1AC
1AC – War on Drugs
Marijuana prohibition is a flawed, racist and classist policy in the status
quo---US legalization reverses this violent social control---framing of
institutional reform is vital
Jelani Hayes 14, Media Intern at the Drug Policy Alliance, "Ending Marijuana Prohibition Must Take a
Historical Perspective", August 21, www.huffingtonpost.com/jelani-hayes/marijuana-prohibitionhistory_b_5697152.html
When the New York Times called for the federal government to repeal its prohibition of marijuana and let the states
decide its fate -- for medicinal or recreational use, production, and sale -- it did not rely solely on issues of the here
and now, such as economics, science, public safety, and current levels of racial disparities in arrests and incarceration rates (all of which are important considerations).
Instead, through the publication of seven pieces, the editorial board provided a more comprehensive argument
in support of their stance, connecting today's legalization movement to the past's criminalization crusade. For the New York Times,
history matters -- as it should for the legalization campaign nationwide.¶ Underlying marijuana prohibition is
a familiar philosophy: to preserve social order and white supremacy and secure profits for an influential
few, it is permissible, even advisable, to construct profit-bearing institutions of social control. Historically, this philosophy has been advanced
by governmental action, guided by special interests. The traditional tactics: manufacturing mass fear,
criminalizing the target or demoting them to a sub-citizen status, and profiting from their subjugation.¶ Cannabis
prohibition did all three. The Times editorial board dedicated an entire article to explaining this phenomenon. Part 3 of the series begins, "The federal
law that makes possession of marijuana a crime has its origins in legislation that was passed in an
atmosphere of hysteria in the 1930s and that was firmly rooted in prejudices against Mexican immigrants
and African-Americans , who were associated with marijuana use at the time. This racially freighted
history lives on in current federal policy , which is so driven by myth and propaganda that it is almost
impervious to reason." This limited analysis refers to the refer madness hysteria and xenophobia that infiltrated President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's
administration.¶ Additionally, business interests play a part in keeping cannabis illegal . Some pharmaceutical
companies, drug-prevention nonprofits, law enforcement agencies, and the private prison industry have
an economic interest in criminalization, what is known as the drug control industrial complex. It pays big to help
fight the war on drugs, and marijuana prohibition is a crucial facet of that effort. The Nation has recently called these interests "The Real Reason Pot is Still Illegal."¶ The
United States should legalize marijuana . It should also end the drug war, which would be a tremendous and beautiful
accomplishment, but it would not be enough.¶ The war on drugs is a mechanism of social control -- not unlike African
slavery, Jim Crow, alcohol Prohibition, or the systematic relegation of immigrants to an illegal status or substandard
existence. Different in their nature and severity, all of these institutions were tools used to control and profit from the
criminalization, regulation, and dehumanization of minority communities. Legalizing marijuana will not alone rid society of the tendency to turn fear
into hatred, hatred into regulation, and regulation into profit. To address this cycle, we must put cannabis prohibition (and the
drug war) in its historical context and connect the dots where appropriate.¶ Already we have seen that the reality of
legalization does not alone ensure justice or equality. As law professor and best selling author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness Michelle
Alexander points out, thousands of black men remain in jail or prison in Colorado (where licit weed has been on the market since January) while white men make money from
the now legal marijuana market -- selling the drug just as the incarcerated men had done. She warns that legalization without reparation is not sufficient, drawing the parallel to
what happened to black Americans post-Reconstruction. "And after a brief period of reconstruction a new caste system was imposed -- Jim Crow -- and another extraordinary
movement arose and brought the old Jim Crow to its knees...Americans said, OK, we'll stop now. We'll take down the whites-only signs, we'll stop doing that," she said. "But
there were not reparations for slavery, not for Jim Crow, and scarcely an acknowledgement of the harm done except for Martin Luther King Day, one day out of the year. And I
Alexander's historical perspective is warranted because despite the size and intensity of
marijuana prohibition, of the drug war in its entirety, its purpose is not unlike that of Jim Crow or other
structural forms of social control and oppression . The drug war was never about drugs. Therefore, our solution to it can't be either.¶ We
must frame the campaigns for cannabis legalization across the states as civil rights movements -- as
institutional reform efforts -- so that the public might demand justice oriented outcomes from the
campaigns. We must also make the public aware of the dangerous relationship between profit and
criminalization so that they can identity the potential dangerous within the relationship between profit and
legalization. We must make legalization about more than raising tax revenue, increasing civil liberties,
and lowering arrests rates for possession (all of which are important and positive outcomes of legalization, nonetheless).¶ In order to
undue the damage -- to the extent that that is possible -- that the criminalization of marijuana specifically and the war on
drugs more broadly have caused, we must pay reparations and retroactively apply reformed drug laws. More importantly,
we must undermine the philosophies that allow for the construction of institutional harm, and we must be
able to identify them when they creep up again and be ready to take action against them , to arm our minds and our
feel like, here we go again."¶
bodies against the next wave of social oppression -- whatever and wherever it may be and to whomever it may be applied.¶ This is my plea to
make history matter
so that it doesn't repeat itself -- again, and again, and again.
The war on drugs is a continuous extermination of minority populations
that must be stopped---as Americans, we must speak out in public spaces
about the injustice of laws
BW 12, Brown Watch, News for People of Color, "War on Drugs is a War on Black & Brown Men - 75
Years of Racial Control: Happy Birthday Marijuana Prohibition", October 2, www.brownwatch.com/genocide-watch/2012/10/2/war-on-drugs-is-a-war-on-black-brown-men-75-years-ofracial.html
"There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana
As we
approach the 75th anniversary of marijuana prohibition in the United States on October 1, it is important to remember
why marijuana was deemed illicit in the first place, and why we as Americans must open our eyes to the
insidious strategy behind 75 years of failed policy and ruined lives . Marijuana laws were designed not to
control marijuana, but to control the Mexican immigrants who had brought this native plant with them to the U.S.
usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.”- Harry Anslinger, first Drug Czar. From [HERE]
Fears over loss of jobs and of the Mexicans themselves led cities to look for ways to keep a close eye on the newcomers. In 1914, El Paso Texas became the first jurisdiction in the
This ban gave police the right to search, detain and question Mexican
immigrants without reason, except the suspicion that they were in possession of marijuana. Folklore started to erupt about the effect that marijuana had on
those who used it. As Harry Anslinger stated, “Reefer makes darkies think they're as good as white men.”¶ Fast forward to 2012. Marijuana is still an
illicit substance and the laws are still being used to justify the search, detainment and questioning of
populations deemed “untrustworthy” and “suspicious” by modern society, namely the poor and young men of color. A prime
example is New York’s Stop and Frisk program, which stopped nearly 700,000 people in 2011. Hailed as a strategy for removing guns and violent crime from the
streets, this method of stopping and questioning “suspicious” individuals, highlights the racial inequities associated with drug laws.
From 2002 to 2011, African American and Hispanic residents made up close to 90% of people stopped. This is not
U.S. to ban the sale and possession of marijuana.
limited to New York. In California, African-Americans are 4 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana, 12 times more likely to go to prison with a felony marijuana charge,
The strategy of using marijuana laws to stop, detain and
imprison poor and minority populations must stop NOW . In the past 75 years we have seen mounting evidence of
the benign nature of the marijuana plant, and its tremendous potential for medical development. But the
rampant misinformation about the effects of marijuana USE is dwarfed by the lifetime of suffering that a
marijuana CONVICTION can bring. In 2010, there were 853,839 marijuana arrests in the U.S., 750,591 of those were for possession. A drug conviction in
and 3 times more likely to go to prison with a marijuana possession charge.¶
America is the gift that keeps on giving. Affected individuals must face a lifetime of stigma that can prevent employment, home ownership, education, voting and the ability to be
a parent. The issue of mass incarceration and the War on Drugs is featured in the new documentary, The House I Live In. In the film, Richard L. Miller, author of Drug Warriors
drug laws , such
as those for marijuana are part of a process of annihilation aimed at poor and minority populations . Miller
poses that drug laws are designed to identify, ostracize, confiscate, concentrate, and annihilate these
populations by assigning the label of drug user, criminal, or addict, seizing property, taking away freedom
and institutionalizing entire communities in our ever growing prison system.¶ We can stop this from
happening . Marijuana was deemed illegal without acknowledging science or the will of the people. 75 years later, 50% of the population
supports marijuana legalization, and families are still being torn apart and lives destroyed over the criminal
sanctions associated with its use. The most vulnerable members of our society are also the targets of a prison industrial
complex out of control and getting bigger every day. Someone is arrested for marijuana in the U.S. every 38 seconds,
we have no time to waste , tax and regulate now.¶ Oregon, Colorado and Washington are all considering a more sensible and humane approach
to marijuana as all three have tax and regulate initiatives on their ballots this November. This is a unique opportunity for citizens to cast a vote
heard round the world, to stand up not only for the freedom to consume marijuana, but against the atrocities and
human suffering that result from the criminalization of it.
and Their Prey, From Police Power to Police State, presents a very sinister take on the method behind the Drug War madness. Miller suggests that
Our method of technical, policy-oriented debate about drug laws is
necessary to effectuate broader change---we must avoid vacuous assertions
because they entrench superficial discussion that leads nowhere
Paul Stares 96, General John W. Vessey Senior Fellow for Conflict Prevention and Director of the
Center for Preventive Action, Brookings, "Drug Legalization?: Time for a real debate", Spring,
www.brookings.edu/research/articles/1996/03/spring-crime-stares
As in the past, some observers will doubtless see the solution in much tougher penalties to deter both suppliers and
consumers of illicit psychoactive substances. Others will argue that the answer lies not in more law enforcement and stiffer
sanctions, but in less. Specifically, they will maintain that the edifice of domestic laws and international
conventions that collectively prohibit the production, sale, and consumption of a large array of drugs for anything other
than medical or scientific purposes has proven physically harmful, socially divisive, prohibitively expensive, and ultimately
counterproductive in generating the very incentives that perpetuate a violent [underground] market for illicit drugs. They will conclude,
moreover, that the only logical step for the United States to take is to "legalize " drugs—in essence repeal and disband the
current drug laws and enforcement mechanisms in much the same way America abandoned its brief experiment with alcohol prohibition in the 1920s. ¶
Although the legalization alternative typically surfaces when the public's anxiety about drugs and despair over existing policies are at their highest, it
never seems to slip off the media radar screen for long. Periodic incidents—such as the heroin-induced death of a young, affluent New York City couple
in 1995 or the 1993 remark by then Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders that legalization
might be beneficial and should be studied —
prominence of many of those who have at various times made the case for legalization —such as
William F. Buckley, Jr., Milton Friedman, and George Shultz—also helps. But each time the issue of legalization
arises, the same arguments for and against are dusted off and trotted out, leaving us with no clearer
understanding of what it might entail and what the effect might be.¶ As will become clear, drug legalization is
not a public policy option that lends itself to simplistic or superficial debate . It requires dissection and
scrutiny of an order that has been remarkably absent despite the attention it perennially receives. Beyond
discussion of some very generally defined proposals, there has been no detailed assessment of the
operational meaning of legalization. There is not even a commonly accepted lexicon of terms to allow an intellectually rigorous exchange to
take place. Legalization, as a consequence, has come to mean different things to different people . Some, for example, use
ensure this. The
legalization interchangeably with "decriminalization," which usually refers to removing criminal sanctions for possessing small quantities of drugs for
personal use. Others equate legalization, at least implicitly, with complete deregulation, failing in the process to acknowledge the extent to which
currently legally available drugs are subject to stringent controls. ¶ Unfortunately,
the U.S. government—including the Clinton
done little to improve the debate. Although it has consistently rejected any retreat from prohibition, its stance
has evidently not been based on in- depth investigation of the potential costs and benefits . The belief that
administration—has
legalization would lead to an instant and dramatic increase in drug use is considered to be so self-evident as to warrant no further study. But if this is
indeed the likely conclusion of any study, what is there to fear aside from criticism that relatively small amounts of taxpayer money had been wasted in
demonstrating what everyone had believed at the outset? Wouldn't such an outcome in any case help justify the continuation of existing policies and
A real debate that acknowledges
the unavoidable complexities and uncertainties surrounding the notion of drug legalization is long
overdue . Not only would it dissuade people from making the kinds of casual if not flippant assertions—both for
and against—that have permeated previous debates about legalization, but it could also stimulate a larger and
equally critical assessment of current U.S. drug control programs and priorities .
