1NC V KU HR
1
Their focus on black subjectivity assimilates and suppresses indigenous peoples
leading to worse oppression against minority groups and constantly reifies
colonialism
Alcoff ‘03
[Linda Martin, Syracuse University Department of Philosophy, “Latino/AS, Asian Americans, and
the Black-White Binary” The Journal of Ethics 7, 5.2.2003.
<http://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1023%2FA%3A1022870628484.pdf >//wyo-hdm]
The reality of race in the U.S. has always been more complicated than black/white. The initial
exclusionary laws concerning testimony in court, as mentioned earlier, grouped “blacks, mulattoes,
and Native Americans.” The Chinese laborers brought to the West in the 1800’s had specific rulings and ideological
justifications used against them, restricting their right not only to vote or own property but even to marry other Chinese. This latter
ruling outlasted slavery and was justified by invoking images of Asian overpopulation. To avoid reproduction, Chinese women were
allowed to come as prostitutes but not as wives, a restriction no other group faced. The Mexicans defeated in the Mexican–
American War were portrayed as cruel and cowardly barbarians, and although the Treaty of Guadalupe–Hidalgo ratified in 1848
guaranteed the Mexicans who stayed in the U.S. full rights of citizenship, like the treaties with Native Americans neither local
governments nor the federal courts upheld the Mexicans right to vote or respected the land deeds they held before the Treaty.18 By
the time of the Spanish– American War of 1898 the image of barbarism used against Mexicans was consistently attributed to a LatinCatholic heritage and expanded for use throughout Latin American and the Caribbean, thus subsequently affecting the immigrant
populations coming from these countries as well as justifying U.S. claims of hegemony in the region.19 The so-called Zoot Suit riots
in Los Angeles in 1943 targeted Mexicans and their ethnically specific style of dress. The
attempts made to
geographically sequester and also to forcibly and totally assimilate Native American groups
were not experienced by any other group, and had their own ideological justifications that
combined contradictory images of the Great Chain of Being with the romanticized Noble
Savage. Native peoples were represented as vanquished, disappearing, and thus of no account .
The paradigm of an antiblack racism intertwined with slavery does not help to illuminate these
and other specific experiences of other nonwhite groups, where ideologies often relied on
charges of evil, religious backwardness, horde mentalities, being a disappearing people, and
other projections not used in regard to African Americans. The hegemony of the black/white
paradigm has stymied the development of an adequate account of the diverse racial realities
in the U.S ., and weakened the general theories of racism which attempt to be truly inclusive.
This has had a negative effect on our ability to develop effective solutions to the various forms
racism can take, to make common cause against ethnic and race based forms of oppression and to create lasting coalitions,
and has recently played a significant role in the demise of affirmative action. I will support these claims further in what follows.
The affirmative mirrors the dominant policy conversations of prostitution by
erasing the native within their counter narratives-- this eraser allows the
continued disposal and dehumanization of native womyn that has resulted in
mass murder of indigenous womyn in Canada and the U.S.- the only option is to
return to a precolonial society
Murphy ‘14
[Meghan Murphy, founder and editor of Feminist Current. She isa freelance writer and journalist
from Vancouver, B.C. and holds a Masters degree in Women’s Studies from Simon Fraser
University." In prostitution, 'race, class, and sex intersect in the worst of ways to subjugate
Native women'", Feminist Current, 3-19-2014, <http://feministcurrent.com/8771/inprostitution-race-class-and-sex-intersect-in-the-worst-of-ways-to-subjugate-native-women/>
//wyo-hdm]
Last month CTV News aired a short documentary as part of their “First Story” series, called “Stepping from the Shadows,” which
looks at indigenous women and prostitution, the Bedford decision, and how the future of Canada’s prostitution laws could impact
indigenous women and girls in Canada.¶ The documentary features women such as Jackie Lynne, Cherry Smiley, Summer-Rain
Bentham and Mona Woodward, who describe the ways poverty, racism, sexism, and violence lead indigenous women into
prostitution and keep them there.¶ “Race,
class, and sex intersect in the worst ways to subjugate Native
women — and in the act of prostitution it’s the most racist, the most sexist… And the man
holds all of the economic power in that,” Lynne says.¶ Indigenous women and girls are
overrepresented in street prostitution and are, according to Cherry Smiley, the most affected, yet she says
in the documentary that the recent judgement on Bedford vs. Canada left them out of the decision.
