltimore-detroitcriminalizing-low-income-people-shutting-water/, May 21, 2015
¶
Matt Hill, an attorney with the Public Justice Center, told the Baltimore Sun that the policy is not being equally applied to residential
and commercial customers. “If
most of the debt is owned by commercial properties, why would they
get the white glove treatment,” Hill said. “Did Baltimore City not learn anything from
Detroit?Ӧ The Detroit Water and Sewage Department (DWSD) last year shut off water service to residents with unpaid bills in an
effort to collect more than $119 million in delinquent payments from more than 150,000 customers. Like in Baltimore,
Detroit’s commercial customers represent more than half of the unpaid water dues.¶ Detroit
announced this month that it would send out water shutoff notices to 25,000 households with
overdue water bills, and give them ten days to seek assistance from the city or lose water
service, reports Al Jazeera.¶ The shutoffs are set to begin next week.¶ According to a city report, there are more than 73,000
residential accounts with bills that are at least two months late, reports the Detroit Free Press.¶ Tawana Petty, a spokesperson for
Detroiters Resisting Emergency Management, told RH Reality Check that the mayor and the DWSD have conducted a public relations
campaign to distract residents and those who want to report the truth about what is happening to low-income people in Detroit.¶
While Baltimore is not going through bankruptcy nor under the rule of an emergency
manager—as Detroit is—there are similarities between the water shutoffs in the two cities.¶
There were reportedly efforts to privatize water services in both cities. Activists in Detroit and
Baltimore were alarmed by former Detroit Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr’s exploration ofprivatizing the DWSD and the Baltimore
Department of Public Works’ requests for proposals from consulting firms for a study of the water system. ¶ “What
they do is,
they come in and do an efficiency study, and then two years from now what they will do is say
that we want to downsize the workers, contract them out of their jobs,” Glenard Middleton, a local
labor leader, told the Baltimore Sun.¶ Both
cities have large communities of color that have
disproportionately high rates of unemployment and poverty, significant infrastructure
problems that include crumbling water systems, and long histories of discriminatory housing
policies and incidents of police brutality.¶ Activists believe that these similarities are not
accidental.¶ “If you look at the cities where they are doing these mass overhauls, where they
are shutting water off and criminalizing people, they are in predominately Black
communities,” Petty said.¶ Maureen Taylor, chairwoman for the Michigan Welfare Rights
Organization, told RH Reality Check that while efforts to privatize water services are taking
hold in low-income communities of color, they will affect all low-income communities,
regardless of race.¶ “They start by coming to the door of the African-American community,”
Taylor said. “The larger white community won’t fight or get involved because they’ll think, ‘It’s
not on our doorstep.'Ӧ The population of Detroit is 82.7 percent Black. Baltimore is 63.7 percent Black. In Detroit, 38.1
percent of residents live below the poverty line, while in Baltimore, 23.8 percent live in poverty. The average annual income of a
Black Baltimore household is about half a white household in Baltimore.¶ Corporate interests have lobbied for water privatization in
communities across the countryand across the world, despite privatization often being more costly and less efficient.¶ Police brutality,
often against people of color, is also common in Baltimore and Detroit. Baltimore has paid out more than $5.7 million to victims of
100 police brutality lawsuits since 2011.¶ “The
problems reflect a long-standing dysfunctional relationship
between law enforcement and citizens, structural poverty, and the legacy of discrimination in
housing and finance policy,” wrote Leana Wen and Joshua Sharfstein in a recent commentary
in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The authors note that there is a large amount of data that
shows significant disparities between low-income communities of color and Baltimore’s more affluent and predominately white
communities.¶ Jennifer Epps-Addison of Wisconsin Jobs Now told RH Reality Check that systemic inequalities all interact to create
deep-seated injustice.¶ “If Black lives
matter, then Black wages have to matter, then reproductive
justice for Black women has to matter, then all Black lives have to matter, not just some Black
lives,” she said.¶ Like this story? Your $10 tax-deductible contribution helps support our research, reporting, and analysis.
Solvency
The Aff gets the ball roling in the right direction to challenge the myth of public
safety , we gotta start where we.
Erica R. Meiners ,Education and Gender and Women’s Studies, Northeastern Illinois University,
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11256-011-0187-9/fulltext.html¶ Ending the School-to-Prison Pipeline/Building
Abolition Futures,
2011
Parents want security guards and surveillance cameras in schools because they perceive
schools as unsafe spaces. Teachers want detention and a school discipline officer because they
don’t know what to do with students in their classrooms who harm themselves or their peers.