convincingly silence those—admittedly never more than a small minority—calling for legalization?¶
Legalization of marijuana is a useful starting point to end the drug war--technical debates allow radical transformation that benefits minorities
more than the privileged
Neill Franklin 14, Executive Director of Law, Enforcement Against Prohibition, "3 Reasons Marijuana
Legalization in Colorado Is Good for People for Color", 1/23, www.huffingtonpost.com/neillfranklin/marijuana-legalization-race-racism-minorities_b_4651456.html
For the first time, President Obama acknowledged this week that the prohibition of marijuana is unfairly enforced against AfricanAmericans and Latinos, and for that reason, he says, legalization in Colorado and Washington should go
forward. Without explicitly endorsing the laws, he told the New Yorker, "it's important for [them] to go forward because it's important for society not to have a situation in which a large portion of people
have at one time or another broken the law and only a select few get punished."¶ ¶ As the president acknowledged, marijuana prohibition targets black and brown
people (even though marijuana users are equally or more likely to be white). Ending prohibition through passing legalization laws , as Colorado and
Washington have, will reduce this racial disparity .¶ The war on drugs, as we all know, has led to mass criminalization and
incarceration for people of color. The legalization of marijuana , which took effect for the first time in the country in Colorado on January 1, is
one step toward ending that war. While the new law won't eradicate systemic racism in our criminal
justice system completely, it is one of the most effective thing s we can do to address it . Here are three concrete ways that
Colorado's law is good for people of color.¶ 1. The new law means there will be no more arrests for
marijuana possession in Colorado.¶ Under Colorado's new law, residents 21 or older can produce, possess, use and sell up to an ounce of marijuana at a time. This change will
have a real and measurable impact on people of color in Colorado, where the racial disparities in
marijuana possession arrests have been reprehensible . In the last ten years, Colorado police arrested blacks for marijuana possession at more than three times
the rate they arrested whites, even though whites used marijuana at higher rates. As noted by the NAACP in its endorsement of the legalization law, it's particularly bad in Denver, where almost one-third of the
These arrests can have devastating and longlasting consequences. An arrest record can affect the ability to get a job, housing, student loans and public benefits. As law professor Michelle Alexander describes, people
(largely black and brown) who acquire a criminal record simply for being caught with marijuana are
people arrested for private adult possession marijuana are black, though they make up only 11% of the population.¶
relegated to a permanent second-class status. When we make marijuana legal, we stop those arrests from
happening.¶ 2. Unlike under decriminalization , the new law means there will be no more arrests for mere
marijuana possession in Colorado, period.¶ In the Jan. 6 article "#Breaking Black: Why Colorado's weed laws may backfire for black Americans," Goldie Taylor
mistakenly suggests that Colorado's new legalization law may "further tip the scales in favor of a privileged class
already largely safe from criminalization." Much of the stubborn "this-changes-nothing" belief about the
new law stems from confusion between decriminalization and legalization . There is a profound difference
between the hodgepodge of laws known collectively as "decriminalization " passed in several states over the past 30 years, and
Colorado's unprecedented legalization law. Decriminalization usually refers to a change in the law which removes
criminal but not civil penalties for marijuana possession, allowing police to issue civil fines (similar to speeding tickets), or require
drug education or expensive treatment programs in lieu of being arrested.¶ Because of the ambiguity in some states with
decriminalization, cops still arrest users with small amounts of marijuana due to technicalities , such as having illegal
paraphernalia, or for having marijuana in "public view" after asking them to empty their pockets. One only need look as far as the infamous stop-and-frisk
law in New York, where marijuana is decriminalized, to see how these ambiguities might be abused to the
detriment of people of color.¶ In Colorado, however, the marijuana industry is now legal and aboveground. People therefore have a right to possess and use marijuana products , although as with alcohol, there are restrictions relating to
things like age, driving, and public use. Police won't be able to racially profile by claiming they smelled marijuana or saw it in plain
view.¶ 3. We will reduce real problems associated with the illicit market .¶ As marijuana users shift to making purchases at regulated stores,
we'll start to see improvement in problems that were blamed on marijuana but are in fact consequences of
its prohibition. The violence related to the street-corner drug trade will begin to fall as the illicit market is slowly replaced by
well-guarded stores with cameras and security systems. And consumers will now know what they're getting; instead of buying whatever's in a baggie, they have the benefit of choosing from a wide variety of
marijuana products at the price level and potency they desire.¶ Goldie Taylor made the dubious claim that since marijuana prices were initially high in Colorado's new stores, the creation of a legal market won't
affect the existing illicit market. But despite sensational headlines, prices for marijuana are just like anything else. They respond to levels of supply and demand. In the first couple weeks, prices were high because
only a small fraction of marijuana businesses in Colorado opened, and what looked like every user in the state was in line to make a purchase on the day the historic law took effect. As the novelty-fueled demand
levels off and the rest of the stores across the state begin to open, increasing supply, prices will drop. For their money, purchasers can conveniently buy a product they know is tested and unadulterated. And for
those who don't want to buy at a store, Colorado residents over 21 are permitted to grow up to six marijuana plants at home.
Connecting our critiques to an advocacy of the legalization of marijuana
uniquely provides a training ground for broader reform---legalization is
vital and allows effective coalition-building
Katherine Tate 14, Professor of Political Science at UC Irvine, Something's in the Air: Race, Crime, and
the Legalization of Marijuana, pg. 9
For increasing numbers of Americans, legalization of personal- use marijuana is the only alternative to draconian laws
drawn up in the "war on drugs" regime of the past three decades. It is well established that concern and paranoia over petty "crack"
cocaine arrests for sales, possession, and use drove the mass warehousing of California's prisons and jail populations to become the largest in the United States (Lusane 1991:
the U.S. federal system of crime control
has left minority citizens less able to challenge unfair sentencing laws. Noting that marijuana possession
constituted nearly 8 of 10 drug- related arrests in the 1990s. Michelle Alexander (2010) insists that this period of
"unprecedented punitiveness" resulted "in prison sentences (rather than dismissal, community service, or probation)" to the
degree that "in two short decades, between 1980 and 2000 the number of people incarcerated in our
nation's prisons and jails soared from roughly 300.000 to more than 2 million. By the end of 2007, more
than 7 million Americans—or one in every 31 adults— were behind bars, on probation, or parole" (Alexander
2010. 59). Pushed by drug prosecutions, the rising rate of incarceration reached unprecedented levels in the
1990s. Today's movement toward more prisons, mandatory minimums and reinstatement of the death penalty logically followed the racially exploitative "law and order"
Provine 2007: Reinerman and Levine 1997: Weatherspoon 1998: Weaver 2007). Miller (2008) contends that
campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s (Murakawa 2008). Conservative American politicians use the mythical Black or Hispanic male drug dealer, like the Black female welfare
African Americans
bear the brunt of law-and-order management of U.S. marijuana laws because of how marijuana use is
racialized. Political scientist Doris Provine contends that the U.S. government increased its punitive response toward drug
use as a response to racial fears and stereotypes. She writes: "[d]rugs remain, symbolically, a menace to white,
middle-class values" (2007. 89). Both politicians and media have used this issue to construct a crisis and sustain punitive state drug laws. The war on
drugs, she concludes, has greatly harmed minority citizens through their imprisonment, contributing to deep
inequalities in education, housing, health care, and equal opportunities to advance economically . The facts of
queen, to drum up votes. A widespread consensus in reported government statistics, advocacy studies, and policy think tanks suggests that
use. sales, and possession, confirmed by academic and critical legal studies literature, are strikingly different from how the national and local media choose to present them. One
study focusing on marijuana initiate found "among Blacks, the annual incidence rate (per 1.000 potential new users) increased from 8.0 in 1966 to 16.7 in 1968. reached a peak
at about the same time as "Whites" (19.4 in 1976). then remained high throughout the late 1970s. Following the low rates in the 1980s, rates among Blacks rose again in the early
1990s, reached a peak in 1997 and 1998 (19.2 and 19.1. respectively), then dropped to 14.0 in 1999. Similar to the general pattern for Whites and Blacks. Hispanics' annual
Individuals and groups in civil
society, advocacy communities, and state legislatures must put forth a serious struggle among activists and
potential coalition partners who can understand the need for reform as a matter of civil rights and justice, and not the morality of
marijuana consumption. Supporting decriminalization potentially can be the training ground for a new generation of leadership in
addressing the larger problem of mass incarceration and social and political isolation associated with it .
incidence rate rose during late 1970s and 1990s, with a peak in 1998 (17.8)" (National Survey on Drug Use 1999).
For Black people and their allies who long for the days— against all odds—of political education, voter
mobilization, legal reform , group solidarity, challenge to the political parties, and political empowerment,
expressed in the modern civil rights movement, the matter of decriminalization is ripe for galvanizing a
collaboration at the grassroots . Too many Blacks have assumed that the "War on Drugs" ended with the
dissipation of the "crack" emergency, when, in sum, marijuana's criminalization—rather than
incarceration—of Black people has been more perennial. If Michelle Alexander (2010) is correct in arguing that mass
incarceration has effectively reasserted Jim Crow second-class citizenship (or no citizenship) rights on African
American people, then they must get off the sidelines of the legalization of cannabis or decriminalization struggle and stop allowing others to fight what is essentially
their battle. This has long been the case in the challenge to the crushing "prison industrial complex." Whites and others, for the most part, have been the leaders in reform efforts
concerning such things as mandatory minimums, the old 100:1 gram of cocaine-to-crack formula, and health care for geriatric or HIV AIDS patients in prisons, while we have
When ordinary people change their
thinking and consciousness and begin to demystify small, personal- use marijuana, then the leaders will eventually
come around without reticence or fear. The marijuana debate needs to be reframed to remove all
penalties against its use (Scherlen 2012). This is our exit strategy: decriminalization reform is the only path to
reversing the dismal trends minorities face in America.
seen Calvin "Snoop- Dogg"' Broadus become more influential than the congressional Black Caucus to our young.
We should engage in these debates regarding institutional reforms within
the system rather than radical alternatives
J. Harvie Wilkinson 14, judge serving on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit,
former Associate professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, formerly had a position in the Civil
Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, June, “In Defense of American, Criminal Justice”,
Vanderbilt Law Review, http://www.vanderbiltlawreview.org/content/articles/2014/06/In-Defense-ofAmerican-Criminal-Justice.pdf
One final count in the indictment remains. Can we truly call a system democratic when a very large section of the
citizenry—African-Americans—feel oppressed by or excluded from it? Is this a reason to discredit American
criminal justice? The reaction to the verdict in the George Zimmerman trial in July 2013—in parts angry, reflective, and resigned—
reminded us that many African-Americans feel as though the criminal justice system does not work for
them. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson argued, "Our society considers young black men to be dangerous, interchangeable, expendable, guilty until proven
innocent.” 362 Manhattan Institute scholar and New Republic contributor John McWhorter argued that, for African-Americans, “the poisonous relationship between young
black men and law enforcement is the prime manifestation of racism in modern America.” 363 And President Obama noted that “the African American community is looking at
There
is something to these criticisms. Americans have tried to address them over the years by requiring objective, raceneutral justifications for government actions within the criminal justice system. We have, for example, required that the jury venire be
composed of a fair cross-section of the community, and in Batson v. Kentucky, the Supreme Court
outlawed the use of peremptory challenges of jurors based upon their race. We can insist that objective
criteria support stop and frisks. And we can focus on racial discrepancies in criminal-law enforcement—
which may lead, for example, to four times as many marijuana arrests for black Americans as white
Americans, despite similar rates of use.367¶ But efforts such as these won’t solve our problems altogether. This is because the story is more
this issue through a set of experiences and history that doesn’t go away,” one wrapped up in “a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal law.” 364¶
complicated than simply a criminal justice system that has failed to win the trust and confidence of many in the African-American community. The problem of racial equality
We can acknowledge that we have not yet reached our goal of race
neutrality in the dispensation of justice while acknowledging also that this alone does not account for the
racial makeup of our prisons and halfway houses. Then–New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg stated, “Ninety percent of all people killed in our
and criminal justice is one of “painful complexity.” 368
city—and 90 percent of all those who commit the murders and other violent crimes—are black and Hispanic.” 369 That is the great double-edged sword. It understandably leads
to more stops and more arrests in high-crime areas. It understandably leads to more convictions of those of whatever race who commit the crimes. But it also leads to
understandable anger and resentment on the part of disadvantaged young black males who want to make a decent go of American life, only to find themselves the object of
The solution to the problem of race and criminal justice is not a total
overhaul of the system . That just renders the criminal justice system the scapegoat for a much larger set of social
problems. The criminal justice system feels the effects of those problems; it does not cause them. Drug and
gun crimes are not any less a blight upon society because of the racial makeup of the offenders; indeed, as
Robinson noted, “[N]owhere will you find citizens more supportive of tough law-and-order policies than in poor,
high-crime neighborhoods.” 370 Our criminal justice system rightly aims to reduce dangerous behavior, and
the beneficiaries of success in that endeavor may be those less advantaged citizens for whom basic safety
will make for greater opportunity, not to mention better prospects for a brighter life. ¶ To cast ceaseless
blame on America’s criminal justice system is to ignore the enormity of the problems it has been asked to
solve . It only diverts attention from the larger ways in which America has failed its
recurrent false suspicion and repeated frisks.¶
underclass. As Michael Gerson recently noted, “The problem of African American boys and young men is a complex mix of lingering racial prejudice, urban economic
dislocation, collapsing family structure, failing schools and sick, atomized communities.” 371 To chastise criminal justice when many levers of upward mobility are so
compromised is an inversion of priorities. A complete “fix” of what the critics allege ails criminal justice will do nothing to restore shattered family structures, improve failing
schools, impart necessary job skills, restore religious and community support groups, or provide meaningful alternatives in deprived neighborhoods to the gangs and drug rings
that steer young people toward lifelong addictions and lives of crime. Society doesn’t create opportunity by sacrificing the basic social need for order. To the contrary,
improvements in communities and institutions will only take root in the kind of safe
environment that, at its best, a strong criminal justice system can provide. And when we provide
opportunity, we in turn reduce the pressure on the criminal justice system and lessen the monumental
task that lack of opportunity for the poorest Americans has left it to perform .¶ How a society chooses to balance justice and
safety with rights and liberties will invariably be the subject of vigorous debate. Our criminal justice system is no exception. Many good and intelligent people will disagree
We should not grow complacent in the face of particular
problems, both for the sake of individual defendants and for the rule of law itself. ¶ But instead of engaging
in a constructive debate about the American approach to criminal justice , legal elites largely have
condemned the entire enterprise. The system, we are told, is broken, and only sweeping reforms imposed from on high can save it.