“There was no mention of colonialism in the judgement, there was no mention of aboriginal
women and girls in the judgement,” she said.¶ Smiley says the voices, experiences, knowledge
and traditions of indigenous women have been silenced and ignored in this case. This, of course,
speaks to a larger pattern we see wherein certain voices are privileged in conversations
around prostitution,
as well as to Canadian society’s general treatment and view of indigenous people.¶ Woodward says
that when her sister died just outside of Calgary, the police didn’t even bother to do an investigation. “Society,
as a whole,
does not care about aboriginal women,” she says. “And they certainly don’t care about sex trade workers, if you’re
aboriginal and you’re poor.”¶ And so while we seem to revel in the stories of white, educated, middle
class women who entered into prostitution, perhaps of their own volition, who can fit the role
of “happy hooker” and placate our desire to believe that, “oh, it’s not so bad,” “it’s natural,”
“it’s just a job like any other,” the voices of the women most impacted are silenced and
erased. ¶ We desperately want prostitution to be simply about consenting adults engaging in fun sexy times, no big deal. What
we don’t want is to address are the larger issues around who ends up in prostitution and why. We also don’t want to deal with the
fact that, behind all this — behind the existence of the entire sex industry — are men who want the “right” to have whatever they
want. And I say “whatever” rather than “whomever” because it seems clear that men who buy sex (especially the
men who
buy sex from indigenous women and girls on the Downtown Eastside) don’t particularly want
to think about the humanity of the women and girls they are using.¶ What’s behind prostitution and the
men who buy sex, I’m told by sisters and allies like Trisha Baptie, is that men want someone to whom they can do the things their
wives and girlfriends won’t let them. Meaning that they want someone who they don’t have to think of as a full human being. As
indigenous women have been historically dehumanized, it’s no surprise that society and johns
would choose them to be the discardable humans, offered up to violent men as the rest of us
look away.¶ What we also don’t like to talk about are the cycles of abuse Woodward and Lynne discuss
— the way indigenous girls are abused in their homes and how that leads them into
prostitution. Nor do we like to discuss the ways in which prostitution is a deeply racist
industry, as Bentham points out.¶ “We’re targeted from the time when we’re small and taught that it’s an option for us. We’re
taught that our bodies aren’t actually ours but that they are to please men,” Bentham says.¶ The
comments that stood in most in contrast to what we hear from many of the indigenous women featured in the documentary came
from Kate Gibson, executive director of WISH, who talked about the “agency” and “choice” of women who enter into the sex
industry. While she claims “women can decide whether or not they’re going to engage in sex work,” it seems that the reality is that
real “choice” and “agency” is what many women don’t have. “While we might not think that sex work is really a viable or safe
alternative for women, that’s not our decision to make. It is their decision to make,” Gibson adds.¶ Is it? Is it really “their decision to
make” when we
as a society have taken so much from indigenous people, forced girls and women
into homes with abusers and then pushed them onto the streets, then abandoned them with
few alternatives or resources, left them vulnerable to predators, and then looked away as
they are murdered and go missing? Is it really fair to say, “well it’s their decision” within that context? Is it really a
“safe alternative?” If we believe that, it seems we aren’t listening.¶ Gibson says that up to 57% of women who use the WISH drop-in
center are aboriginal (despite the fact that they make up only 2-4% of the population in Canada). What does this tell us about
“women’s choices?” If prostitution were just a great “choice” women just happen to make, wouldn’t more middle class white
women would be doing it? Or maybe men? Why is it that those people don’t “choose” prostitution?¶ The
rhetoric of “free
choice and agency” reeks of free market capitalism and delusion.¶ Smiley points out that “when we
decriminalize pimps and johns or when we move towards a legalized regime of prostitution… we’re putting all of our faith and hope
in capitalism.”¶ “We’re hoping that that greed will somehow regulate itself and we’re hoping that somehow pimps and johns will all
of a sudden decide they want to put women’s equality before profit and before dollars,” she says. ¶ Bentham believes that fully
decriminalizing prostitution (i.e. decriminalizing pimps, johns, and brothels) will further entrench aboriginal girls and women in
street-level prostitution, saying that they are not going to be the ones in the supposedly “safe” indoor escort agencies or brothels.¶
That indigenous
women — the most marginalized people in Canada — are the ones funneled into this
industry, groomed via sexual abuse from the time they are children, offered no options for
escape, no housing, no education, no support services, are ignored when they disappear and
are murdered, and are dehumanized by men want to think of and treat them as non-human
should be one of the most significant aspects of this conversation. It is unacceptable that the
voices, experiences, traditions, and realities of these women and girls are left out of debates
and decisions around prostitution and prostitution law .¶ It is also unacceptable that we
discuss this as anything but a violent and oppressive industry. To do so is to further erase
those who are already silenced.¶ Smiley thinks Canada should adopt the Nordic model.¶ “What we want is prostituted
women and girls to be decriminalized, we want the pimps and the johns to face criminal sanction, we want the government to put
money into exiting services and services that help [prevent] women and girls from entering into prostitution in the first place,”
Smiley says.¶ “We’re talking about alleviating poverty, we’re talking about safe and affordable housing… women-only detox,
addiction services, mental health services, access to jobs, access to education, and especially for our women and girls we need
access to our languages, to our cultures, and to our lands,” she adds.¶ We can do better Canada.
The silence of the aff on the question of how colonialism was produced
condemns their project to reifying colonialism- the call to come before
decolonization bases the aff’s moral system on the continued benefit of
genocidal occupation
Morgensen 2010
[Morgensen, Scott, 2k10, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 16, Number 1-2,
“Settler Homonationalism: Theorizing Settler Colonialism within Queer Modernities, 2010.]