People often want more police on the streets and tougher laws because they want to feel
safe. People want, need and deserve safe schools and communities, but what makes these
spaces feel and be safe or unsafe?¶ The prevailing contemporary carceral logic recycles the
false notion that safety can be achieved through essentially more of the same: more guards,
fences, surveillance, suspensions, punishment, etc. Inviting abolition futures pushes us to
name how this “more of the same”—building more youth detention centers and prisons,
funneling more youth into suspensions or expulsions, placing more police and cameras in
schools—will not make schools safer, or our communities stronger. We must reclaim
definitions of safety. Scholars that are invested in work that interrupts and transforms the
school-to-prison nexus must build other futures and participate in rethinking safety.¶ Building
safer schools requires challenging mass incarceration policies but also grappling directly with
questions and feelings of safety, and in particular, how a gendered and often racialized fear
(for example, of sexual assault of white women and children) is publicly deployed to augment
the prison system. Our classrooms are not immune from these stereotypes and fears. Our
schools receive and can reproduce powerful mythologies: violent teenaged super-predators,
crack babies, “bad and lazy” parents and disordered and dangerous youth. The work to challenge mass
incarceration as a public safety strategy is also made difficult by how “common sense” the ideas of both incarceration and exclusion appear, as well as the real lived experiences of violence and
But shifting from a punishment- and detention-based approach to a definition of
safety that incorporates relationships and community inside and outside our schools requires
engagement with the lived experience of being and feeling safe. This is complicated and vital
work. We need research and organizing that explores what schools and communities are
doing to create safe and strong communities without relying on more detention rooms,
truancy officers, surveillance cameras and school security guards. Unpacking carceral logic
from feelings and experiences of being unsafe or fearful can demonstrate how punishment
logic masks the real question: how do we build stronger and safer communities? This is local
and affective work, and we must do this together. As many, from Audre Lorde (1984) to Feel Tank Chicago point out, politics
and political engagement is a “world of orchestrated feeling” (Feel Tank 2008, ¶3). Addressing questions of fear and safety in a
landscape where sexual and other forms of harm are endemic is difficult, because building responses to these forms of state and interpersonal violence necessitates multifaceted labors. We
must consider how our responses mobilize disgust, defensiveness and pity, and to
subsequently use this thinking to shape our organizing efforts. In schools, these practices are
no different, and we need allies willing to focus research and other labors on the fledgling
restorative and transformative justice practices that are happening in schools: peace circles,
peer juries, motivational interviewing and many other forms of building relationships and
community. Ending the school-to-prison pipeline requires building other sustainable
frameworks for public safety.
unsafety of many.
For solvency
Erica R. Meiners ,Education and Gender and Women’s Studies, Northeastern Illinois University,
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11256-011-0187-9/fulltext.html¶ Ending the School-to-Prison Pipeline/Building
Abolition Futures,
2011
Indigenous rights scholar and activist Andrea Smith invites activist scholars to see ourselves as
workers in justice movements before scholarship, and names the importance of collectivizing
and being able to recognize ourselves and build cultures within universities:¶ The point is that if
we are going to challenge the individualist system, we need to engage in collective action
through relationships built on mutual responsibility and accountability. The system can handle
thousands of “oppositional” academics who do work on their own; it is not until these
thousands begin to act collectively that the system can be challenged (Smith 2009, p. 41)¶ I
imagine Smith’s call for collectivizing could take many forms, because we know that research is
not confined to colleges and universities, nor is there a best or only recipe for producing justicemobilizing scholarship inside institutions (if only it was hermeneutics or statistics that could snap
away white supremacy). Instead, Smith asks us to imagine and to practice collective models, and
to build and strengthen collective pathways for justice work in our institutions. These initiatives
could be framed methodologically, if, for example, instead of producing more research on the
experience of youth behind bars, or more reports on why young people are locked up, we
shifted our gaze to studying up (Nader 1972) and organized to document how organizations and
institutions work to naturalize carceral outcomes for select youth.¶ Perhaps more importantly,
Smith’s charge suggests the myriad of assets we possess—not simply research skills but other
labor, research and pedagogical tools—and asks us who we hold ourselves accountable to at the
end of the day—our scholarship or justice movements? Generally, scholars are professionalized
to produce academic products to get and to keep our jobs, to build our expertise and to advance
our disciplines or the field. But what if we built networks that moved us to ask—how am I
accountable to movements? To a larger collective that is struggling to make a way out of no
way? If we are conducting work with human subjects we must go through an Institutional
Review Board (IRB) process (generally to protect the institution from any liability). What if we
developed processes that asked the question—how is the work linked to other justicemobilizing scholarship? Or, how will this work redistribute resources or access to life pathways?
Changing to whom and how we are accountable can move us away from “research of
convenience” to research that responds to express material, political or historical need(s). Our
networks could develop pathways between organizations, people and institutions to focus work.
For example, these networks could channel resources, graduate students who want experience
doing research, with people and organizations that need this labor. Collectivizing moves against
so much of what the academy emphasizes—individual expertise and success (or failure)—but as
resources continue to diminish inside universities for justice work, pooling our labors is a
strength. This is how we build justice movements, abolition democracies and end the school-toprison nexus.
AT: Cap
Prison and it relation ship to capitalism :– its not that simple but Marxism
forgets about the darkies . Idenity politics This recognition should signal the
urgent need to organize the unemployed and lumpenproletariat other you cant
help black brown and other economicly disadvantaged boddies as an
“preventive fascism,”
Angela Y. Davis,
Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation, 68-72.