But the rhetoric that fuels the wholesale assault upon the system not only will fail to achieve any
meaningful change , it obscures the many strengths of our institutions. By focusing so much on what is wrong, we inevitably forget
passionately about the contours of our criminal law. That is all to the good.
what is right.¶ The terms of engagement must change. My call is not for scholars to whitewash our system’s failings but to realize the picture is far more nuanced and complex
Given the volume of matters it is asked to address and immensity of the task it is asked to
perform, our criminal justice system functions rather well. It is both unrealistic and uncharitable to
portray the system as an engine of oppression and injustice. Ironically, many of the features that critics
claim operate one-sidedly against defendants often work to their benefit. The American criminal justice
system strikes a valuable front-end note. It strikes difficult balances between protecting the innocent and
convicting the guilty, between procedural protections and administrative realities. It rightly allows these
contestable choices to be made democratically, but only to a point. Such qualities are hardly the
hallmarks of a failed system .¶ Indeed, those who have been among the most persistent critics of the
criminal justice system were among the first to call for its utilization in the aftermath of the September
11th terrorist attacks.372 And since that time, the refrain has often been that acts of terrorism are crimes that should
be dealt with in the customary way through enforcement of federal criminal law.373 I recognize that this plea for criminal
trials does not constitute an acknowledgment of the system’s perfection, but it does indicate that the system imparts a legitimacy for the
than they have presented it.
deprivation of liberty that other routes of trying suspected terrorists may lack. This is no place to explore the complicated question of whether alleged terrorism is more aptly
regarded as a criminal offense or as an act of war. Separation of powers concerns and the need for action to prevent mass casualties make the question an exceptionally
I note only the irony that many who reject the considerable virtues of the American criminal
justice system are at least prepared to look upon it as a preferred solution when the values of liberty and
security are in epochal tension.¶ To be sure, there is plenty of room for reform , and all parts of the legal
profession should head for the front lines. But let us not forget our system’s virtues as we seek to correct
its vices. Otherwise, any legitimate concerns will be lost in the din of diatribe. We have gone too long without a degree of
complicated one.
balance or moderation in our assessment of the American criminal justice system. It is time we gave our institutions a fair trial.
Efforts toward reform can’t be understood outside of their ultimate goals--building bridges on the legalization of marijuana itself challenges the logic
of incarceration---institutional engagement is necessary to actualize the
ideals of revolution while avoiding the failures of typical reform
Julia Sudbury 8, Metz Professor of Ethnic Studies at Mills College. She is a leading activist scholar in
the prison abolitionist movement. She was a co-founder of Critical Resistance, a national abolitionist
organization. “Rethinking Global Justice: Black Women Resist the Transnational Prison-Industrial
Complex”, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, Volume 10, Issue 4
Chronic overcrowding has led to worsening conditions for prisoners. As a result of the unprecedented growth in sentenced populations, prison
authorities have packed three or four prisoners into cells designed for two, and have taken over recreation rooms, gyms, and rooms designed for
programming and turned them into cells, housing prisoners on bunk beds or on the floor. These new conditions have created challenges for activists,
who have found themselves expending time and resources in pressuring prison authorities to provide every prisoner a bed, or to provide access to basic
education programs. As prison populations continue to swell, anti-prison
activists are faced with the limitations of reformist
strategies. Gains temporarily won are swiftly undermined, new “women-centered” prison regimes are replaced with a focus on
cost-efficiency and minimal programming and even changes enforced by legal cases like Shumate vs. Wilson are subject to backlash and resistance. 19
Of even greater concern is the well-documented tendency of prison regimes to co-opt reforms and
respond to demands for changes in conditions by further expanding prison budgets. The vulnerability of
prison reform efforts to cooption has led Angela Y. Davis to call for “non-reformist reforms,” reforms
that do not lead to bigger and “better” prisons. 20 Despite the limited long-term impact of human rights
advocacy and reforms, building bridges between prisoners, activists, and family members is an important
step toward challenging the racialized dehumanization that undergirds the logic of incarceration . In this way,
human rights advocacy carried out in solidarity with prisoner activists is an important component of a
radical anti-prison agenda . Ultimately, however, anti-prison activists aim not to create more humane, culturally sensitive,
women-centered prisons, but to dismantle prisons and enable formerly criminalized people to access services and
resources outside the penal system. After three decades of prison expansion, more and more people are living with criminal convictions
and histories of incarceration. In the U.S., nearly 650,000 people are released from state and federal prisons to the community each year. 21
Organizations of formerly incarcerated people focus on creating opportunities for former prisoners to survive after release, and on eliminating barriers
to reentry, including extensive discrimination against former felons. The wide array of “post-incarceration sentences” that felons are subjected to has
led activists to declare a “new civil rights movement.” 22 As a class, former prisoners can legally be disenfranchised and denied rights available to other
citizens. While reentry has garnered official attention, with President Bush proposing a $300 million reentry initiative in his 2004 State of the Union
address, anti-prison activists have critiqued this initiative for focusing on faith-based mentoring, job training, and housing without addressing the
endemic discrimination against former prisoners or addressing the conditions in the communities which receive former prisoners, including racism,
poverty, and gender violence. Organizations of ex-prisoners working to oppose discrimination against former prisoners and felons include All of Us Or
None, the Nu Policy Leadership Group, Sister Outsider and the National Network for Women Prisoners in the U.S., and Justice 4 Women in Canada.
All of Us Or None is described by members as “a national organizing initiative of prisoners, former prisoners and felons, to combat the many forms of
discrimination that we face as the result of felony convictions.” 23 Founded by anti-imperialist and former political prisoner Linda Evans, and former
prisoner and anti-prison activist Dorsey Nunn, and sponsored by the Northern California–based Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, All of Us
Or None works to mobilize former prisoners nationwide and in Toronto, Canada. The organization's name, from a poem by Marxist playwright Bertold
Brecht, invokes the need for solidarity across racial, class, and gender lines in creating a unified movement of former prisoners. Black women play a
leading role in the organization, alongside other people of color. All of Us Or None focuses its lobbying and campaign work at city, county, and state
levels, calling on local authorities to end discrimination based on felony convictions in public housing, benefits, and employment, to opt out of lifetime
welfare and food stamp bans for felons, and to “ban the box” requiring disclosure of past convictions on applications for public employment. In
addition, the organization calls for guaranteed housing, job training, drug and alcohol treatment, and public assistance for all newly released prisoners.
24 In the context of the war on drugs, many people with felony convictions also struggle with addictions. The recovery movement, which is made up of
12-step programs, treatment programs, community recovery centers, and indigenous healing programs run by and for people in recovery from
addiction, offers an alternative response to problem drug use through programs focusing on spirituality, healing, and fellowship. However, the recovery
movement's focus on individual transformation and accountability for past acts diverges from many anti-prison activists' focus on the harms done to
criminalized communities by interlocking systems of dominance. As a result, anti-prison spaces seldom engage with the recovery movement, or tap the
radical potential of its membership. Breaking with this trend, All of Us Or None has initiated a grassroots organizing effort to reach out to people in 12step programs with felony convictions. This work is part of their wider organizing efforts that aim to mobilize former prisoners as agents of social
change. Building on the strengths of identity politics, these organizations suggest that those who have experienced the prison-industrial complex firsthand may be best placed to provide leadership in dismantling it. As former prisoners have taken on a wide range of leadership positions across the
movement, there has been a shift away from leadership by white middle-class progressives, and a move to promote the voices of those directly affected
by the prison-industrial complex. Politicians who promote punitive “tough-on-crime” policies rely on racialized controlling images of “the criminal” to
inspire fear and induce compliance among voters. Once dehumanized and depicted as dangerous and beyond rehabilitation, removing people from
communities appears the only logical means of creating safety. Activists
who pursue decarceration challenge stereotypical
images of the “criminal” by making visible the human stories of prisoners, with the goal of demonstrating
the inadequacy of incarceration as a response to the complex interaction of factors that produce harmful
acts. Decarceration usually involves targeting a specific prison population that the public sees as low-risk
and arguing for an end to the use of imprisonment for this population. Decarcerative strategies often
involve the promotion of alternatives to incarceration that are less expensive and more effective than
prison and jail. For example, Proposition 36, the Substance Abuse and Crime Prevention Act, which passed in California in 2000 and allowed
first- and second-time non-violent drug offenders charged with possession to receive substance abuse treatment instead of prison, channels
Drug law reform is a key area of decarcerative work .
Organizations and campaigns that promote drug law reform include Drop the Rock, a coalition of youth, former prisoners,
criminal justice reformers, artists, civil and labor leaders working to repeal New York's Rockefeller Drug Laws. The campaign combines racial
justice, economic, and public safety arguments by demonstrating that the laws have created a pipeline of
prisoners of color from New York City to newly built prisons in rural, mainly white areas represented Republican senators, resulting in a
approximately 35,000 people into treatment annually. 25
transfer of funding and electoral influence from communities of color to upstate rural communities. 26 Ultimately, the campaign calls for an end to
mandatory minimum sentencing and the reinstatement of judges' sentencing discretion, a reduction in sentence lengths for drug-related offenses and
the expansion of alternatives, including drug treatment, job training, and education. Former drug war prisoners play a leadership role in decarcerative
efforts in the field of drug policy reform. Kemba Smith, an African–American woman who was sentenced to serve 24.5 years as a result of her
relationship with an abusive partner who was involved in the drug industry, is one potent voice in opposition to the war on drugs. While she was
incarcerated, Smith became an active advocate for herself and other victims of the war on drugs, securing interviews and feature articles in national
media. Ultimately, Smith's case came to represent the failure of mandatory minimums, and in 2000, following a nation-wide campaign, she and fellow
drug war prisoner Dorothy Gaines were granted clemency by outgoing President Clinton. After her release, Smith founded the Justice for People of
Color Project (JPCP), which aims to empower young people of color to participate in drug policy reform and to promote a reallocation of public
expenditures from incarceration to education. While women like Kemba Smith and Dorothy Gaines have become the human face of the drug war,
prison invisibilizes and renders anonymous hundreds of thousands of drug war prisoners. The organization Families Against Mandatory Minimums
(FAMM) challenges this process of erasure and dehumanization through its “Faces of FAMM” project. The project invites people in federal and state
prisons serving mandatory minimum sentences to submit their cases to a database and provides online access to their stories and photographs. 27 The
“Faces of FAMM” project highlights cases where sentencing injustices are particularly visible in order to galvanize public support for sentencing
reform. At the same time, it dismantles
popular representations of the war on drugs as a necessary protection
against dangerous drug dealers and traffickers, demonstrating that most drug war prisoners are serving
long sentences for low-level, non-violent drug-related activities or for being intimately connected to someone involved in
these activities. Decarcerative work is not limited to drug law reform. Free Battered Women's (FBW) campaign for the release of incarcerated survivors
is another example of decarcerative work. The organization supports women and transgender prisoners incarcerated for killing or assaulting an abuser
in challenging their convictions by demonstrating that they acted in self-defense. Most recently, FBW secured the release of Flozelle Woodmore, an
African–American woman serving a life sentence at CCWF for shooting her violent partner as an 18 year old. Released in August 2007, after five parole
board recommendations for her release were rejected by Governors Davis and then Schwarzenegger, Woodmore's determined pursuit of justice made
visible and ultimately challenged the racialized politics of gubernatorial parole releases. 28 While the number of women imprisoned for killing or
assaulting an abuser is small—FBW submitted 34 petitions for clemency at its inception in 1991, and continues to fight 23 cases—FBW's campaign for
the release of all incarcerated survivors challenges the mass incarceration of gender-oppressed prisoners on a far larger scale. FBW argues that
experiences of intimate partner violence and abuse contribute to the criminalized activities that lead many women and transgender people into conflict
with the law, including those imprisoned on drug or property charges, and calls for the release of all incarcerated survivors. Starting with a population
generally viewed with sympathy—survivors of intimate partner violence—FBW generates a radical critique of both state and interpersonal violence,
arguing that “the violence and control used by the state against people in prison mirrors the dynamics of battering that many incarcerated survivors
have experienced in their intimate relationships and/or as children.” 29 In
theorizing the intersections of racialized state
violence and gendered interpersonal violence, FBW lays the groundwork for a broader abolitionist
agenda that refutes the legitimacy of incarceration as a response to deep-rooted social inequalities based
on interlocking systems of oppression . By gradually shrinking the prison system, Black women activists
involved in decarcerative work hope to erode the public's reliance on the idea of imprisonment as a
commonsense response to a wide range of social ills. At the other end of anti-expansionist work are activists who take a more
confrontational approach. By starving correctional budgets of funds to continue building more prisons and jails, they hope to force politicians to
embrace less expensive and more effective alternatives to incarceration. Prison moratorium organizing aims to stop construction of new prisons and
jails. Unlike campaigns against prison privatization, which oppose prison-profiteering by private corporations, and seek to return imprisonment to the
public sector, prison moratorium work opposes all new prison construction, public or private. In New York, the Brooklyn-based Prison Moratorium
Project (PMP), co-founded by former prisoner Eddie Ellis and led by young women and gender non-conforming people of color, does this work through
popular education and mass campaigns against prison expansion. Focusing on youth as a force for social change, New York's PMP uses compilations of
progressive hip hop and rap artists to spread a critical analysis of the prison-industrial complex and its impact on people of color. PMP's strategies have
been effective; for example, in 2002 the organization, as part of the Justice 4 Youth Coalition, succeeded in lobbying the New York Department of
Juvenile Justice to redirect $53 million designated for expansion in Brooklyn and the Bronx. 30 PMP has also worked to make visible the connections
between underfunding, policing of schools, and youth incarceration through their campaign “Stop the School-to-Prison Pipeline.” By demonstrating
how zero tolerance policies and increased policing and use of surveillance technology in schools, combined with underfunded classrooms and
overstretched teachers, has led to the criminalization of young people of color and the production of adult prisoners, PMP argues for a reprioritization
of public spending from the criminal justice system to schools and alternatives to incarceration. 31 Moratorium work often involves campaigns to
prevent the construction of a specific prison or jail. In Toronto, for example, the
Prisoner Justice Action Committee formed the
“81 Reasons” campaign, a multiracial collaboration of experienced anti-prison activists, youth and
student organizers , in response to proposals to build a youth “superjail ” in Brampton, a suburb of Toronto. 32 The
campaign combined popular education on injustices in the juvenile system, including the disproportionate
incarceration of Black and Aboriginal youth, with an exercise in popular democracy that invited young people to decide
themselves how they would spend the $81 million slated for the jail. Campaigners mobilized public
concerns about spending cuts in other areas, including health care and education, to create pressure on the
provincial government to look into less expensive and less punitive alternatives to incarceration for youth.