Denaturalizing settler colonialism will mark it as not a fait accompli but a process open to change. While settlement suggests the
appropriation of land, that history was never fixed: even the violence of allotment failed to erase collective Native land claims, just
as land expropriation is being countered by tribal governments reacquiring sovereign land. In turn, as Thomas King and Paul Carter
suggest, settlement narrates the land, and, as storytelling, it remains open to debate, End Page 122 such as in Native activisms that
sustain Indigenous narratives of land or tell new stories to denaturalize settler landscapes. The
processes of settler
colonialism produce contradictions, as settlers try to contain or erase Native difference in
order that they may inhabit Native land as if it were their own. Doing so produces the contortions
described by Deloria, as settler subjects argue that Native people or their land claims never existed,
no longer exist, or if they do are trumped by the priority of settler claims. Yet at the same time
settler subjects study Native history so that they may absorb it as their own and legitimate
their place on stolen land. These contradictions are informed by the knowledge, constantly
displaced, of the genocidal histories of occupation. Working to stabilize settler subjectivity
produces the bizarre result of people admitting to histories of terrorizing violence while basing
their moral systems on continuing to benefit from them. The difference between conservative
and liberal positions on settlement often breaks between whether non-Natives feel morally
justified or conscionably implicated in a society based on violence. But while the first position
embraces the status quo, the second does nothing necessarily to change it. As Smith pointedly argues,
"It is a consistent practice among progressives to bemoan the genocide of Native peoples, but
in the interest of political expediency, implicitly sanction it by refusing to question the
illegitimacy of the settler nation responsible for this genocide." In writing with Kehaulani Kauanui, Smith
argues that this complicity continues, as progressives have critiqued the seeming erosion of civil liberties and democracy under the
Bush regime. How is this critique affected if we understand the Bush regime not as the erosion of U.S. democracy but as its
fulfillment? If we understand American democracy as predicated on the genocide of indigenous people? . . . Even scholars critical of
the nation-state often tend to presume that the United States will always exist, and thus they overlook indigenous feminist
articulations of alternative forms of governance beyond the United States in particular and the nation-state in general. Smith and
Kauanui remind us here that Indigenous feminists crucially theorize life beyond settler colonialism, including by fostering terms for
national community that exceed the heteropatriarchal nation-state form. Non-Natives
who seek accountable
alliance with Native people may align themselves with these stakes if they wish to commit to
denaturalizing settler colonialism. But as noted, their more frequent effort to stabilize their
identities follows less from a belief that settlement is natural than from a compulsion to
foreclose the Pandora's box of contradictions End Page 123 they know will open by calling it into
question. In U.S. queer politics, this includes the implications of my essay: queers will invoke and repeat
the terrorizing histories of settler colonialism if these remain obscured behind normatively
white and national desires for Native roots and settler citizenship.
Lack of decolonization results in ongoing genocide, assimilation and
annihilation of indigenous peoples and culture- k2 solve environmental
degradation, heterosexism, classism, racism, sexism and militarism
Churchill 96 (Ward, Prof. of Ethnic Studies @ U. of Colorado, Boulder BA and MA in
Communications from Sangamon State, “From a Native Son”,mb)
I’ll debunk some of this nonsense in a moment, but first I want to take up the posture of self-proclaimed leftist
radicals in the same
connection. And I’ll do so on the basis of principle, because justice is supposed to matter
more to progressives than to rightwing
hacks. Let me say that the pervasive and near-total silence of the Left
in this connection has been quite illuminating.
Non-
Indian activists, with only a handful of exceptions,
persistently plead that they can’t really take a coherent position on the
matter of Indian land rights because
“unfortunately,” they’re “not really conversant with the issues” ( as if these were tremendously
complex ).
Meanwhile, they do virtually
nothing, generation after generation, to inform themselves on the topic
of who
actually owns the ground they’re standing on. The record can be played only so many times before it
wears
out and becomes just another variation of “hear no evil, see no evil.” At this point, it doesn’t take Albert
Einstein to figure
out that the
Left doesn’t know much about such things because it’s never wanted to know,
or
that this is so because it’s always had its own plans for utilizing land it has no more right to
than does the status quo it claims to oppose. The usual technique for explaining this away has always been a sort
of pro
forma acknowledgement that Indian land rights are of course “really important stuff” (yawn), but that one”
really doesn’t
have a lot of time to get into it ( I’ll buy your book, though, and keep it on my shelf, even if I
never read it ). Reason? Well, one is just
“overwhelmingly preoccupied” with working on “other important
issues” (meaning, what they consider to be more important
issues). Typically
enumerated are sexism, racism,
homophobia, class inequities, militarism, the
environment, or some combination of these. It’s a pretty good
evasion, all in all. Certainly, there’s no denying any of these
issues their due; they are all important, obviously
so. But more important than the question of land rights? There are some serious
problems of primacy and
priority imbedded in the orthodox script. To frame things clearly in this regard,
lets hypothesize
for a moment
that all of the various non-Indian movements concentrating on each of these
issues were suddenly successful
in accomplishing their objectives . Lets imagine that the United States as
a whole were somehow transformed
into an entity defined by the parity of its race, class, and gender relations, its embrace of
unrestricted sexual
preference, its rejection of militarism in all forms, and its abiding concern with environmental protection (I
know, I know, this is a sheer impossibility, but that’s my point). When all is said and done,
scenario is
the society resulting from this
still, first and foremost, a colonialist society, an imperialist society in the most fundamental sense possible with
scenario does nothing at all to
address the fact that whatever
is happening happens on someone else’s land, not only without their consent,
but through an
adamant disregard for their rights to the land. Hence, all it means is that the immigrant or
invading
population has rearranged its affairs in such a way as to make itself more comfortable at the
continuing expense of indigenous people. The colonial equation remains intact and may even
be reinforced
by a greater degree of participation, and vested interest in maintenance of the colonial order among the
all that this implies. This is true because the
settler population at large. The dynamic here is not very different from that evident in the American
Revolution of the late 18th
century, is it? And we all know very well where that led, don’t we?