The legal apparatus designates the black liberation fighter a criminal, prompting Nixon, [Vice President Spiro] Agnew,
[California Governor Ronald] Reagan et al. to proceed to mystify with their demagogy millions of Americans whose senses
have been dulled and whose critical powers have been eroded by the continual onslaught of racist
ideology. As the black liberation movement and other progressive struggles increase in magnitude and
intensity, the judicial system and its extension, the penal system, consequently become key weapons in the
state’s fight to preserve the existing conditions of class domination, and therefore racism, poverty and
war. In 1951, W. E. B. Du Bois, as Chairman of the Peace Information Center, was indicted by the federal government for “failure to register as an
agent of a foreign principal.” In assessing this ordeal, which occurred in the ninth decade of his life, he turned his attention to the inhabitants of the
nation’s jails and prisons: What turns me cold in all this experience is the certainty that thousands of innocent victims are in
jail today because they had neither money nor friends to help them. The eyes of the world were on our trial despite the desperate
efforts of press and radio to suppress the facts and cloud the real issues; the courage and money of friends and of strangers who dared stand for a principle
freed me; but God only knows how many who were as innocent as I and my colleagues are today in hell. They daily stagger out of prison doors
embittered, vengeful, hopeless, ruined. And of this army of the wronged, the proportion of Negroes is frightful. We protect and defend
sensational cases where Negroes are involved. But the great mass of arrested or accused black folk have no defense.
There is desperate need of nationwide organizations to oppose this national racket of railroading to jails and chain
gangs the poor, friendless and black. Almost two decades passed before the realization attained by Du Bois on the occasion of his own
A number of factors have combined to transform the penal
system into a prominent terrain of struggle, both for the captives inside and the masses outside. The
impact of large numbers of political prisoners both on prison populations and on the mass movement has
been decisive. The vast majority of political prisoners have not allowed the fact of imprisonment to
curtail their educational, agitational, and organizing activities, which they continue behind prison walls.
And in the course of developing mass movements around political prisoners, a great deal of attention has
inevitably been focused on the institutions in which they are imprisoned. Furthermore the political
receptivity of prisoners-especially black and brown captives-has been increased and sharpened by the
surge of aggressive political activity rising out of black, Chicano, and other oppressed communities.
Finally, a major catalyst for intensified political action in and around prisons has emerged out of the
transformation of convicts, originally found guilty of criminal offenses, into exemplary political militants.
Their patient educational efforts in the realm of exposing the specific oppressive structures of the penal
system in their relation to the larger oppression of the social system have had a profound effect on their
fellow captives. The prison is a key component of the state’s coercive apparatus, the overriding function of
which is to ensure social control. The etymology of the term “penitentiary” furnishes a clue to the controlling idea behind the “prison
encounter with the judicial system achieved extensive acceptance .
system” at its inception. The penitentiary was projected as the locale for doing penitence for an offense against society, the physical and spiritual purging
cloaking itself with the bourgeois aura of
universality-imprisonment was supposed to cut across all class lines, as crimes were to be defined by the
act, not the perpetrator-the prison has actually operated as an instrument of class domination, a means of
prohibiting the have-nots from encroaching upon the haves. The occurrence of crime is inevitable in a
society in which wealth is unequally distributed, as one of the constant reminders that society’s
productive forces are being channeled in the wrong direction. The majority of criminal offenses bear a direct relationship to
property. Contained in the very concept of property, crimes are profound but suppressed social needs which express
themselves in anti-social modes of action. Spontaneously produced by a capitalist organization of society,
this type of crime is at once a protest against society and a desire to partake of its exploitative content. It
challenges the symptoms of capitalism, but not its essence. Some Marxists in recent years have tended to
banish “criminals” and the lumpenproletariat as a whole from the arena of revolutionary struggle. Apart
of proclivities to challenge rules and regulations which command total obedience. While
from the absence of any link binding the criminal to the means of production, underlying this exclusion
has been the assumption that individuals who have recourse to antisocial acts are incapable of developing
the discipline and collective orientation required by revolutionary struggle. With the declassed character of
lumpenproletarians in mind, Marx had stated that they are as capable of “the most heroic deeds and the most exalted sacrifices, as of the basest banditry
and the dirtiest corruption.” He emphasized the fact that the provisional government’s mobile guards under the Paris Commune-some 24,000 troops-were
Too many Marxists have been inclined to
overvalue the second part of Marx’s observation-that the lumpenproletariat is capable of the basest
banditry and the dirtiest corruption-while minimizing or indeed totally disregarding his first remark,
applauding the lumpen for their heroic deeds and exalted sacrifices. Especially today when so many black,
Chicano, and Puerto Rican men and women are jobless as a consequence of the internal dynamic of the
capitalist system, the role of the unemployed, which includes the lumpenproletariat, in revolutionary
struggle must be given serious thought. Increased unemployment, particularly for the nationally
oppressed, will continue to be an inevitable by-product of technological development. At least thirty percent
of black youth are presently without jobs. In the context of class exploitation and national oppression it
should be clear that numerous individuals are compelled to resort to criminal acts, not as a result of
conscious choice-implying other alternatives-but because society has objectively reduced their possibilities
of subsistence and survival to this level. This recognition should signal the urgent need to organize the
unemployed and lumpenproletariat, as indeed the Black Panther Party as well as activists in prison have
already begun to do. In evaluating the susceptibility of the black and brown unemployed to organizing efforts,
the peculiar historical features of the US, specifically racism and national oppression, must be taken into
account. There already exists in the black and brown communities, the lumpenproletariat included, a long tradition of collective resistance to national
oppression. Moreover, in assessing the revolutionary potential of prisoners in America as a group, it should be
borne in mind that not all prisoners have actually committed crimes. The built-in racism of the judicial
system expresses itself, as Du Bois has suggested, in the railroading of countless innocent blacks and other
national minorities into the country’s coercive institutions. One must also appreciate the effects of
disproportionately long prison terms on black and brown inmates. The typical criminal mentality sees imprisonment as a
calculated risk for a particular criminal act. One’s prison term is more or less rationally predictable. The function of
racism in the judicial-penal complex is to shatter that predictability. The black burglar, anticipating a
two-to-four-year term, may end up doing ten to fifteen years, while the white burglar leaves after two
years. Within the contained, coercive universe of the prison, the captive is confronted with the realities of
racism, not simply as individual acts dictated by attitudinal bias; rather he is compelled to come to grips
with racism as an institutional phenomenon collectively experienced by the victims. The disproportionate
representation of the black and brown communities, the manifest racism of parole boards, the intense
brutality inherent in the relationship between prison guards and black and brown inmates-all this and
more causes the prisoner to be confronted daily, hourly, with the concentrated systematic existence of
racism. For the innocent prisoner, the process of radicalization should come easy; for the “guilty” victim, the insight into the nature of racism as it
largely formed out of young lumpenproletarians from fifteen to twenty years of age.