While this campaign did not ultimately prevent the construction of the youth jail, the size of the proposed facility was reduced. More importantly, the
campaign built a grassroots multiracial antiprison youth movement and raised public awareness of the
social and economic costs of incarceration. Moratorium campaigns face tough opposition from advocates who believe that building
prisons stimulates economic development for struggling rural towns. Prisons are “sold” to rural towns that have suffered economic decline in the face of
global competition, closures of local factories, and decline of small farms. In the context of economic stagnation, prisons are touted as providing stable,
well-paying, unionized jobs, providing property and sales taxes and boosting real estate markets. The California Prison Moratorium Project has worked
to challenge these assertions by documenting the actual economic, environmental, and social impact of prison construction in California's Central
Valley prison towns. According to California PMP: We consider prisons to be a form of environmental injustice. They are normally built in economically
depressed communities that eagerly anticipate economic prosperity. Like any toxic industry, prisons affect the quality of local schools, roads, water, air,
land, and natural habitats. 33 California PMP opposes prison construction at a local level by building multiracial coalitions of local residents, farm
workers, labor organizers, anti-prison activists, and former prisoners and their families to reject the visions of prison as a panacea for economic decline.
34 In the Californian context, where most new prisons are built in predominantly Latino/a communities and absorb land and water previously used for
agriculture, PMP facilitates communication and solidarity between Latino/a farm worker communities, and urban Black and Latino/a prisoners in
promoting alternative forms of economic development that do not rely on mass incarceration. Scholar-activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore's research on the
political economy of prisons in California has been critical in providing evidence of the detrimental impact of prisons on local residents and the
environment. 35 As an active member of CPMP, Gilmore's work is deeply rooted in anti-prison activism and in turn informs the work of other activists,
demonstrating the important relationship between Black women's activist scholarship and the anti-prison movement. 36 Many
anti-prison
activists view campaigns for decarceration or moratorium as building blocks toward the ultimate goal of
abolition. These practical actions promise short and medium-term successes that are essential markers
on the road to long-term transformation. However, abolitionists believe that like slavery, the prison-industrial complex is a system of
racialized state violence that cannot be “fixed.” The contemporary prison abolitionist movement in the U.S. and Canada
dates to the 1970s, when political prisoners like Angela Y. Davis and Assata Shakur, in conjunction with
other radical activists and scholars in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, began to call for the dismantling of
prisons. 38 The explosion in political prisoners, fuelled by the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) and targeting of Black liberation,
American Indian and Puerto Rican independence movements in the U.S. and First Nations resistance in Canada as “threats” to national security, fed
into an understanding of the role of the prison in perpetuating state repression against insurgent communities. 39 The new anti-prison politics were
also shaped by a decade of prisoner litigation and radical prison uprisings, including the brutally crushed Attica Rebellion. These
“common”
prisoners, predominantly working-class people of color imprisoned for everyday acts of survival, challenged the state's legitimacy by
declaring imprisonment a form of cruel and unusual punishment and confronting the brute force of state
power. 40 By adopting the term “abolition” activists drew deliberate links between the dismantling of prisons and the
abolition of slavery. Through historical excavations, the “new abolitionists” identified the abolition of prisons as the logical completion of the
unfinished liberation marked by the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which regulated, rather than ended, slavery. 41 Organizations
that actively promote dialogue about what abolition means and how it can translate into concrete action include Critical Resistance (CR), New York's
Prison Moratorium Project, Justice Now, California Coalition for Women Prisoners, Free Battered Women, and the Prison Activist Resource Center in
the U.S. and the Prisoner Justice Action Committee (Toronto), the Prisoners' Justice Day Committee (Vancouver) and Joint Action in Canada. CR was
founded in 1998 by a group of Bay Area activists including former political prisoner and scholar-activist Angela Y. Davis. Initially, CR focused on
popular education and movement building, coordinating large conferences where diverse organizations could generate collective alternatives to the
prison-industrial complex. Later work has included campaigns against prison construction in California's Central Valley and solidarity work with
imprisoned Katrina survivors. CR describes abolition as: [A] political vision that seeks to eliminate the need for prisons, policing, and surveillance by
creating sustainable alternatives to punishment and imprisonment … . An
abolitionist vision means that we must build models
today that can represent how we want to live in the future . It means developing practical strategies for
taking small steps that move us toward making our dreams real and that lead the average person to
believe that things really could be different . It means living this vision in our daily lives . 42 In this sense,
prison abolitionists are tasked with a dual burden: first, transforming people's consciousness so that they
can believe that a world without prisons is possible, and second, taking practical steps to oppose the
prison-industrial complex. Making abolition more than a utopian vision requires practical steps toward
this long-term goal . CR describes four steps that activists can get involved in: shrinking the system,
creating alternatives, shifting public opinion and public policy , and building leadership among those directly impacted by
the prison-industrial complex. 43 Since its inception in the San Francisco Bay Area, Critical Resistance has become a national organization with
chapters in Baltimore, Chicago, Gainesville, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Tampa/St. Petersburg, and Washington, D.C. As such, CR has played
a critical role in re-invigorating abolitionist politics in the U.S. This work is rooted in the radical praxis of Black women and transgender activists.
Reformism is effective and brings revolutionary change closer rather than
pushing it away
Richard Delgado 9, self-appointed Minority scholar, Chair of Law at the University of Alabama Law
School, J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, his books have won eight national book prizes,
including six Gustavus Myers awards for outstanding book on human rights in North America, the
American Library Association’s Outstanding Academic Book, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination. Professor
Delgado’s teaching and writing focus on race, the legal profession, and social change, 2009, “Does Critical
Legal Studies Have What Minorities Want, Arguing about Law”, p. 588-590
2. The CLS critique of piecemeal reform¶ Critical scholars reject the idea of piecemeal reform. Incremental
change, they argue, merely postpones the wholesale reformation that must occur to create a decent society .
Even worse, an unfair social system survives by using piecemeal reform to disguise and legitimize oppression.
Those who control the system weaken resistance by pointing to the occasional concession to , or periodic court
victory of, a black plaintiff or worker as evidence that the system is fair and¶ just. In fact, Crits believe that teaching the¶ common
law or using the case method in law school is a disguised means of preaching incrementalism and thereby maintaining the current power structure.“ To avoid this, CLS scholars¶
urge law professors to abandon the case method, give up the effort to find rationality and order¶ in the case law, and teach in an unabashedly political fashion.¶
The
CLS
critique of piecemeal reform is familiar, imperialistic and wrong . Minorities know from bitter experience that occasional court
. The critique is imperialistic in that it tells minorities and other oppressed peoples
how they should interpret events affecting them. A court order directing a housing authority to disburse
funds for heating in subsidized housing may postpone the revolution, or it may not . In the meantime, the
order keeps a number of poor families warm. This may mean more to them than it does to a comfortable
academic working in a warm office. It smacks of paternalism to assert that the possibility of revolution
later outweighs the certainty of heat now,¶ unless there is evidence for that possibility. The Crits do not offer such evidence.
Indeed, some incremental changes may bring revolutionary changes closer , not push them further away.
Not all small reforms induce complacency; some may whet the appetite for further combat. The welfare
family may hold a tenants‘ union meeting in their heated living room. CLS scholars‘ critique of piecemeal
reform often misses these possibilities, and neglects the question of whether total change, when it comes,
will be what we want.
victories do not mean the Promised Land is at hand
Racial progress has occurred though legal change and more in the area of
drug laws is still possible---reject pessimism because it ignores specific
reforms that achieved lasting reductions in racial inequality
Michael Omi 13, and Howard Winant, Resistance is futile?: a response to Feagin and Elias, Ethnic and
Racial Studies Volume 36, Issue 6, p. 961-973, 2013 Special Issue: Symposium - Rethinking Racial
Formation Theory
In Feagin and Elias's account, white racist rule in the USA appears unalterable and permanent . There is little sense that the
‘white racial frame’ evoked by systemic racism theory changes in significant ways over historical time. They dismiss important
rearrangements and reforms as merely ‘a distraction from more ingrained structural oppressions and deep
lying inequalities that continue to define US society’ (Feagin and Elias 2012, p. 21). Feagin and Elias use a concept they call ‘surface flexibility’
to argue that white elites frame racial realities in ways that suggest change, but are merely engineered to reinforce the underlying structure of racial
oppression. Feagin and Elias say the phrase ‘racial democracy’ is an oxymoron – a word defined in the dictionary as a figure of speech that combines
contradictory terms. If they mean the USA is a contradictory and incomplete democracy in respect to race and racism issues, we agree. If they mean
we disagree . The USA is a racially despotic country in many
ways, but in our view it is also in many respects a racial democracy, capable of being influenced towards more or
less inclusive and redistributive economic policies , social policies, or for that matter, imperial policies. What is distinctive about our own
that people of colour have no democratic rights or political power in the USA,
epoch in the USA (post-Second World War to the present) with respect to race and racism? ¶ Over the past decades there has been a steady drumbeat of
efforts to contain and neutralize civil rights, to restrict racial democracy, and to maintain or even increase racial inequality. Racial disparities in
different institutional sites – employment, health, education – persist and in many cases have increased. Indeed, the post-2008 period has seen a
dramatic increase in racial inequality. The subprime home mortgage crisis, for example, was a major racial event. Black and brown people were
disproportionately affected by predatory lending practices; many lost their homes as a result; race-based wealth disparities widened tremendously. It
would be easy to conclude, as Feagin and Elias do, that white racial dominance has been continuous and
unchanging throughout US history . But such a perspective misses the dramatic twists and turns in racial
politics that have occurred since the Second World War and the civil rights era. ¶ Feagin and Elias claim that we
overly inflate the significance of the changes wrought by the civil rights movement , and that we ‘overlook the
serious reversals of racial justice and persistence of huge racial inequalities’ (Feagin and Elias 2012, p. 21) that followed
in its wake. We do not . In Racial Formation we wrote about ‘racial reaction’ in a chapter of that name, and elsewhere in the book as well. Feagin
and Elias devote little attention to our arguments there; perhaps because they are in substantial agreement with us. While we argue that the right
wing was able to ‘rearticulate’ race and racism issues to roll back some of the gains of the civil rights
movement, we also believe that there are limits to what the right could achieve in the post-civil rights political
landscape.¶ So we agree that the present prospects for racial justice are demoralizing at best. But we do not think
that is the whole story. US racial conditions have changed over the post-Second World War period, in ways that Feagin and
Elias tend to downplay or neglect. Some of the major reforms of the 1960s have proved irreversible ; they have set
powerful democratic forces in motion . These racial (trans)formations were the results of unprecedented political mobilizations, led by
the black movement, but not confined to blacks alone. Consider the desegregation of the armed forces, as well as key civil rights
movement victories of the 1960s: the Voting Rights Act, the Immigration and Naturalization Act (Hart- Celler), as well as
important court decisions like Loving v. Virginia that declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional . While we have
the greatest respect for the late Derrick Bell, we do not believe that his ‘interest convergence hypothesis’ effectively explains all these developments.
How does Lyndon Johnson's famous (and possibly apocryphal) lament upon signing the Civil Rights Act on 2 July 1964 – ‘We have lost the South for a
generation’ – count as ‘convergence’?¶ The US racial regime has been transformed in significant ways . As Antonio Gramsci
argues, hegemony proceeds through the incorporation of opposition (Gramsci 1971, p. 182). The civil rights reforms can be seen as a classic example of
this process; here the US racial regime – under movement pressure – was exercising its hegemony. But Gramsci insists that such reforms – which he
calls ‘passive revolutions’ – cannot be merely symbolic if they are to be effective: oppositions must win real gains in the process. Once again, we are in
the realm of politics, not absolute rule.¶ So yes, we think there were important
if partial victories that shifted the racial state
and transformed the significance of race in everyday life. And yes, we think that further victories can take place
both on the broad terrain of the state and on the more immediate level of social interaction: in daily interaction, in the human psyche
and across civil society . Indeed we have argued that in many ways the most important accomplishment of the antiracist movement of the 1960s in the USA was the politicization of the social. In the USA and indeed around the globe, race-based
movements demanded not only the inclusion of racially defined ‘others’ and the democratization of
structurally racist societies, but also the recognition and validation by both the state and civil society of
racially-defined experience and identity. These demands broadened and deepened democracy itself. They
facilitated not only the democratic gains made in the USA by the black movement and its allies, but also the political
advances towards equality, social justice and inclusion accomplished by other ‘new social movements’: second-wave feminism, gay liberation, and the
By no means do we think that the post-war movement upsurge
was an unmitigated success. Far from it: all the new social movements were subject to the same ‘rearticulation’ (Laclau and Mouffe 2001, p.