Should we
therefore begin to refer to
socialist imperialism, feminist imperialism, gay and lesbian imperialism,
environmental imperialism, African
American, and la Raza imperialism? I would hope not. I would hope this is
all just a matter of confusion, of muddled priorities
among people who really do mean well and who’d like to
do better. If so, then all that is necessary to correct the situation is a basic
land rights of
“First Americans”
should serve as a first priority for everyone seriously committed to
accomplishing positive change in North
America. But before I suggest everyone jump off and adopt this priority, I
rethinking of what must be done.,
and in what order. Here, I’d advance the straightforward premise that the
suppose it’s only fair that I
interrogate the converse of the proposition: if making things like class inequity and sexism the
preeminent
focus of progressive action in North America inevitably perpetuates the internal colonial structure of the
United States,
does the reverse hold true?
The alternative is an ethic of incommensurability as an act of decolonization – a
refusal of any combination of the settler mentality. This is a rubric and role of
the ballot for evaluating the rhetorical frames offered in the debate
Tuck and Yang ‘12
(State University of New York at New Paltz; University of California, San Diego) 12
(Eve and K. Wayne, Decolonization is not a metaphor, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education &
Society Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012, pp. 1-40)
An ethic of incommensurability, which guides moves that unsettle innocence, stands in
contrast ¶ to aims of reconciliation, which motivate settler moves to innocence. Reconciliation
is about ¶ rescuing settler normalcy, about rescuing a settler future. Reconciliation is concerned
with questions of what will decolonization look like? What will happen after abolition? What
will be the consequences of decolonization for the settler? Incommensurability acknowledges
that these questions need not, and perhaps cannot, be answered in order for decolonization
to exist as a framework. We want to say, first, that decolonization is not obliged to answer
those questions - decolonization is not accountable to settlers, or settler futurity.
Decolonization is accountable to Indigenous sovereignty and futurity. Still, we acknowledge
the questions of those wary ¶ participants in Occupy Oakland and other settlers who want to
know what decolonization will ¶ require of them. The answers are not fully in view and can’t be
as long as decolonization ¶ remains punctuated by metaphor. The answers will not emerge
from friendly understanding, and ¶ indeed require a dangerous understanding of
uncommonality that un-coalesces coalition politics -¶ moves that may feel very unfriendly.
But we will find out the answers as we get there, “in the exact measure that we can discern the
movements which give [decolonization] historical form ¶ and content” (Fanon, 1963, p. 36).¶ To
fully enact an ethic of incommensurability means relinquishing settler futurity, ¶ abandoning
the hope that settlers may one day be commensurable to Native peoples. It means ¶
removing the asterisks, periods, commas, apostrophes, the whereas’s, buts, and conditional ¶
clauses that punctuate decolonization and underwrite settler innocence. The Native futures,
the ¶ lives to be lived once the settler nation is gone - these are the unwritten possibilities
made ¶ possible by an ethic of incommensurability.¶ when you take away the punctuation¶
he says of¶ lines lifted from the documents about¶ military-occupied land¶ its acreage and
location¶ you take away its finality¶ opening the possibility of other futures¶ -Craig Santos
Perez, Chamoru scholar and poet ¶ (as quoted by Voeltz, 2012)¶ Decolonization offers a
different perspective to human and civil rights based approaches to ¶ justice, an unsettling
one, rather than a complementary one. Decolonization is not an “and”. It is ¶ an elsewhere.
The refusal produces generative political possibilities that allow for alternative
logics to settler colonialism. Multiple examples prove its possibilities.