manifests itself in the judicial-penal complex can lead to a questioning of his own past criminal activity and a re-evaluation of the methods he has used
to survive in a racist and exploitative society. Needless to say, this process is not automatic, it does not occur spontaneously. The persistent
educational work carried out by the prison’s political activists plays a key role in developing the political
potential of captive men and women. Prisoners-especially blacks, Chicanos and Puerto Ricans-are
increasingly advancing the proposition that they are political prisoners. They contend that they are
political prisoners in the sense that they are largely the victims of an oppressive politico-economic order,
swiftly becoming conscious of the causes underlying their victimization. The Folsom Prisoners’ Manifesto of Demands
and Anti-Oppression Platform” attests to a lucid understanding of the structures of oppression within the prison-structures which contradict even the
avowed function of the penal institution: “The program we are submitted to, under the ridiculous title of rehabilitation, is relative to the ancient stupidity
of pouring water on the drowning man, in as much as we are treated for our hostilities by our program administrators with their hostility for medication.”
The Manifesto also reflects an awareness that the severe social crisis taking place in this country, predicated in part on the ever-increasing mass
consciousness of deepening social contradictions, is forcing the political function of the prisons to surface in all its brutality. Their contention that
prisons are being transformed into the “fascist concentration camps of modern America,” should not be taken
lightly, although it would be erroneous as well as defeatist in a practical sense, to maintain that fascism has irremediably established itself. The point is
this, and this is the truth which is apparent in the Manifesto: the ruling circles of America are expanding and intensifying
repressive measures designed to nip revolutionary movements in the bud as well as to curtail
radicaldemocratic tendencies, such as the movement to end the war in Indochina. The government is not
hesitating to utilize an entire network of fascist tactics, including the monitoring of congressmen’s
telephone calls, a system of “preventive fascism,” as [Herbert] Marcuse has termed it, in which the role of the judicial-penal
systems looms large. The sharp edge of political repression, cutting through the heightened militancy of the
masses, and bringing growing numbers of activists behind prison walls, must necessarily pour over into
the contained world of the prison where it understandably acquires far more ruthless forms. It is a
relatively easy matter to persecute the captive whose life is already dominated by a network of
authoritarian mechanisms. This is especially facilitated by the indeterminate sentence policies of many
states, for politically conscious prisoners will incur inordinately long sentences on the original conviction.
According to Louis S. Nelson, warden of the San Quentin Prison, “if the prisons of California become
known as schools for violent revolution, the Adult Authority would be remiss in their duty not to keep the
inmates longer” (San Francisco Chronicle, May 2, 1971). Where this is deemed inadequate, authorities have recourse to the whole spectrum of
brutal corporal punishment, including out and out murder. At San Quentin, Fred Billingslea was tear gassed to death in February 1970. W. L. Nolen,
Alvin Miller, and Cleveland Edwards were assassinated by a prison guard in January 1970, at Soledad Prison. Unusual and inexplicable ‘‘suicides” have
occurred with incredible regularity in jails and prisons throughout the country. It should be self-evident that the frame-up becomes a powerful weapon
within the spectrum of prison repression, particularly because of the availability of informers, the broken prisoners who will do anything for a price. The
Soledad Brothers and the Soledad Three are leading examples of frame-up victims. Both cases involve militant activists who have been charged with
killing Soledad prison guards. In both cases, widespread support has been kindled within the California prison system. They have served as occasions to
link the immediate needs of the black community with a forceful fight to break the fascist stronghold in the prisons and therefore to abolish the prison
system in its present form.
Protected by logic of security, the oppressed exist and will always be used to
maintain the privileged status of the exploiters the as “rehabilitated” and
“illegitimate capitalists”. Extortion as its best – we trade your body for your
mind.
69, Huey P. Newton,
Prison, Where Is Thy Victory? , July 12, 19
81-3
The prison operates with the concept that since it has a person’s body it has his entire being, because the
whole cannot be greater than the sum of the parts. They put the body in a cell and seem to get some sense of
relief and security from that fact. The idea of prison victory, then is that when the person in jail begins to
act, think, and believe the way they want him to, they have won the battle and the person is then
“rehabilitated.” But this cannot be the case because those who operate the prisons have failed to examine
their own beliefs thoroughly, and they fail to understand the types of people they attempt to control.