environmentalist and anti-war movements among others.¶
xii) that produced the racial ideology of ‘colourblindness’ and its variants; indeed all these movements confronted their mirror images in the
mobilizations that arose from the political right to counter them. Yet even their incorporation and containment, even their confrontations with the
various ‘backlash’ phenomena of the past few decades, even
the need to develop the highly contradictory ideology of
‘colourblindness’, reveal the transformative character of the ‘politicization of the social’. While it is not possible here to explore
so extensive a subject, it is worth noting that it was the long-delayed eruption of racial subjectivity and self-awareness into the mainstream political
arena that set off this transformation, shaping both the democratic and anti-democratic social movements that are evident in US politics today. ¶ What
are the political implications of contemporary racial trends? ¶ Feagin and Elias's use
of racial categories can be imprecise. This is
not their problem alone; anyone writing about race and racism needs to frame terms with care and precision,
and we undoubtedly get fuzzy too from time to time. The absence of a careful approach leads to ‘ racial
lumping’ and essentialisms of various kinds. This imprecision is heightened in polemic . In the Feagin and Elias
essay the term ‘whites’ at times refers to all whites, white elites, ‘dominant white actors’ and very
exceptionally, anti-racist whites, a category in which we presume they would place themselves. Although the terms ‘black’, ‘African
it
is important not to frame race in a bipolar manner . The black/white paradigm made more sense in the
past than it does in the twenty-first century. The racial make-up of the nation has now changed
dramatically. Since the passage of the Immigration Reform Act of 1965, the USA has become more ‘coloured’. A ‘majority–minority’ national
American’ and ‘Latino’ appear, the term ‘people of colour’ is emphasized, often in direct substitution for black reference points.¶ In the USA today
demographic shift is well underway. Predicted to arrive by the mid-twenty-first century, the numerical eclipse of the white population is already in
evidence locally and regionally. In California, for example, non-Hispanic whites constitute only 39.7 per cent of the state's population. While the decline
in the white population cannot be correlated with any decline of white racial dominance, the dawning and deepening of racial multipolarity calls into
question a sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit black/white racial framework that is evident in Feagin and Elias's essay. Shifting racial
demographics and identities also raise general questions of race and racism in new ways that the ‘systemic racism’ approach is not prepared to
explain.3¶ Class questions and issues of panethnicizing trends, for example, call into question what we mean by race, racial identity and race
consciousness. No racially defined group is even remotely uniform; groups that we so glibly refer to as Asian American or Latino are particularly
heterogeneous. Some have achieved or exceeded socio-economic parity with whites, while others are subject to what we might call ‘engineered poverty’
in sweatshops, dirty and dangerous labour settings, or prisons. Tensions within panethnicized racial groups are notably present, and conflicts between
racially defined groups (‘black/brown’ conflict, for example) are evident in both urban and rural settings. A substantial current of social scientific
analysis now argues that Asians and Latinos are the ‘new white ethnics’, able to ‘work toward whiteness’4 at least in part, and that the black/white
bipolarity retains its distinct and foundational qualities as the mainstay of US racism (Alba and Nee 2005; Perlmann 2005; Portes and Rumbaut 2006;
Waters, Ueda and Marrow 2007).¶ We question that argument in light of the massive demographic shifts taking place in the USA. Globalization,
climate change and above all neoliberalism on a global scale, all drive migration. The country's economic capacity to absorb enormous numbers of
immigrants, low-wage workers and their families (including a new, globally based and very female, servant class) without generating the sort of
established subaltern groups we associate with the terms race and racism, may be more limited than it was when the ‘whitening’ of Europeans took
place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In other words this argument's key precedent, the absorption of white immigrants ‘of a different color’
(Jacobson 1998), may no longer apply. Indeed, we might think of the assimilationist model itself as a general theory of immigrant incorporation that
was based on a historically specific case study – one that might not hold for, or be replicated by, subsequent big waves of immigration. Feagin and
Elias's systemic racism model, while offering numerous important insights, does not inform concrete analysis of these issues. ¶ It is important going
forward to understand how groups are differentially racialized and relatively positioned in the US racial hierarchy: once again racism must be seen as a
shifting racial project. This has important consequences, not only with respect to emerging patterns of inequality, but also in regard to the degree of
power available to different racial actors to define, shape or contest the existing racial landscape. Attention to such matters is largely absent in Feagin
and Elias's account. In their view racially identified groups are located in strict reference to the dominant ‘white racial frame’, hammered into place, so
to speak. As a consequence, they fail to examine how racially subordinate groups interact and influence each others’ boundaries, conditions and
practices. Because they offer so little specific analysis of Asian American, Latino or Native American racial issues, the reader finds her/himself once
again in the land (real or imaginary, depending on your racial politics) of bipolar US racial dynamics, in which whites and blacks play the leading roles,
and other racially identified groups – as well as those ambiguously identified, such as Middle Eastern and South Asian Americans (MEASA) – play at
We still want to acknowledge that blacks
have been catching hell and have borne the brunt of the racist reaction of the past several decades. For
example, we agree with Feagin and Elias's critique of the reactionary politics of incarceration in the USA. The ‘new Jim
best supporting roles, and are sometimes cast as extras or left out of the picture entirely. ¶
Crow’ (Alexander 2012) or even the ‘new slavery’ that the present system practises is something that was just in its beginning stages when we were
writing Racial Formation. It is now recognized as a national and indeed global scandal. How is it to be understood? Of course there are
substantial debates on this topic, notably about the nature of the ‘prison-industrial complex’ (Davis 2003, p. 3) and the social and cultural effects of
mass incarceration along racial lines. But beyond Feagin and Elias's denunciation
of the ferocious white racism that is
operating here, deeper political implications are worth considering. As Alexander (2012), Mauer (2006), Manza and
Uggen (2008) and movement groups like Critical Resistance and the Ella Baker Center argue, the upsurge over recent decades in
incarceration rates for black (and brown) men expresses the fear-based, law-and-order appeals that have shaped US racial politics since the rise
of Nixonland (Perlstein 2008) and the ‘Southern strategy’. Perhaps even more central, racial repression aims at restricting the increasing
impact of voters of colour in a demographically shifting electorate.¶ There is a lot more to say about this, but for the
present two key points stand out: first, it is not an area where Feagin and Elias and we have any sharp disagreement, and second, for all the
horrors and injustices that the ‘new Jim Crow’ represents, incarceration, profiling and similar practices
remain political issues . These practices and policies are not ineluctable and unalterable dimensions of
the US racial regime . There have been previous waves of reform in these areas. They can be transformed
again by mass mobilization, electoral shifts and so on. In other words, resistance is not futile .¶ Speaking of
electoral shifts and the formal political arena, how should President Barack Obama be politically situated in this discussion? How do Feagin and Elias
explain Obama? Quite amazingly, his name does not appear in their essay. Is he a mere token, an ‘oreo’, a shill for Wall Street? Or does Obama
represent a new development in US politics, a black leader of a mass, multiracial party that for sheer demographic reasons alone might eventually
triumph over the white people's party, the Republicans? If the President is neither the white man's token nor Neo, the One,5 then once again we are in
the world of politics: neither the near-total white despotism depicted by Feagin and Elias, nor a racially inclusive democracy. ¶ President Obama
continues to enjoy widespread black support, although it is clear that he has not protected blacks against their greatest cumulative loss of wealth in
history. He has not explicitly criticized the glaring racial bias in the US carceral system. He has not intervened in conflicts over workers’ rights –
particularly in the public sector where many blacks and other people of colour are concentrated. He has not intervened to halt or slow foreclosures,
except in ways that were largely symbolic. Workers and lower-middle-class people were the hardest hit by the great recession and the subprime home
mortgage crisis, with black families faring worst, and Latinos close behind (Rugh and Massey 2010); Obama has not defended them. Many writers have
explained Obama's centrism and unwillingness to raise the issue of race as functions of white racism (Sugrue 2010).¶ The black community – and other
communities of colour as well – remains politically divided. While black folk have taken the hardest blows from the reactionary and racist regime that
has mostly dominated US politics since Reagan (if not since Nixon), no united black movement has succeeded the deaths of Malcolm and Martin.
Although there is always important political activity underway, a relatively large and fairly conservative black middle class, a ‘black bourgeoisie’ in
Frazier's (1957) terms, has generally maintained its position since the end of the civil rights era. Largely based in the public sector, and including a
generally centrist business class as well, this stratum has continued to play the role that Frazier – and before him, Charles S. Johnson. William Lloyd
Warner, Alison Davis and other scholars – identified: vacillation between the white elite and the black masses. Roughly similar patterns operate in
Latino communities as well, where the ‘working towards whiteness’ framework coexists with a substantial amount of exclusion and super-exploitation.¶
Alongside class issues in communities of colour, there are significant gender issues. The disappearance of blue-collar work, combined with the assault
by the criminal justice system – chiefly profiling by the police (‘stop and frisk’) and imprisonment, have both unduly targeted and victimized black and
brown men, especially youth. Women of colour are also targeted, especially by violence, discrimination and assaults on their reproductive rights
(Harris-Perry 2011); profiling is everywhere (Glover 2009). ¶ Here again we are in the realm of racial politics. Debate proceeds in the black community
on Obama's credibilty, with Cornel West and Tavis Smiley leading the critics. But it seems safe to say that in North Philly, Inglewood or Atlanta's
Lakewood section, the president remains highly popular. Latino support for Obama remains high as well. Feagin and Elias need to clarify their views on
black and brown political judgement. Is it attuned to political realities or has it been captured by the white racial frame? Is Obama's election of no
importance?¶ ***¶ In conclusion, do Feagin and Elias really believe that white power is so complete, so extensive, so ‘sutured’ (as Laclau and Mouffe
might say) as they suggest here? Do they mean to suggest, in Borg-fashion, that ‘resistance is futile?’ This seems to be the underlying political logic of
the ‘systemic racism’ approach, perhaps unintentionally so. Is white racism so ubiquitous that no meaningful political challenge can be mounted
against it? Are black and brown folk (yellow and red people, and also others unclassifiable under the always- absurd colour categories) utterly supine,
duped, abject, unable to exert any political pressure? Is such a view of race and racism even recognizable in the USA of 2012? And is that a responsible
political position to be advocating? Is this what we want to teach our students of colour? Or our white students for that matter?¶ We suspect that if
pressed, Feagin and Elias would concur with our judgement that racial
conflict, both within (and against) the state and in
everyday life, is a fundamentally political process. We think that they would also accept our claim that the ongoing
political realities of race provide extensive evidence that people of colour in the USA are not so
powerless , and that whites are not so omnipotent, as Feagin and Elias's analysis suggests them to be.¶ Racial formation theory
allows us to see that there are contradictions in racial oppression. The racial formation approach reveals that white racism is unstable and constantly
challenged, from the national and indeed global level down to the personal and intra-psychic conflicts that we all experience, no matter what our racial
identity might be. While racism – largely white – continues to flourish, it is not monolithic. Yes, there
have been enormous increases in
racial inequality in recent years. But movement-based anti-racist opposition continues, and sometimes
scores victories. Challenges to white racism continue both within the state and in civil society . Although largely
and properly led by people of colour, anti-racist movements also incorporate whites such as Feagin and Elias themselves. Movements may
experience setbacks, the reforms for which they fought may be revealed as inadequate , and indeed their leaders
may be co-opted or even eliminated, but racial subjectivity and self-awareness, unresolved and conflictual both within the
individual psyche and the body politic, abides . Resistance is not futile.
Legal change has resulted in racial advancement and more is still possible--reject pessimism because it results in subversive alternatives
Randall Kennedy 12, Harvard Law Professor, Race, Crime, and the Law, Knopf Doubleday
Publishing Group, pp. 388-389
True, it is sometimes genuinely difficult to determine an appropriate remedial response. The proper way to
address that difficulty, however, is to acknowledge and grapple with it, not bury it beneath unbelievable assertions
that, in fact, no real problem exists. Whitewashing racial wrongs (especially while simultaneously proclaiming that courts are
doing everything reasonably possible to combat racially invidious government action) corrupts officials and jades onlookers, nourishing
simplistic, despairing, and defeatist critiques of the law that are profoundly destructive .¶ The second impression that I
want to leave with readers should serve as an antidote to these overwrought, defeatist critiques by acknowledging that the administration of
criminal law has changed substantially for the better over the past half century and that there is reason to
believe that, properly guided, it can be improved even more . Today there are more formal and informal
protections against racial bias than ever before , both in terms of the protections accorded to blacks
against criminality and the treatment accorded to black suspects , defendants, and convicts. That deficiencies,
large deficiencies, remain is clear. But comparing racial policies today to those that prevailed in 1940 or
1960 or even 1980 should expose the fallacy of asserting that nothing substantial has been changed for
the better .¶ This point is worth stressing because of the prevalence and prominence of pessimistic thinking about
the race question in American life. Some commentators maintain, in all seriousness, that there has been no
significant improvement in the overall fortunes of black Americans during the past half century, that advances that
appear to have been made are merely cosmetic, and that the United States is doomed to remain a
pigmentocracy. This pessimistic strain often turns paranoid and apocalyptic in commentary about the
administration of criminal law.¶ It is profoundly misleading , however, to focus exclusively on the ugliest
aspects of the American legal order . Doing so conceals real achievements: the Reconstruction
Constitutional Amendments, the Reconstruction civil rights laws, Strauder v. Alabama, Dempsey v. Moore, Brown
v. Mississippi, Powell v. Alabama, Norris v. Alabama, Batson v. Kentucky, the resuscitation of
Reconstruction by the civil rights movement, the changing demographics of the bench, bar, and police
departments—in sum, the stigmatization (albeit incomplete) of invidious racial bias. Neglecting these
achievements robs them of support . Recent sharp attacks upon basic guarantees bequeathed by the New Deal
ought to put everyone on notice of the perils of permitting social accomplishments to lose their rightful stature
in the public's estimation. Moreover, one-dimensional condemnations of the racial situation in America
renders attractive certain subversive proposals that are, given actual conditions , foolish,
counterproductive , and immoral. I think here in particular of the call for racially selective jury nullification. Such proposals
should be openly challenged on the grounds that they fundamentally misperceive the racial realities of
American life.
the law is obviously problematic, but that’s a reason we should hold it
accountable to live up to its ideals
Kimberle Crenshaw 88, Law @ UCLA, “RACE, REFORM, AND RETRENCHMENT:
TRANSFORMATION AND LEGITIMATION IN ANTIDISCRIMINATION LAW”, 101 Harv. L. Rev. 1331,
lexis
Questioning the Transformative View: Some Doubts About Trashing The Critics' product is of limited utility to Blacks in its present form. The
implications for Blacks of trashing liberal legal ideology are troubling, even though it may be proper to assail belief structures that obscure liberating
possibilities. Trashing legal ideology seems to tell us repeatedly what has already been established -- that legal discourse is unstable and relatively
indeterminate. Furthermore,
trashing offers no idea of how to avoid the negative consequences of engaging in
reformist discourse or how to work around such consequences. Even if we imagine the wrong world when
we think in terms of legal discourse, we must nevertheless exist in a present world where legal protection
has at times been a blessing -- albeit a mixed one. The fundamental problem is that, although Critics criticize law
because it functions to legitimate existing institutional arrangements, it is precisely this legitimating
function that has made law receptive to certain demands in this area. The Critical emphasis on deconstruction as
the vehicle for liberation leads to the conclusion that engaging in legal discourse should be avoided
because it reinforces not only the discourse itself but also the society and the world that it embodies. Yet Critics
offer little beyond this observation. Their focus on delegitimating rights rhetoric seems to suggest that , once rights rhetoric
has been discarded, there exists a more productive strategy for change , one which does not reinforce existing
patterns of domination. Unfortunately, no such strategy has yet been articulated , and it is difficult to imagine
that racial minorities will ever be able to discover one. As Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward point out in their [*1367]
excellent account of the civil rights movement, popular struggles are a reflection of institutionally determined logic and
a challenge to that logic. 137 People can only demand change in ways that reflect the logic of the
institutions that they are challenging . 138 Demands for change that do not reflect the institutional logic -that is, demands that do not engage and subsequently reinforce the dominant ideology -- will probably be
ineffective . 139 The possibility for ideological change is created through the very process of legitimation, which is triggered by crisis.