Tuck and Yang, ‘14
[Eve (Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations and Coordinator of Native American
Studies at the State University of New York at New Paltz. Earned her Ph.D.in Urban Education at
The Graduate Center, The City University of New York in 2008) and K Wayne (Ph.D., 2004, Social
and Cultural Studies, University of California, Berkeley), “R-Words: Refusing Research”, pg. 238243, RSR]
Simpson’s (2007) article is in many ways a director’s-cut commentary on her ethnography on
Mohawk nationhood and citizenship, and is a layered example of refusal centered in the
Kahnawake Nation, within which she herself is a member. Simpson opens her article with a
critique of the need to know as deeply connected to a need to conquer, a need to govern. In
light of this, how Canada “knows” who is and isn’t Indigenous is imbricated with law. The Indian Act, a specific body of
law that recognises Indians in a wardship status in Canada, created the categories of person
and rights that served to sever Indian women from their communities upon marriage to white
men. It did the reverse to Indian men—white women gained Indian status upon their marriage into an Indian community. (p. 75)
In 1984, Bill C-31 amended the act to add Indian women and their descendants back into the federal registry of Indians in Canada,
leaving it up to individual nations to determine whether to reinstate them in their local registries. The
politics of
membership generated a series of massive predicaments for people who had assimilated
versions of the law for the past 150 years and found ways to resist it all the same . Kahnawake’s own
blood quantum membership code, developed in defiance of Canadian regulations for political recognition, was “contested and
defended by, it seemed, everyone within the community and sometimes all at once” (p. 73). The question of who is and isn’t
Mohawk is not only politically contentious but one that is implicated within the very logic of settler colonial knowledge. Instead
of surfacing the personal predicaments of “cousins and friends and enemies that comprise my
version of Kahnawake” (p. 74), Simpson turns her ethnography toward the ways in which
Kahnawake participants incorporated, dismissed, thwarted, and traversed notions of
membership, especially via constructions of citizenship that intentionally drew upon logics
found outside settler colonialism . There are three concurrent dimensions of refusal in
Simpson’s analysis—in Simpson’s words, her ethnography “pivoted upon refusal(s)” (p. 73). The first dimension is
engaged by the interviewee, who refuses to disclose further details: “I don’t know what you
know, or what others know . . . no-one seems to know.” The second dimension is enacted by
Simpson herself, who refuses to write on the personal pain and internal politics of citizenship.
“ No one seems to know ” was laced through much of my informant’s discussion of C-31, and of
his own predicament—which I knew he spoke of indirectly, because I knew his predicament. And I also knew everyone
knew, because everyone knows everyone’s “predicament.” This was the collective “limit”—that of
knowledge and thus who we could or would not claim. So it was very interesting to me that he would tell me that “he did not know”
and “no one seems to know”—to me these utterances meant, “I know you know, and you know that I know I know . . . so let’s just
not get into this.” Or, “let’s just not say.” So I did not say, and so I did not “get into it” with him, and I won’t get into it with my
readers. What I am quiet about is his predicament and my predicament and the actual stuff (the math, the clans, the mess, the
misrecognitions, the confusion and the clarity)—the calculus of our predicaments. (p. 77) The
interviewee performs
refusal by speaking in pointedly chosen phrases to indicate a shared/common knowledge, but
also an unwillingness to say more , to demarcate the limits of what might be made public , or
explicit. The second dimension of refusal is in the researcher’s (Simpson’s) accounting of the
exchange, in which she installs limits on the intelligibility of what was at work, what was said
and not said, for her readers. Simpson tells us, “In listening and shutting off the tape recorder, in situating each subject
within their own shifting historical context of the present, these refusals speak volumes, because they tell us when to stop,” (p. 78).
In short,
researcher and researched refuse to fulfill the ethnographic want for a speaking
subaltern . Both of these refusals reflect and constitute a third dimension—a more general
anticoloniality and insistence of sovereignty by the Kahnawake Nation—and for many, a
refusal to engage the logic of settler colonialism at all. For the purposes of our discussion, the most
important insight to draw from Simpson’s article is her emphasis that
refusals are not subtractive, but are
theoretically generative (p. 78), expansive. Refusal is not just a “no,” but a redirection to ideas
otherwise unacknowledged or unquestioned. Unlike a settler colonial configuration of knowledge that is
petulantly exasperated and resentful of limits, a methodology of refusal regards limits on knowledge as
productive , as indeed a good thing. To explore how refusal and the installation of limits on settler colonial
knowledge might be productive, we make a brief detour to the Erased Lynching series (2002–2011) by Los Angeles–based artist Ken
Gonzales-Day (see Figure 12.1). Gonzales-Day researched lynching in California and the Southwest and found that the majority of
lynch victims were Latinos, American Indians, and Asians. Like lynchings in the South, lynchings in California were events of public
spectacle, often attended by hundreds, sometimes thousands of festive onlookers. At
the lynchings, professional
photographers took hours to set up portable studios similar to those used at carnivals; they
sold their images frequently as postcards, mementos of public torture and execution to be
circulated by U.S. post throughout the nation and the world. Lynching, we must be reminded,
was extralegal, yet nearly always required the complicity of law enforcement—either by
marshals or sheriffs in the act itself, or by judges and courts in not bothering to prosecute the
lynch mob afterward. The photographs immortalize the murder beyond the time and place of the lynching, and in their
proliferation, expand a single murder to the general murderability of the non-White body. In this respect, the image of
the hanged, mutilated body itself serves a critical function in the maintenance of White
supremacy and the spread of racial terror beyond the lynching. The spectacle of the lynching is the medium
of terror. The Erased Lynching series yields another context in which we might consider what a social scientist’s refusal stance might
comprise. Though indeed centering on the erasure of the former object, refusal need not be thought of as a subtractive
methodology. Refusal
prompts analysis of the festive spectators regularly backgrounded in favor
of wounded bodies, strange fruit, interesting scars. Refusal shifts the gaze from the violated body to the
violating instruments—in this case, the lynch mob, which does not disappear when the lynching is over, but continues to live,
accumulating land and wealth through the extermination and subordination of the Other. Thus, refusal
helps move us
from thinking of violence as an event and toward an analysis of it as a structure. Gonzales-Day might
have decided to reproduce and redistribute the images as postcards, which, by way of showing up in mundane spaces, might have
effectively inspired reflection on the spectacle of violence and media of terror. However, in removing the body and the ropes, he
installed limits on what the audience can access, and redirected our gaze to the bodies of those who were there to see a murder
take place, and to the empty space beneath the branches. Gonzales-Day
introduced a new representational
territory, one that refuses to play by the rules of the settler colonial gaze, and one that refuses
to satisfy the morbid curiosity derived from settler colonialism’s preoccupation with pain.