Therefore, even when the prison thinks it has won, there is no victory. There are two types of prisoners. The
largest number are those who accept the legitimacy of the assumptions upon which the society is based.
They wish to acquire the same goals as everybody else: money, power, and conspicuous consumption. In
order to do so, however, they adopt techniques and methods which the society has defined as
illegitimate. When this is discovered such people are put in jail. They may be called “illegitimate
capitalists” since their aim is to acquire everything capitalist society defines as legitimate. The second type
of prisoner is the one who rejects the legitimacy of the assumptions upon which the society is based. He
argues that the people at the bottom of the society are exploited for the profit and advantage of those at
the top. Thus, the oppressed exist and will always be used to maintain the privileged status of the
exploiters. There is no sacredness, there is no dignity in either exploiting or being exploited. Although this
system may make the society function at a high level of technological efficiency, it is an illegitimate
system, since it rests upon the suffering of humans who are as worthy and as dignified of those who do not
suffer. Thus, the second type of prisoner says that the society is corrupt and illegitimate and must be
overthrown. This second type of prisoner is the “political prisoner.” They do not accept the legitimacy of
the society and cannot participate in its corruption and exploitation, whether they are in the prison or on
the block. The prison cannot gain a victory over either type of prisoner no matter how hard it tries. The
“illegitimate capitalist” recognizes that if he plays the game the prison wants him to play he will have his
time reduced and be released to continue his activities. Therefore, he is willing to go through the prison
programs and say the things the prison authorities want to hear. The prison assumes he is
“rehabilitated”and ready for the society. The prisoner has really played the prison’s game so that he can
be released to resume pursuit of his capitalist goals. There is no victory, for the prisoner from the “git-go”
accepted the idea of the society. He pretends to accept the idea of the prison as a part of the game he has
always played. The prison cannot gain a victory over the political prisoner because he has nothing to be
rehabilitated from or to. He refuses to accept the legitimacy of the system and refuses to participate. To
participate is to admit that the society is legitimate because of its exploitation of the oppressed. This is the
idea which the political prisoner does not accept for which he has been imprisoned, and this is the reason
why he cannot cooperate with the system. The political prisoner will, in fact, serve his time just as will the
“illegitimate capitalist.” Yet the idea which motivated and sustained the political prisoner rests in the
people. All the prison has is the body. The dignity and beauty of man rests in the human spirit which
makes him more than simply a physical being. This spirit must never be suppressed for exploitation by
others. As long as the people recognize the beauty of their human spirits and move against suppression
and exploitation, they will be carrying out one of the most beautiful ideas of all time. Because the human
whole is much greater than the sum of its parts. The ideas will always be among the people. The prison
cannot be victorious because walls, bars and guards cannot conquer or hold down an idea.
AT: to school aff
CP: affirmative action for low income to Ivy league universities’ funding and
access.
Gordon
Telling Poor, Smart Kids That All It Takes Is Hard Work to Be as Successful as Their
Wealthy Peers Is a Blatant Lie http://atlantablackstar.com/2015/06/03/telling-poor-smart-kids-takesTaylor
hard-work-successful-wealthy-peers-blatant-lie ,
2015
And if you’re one of the many Americans that believes there isn’t much universities can do
about that sad fact, you’re sadly mistaken.¶ America’s top-notch, elite universities have the
money and funding to open their doors to low-income students and help guide them to
graduation but they rarely decide to do so.¶ A report by Insider Higher Ed revealed that while
Harvard University has an endowment of roughly $43 billion, making it the wealthiest college in
the country, it hasn’t dedicated a significant amount of funding to making sure intelligent lowincome students have the opportunity to fill their prestigious halls.¶ The trend is the same for
other wealthy and prestigious universities across the country.¶ “Yale University and the
University of Notre Dame have $25.4 billion and $9.5 billion in cash and investments,
respectively, but had the lowest portion of Pell recipients among this group, at 12 percent,”
according to the report that took a closer look at the country’s 10 wealthiest universities.
“Columbia University, with cash and investments of $9.9 billion, enrolled the highest number of
Pell recipients, at 30 percent. Harvard, with its $43 billion in wealth, trailed behind at 19
percent.”¶ All the numbers are below the national average of 36 percent.¶ Since students that
graduate from such universities often go on to earn more than their peers, the lack of lowincome students being welcomed to such universities only works to widen the income gap.¶
And, based on the research reported by Inside Higher Ed, these universities aren’t interested in
doing much about it.¶ “We are spending the most money as a society educating the wealthiest
people,” Ronald Ehrenberg, director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute, told
Inside Higher Ed. “The people who need help the most are the most disadvantaged. They end up
going to the universities that spend the smallest amount per student.Ӧ The result is an
unfortunate and yet seemingly endless cycle that keeps low-income students trapped in
poverty—regardless of whether or not they did manage to work twice as hard as their wealthy
peers.