Powerless people can sometimes trigger such a crisis by challenging an institution internally, that is, by
using its own logic against it. 140 Such crisis occurs when powerless people force open and politicize a
contradiction between the dominant ideology and their reality . The political consequences [*1368] of maintaining the
contradictions may sometimes force an adjustment -- an attempt to close the gap or to make things appear fair. 141 Yet, because the adjustment is
triggered by the political consequences of the contradiction, circumstances will be adjusted only to the extent necessary to close the apparent
contradiction. This approach to understanding legitimation and change is applicable to the civil rights movement. Because
Blacks were challenging their exclusion from political society, the only claims that were likely to achieve recognition were those that reflected American
society's institutional logic: legal rights ideology. Articulating their formal demands through legal rights ideology, civil rights protestors exposed a series
of contradictions -- the most important being the promised privileges of American citizenship and the practice of absolute racial subordination.
Rather than using the contradictions to suggest that American citizenship was itself illegitimate or false,
civil rights protestors proceeded as if American citizenship were real, and demanded to exercise the
“rights” that citizenship entailed. By seeking to restructure reality to reflect American mythology, Blacks
relied upon and ultimately benefited from politically inspired efforts to resolve the contradictions by granting
formal rights. Although it is the need to maintain legitimacy that presents powerless groups with the opportunity to wrest concessions from the
dominant order, it is the very accomplishment of legitimacy that forecloses greater possibilities. In sum, the potential for change is both created and
limited by legitimation.
a dialectical process of revolutionary reforms is necessary---the aff is a
concrete expression of a more systemic critique
Ben Wray 14, International Socialist Group, The case for revolutionary reforms,
http://internationalsocialist.org.uk/index.php/2014/04/the-case-for-revolutionary-reforms/
We need revolutionary change. There’s no two ways about it – if the exploitation of labour by capital continues to be the central dynamic
driving economic development, we are headed for human and environmental catastrophe. ¶ But as I’ve discussed in the previous five parts of this
series, getting from where we are to a revolutionary transformation that overthrows the dominant property relations
of the capitalist economy and replaces them with social relations based on democratic control of the world’s resources is not as simple
as declaring our desire for it to be so. I saw a petition on change.org the other day proposing the overthrow of
capitalism. If one million people signed that petition and one million people signed a further petition to
introduce full collective bargaining rights for trade-unions in the UK, which one would move us closer to the
overthrow of capitalism? I wager the latter.¶ Whilst having an end goal in sight is important, most people
don’t change their thinking about the world based on bold visions of what could be done at some point in the future:
they change their ideas based on evidence from their material lives which points to the inadequacy or irrationality of the status quo. In other words, we
need to have ideas that build upon people’s lived experience of capitalism, and since that it is within the framework of a representative democracy
system, we
need ideas based around proposals for reforms. At the same time those reforms have to help rather than
hinder a move to more revolutionary transformation that challenges the very core of the capitalist
system.¶ The dialectic of reform and revolution¶ What we need, therefore, is a strategy of revolutionary reforms. Such a notion
would appear as a contradiction in terms to many who identify as reformists or revolutionaries and see the two as dichotomous, but
there is no reason why this should be the case. Indeed, history has shown that revolutionary transformations have
always happened as a dialectical interaction between rapid, revolutionary movements and more
institutional, reform-based challenges . Even the revolutionary part of that dialectic has always been motivated by the immediate needs
of the participants involved – ‘land, bread and peace’ being the first half of the slogan of the Russian Revolution.¶ What does a strategy of
‘revolutionary
reforms’ entail? Ed Rooksby explains that it is a political strategy that builds towards revolutionary
change by using reforms to ‘push up against the limits’ of the ‘logic of capitalism’ in practice:¶ “At first
these “feasible objectives” will be limited to reforms within capitalism—or at least to measures which, from
the standpoint of a more or less reformist working class consciousness, appear to be legitimate and achievable within the
system, but which may actually run counter to the logic of capitalism and start to push up against its
limits. As the working class engages in struggle, however, the anti-capitalist implications of its needs and
aspirations are gradually revealed. At the same time, through its experience of struggle for reform, the working
class learns about its capacity for “self-management, initiative and collective decision ” and can have a “foretaste of
what emancipation means”. In this way struggle for reform helps prepare the class psychologically,
ideologically and materially for revolution .” The late Daniel Bensaid expressed this argument through the lens of the history of the
socialist movement:¶ “In reality all sides in the controversy agree on the fundamental points inspired by The Coming Catastrophe (Lenin’s
pamphlet of the summer of 1917) and the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International (inspired by Trotsky in 1937): the need for
transitional demands , the politics of alliances (the united front), the logic of hegemony and on the dialectic (not
antinomy) between reform and revolution. We are therefore against the idea of separating an (‘anti-neoliberal’) minimum
programme and an (anti-capitalist) ‘maximum’ programme. We remain convinced that a consistent anti-neoliberalism leads to anti-capitalism and that
the two are interlinked by the dynamic of struggle.Ӧ So revolutionary
reforms means a policy agenda that, as Alberto Toscano
one and the same time make concrete gains within capitalism which permits further movement
against capitalism”. The Italian marxist Antonio Gramsci described this approach as a ‘war of positon’.
has put it, “at
1AC – Advocacy Text Ideas
Marijuana should not be criminalized in the United States
2AC
K
FW
Their desire to ignore the consequences of their advocacy causes alt failure
---must evaluate consequences of proposals
Christopher A. Bracey 6, Associate Professor of Law, Associate Professor of African & African
American Studies, Washington University in St. Louis, September, Southern California Law Review, 79 S.
Cal. L. Rev. 1231, p. 1318
Second, reducing conversation on race matters to an ideological contest allows opponents to elide inquiry into
whether the results of a particular preference policy are desirable. Policy positions masquerading as principled
ideological stances create the impression that a racial policy is not simply a choice among available
alternatives, but the embodiment of some higher moral principle . Thus, the "principle" becomes an end in
itself, without reference to outcomes. Consider the prevailing view of colorblindness in constitutional
discourse. Colorblindness has come to be understood as the embodiment of what is morally just , independent of
its actual effect upon the lives of racial minorities. This explains Justice Thomas's belief in the "moral and constitutional equivalence" between Jim Crow laws and race
preferences, and his tragic assertion that "Government cannot make us equal [but] can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the law." 281 For Thomas, there is
Critics may point out
that colorblindness in practice has the effect of entrenching existing racial disparities in health, wealth, and society.
But in framing the debate in purely ideological terms, opponents are able to avoid the contentious issue of
outcomes and make viability determinations based exclusively on whether racially progressive measures
exude fidelity to the ideological principle of colorblindness. Meaningful policy debate is replaced by
ideological exchange, which further exacerbates hostilities and deepens the cycle of resentment .
no meaningful difference between laws designed to entrench racial subordination and those designed to alleviate conditions of oppression.
Debating pragmatic legalization policy is key to generate an empathetic
institutional change---progress is possible
David Cole 11, Professor at Georgetown Law, Turning the Corner on Mass Incarceration?, 9 Ohio St. J.
Crim. L. 27-51 (2011)
The tragedy of the United States’ forty-year incarceration epidemic remains very much with us. No country on
earth incarcerates more people, or at a higher rate per capita. And while that strategy has imposed unnecessary costs on us all, the burden has been
disproportionately borne by African American and Latino men. But that is old news. The new news is that after
forty years of increasing
incarceration and widening racial disparities, the trend lines appear to be shifting . In recent years, the
incarceration rate has dropped, as has the total number of persons incarcerated in state prisons. And racial
disparities are also falling. Legislatures that were once obsessed with enacting mandatory minimums and increasing
the severity of criminal sentences are now eliminating mandatory minimums, reducing criminal penalties, and
directing new resources to alternatives to incarceration and reentry. The politics of crime, at least for the moment,
appears to have changed. It is less captured by demagoguery and more susceptible to arguments about costs and
benefits . ¶ These developments should not be overstated. The changes have as yet been only marginal, offering little challenge
to the United States’ dubious distinction of being the world leader in incarceration rates. Moreover, the criminal justice system, at every stage, still
disproportionately targets minority groups. But
the change in direction is nonetheless good, and surprising, news. The story has
we be in the midst of a new story line, a new strategy, a new criminal
justice policy? ¶ It is too early to tell, of course. But it is not too early to recognize the changes, to ask what may have
prompted them, and to think about strategies for facilitating further positive change . We ought to build on
what has worked and push for change that might create further improvements. While what must be done is
relatively clear—reduce criminal sentences, reduce reliance on criminal penalties for illicit drugs , increase
resources for alternatives to incarceration, and invest in communities that are most vulnerable to crime—
it is less clear how we persuade the public that these measures are worth it. Pragmatic arguments about cost
savings need to be paired with moral appeals to America’s commitment to equality. But most importantly, we must bridge the
empathy gap between the public at large and the incarcerated population. If Americans were to come to view those
been otherwise for two solid generations. Might
behind bars as part of our community, indeed our family, mass incarceration would no longer be tolerated.
FW – Macropolitical Focus Good
Institutional macropolitical policy engagement is vital to solve---any
alternative results in cooption and moot activism
Orly Lobel 7, Assistant Professor of Law, University of San Diego, THE PARADOX OF EXTRALEGAL
ACTIVISM: CRITICAL LEGAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND TRANSFORMATIVE POLITICS, Harvard Law
Review, Vol. 120
Both the practical failures and the fallacy of rigid boundaries generated by extralegal activism rhetoric permit us to broaden our
inquiry to the underlying assumptions of current proposals regarding transformative politics — that is, attempts to produce
meaningful changes in the political and socioeconomic landscapes. The suggested alternatives produce a new image of social and
political action. This vision rejects a shared theory of social reform, rejects formal programmatic agendas, and
embraces a multiplicity of forms and practices. Thus, it is described in such terms as a plan of no plan,211 “a project of
pro- jects,”212 “anti-theory theory,”213 politics rather than goals,214 presence rather than power,215 “practice over theory,”216 and
chaos and openness over order and formality. As a result, the contemporary message rarely includes a comprehensive
vision of common social claims, but rather engages in the description of fragmented efforts . As Professor Joel
Handler argues, the commonality of struggle and social vision that existed during the civil rights movement has disappeared.217
There is no unifying discourse or set of values, but rather an aversion to any metanarrative and a resignation from theory. Professor
Handler warns that this move away from grand narratives is self-defeating precisely because only certain
parts of the political spectrum have accepted this new stance: “[T]he opposition is not playing that game .
. . . [E]veryone else is operating as if there were Grand Narratives . . . .”218 Intertwined with the resignation from
law and policy, the new bromide of “neither left nor right” has become axiomatic only for some.219 The contemporary critical legal
consciousness informs the scholarship of those who are interested in progressive social activism, but less so that of those who are
interested, for example, in a more competitive securities market. Indeed, an interesting recent development has been the rise of
“conservative public interest lawyer[ing].”220 Although “public interest law” was originally associated exclusively with liberal
projects, in the past three decades conservative advocacy groups have rapidly grown both in number and in their vigorous use of
traditional legal strategies to promote their causes.221 This growth in conservative advocacy is particularly salient in
juxtaposition to the decline of traditional progressive advocacy. Most recently, some thinkers have even suggested
that there may be “something inherent in the left’s conception of social change — focused as it is on participation and empowerment
— that produces a unique distrust of legal expertise.”222 Once again, this conclusion reveals flaws parallel to the original
disenchantment with legal reform. Although the new extralegal frames present themselves as apt alternatives to
legal reform models and as capable of producing significant changes to the social map, in practice they
generate very limited improvement in existing social arrangements. Most strikingly, the cooptation effect here
can be explained in terms of the most profound risk of the typology — that of legitimation. The common
pattern of extralegal scholarship is to describe an inherent instability in dominant structures by pointing, for
example, to grassroots strategies,223 and then to assume that specific instances of counterhegemonic activities
translate into a more complete transformation . This celebration of multiple micro-resistances seems to
rely on an aggregate approach — an idea that the multiplication of practices will evolve into something
substantial. In fact, the myth of engagement obscures the actual lack of change being produced , while the
broader pattern of equating extralegal activism with social reform produces a false belief in the potential of change. There are few
instances of meaningful reordering of social and economic arrangements and macro-redistribution.