Refusals are needed for narratives and images arising in social science research that
rehumiliate when circulated, but also when, in Simpson’s words, “the representation would
bite all of us and compromise the representational territory that we have gained for ourselves
in the past 100 years” (p. 78). As researcher-narrator, Simpson tells us, “I reached my own limit when the data would not
contribute to our sovereignty or complicate the deeply simplified, atrophied representations of Iroquois and other Indigenous
peoples that they have been mired within anthropologically” (p. 78). Here Simpson makes clear the ways in which research is not the
intervention that is needed—that is, the interventions of furthering sovereignty or countering misrepresentations of Native people
as anthropological objects. Considering Erased Lynchings dialogically with On Ethnographic Refusal, we can see how refusal is not a
prohibition but a generative form. First, refusal
turns the gaze back upon power, specifically the colonial
modalities of knowing persons as bodies to be differentially counted, violated, saved, and put
to work. It makes transparent the metanarrative of knowledge production—its spectatorship
for pain and its preoccupation for documenting and ruling over racial difference. Thus, refusal to
be made meaningful first and foremost is grounded in a critique of settler colonialism, its
construction of Whiteness, and its regimes of representation. Second, refusal generates,
expands, champions representational territories that colonial knowledge endeavors to settle,
enclose, domesticate. Simpson complicates the portrayals of Iroquois, without resorting to
reportrayals of anthropological Indians. Gonzales-Day portrays the violations without reportraying the
victimizations. Third, refusal is a critical intervention into research and its circular self-defining
ethics. The ethical justification for research is defensive and self-encircling—its apparent self-criticism serves to expand its own
rights to know, and to defend its violations in the name of “good science.” Refusal challenges the individualizing
discourse of IRB consent and “good science” by highlighting the problems of collective harm,
of representational harm, and of knowledge colonization. Fourth, refusal itself could be
developed into both method and theory. Simpson presents refusal on the part of the researcher as a type of
calculus ethnography. Gonzales-Day deploys refusal as a mode of representation. Simpson theorizes refusal by the Kahnawake
Nation as anticolonial, and rooted in the desire for possibilities outside of colonial logics, not as a reactive stance. This
final
point about refusal connects our conversation back to desire as a counterlogic to settler
colonial knowledge. Desire is compellingly depicted in Simpson’s description of a moment in
an interview, in which the alternative logics about a “feeling citizenship” are referenced. The
interviewee states, Citizenship is, as I said, you live there, you grew up there, that is the life that you know—that is who you are.
Membership is more of a legislative enactment designed to keep people from obtaining the various benefits that Aboriginals can
receive. (p. 76) Simpson
describes this counterlogic as “the logic of the present,” one that is
witnessed, lived, suffered through, and enjoyed (p. 76). Out of the predicaments, it innovates “tolerance and
exceptions and affections” (p. 76). Simpson writes (regarding the Indian Act, or blood quantum), “‘Feeling citizenships’ . . .
are structured in the present space of intra-community recognition, affection and care,
outside of the logics of colonial and imperial rule” (p. 76). Simpson’s logic of the present dovetails with our
discussion on the logics of desire. Collectively, Kahnawake refusals decenter damage narratives; they unsettle the settler colonial
logics of blood and rights; they center desire. By theorizing through desire, Simpson thus theorizes with and as Kahnawake Mohawk.
It is important to point out that Simpson does not deploy her tribal identity as a badge of authentic voice, but rather highlights the
ethical predicaments that result from speaking as oneself, as simultaneously part of a collective with internal disputes, vis-à-vis
negotiations of various settler colonial logics. Simpson
thoughtfully differentiates between the Native
researcher philosophically as a kind of privileged position of authenticity, and the Native
researcher realistically as one who is beholden to multiple ethical considerations. What is tricky
about this position is not only theorizing with, rather than theorizing about, but also theorizing as. To theorize with and as at the
same time is a difficult yet fecund positionality—one that rubs against the ethnographic limit at the outset. Theorizing
with
(and in some of our cases, as) repositions Indigenous people and otherwise researched Others
as intellectual subjects rather than anthropological subjects . Thus desire is an
“epistemological shift,” not just a methodological shift (Tuck, 2009, p. 419).