Case
Single issue focus fails , don’t care about the aff they just wanna save children
which force to live with the frames and social construction of youth
Erica R. Meiners ,Education and Gender and Women’s Studies, Northeastern Illinois University,
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11256-011-0187-9/fulltext.html¶ Ending the School-to-Prison Pipeline/Building
Abolition Futures,
2011
Research and organizing within the framework of the school-to-prison pipeline struggles with
the tensions involved in working with and challenging a portion of a system and a structure
that is flawed; this becomes particularly troubling as this labor and focus is reliant on
prioritizing a category, “youth,” that is also constructed and flexible. Scholarship and advocacy
in this field often starts with a shared understanding that youth are different than adults. This
a priori case for a kind of exceptionalism creates problems for both wider justice movements,
and for work with youth as well.These categories—childhood, youth, juvenile, adult—are
anything but natural or static. Debates about where to draw the chronological (and culpable)
line repeatedly surface in mainstream media; less visible yet equally important is the evidence
used to rationalize any boundary by the media, “child savers,” psychological experts and other
parties across the political spectrum. For example, “emerging adulthood,” the new
development category that elongates adolescence, surfaced in 2010 in mainstream media at
the same time the Supreme Court debated the constitutionality of sentencing juveniles to life
without parole (LWOP) for non-murder crimes (the death penalty for juveniles was abolished
in the U.S. in 2005). Science and experience were used to scaffold both constructions.
“Emerging adulthood,” psychologists identify, is demarcated by delay of “common” adult
experiences—employment, leaving the parental home, marriage, childbirth—and other
seemingly naturalized life-stage markers. In writing the Court’s 6-3 decision to render LWOP unconstitutional for those who commit crimes under age
¶
18, the New York Times cites Justice Stephens’s decision:¶ “Knowledge accumulates,” he wrote. “We learn, sometimes, from our mistakes” (as cited in Liptak 2010).¶ Neurological research was
also circulated in material that supported efforts to render the death penalty unconstitutional for juveniles by the American Bar Association (2004). Psychology, experience and neurology legitimate
“delay,” and are organized as evidence that juveniles need protection and should not receive the death penalty, or that 26-year-olds (“emerging adults”) should be able to continue to access their
In particular, for youth, experience becomes
a double bind. Remaining innocent (the defining category of childhood) requires the negation
of experience (sexual, life and other), and therefore knowledge becomes tricky for children. As
McDermott et al. (2006) aptly point out in their research on the construction and circulation of
“learning disability” within educational spaces, the child can be the unit of concern, but not
the unit of analysis (2006, p. 12). When the child becomes the unit of analysis the contextual
factors that shape and produce this artifact, the child, and her condition as “disabled,” are
erased.
parents’ health insurance and remain dependent on state or parental management and intervention.¶
AT: the aff case turn – Exceptionality , suggesting that particular identities get
special treatment make them not only hyper visible with surrenveilence tacticts
which renders certain populations disposable .
Erica R. Meiners ,Education and Gender and Women’s Studies, Northeastern Illinois University,
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11256-011-0187-9/fulltext.html¶ Ending the School-to-Prison Pipeline/Building
Abolition Futures,
2011
Justice movements struggle with exceptionality, or what is the difference that makes a
difference? Motherhood continues to be circulated in efforts to push for changes in
sentencing and conditions for women who are locked up. Narratives and images of
transwomen in men’s prisons who are denied access to hormones or the right to serve their
sentence in women’s institutions are circulated to instigate change. These are critical and vital issues.
Exceptionality, as noted, is particularly prevalent in work related to the school-to-prison
pipeline. We love children, want to center children and youth as different from adults and our
entire body of developmental literature reinforces developmental differences. Yet, there are
costs to the deploying and framing of populations as different, special. This use of difference
can also limit other ways of knowing/knowledge and organizing. If juveniles are protected
because of immature brain development, does this make the rest of us culpable and can only
access punishment?¶ The challenge for those of us with extra time who are paid to think is to ask what the circulation of these identities makes visible and what is obscured.
Yet, as I write this I am daily reminded of the unequal ways in which state and interpersonal violence is deployed in our own lives and communities. “Disproportionality”
does not capture the reality of who is actively targeted for state and interpersonal violence:
women, queers and those gender non-conforming, poor people, brown–red–black people,
people with disabilities and/or others on the margins.¶ Nancy Fraser addresses this challenge
directly in her work, writing about when our tactics result in recognition but not redistribution
(of resources, state systems, and more) (Fraser 1997). For Fraser, justice strategies all too
often agitate for recognition (a liberal multicultural model), thus inviting additive responses
that are not capable of transforming systems of power, oppression and privilege.3 In addition,
recognition can often only be on a single axis (race, gender or sexuality). Asking juveniles or
children to be viewed as different than adults does not transform the larger contexts that
punish particular communities. This is also the reform/abolition question—in a different outfit. Abolition visions can get
translated into reformist strategies because organizing can be about compromise, and the
tactics deployed attempt to trigger public feelings (outrage, sympathy, pity) that can limit and
constrain work. Public and private affect (and corresponding campaigns) are often produced
through the “specialness” of particular populations.4 Organizing and research on the schoolto-prison nexus, with a center on youth, is particularly challenged by the very framings that
make this work and these interventions possible.