Scholars write about decoding what is really happening, as though the scholarly narrative has the power to unpack more than the
actual conventional experience will admit.224 Unrelated efforts become related and part of a whole through mere reframing. At the
same time, the elephant in the room — the rising level of economic inequality — is left unaddressed and
comes to be understood as natural and inevitable.225 This is precisely the problematic process that critical theorists
decry as losers’ self-mystification, through which marginalized groups come to see systemic losses as the product of
their own actions and thereby begin to focus on minor achievements as representing the boundaries of
their willed reality. The explorations of micro-instances of activism are often fundamentally performative, obscuring the
distance between the descriptive and the prescriptive. The manifestations of extralegal activism — the law and organizing
model; the proliferation of informal, soft norms and norm-generating actors; and the celebrated, separate nongovernmental sphere
of action — all produce a fantasy that change can be brought about through small-scale, decentralized
transformation. The emphasis is local, but the locality is described as a microcosm of the whole and the
audience is national and global. In the context of the humanities, Professor Carol Greenhouse poses a comparable challenge
to ethnographic studies from the 1990s, which utilized the genres of narrative and community studies, the latter including works on
American cities and neighborhoods in trouble.226 The aspiration of these genres was that each individual story could
translate into a “time of the nation” body of knowledge and motivation.227 In contemporary legal thought, a
corresponding gap opens between the local scale and the larger, translocal one. In reality, although there has been a recent
proliferation of associations and grassroots groups, few new local-statenational federations have emerged in the
United States since the 1960s and 1970s, and many of the existing voluntary federations that flourished in the mid-twentieth
century are in decline.228 There
is, therefore, an absence of links between the local and the national, an absent
intermediate public sphere, which has been termed “the missing middle” by Professor Theda Skocpol.229 New
social movements have for the most part failed in sustaining coalitions or producing significant
institutional change through grassroots activism . Professor Handler concludes that this failure is due in part to the
ideas of contingency, pluralism, and localism that are so embedded in current activism.230 Is the focus on small-scale
dynamics simply an evasion of the need to engage in broader substantive debate? It is important
for next-generation progressive legal scholars, while maintaining a critical legal consciousness, to recognize that not all
extralegal associational life is transformative. We must differentiate , for example, between inward-looking
groups , which tend to be self- regarding and depoliticized, and social movements that participate in
political activities, engage the public debate, and aim to challenge and reform existing realities .231 We
must differentiate between professional associations and more inclusive forms of institutions that act as trustees for larger segments
of the community.232 As described above, extralegal activism tends to operate on a more divided and hence a smaller scale than
earlier social movements, which had national reform agendas. Consequently, within critical discourse there is a need
to recognize the limited capacity of small-scale action. We should question the narrative that imagines
consciousness-raising as directly translating into action and action as directly translating into change.
Certainly not every cultural description is political. Indeed, it is questionable whether forms of activism that are opposed to
programmatic reconstruction of a social agenda should even be understood as social movements. In fact, when groups are
situated in opposition to any form of institutionalized power, they may be simply mirroring what they are
fighting against and merely producing moot activism that settles for what seems possible within the
narrow space that is left in a rising convergence of ideologies. The original vision is consequently coopted ,
and contemporary discontent is legitimated through a process of self-mystification.
Non-Mutually Exclusive
Must take action---pessimism doesn’t necessitate passivity
Louis Michael Seidman 11, Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown, Hyper-Incarceration and
Strategies of Disruption: Is There a Way Out?, moritzlaw.osu.edu/osjcl/Articles/Volume9_1/Seidman.pdf
My worry about myself is not that I would make a wrong choice between these alternatives, but that I would avoid the
necessity of choice by adopting a stance of world-weary passivity or complacent indifference . There is no
good way to deal with overwhelming evil, but there is surely a way not to deal with it. Willful blindness,
craven apologetics, and flaccid acquiescence are not options when millions of our fellow inhabitants are behind bars .
Like the people of good will trapped in Nazi Europe, we opponents of hyper-incarceration need to confront the truth of our situation and be honest about
how bleak the prospects are. But pessimism should not be confused with passivity. Even if our efforts
accomplish nothing at all, and whatever form our politics take, we must do what we can to stop the
horror. ¶ Our personal dignity demands no less.
AT: Vampiristic Consumption
Not vampiristic consumption
Rosi Braidotti 6, contemporary philosopher and feminist theoretician, Transpositions: On Nomadic
Ethics, 76
I beg to differ from Spivak's assessment. The
charge of vampiristic or consumerist consumption of others is an illinformed way of approaching the issue, in that it ignores the rigorous anti-humanistic, cartographic and
materialistic roots of poststructuralism. It specifically rests on a misreading of what is involved in the
poststructuralist critique of representation and on what is at stake in the task of redefining alternative
subject positions. Spivak attempts to rescue Derrida, whom she credits with far more self-reflexivity and political integrity than she is prepared
to grant to Foucault and Deleuze. The grounds for this preferential treatment are highly debatable. Nomadic thinking challenges the
semiotic approach that is crucial to the 'linguistic turn' and also to deconstruction. Both Deleuze and Foucault
engage in a critical dialogue with it and work towards an alternative model of political and ethical practice. It seems
paradoxical that thinkers who are committed to an analytics of contemporary subject-positions get
accused of actually having caused the events which they account for; as if they were single-handedly
responsible for, or even profiting from, the accounts they offer as cartographies. Naming the networks of powerrelations in late postmodernity, however, is not as simple as metaphorizing and therefore consuming them . In my
view there is no vampiristic approach towards 'otherness' on the part of the poststructuralists. Moreover, I find
that approach compatible with the emerging subjectivities of the former 'others' of Western reason. Late postmodernity has seen the proliferation of
many and potentially contradictory discourses and practices of difference, which have dislocated the classical axis of distinction between Self or
Same/Other or Different. The
point of coalition between different critical voices and the poststructuralists is the
process of elaborating the spaces in-between self and other, which means the practice of the Relation .
They stress the need to elaborate forms of social and political implementation of non-pejorative and
nondualistic notions of 'others'.
Bhambra
the impact is the reinscription of identity as politics devolves into a binary
affair of guilt and resentment
Bhambra 10—U Warwick—AND—Victoria Margree—School of Humanities, U Brighton (Identity
Politics and the Need for a ‘Tomorrow’,
http://www.academia.edu/471824/Identity_Politics_and_the_Need_for_a_Tomorrow_)
Political mobilisation around suffering engenders solidarities between those who are suffering and those who
afford recognition of (and then action around) that suffering. Those who suffergenerally claim their common humanity with others in asking forpeople
to look beyond the specific circumstances of their suffer-ing, and in doing so, the
request is to address those specific
circumstances on the basis of a humanity not bound to the circumstances. The mistake of some forms
of identity politics, then, is to associate identity with suffering. While a recognition of historical
(and contemporary) suffering is an important aspect of the political process of seeking redress for the
conditions of suffering, it does not constitute identity singularly. ¶ “Wounded attachments”, we would argue, do
not representthe general condition of politicised identities, but rather, are prob-lematic constructions of identities which fail to
recognise (oraccept) the processes of change associated with movements. The accumulation of different sorts
of challenges around similar issues generally leads to the gradual amelioration of the condi-tions which
generated the identity (and the associated move-ment) in the first instance. If the emphasis in the movement is on identity
then successful reform (even partial reform) reduces the injury and thus diminishes the power of
the identity claim based upon that injury. This is because reform is necessarily uneven in terms of the impact it has. This
then poses a problem for those within the movement who would wish the reforms to go further and
who see in the reforms a weakening of the identity that they believe is a necessary prerequisite for political
action. As they can no longer mobilise the injured identity – and the associated suffering –
as common to all (and thus requiring address becauseof its generalised effect), there is often, then, a perceived need
to privilege that suffering as particular and to institute a politics of guilt with regard to
addressing it – truly the politics of ressentiment. ¶ The problems arise by insisting on the necessity
of political action being constituted through pre-existing identities and soli-darities (for example, those of being a woman).
If, instead, it was recognised that equality for women is not separable from (or achievable separated
from) wider issues of justice and equality within society then reforms could be seen as steps towards
equality . A movement concerned with issues of social justice (of whichgender justice is an integral aspect) would
allow for provisional reforms to prevailing conditions of injustice without calling into question the basis
for the movement – for there would always be more to be achieved . 8 Each achievement would itself
necessitate further revision of what equality would look like. And it would also necessitate revision of the particular aims that
constitute the “identity” afforded by participating in that movement. In this way, identity becomes more
appropriately understood as being, in part at least, about participating in a series of dialogues about what
is desired for the future in terms of understandings of social justice. ¶ Focusing on the future, on how we would like things
to be tomorrow, based on an understanding of where we are today, would allow for partial reforms to be seen as gains and not threats. It is only if
one believes that political action can only occur in the context of identification of past injustices as
opposed to future justice that one has a problem with (partial) reforms in the present. Political identity which
exists only through an enunciation of its injury and does not seek to dissolve itself as an identity can lead
to the ossification of injured relations. The “wounded attachment” occurs when the politicised identity
can see no future without the injury also constituting an aspect of that future. Developing on the work of Brown, we
would argue that not only does a “reformed” identity politics need to be based upon desire for the future, but that that desire should actually
be a desire for the dissolution (in the future) of the identity claim. The complete success of the femi-nist movement, for instance,
would mean that feminists no longerexisted, as the conditions that caused people to become feministhad been addressed. Similarly, with the dalit
movement, its success would be measured by the dissolution of the identity of “dalit” as asalient political category. There would be no loss here, only a
gain.¶ As we have argued, following Mohanty ([1993] 2000) andNelson (1993), it is participation in the processing of one’s ownand other’s experiences
into knowledge about the world, in thecontext of communities that negotiate epistemological premises, which confers a notion of politicised identity.
Since it is an under-standing of “tomorrow” (what that would be, and how it is to beachieved) that establishes one as, for example,
a feminist, such an identity claim does not exclude others from participation, and it does not solicit the
reification of identity around the fact of historical or contemporary suffering. By removing these obstacles
to progress, the “tomorrow” that is the goal, is more readily achievable. Identity politics , then, “ needs a
tomorrow ” in this sense: that the raison d’être of any politicised identity is the bringing about of a tomorrow in
which the social injustices of the present have been overcome. But identity politics also needs that
tomorrow – today – in the sense that politicised identities need to inscribe that tomorrow into their self-
definition in the present, in order to avoid consolidating activity around the maintenance of the identity
rather than the overcoming of the conditions that generated it. That the tomorrow to be inscribed – today – in the selfdefinition of one’s political identity, is one in which that identity will no longer be required, is not a situation to be regretted, since it is rather the
promise of success for any movement for justice.
Institutions KT Solve Anti-Blackness
Finishing Crenshaw
139 The possibility for ideological change is created through the very process of legitimation, which is triggered by crisis. Powerless
people can
sometimes trigger such a crisis by challenging an institution internally, that is, by using its own logic
against it. 140 Such crisis occurs when powerless people force open and politicize a contradiction between
the dominant ideology and their reality. The political consequences [*1368] of maintaining the contradictions may sometimes force an
adjustment -- an attempt to close the gap or to make things appear fair. 141 Yet, because the adjustment is triggered by the political consequences of the
contradiction, circumstances will be adjusted only to the extent necessary to close the apparent contradiction. This
approach to understanding
legitimation and change is applicable to the civil rights movement. Because Blacks were challenging their exclusion from political
society, the only claims that were likely to achieve recognition were those that reflected American society's institutional logic: legal rights ideology.
Articulating their formal demands through legal rights ideology, civil rights protestors exposed a series of contradictions -- the most important being
the promised privileges of American citizenship and the practice of absolute racial subordination. Rather
than using the contradictions
to suggest that American citizenship was itself illegitimate or false, civil rights protestors proceeded as if
American citizenship were real, and demanded to exercise the “rights” that citizenship entailed. By
seeking to restructure reality to reflect American mythology, Blacks relied upon and ultimately benefited from
politically inspired efforts to resolve the contradictions by granting formal rights. Although it is the need to maintain
legitimacy that presents powerless groups with the opportunity to wrest concessions from the dominant order, it is the very accomplishment of
legitimacy that forecloses greater possibilities. In sum, the potential for change is both created and limited by legitimation.
AT: Affirmation of Self
Their deployment of identity/social location/privilege arguments shuts
down effective collective action – this reifies racism and leads to endless
squabbling about authenticity
Rob 13 the Idealist, Carleton College, JD candidate, 10/1, Tim Wise & The Failure of Privilege
Discourse, www.orchestratedpulse.com/2013/10/tim-wise-failure-privilege-discourse/
I don’t find it meaningful to criticize Tim Wise the person and judge whether he’s living up to some anti-racist bona fides. Instead, I
choose to focus on the paradigm of “White privilege” upon which his work is based, and its conceptual and practical limitations.
Although the personal is political, not all politics is personal; we have to attack systems . To paraphrase the
urban poet and philosopher Meek Mill: there are levels to this shit. How I Define Privilege There are power structures
that shape individuals’ lived experiences. Those structures provide and withhold resources to people based on
factors like class, disability status, gender, and race. It’s not a “benefit” to receive resources from an unjust order because ultimately,
injustice is cannibalistic. Slavery binds the slave, but destroys the master. So, the point then becomes not to assimilate the
“underprivileged”, but to instead eradicate the power structures that create the privileges in the first place.
The conventional wisdom on privilege often says that it’s “benefits” are “unearned”. However, this belief ignores the reality and
history that privilege is earned and maintained through violence. Systemic advantages are allocated and secured as a class, and
simply because an individual hasn’t personally committed the acts, it does not render their class dominance unearned. The
history and modern reality of violence is why Tim Wise’ comparison between whiteness and tallness fails.
White supremacy is not some natural evolution, nor did it occur by happenstance . White folks *murdered*
people for this thing that we often call “White privilege”; it was bought and paid for by blood and terror. White supremacy is
not some benign invisible knapsack. The same interplay between violence and advantage is true of any systemic hierarchy
(class, gender, disability, etc). Being tall, irrespective of its advantages, does not follow that pattern of violence. Privilege is Failing
Us Unfortunately, I think our use of the term “privilege” is no longer a productive way for us to gain a
thorough understanding of systemic injustice, nor is it helping us to develop collective strategies to
dismantle those systems. Basically , I never want to hear the word “privilege” again because the term is so
thoroughly misused at this point that it does more harm than good. Andrea Smith, in the essay “The Problem with
Privilege”, outlines the pitfalls of misapplied privilege theory. Those who had little privilege did not have to confess and
were in the position to be the judge of those who did have privilege. Consequently, people aspired to be oppressed .