2
Interpretation and violation---the affirmative should defend legalization of
prostitution, marihuana, online gambling, the sale of human organs, or
physician-assisted suicide by the United States
The US is the 50 states, DC, and the territories/possessions
Angel & Orloff 12
[Carole and Leslye, Human Trafficking and the T-visa, American University Washington College
of Law, Sept 12, http://niwaplibrary.wcl.american.edu/reference/additional-materials/iwptraining-powerpoints/september-20-21-2012-new-orleans-la/trafficking/11_T-visa-MANUALES.pdf]
The Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000 defines the United States as
including “the fifty states of the United States, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of
Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam, the Commonwealth of the Mariana
Islands, and the territories and possessions of the United Stat es.” Victims of Trafficking and
Violence Protection Act of 2000 § 103(12); 22 U.S.C § 7102(12) (2000).
Absent defense of a specific actor legalization is meaningless.
McFerran 5 - began his career working as a feature writer and contributing editor for the New
American, a journal committed to topics of social, political, and economic interests. He has
published numerous articles on historical events, politics, and current affairs and served as the
national director of Tax Reform Immediately (TRIM). Dedicated to the American dream of
prosperity, McFerran writes to generate increased awareness and appreciation for the
Constitution of the United States
(Warren, "Political Sovereignty: The Supreme Authority in the United States," p. 147)
True, Calhoun conceded, the Preamble of the Constitution reads that “We the people of the United States” ordain and establish the new government. But this phrase proves
The term “United States” had been used earlier to designate the thirteen States in
Congress assembled, even though the Articles of Confederation specifically recognized the
sovereignty of the separate States. Here was a mere problem of semantics, Calhoun thought (though, of course, he did not use that word; it had
not yet been invented). The phrase “the people of the United States” could be ambiguous, for it was sometimes
used in a territorial or geographical sense. “In this sense, the people of the United States may mean
all the people living within these Limits, without reference to the States or Territories in which
they may reside, or of which they may be citizens,” Calhoun admitted. But he said the phrase, in its political
sense, refers to “the States united, which inversion alone, without further explanation, removes the ambiguity.” There was, strictly
speaking, no United States. There were only the States United.
nothing, he said.
Legalization means giving legal sanction to a previously unlawful activity
Supreme Court of Colorado 92 [IN THE MATTER OF THE TITLE, BALLOT TITLE AND
SUBMISSION CLAUSE APPROVED SEPTEMBER 4, 1991, WITH REGARD TO THE PROPOSED
INITIATED CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT CONCERNING LIMITED GAMING IN MANITOU
SPRINGS, FAIRPLAY AND IN AIRPORTS. KATHY VERLO, Petitioner, and GEORGE L. JAMES,
RAYMOND DELLACROCE, and CHARLES SARNER, Respondents, and GALE NORTON, BILL HOBBS
and NATALIE MEYER, Title Setting Board., NO. 91SA359, 826 P.2d 1241; 1992 Colo. LEXIS 53; 16
BTR 133]
Turning to Verlo's claim, we are satisfied that the Board's use of the term "legalize" in the title and in the ballot title
and submission clause correctly and fairly expresses the true intent and meaning of the proposed
constitutional amendment. The word "legalize" means "to make legal" or "to give legal
validity or sanction to." Webster's Third New International Dictionary 1290 (1986); see also Black's Law Dictionary
(6th ed. 1990) (legalize means "to make legal or lawful" or "to confirm or validate what was before
void or unlawful"). In the context of the phrase "to legalize limited gaming in the cities of Manitou
Springs and Fairplay," the word "legalize" expresses the sense that these cities will be required to
legislate so as to make limited gaming legal within their respective municipalities. Contrary to
Verlo's argument, we do not construe the word "legalize" as somehow suggesting that the cities of
Manitou Springs and Fairplay [**11] will retain the discretion either to legalize or to prohibit limited
gaming as they see fit. The Board's decision to add a sentence to the summary stating that under the proposed
constitutional amendment the cities of Manitou Springs and Fairplay would be "required to enact certain ordinances to implement
limited gaming" merely expands upon what is conveyed in the title and in the ballot title and submission clause by the phrase "to
legalize limited gaming in the cities of Manitou Springs and Fairplay." Nothing in the record persuades
us that the
of language in the title and in the ballot title and submission clause is in any way
misrepresentative of the true intent and meaning of the proposed constitutional amendment. We accordingly affirm
Board's choice
the ruling of the Board.