¶
AT: the aff because its looking to change the state
The aff helps the cerceal state shift, good intention makes the state
stronger just without the name of the state
Erica R. Meiners ,Education and Gender and Women’s Studies, Northeastern Illinois University,
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11256-011-0187-9/fulltext.html¶ Ending the School-to-Prison Pipeline/Building
Abolition Futures,
2011
As prison reform organizations lobby—particularly for populations afforded “exceptionality”
status, including pregnant women and juveniles—for “alternatives” to incarceration, it is
important to trace how these alternatives are created, developed and implemented and to
track the relationships of these alternatives to the carceral state. The construction of
alternatives to incarceration also offers us the opportunity to engage with the changing
conceptions of the state and the corresponding ways identities are sutured, often through
affect, to these new state practices/formations. As political scientist James Ferguson argues, the state is
not a static entity: “The state, in this conception, is not the name of an actor, it is the name of a way of tying together,
multiplying, and coordinating power relations, a kind of knotting or congealing of power” (1994, p. 273).¶ By alternatives to
incarceration and punishment, I refer to a range of programs like the “culture of calm” in Chicago Public Schools (Huston
2010), and more widely, the limited moves in some school systems to include forms of restorative justice, and the
I
also include the growing number of programs that are often mandated for “at risk” youth:
anger management (men) and self-esteem (women). Academics and those invested in prison
reform (or educational reform) are often called to support these alternatives, and we often
evaluate, grant write and endorse these options because these are “alternatives” to prison or
detention for young people (Haney 2010, Carr 2010).¶ Yet these alternatives, provided by
community-based, non-profit entities that wield considerable power, participate in forming a
neoliberal state capable of “government from a distance” (Rose 1999). It is not immediately
clear whether these programs extend or soften the carceral state, or if they are alternatives.
The relationships between these programs and the state are nuanced. These alternatives form
networks of power that remind us that the decentralization key to neoliberal policies does not
mean that the state withdraws; rather, the state’s relationships and abilities to negotiate
power, to “govern” from a distance, shift and potentially expand. A key concern is whether
young people are made more vulnerable by supporting and implementing, for example, the
proliferation of anger management programs in lieu of in-school detentions.¶ I use the
geographer Jennifer Wolch’s term, “shadow state,” to describe the foundations, non-profit
organizations, for-profit entities and other non-governmental forces that essentially fulfill
functions that were once identified as the purview of the state (Wolch 1990). Instances of the
shadow state include when tax exempt private foundations and not-for-profit corporations
fund and run schools that are still legally framed as public school (for example charter schools
where students must be admitted via lottery). Men and women are paroled from prison and
receive housing from religious non-profit associations and are court-mandated to counseling
services conducted by “in-training apprentices” from the local for-profit colleges and
institutes. These “service agencies,” often staffed by women in low-paying non-union jobs, do
not have to be accountable to any public, just to its unelected board members, or the invisible
or too visible big-ticket donors. The constellation of these organizations forms a shadow state
to deliver central services, and also participates in changing what counts as the state. ¶ In the
extension in many states to include boot camps and military programs into their menu of public educational options.
realm of alternatives to incarceration or punishment, arenas of service continue to emerge, often linked as forms of
therapeutic self-governance: anger management programs, self-esteem workshops, etc. In her study of women locked up
in community-based alternatives to incarceration, and staff members who work in these programs, Haney (2010)
documents the strength and growth of therapeutic governance, or the augmentation of “recovery” programs and cultures
within the carceral state, particularly for populations, such as women, pregnant teens and juveniles. These
forms of
therapeutic governance are predicated on the assumption that the body at stake is not
eligible for a rights-based discourse, but instead requires forms of governance to manage an
outlaw’s desires and feelings. I am particularly interested in how these new non-profit organizations—
or hybrid or satellite states as Haney terms them (2010)—manage affect. In Haney’s work, the
therapeutics of carceral self-governance are explicitly gendered and racialized and naturalize a
correspondingly gendered, heteronormative and racialized dependency discourse.
No more lips service to the poor and unemployable. The conflation of the poor
and the underclass is not only racist but secures capitalism because it disavowal
that we live in a racist society that keeps a racialize unemploy.
Garry L. Rolison, An Exploration of the Term Underclass as It Relates to African-Americans¶
Author(s): Source: Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 21, No. 3), pp. 287-301Published by: Sage Publications,
Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2784338 .¶298-9(Mar., 1991
The definition of the underclass offered above differs substan-tially from definitions employed
by other analysts. As mentioned earlier, much contemporary discussion of the underclass
defines it simply in terms of poverty. This is unfortunate; while poverty is a concomitant
condition of the underclass, it alone does not define it. The underclass is a class and not a
stratum. To iterate, the underclass is defined by its lack of opportunity for stable inclusion into
the labor market due primarily to its interests that are antagonistic to the proletariat in the
sphere of exchange. Moreover, simply defining the underclass in terms of poverty is
problematic, as it underplays the crucial import of race as the mode of underclass
structuration in a racialist society. In short, it should be understood that the Black underclass
differs fundamentally from the White poor because of its exclusion from the labor market as a
result of the cultural construction of racial membership as an axis of social closure in a
multiethnic, multiracial society such as the United States. In other words, by not paying
sufficient attention to the enduring quality of racism and its class basis and function, many
analysts have confused the poor - those with little income but with the possibility for either
intra- or intergenerational social mobility - with the underclass - those who are without such
possibilities due primarily to a racial status that prevents the full and equal exchange of their
labor power in the market.
Topicality
Topical version of the aff
Lindsey M.