Inevitably, those with more privilege would develop new heretofore unknown forms of oppression from which
they suffered… Consequently, the goal became not to actually end oppression but to be as oppressed as
possible. These rituals often substituted confession for political movement-building. Andrea Smith, The Problem
with Privilege Dr. Tommy Curry says it more bluntly, “It’s not genius to say that in an oppressive society there are
benefits to being in the superior class instead of the inferior one. That’s true in any hierarchy, that’s not an ‘aha’
moment.” Conceptually, privilege is best used when narrowly focused on explaining how structures generally shape experiences.
However, when we overly personalize the problem, then privilege becomes a tit-for-tat exercise in blame,
shame, and guilt. In its worst manifestations, this dynamic becomes “oppression Olympics” and people tally
perceived life advantages and identities in order to invalidate one another . At best, we treat structural
injustice as a personal problem, and moralizing exercises like “privilege confessions” inadequately address
the nexus between systemic power and individual behavior. The undoing of privilege occurs not by
individuals confessing their privileges or trying to think themselves into a new subject position, but through the
creation of collective structures that dismantle the systems that enable these privileges. The activist genealogies that
produced this response to racism and settler colonialism were not initially focused on racism as a problem of individual prejudice.
Rather, the purpose was for individuals to recognize how they were shaped by structural forms of oppression. Andrea Smith, The
Problem with Privilege Bigger than Tim Wise However, the problem with White privilege isn’t simply that Tim Wise, a white man,
can build a career off of Black struggles. As I’ve already said, White people need to talk to White people about the historical and
social construction of their racial identities and power, and the foundation for that conversation often comes from past Black theory
and political projects. The problem for me is that privilege work has become a cottage industry of self-help
moralizing that in no way attacks the systemic ills that create the personal injustices in the first place . A
substantive critique of privilege requires us to get beyond identity politics . It’s not about good people and
bad people; it’s a bad system. It’s not just White people that participate in the White privilege industry, although not everyone
equally benefits/profits (see: Tim Wise). Dr. Tommy Curry takes elite Black academics to task for their role in
profiting from the White privilege industry while offering no challenge to White supremacy . These
conversations about White privilege are not conversations about race, and certainly not about racism; it’s a business where Blacks
market themselves as racial therapists for White people… The White privilege discourse became a bourgeois distraction .
It’s a tool that we use to morally condemn whites for not supporting the political goals of elite black
academics that take the vantages of white notions of virtue and reformism and persuade departments ,
journals, and presses into
making concessions for the benefit of a select species of Black intellectuals in the
Ivory Tower, without seeing that the white racial vantages that these Black intellectuals claim they’re
really interested in need to be dissolved, need to be attacked all the way to the very bottom of American
society. Dr. Tommy Curry, Radio Interview The truth is that a lot of people, marginalized groups included, simply
want more access to existing systems of power. They don’t want to challenge and push beyond these systems; they just
want to participate. So if we continue to play identity politics and persist with a personal privilege view of
power, then we will lose the struggle . Barack Obama is president, yet White supremacy marches on, and
often with his help (record deportations, expanded a drone war based on profiling, fought on behalf of US corporations to repeal a
Haitian law that raised the minimum wage). Adolph Reed, writing in 1996, predicted the quagmire of identity politics in the Age of
Obama. In Chicago, for instance, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one
of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a
state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened
by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the
predictable elevation of process over program — the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform
in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics. Adolph Reed Jr., Class Notes:
Posing As Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene Although it has always been the case, Obama’s election and
subsequent presidency has made it starkly clear that it’s not just White people that can perpetuate White
supremacy. Systems of oppression condition all members of society to accept systemic injustice, and there are (unequal)
incentives for both marginalized and dominant groups to perpetuate these structures. Our approaches to injustice must
reflect this reality. This isn’t a naïve plea for “unity”, nor am I saying that talking about
identities/experiences is inherently “divisive”. Many of these privilege discussions use empathy to build personal and
collective character, and there certainly should be space for us to work together to improve/heal ourselves and one another. People
will always make mistakes and our spaces have to be flexible enough to allow for reconciliation . Though
we don’t have to work with persistently abusive people who refuse to redirect their behavior, there’s a
difference between establishing boundaries and puritanism. Fighting systemic marginalization and
exploitation requires more than good character, and we cannot fetishize personal morals over collective action .
AT Debate
The focus on resolving racism at the level of immediate interaction cedes
the potential for debate to serve as a training ground for system-level
critique---your focus should be on overall liberation, not single instances of
inclusion
Steve Darcy 14, Department of Philosophy, Huron University College, London, Ontario, Canada. The
Rise of the Post-New Left Political Vocabulary, publicautonomy.org/2014/01/27/the-rise-of-the-postnew-left-political-vocabulary/
Second, however, it is also true that the series of shifts from the old vocabulary to the new one has entailed certain losses. In particular, the relative de-
emphasizing of system-level causation, in favour of a new emphasis on the importance of individual action
or inaction, tends to weaken the integration of everyday Left discourse with the theoretical analysis of systems like
capitalism and colonialism. It is true that, in exchange, we have a vocabulary that better enables us to focus on class privilege and settler
privilege. But if we are to defeat colonialism and capitalism, we cannot do so one person at a time, or one
interaction or relationship at a time. The systems themselves have to be named, understood, attacked and
overthrown. This issue is, obviously, closely connected to the loss of a focus on liberation. A liberation focus
and a systems focus share a common understanding: that the purpose of the Left is to defeat systems of
exploitation and oppression. Challenging immediate impacts is important, but not enough. It is necessary, but by no
means sufficient. Moreover, the way we challenge everyday impacts should be informed by our understanding that
they are not produced simply by individual actions, but by the operation of large-scale systems. The Left
needs a vocabulary, and a self-understanding, that highlights and foregrounds the importance of constructing
and expanding anti-systemic movements that aim to defeat systems of oppressive and exploitative power .
It is hard not to think that the older vocabulary better expresses this insight, even as it obstructs our access to other critical insights that are also
indispensable.
Marriott
Afro-pessimism’s dogmatism reifies the failures of defining static
identities—blackness is reduced to incapacity which recreates violence of
universality by actively refusing to understand contingency
David Marriott 12, “Black Cultural Studies”, Years Work Crit Cult Theory (2012) 20 (1): 37-66
However, this is also not the entire story of Red, White, and Black, as I hope to show. For example, in Chapter One (‘The Structure of
Antagonisms’), written as a theoretical introduction, and which opens explicitly on the Fanonian question of why ontology cannot
understand the being of the Black, Wilderson is prepared to say that black suffering is not only beyond analogy, it
also refigures the whole of being: ‘the essence of being for the White and non-Black position’ is non-niggerness,
consequently, ‘[b]eing can thus be thought of, in the first ontological instance, as non-niggerness, and slavery then as niggerness’ (p.
37). It is not hard when reading such sentences to suspect a kind of absolutism at work here, and one that
manages to be peculiarly and dispiritingly dogmatic : throughout Red, White, and Black, despite variations in tone and
emphasis, there is always the desire to have black lived experience named as the worst , and the politics of
such a desire inevitably collapses into a kind of sentimental moralism : for the claim that ‘Blackness is
incapacity in its most pure and unadulterated form’ means merely that the black has to embody this abjection
without reserve (p. 38). This logic—and the denial of any kind of ‘ontological integrity’ to the Black/Slave due
to its endless traversal by force does seem to reduce ontology to logic , namely, a logic of non-recuperability —
moves through the following points: (1) Black non-being is not capable of symbolic resistance and, as such, falls outside of any
language of authenticity or reparation; (2) for such a subject, which Wilderson persists in calling ‘death’, the symbolic remains
foreclosed (p. 43); (3) as such, Blackness is the record of an occlusion which remains ever present: ‘White (Human) capacity, in
advance of the event of discrimination or oppression, is parasitic on Black incapacity’ (p. 45); (4) and, as an example of the
institutions or discourses involving ‘violence’, ‘antagonisms’ and ‘parasitism’, Wilderson describes White (or non-Black) film
theory and cultural studies as incapable of understanding the ‘suffering of the Black—the Slave’ (they cannot
do so because they are erroneously wedded to humanism and to the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, which Wilderson takes as two
examples of what the Afro-pessimist should avoid) (p. 56); as a corrective, Wilderson calls for a new language of
abstraction, and one centrally concerned with exposing ‘the structure of antagonisms between Blacks and
Humans’ (p. 68). Reading seems to stop here, at a critique of Lacanian full speech: Wilderson wants to say that Lacan’s notion of
the originary (imaginary) alienation of the subject is still wedded to relationality as implied by the contrast between ‘empty’ and ‘full’
speech, and so apparently cannot grasp the trauma of ‘absolute Otherness’ that is the Black’s relation to Whites, because
psychoanalysis cannot fathom the ‘structural, or absolute, violence’ of Black life (pp. 74; 75). ‘Whereas Lacan was aware of how
language ‘‘precedes and exceeds us’’, he did not have Fanon’s awareness of how violence also precedes and exceeds Blacks’ (p. 76).
The violence of such abjection—or incapacity—is therefore that it cannot be communicated or avowed, and is always already
delimited by desubjectification and dereliction (p. 77). Whence the suspicion of an ontology reduced to a logic (of abjection). Leaving
aside the fact that it is quite mistaken to limit Lacan’s notion of full speech to the search for communication (the unconscious cannot
be confined to parole), it is clear that, according to Wilderson’s own ‘logic’, his description of the Black is working,
via analogy, to Lacan’s notion of the real but, in his insistence on the Black as an absolute outside
Wilderson can only duly reify this void at the heart of universality . The Black is ‘beyond the limit of
contingency’—but it is worth saying immediately that this ‘beyond’ is indeed a foreclosure that defines a violence
whose traces can only be thought violently (that is, analogically), and whose nonbeing returns as the theme for
Wilderson’s political thinking of a non-recuperable abjection. The Black is nonbeing and, as such, is more
real and primary than being per se: given how much is at stake, this insistence on a racial metaphysics of injury
implies a fundamental irreconcilability between Blacks and Humans (there is really no debate to be had here:
irreconcilability is the condition and possibility of what it means to be Black).
1AR
Rob
finishing rob --- sticking at the level at debate results in academic elitism --the neg sounds eerily Goldman board meeting
substantive critique of privilege requires us to get beyond identity politics . It’s not about good people
and bad people; it’s a bad system. It’s not just White people that participate in the White privilege industry, although not
everyone equally benefits/profits (see: Tim Wise). Dr. Tommy Curry takes elite Black academics to task for their role in
profiting from the White privilege industry while offering no challenge to White supremacy . These
A
conversations about White privilege are not conversations about race, and certainly not about racism; it’s a business where Blacks
market themselves as racial therapists for White people… The White privilege discourse became a bourgeois distraction .
It’s a tool that we use to morally condemn whites for not supporting the political goals of elite black
academics that take the vantages of white notions of virtue and reformism and persuade departments ,
journals, and presses into making concessions for the benefit of a select species of Black intellectuals in the
Ivory Tower, without seeing that the white racial vantages that these Black intellectuals claim they’re
really interested in need to be dissolved, need to be attacked all the way to the very bottom of American
society. Dr. Tommy Curry, Radio Interview The truth is that a lot of people, marginalized groups included, simply
want more access to existing systems of power. They don’t want to challenge and push beyond these
systems ; they just want to participate. So if we continue to play identity politics and persist with a personal
privilege view of power, then we will lose the struggle . Barack Obama is president, yet White supremacy
marches on, and often with his help (record deportations, expanded a drone war based on profiling, fought on behalf of US
corporations to repeal a Haitian law that raised the minimum wage). Adolph Reed, writing in 1996, predicted the quagmire of
identity politics in the Age of Obama. In Chicago, for instance, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black
communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive
neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His
fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, smallscale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program — the point where identity politics
converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in
U.S. black politics. Adolph Reed Jr., Class Notes: Posing As Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene Although it has
always been the case, Obama’s election and subsequent presidency has made it starkly clear that it’s not just
White people that can perpetuate White supremacy. Systems of oppression condition all members of society to accept
systemic injustice, and there are (unequal) incentives for both marginalized and dominant groups to perpetuate these structures.
Our approaches to injustice must reflect this reality. This isn’t a naïve plea for “unity”, nor am I saying
that talking about identities/experiences is inherently “divisive”. Many of these privilege discussions use empathy to
build personal and collective character, and there certainly should be space for us to work together to improve/heal ourselves and
one another. People will always make mistakes and our spaces have to be flexible enough to allow for
reconciliation. Though we don’t have to work with persistently abusive people who refuse to redirect their
behavior, there’s a difference between establishing boundaries and puritanism . Fighting systemic
marginalization and exploitation requires more than good character, and we cannot fetishize personal morals
over collective action .
Debating Law Good
Students debating legal change to drug laws on campuses is essential to
long-term alterations in policy
Alec Berry 13, USA Today, "Drug policy debate pushes students toward activism, leadership", May 22,
college.usatoday.com/2013/05/22/drug-policy-debate-pushes-students-toward-activism-leadership/
Overall, Foster says campus activism is essential to long-term policy change in drugs laws . He says NYU is recognizing that. The
school chose him to be the co-chair of the student health advising board. He says this is a statement on the university’s part.¶ “The fact that NYU, knowing I was a drug policy
activist, chose me to be their co-chair says a lot about the changing tone,” says Foster, now chair of the board. “We aren’t just activists or advocates. SSDPers are mediators, and
conversation continues. As more attention is focused on marijuana
legalization , functions like SSDP will only celebrate a continued, if not elevated, position in the debate . For Sunil
Aggarwal, an NYU SSDP staff adviser, that’s almost sweet enough.¶ “It’s something we should be proud of,” he says. “ It goes past what we call the
‘D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) Generation,’ where the youth were improperly educated
about drugs … Now these guys can think about sensible approaches and nail the facts.”
we’ve grown more powerful in closed door meetings.”¶ That