Burke, What Congress and States Can Do to Reform Education Policy, Heritage
Foundation. Org, 2015
Federal action: A-PLUS would allow states to opt out of the programs that fall under
NCLB, and to put funding toward any education purpose or program authorized under
state law. Instead of continuing to spend the nearly $25 billion in federal funding that
is authorized under NCLBon dozens of ineffective and duplicative federal programs, APLUS would give states the option to decline participation in NCLBand focus that
spending on the education initiatives that work for their communities. State action: APLUS would allow state leaders to direct dollars to their state’s most pressing
education needs. States should, in turn, shift from state-managed, assignment-by-zipcode systems to devolve funding to the most local level possible— parents. Doing so
could take the form of school choice options, such as vouchers or education savings
accounts, which enable parents to choose educational options that meet their
children’s unique learning needs.
In the face of education is Policy key. A protest of state action do away with the
state and its anti- black function . we gotta put the money back in the hands of
folks who can make the change . We need an ‘A-Plus Hero ‘ to solve the aff
Lindsey M.
Burke, What Congress and States Can Do to Reform Education Policy, Heritage
Foundation. Org, 2015
Policymakers at the federal and state levels should advance reforms that will send dollars and
decision making back to those closest to the student in K–12 education. Congress can promote
this goal through the A-PLUS Act and by reducing federal competitive grant programs and
spending. In higher education, Congress should advance reform through the HERO Act and by
limiting federal loan programs that have encouraged families to incur high levels of debt. In
turn, state policymakers can take the lead in determining their own students’ K–12 education
priorities under the A-PLUS Act. They will also need to structure their own higher education
accreditation process under the HERO Act. Together, federal and state policymakers can
advance education reforms that will provide greater educational freedom and empower
parents to make education decisions for their children.
TOPICAL version of the aff would solve what incentivize push out tactics and
underfunding in public school
Lindsey M. Burke , How the A-PLUS Act Can Rein In¶ the Government’s Education Power Grab¶
http://report.heritage.org/bg2858 ¶ Produced by the Domestic Policy Studies Department ¶ The
Heritage Foundation November 14,
2013
No Child Left Behind (NCLB), a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education
Act of 1965, has been slated for its own reauthorization since 2007. Since that time, Congress
has considered various proposals to rewrite the 600-page education law, without reaching a
consensus, leaving NCLB to continue to operate as it has since 2002. While policymakers agree
No Child Left Behind is broken, there is less agreement about how to move forward. ¶ During
this time of deliberation over the future of NCLB, the Obama Administration began offering
conditions-based waivers to states, “freeing” them from the law’s most onerous provisions.
The Administration has seized on bipartisan displeasure with NCLB and provided waivers to over 40 states, along with eight school
districts in California, that agreed to implement the Administration’s vision of education policy. The
relief offered through
this waiver pact between states and Washington is a ruse; any short-term relief that states
gain comes at the price of ceding unprecedented authority over education decisions to the
U.S. Department of Education. ¶ Neither a wholesale reauthorization of the massive NCLB nor
strings-attached waivers from its regulations is the way to reduce federal intervention and
restore excellence in education. Members of Congress, superintendents, parents, and
taxpayers recognize that schools need genuine flexibility from Washington mandates. ¶ The
Academic Partnerships Lead Us to Success (A-PLUS) Act would allow states to completely opt
out of the programs that fall under No Child Left Behind and direct dollars to their state’s most
pressing education needs. Such an approach would help downsize federal intervention in
education, place decisions about education spending and programs in the hands of state and
local leaders, reduce the bureaucratic compliance burden, and begin to restore federalism in
education. ¶ A Half-Century of Growing Federal Intervention. No Child Left Behind is a continuation of nearly five decades
of growing federal intervention in education. NCLBis the seventh reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act
(ESEA), which was signed into law in 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson. The ESEA was the education component of Johnson’s
“Great Society” initiative, and began the practice of compensatory education. In the wake of ESEA’s enactment, the federal government began compensating low-income school districts, primarily through Title I of the law, in an effort to narrow achievement
gaps between disadvantaged students and their more advantaged peers. ¶ The original ESEA included five titles, 32 pages, and
roughly $1 billion in federal funding. Programs and spending under the ESEA grew throughout the 1970s and 1980s, marking a shift
from the compensatory model toward attempts at systemic education reform from Washington. That shift became particularly
acute in the 1990s when the focus became standards-based reform. President Bill Clinton signed his ESEA reauthorization—the
Improving America’s Schools Act (IASA) of 1994—into law, after having ushered in companion legislation known as Goals 2000.1 ¶
Prior to 1994, education funding targeted categorical programs with specific purposes. The coordination of the Improving America’s
Schools Act and Goals 2000 funded “school restructuring that influence[d] the entire school curriculum and culture. Goals 2000
[was] essentially a portrait of the Clinton administration’s model public school, complete with social services.”2 Moreover, the IASA
for the first time required states to establish “performance-based accountability systems,” marking a shift toward outcomes-based
reform and further federal intervention.3 ¶ In 1999, in the face of growing federal interference in local school policy, conservatives in
Congress introduced an alternative: the Academic Achievement for All Act (Straight A’s). Straight A’s proposed allowing states to
consolidate funding under ESEA programs in order to drastically reduce the bureaucratic red tape that had accumulated under the
ESEA, and became the foundation of the Academic Partnerships Lead Us to Success (A-PLUS) Act.¶ American students, principals,
teachers, and taxpayers never had the opportunity to benefit from the flexibility that Straight A’s offered, which only progressed
through the House. Two years later, as the seventh reauthorization of ESEA, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 was signed into law
by President George W. Bush.