Vote neg
A precise narrow resolution is best—facilitates decision making skills through a
process of simulation of government activity
Steinberg and Freely 08
(David L., lecturer of communication studies – University of Miami, and Austin J.,Boston based
attorney who focuses on criminal, personal injury and civil rights law, “Argumentation and
Debate: Critical Thinking for Reasoned Decision Making” p. 45//wyoccd)
Debate is a means of settling differences, so there must be a difference of opinion or a conflict
of interest before there can be a debate. If everyone is in agreement on a tact or value or
policy, there is no need for debate: the matter can be settled by unanimous consent. Thus, for
example, it would be pointless to attempt to debate "Resolved: That two plus two equals four," because there is simply no
controversy about this statement. (Controversy is an essential prerequisite of debate. Where
there is no clash of ideas,
proposals, interests, or expressed positions on issues, there is no debate. In addition, debate
cannot produce effective decisions without clear identification of a question or questions to
be answered. For example, general argument may occur about the broad topic of illegal immigration. How many illegal
immigrants are in the United States? What is the impact of illegal immigration and immigrants on our economy? What is their
impact on our communities? Do they commit crimes? Do they take jobs from American workers? Do they pay taxes? Do they require
social services? Is it a problem that some do not speak English? Is it the responsibility of employers to discourage illegal immigration
by not hiring undocumented workers? Should they have the opportunity- to gain citizenship? Docs illegal immigration pose a
security threat to our country? Do illegal immigrants do work that American workers are unwilling to do? Are their rights as workers
and as human beings at risk due to their status? Are they abused by employers, law enforcement, housing, and businesses? I low are
their families impacted by their status? What is the moral and philosophical obligation of a nation state to maintain its borders?
Should we build a wall on the Mexican border, establish a national identification can!, or enforce existing laws against employers?
Should we invite immigrants to become U.S. citizens? Surely you can think of many more concerns to be addressed by a
conversation about the topic area of illegal immigration. Participation
in this "debate" is likely to be emotional
and intense. However, it is not likely to be productive or useful without focus on a particular
question and identification of a line demarcating sides in the controversy. To be discussed and
resolved effectively, controversies must be stated clearly. Vague understanding results in
unfocused deliberation and poor decisions, frustration, and emotional distress, as evidenced by the
failure of the United States Congress to make progress on the immigration debate during the summer of 2007.¶ Someone disturbed
by the problem of the growing underclass of poorly educated, socially disenfranchised youths might observe, "Public schools are
doing a terrible job! They are overcrowded, and many teachers are poorly qualified in their subject areas. Even the best teachers can
do little more than struggle to maintain order in their classrooms." That same concerned citizen, facing a complex range of issues,
might arrive at an unhelpful decision, such as "We ought to do something about this" or. worse. "It's too complicated a problem to
deal with." Groups
of concerned citizens worried about the state of public education could join
together to express their frustrations, anger, disillusionment, and emotions regarding the
schools, but without a focus for their discussions, they could easily agree about the sorry state
of education without finding points of clarity or potential solutions. A gripe session would
follow. But if a precise question is posed—such as "What can be done to improve public
education?"—then a more profitable area of discussion is opened up simply by placing a focus
on the search for a concrete solution step. One or more judgments can be phrased in the form of debate
propositions, motions for parliamentary debate, or bills for legislative assemblies. The statements "Resolved: That the federal
government should implement a program of charter schools in at-risk communities" and "Resolved: That the state of Florida should
adopt a school voucher program" more clearly identify specific ways of dealing with educational problems in a manageable form,
suitable for debate. They provide specific policies to be investigated and aid discussants in identifying points of difference.¶ To
have a productive debate, which facilitates effective decision making by directing and placing
limits on the decision to be made, the basis for argument should be clearly defined. If we
merely talk about "homelessness" or "abortion" or "crime'* or "global warming" we are likely
to have an interesting discussion but not to establish profitable basis for argument. For example,
the statement "Resolved: That the pen is mightier than the sword" is debatable, yet fails to provide much basis for clear
argumentation. If we take this statement to mean that the written word is more effective than physical force for some purposes, we
can identify a problem area: the comparative effectiveness of writing or physical force for a specific purpose.¶
Although we
now have a general subject, we have not yet stated a problem. It is still too broad, too loosely
worded to promote well-organized argument. What sort of writing are we concerned with—poems, novels,
government documents, website development, advertising, or what? What does "effectiveness" mean in this context? What kind of
physical force is being compared—fists, dueling swords, bazookas, nuclear weapons, or what? A more specific question might be.
"Would a mutual defense treaty or a visit by our fleet be more effective in assuring Liurania of our support in a certain crisis?" The
basis for argument could be phrased in a debate proposition such as "Resolved: That the United States should enter into a mutual
defense treatv with Laurania." Negative
advocates might oppose this proposition by arguing that fleet
maneuvers would be a better solution. This is not to say that debates should completely avoid creative
interpretation of the controversy by advocates, or that good debates cannot occur over competing interpretations of the
controversy; in fact, these sorts of debates may be very engaging. The
point is that debate is best facilitated by
the guidance provided by focus on a particular point of difference, which will be outlined in
the following discussion.
Decisionmaking is the most portable skill—key to all facets of life and advocacy
Steinberg and Freely 08
(David L., lecturer of communication studies – University of Miami, and Austin J.,Boston based
attorney who focuses on criminal, personal injury and civil rights law, “Argumentation and
Debate: Critical Thinking for Reasoned Decision Making” p. 9-10//wyoccd)
After several days of intense debate, first the United States House of Representatives and then
the U.S. Senate voted to authorize President George W. Bush to attack Iraq if Saddam Hussein
refused to give up weapons of mass destruction as required by United Nations's resolutions.
Debate about a possible military* action against Iraq continued in various governmental bodies
and in the public for six months, until President Bush ordered an attack on Baghdad, beginning
Operation Iraqi Freedom, the military campaign against the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. He
did so despite the unwillingness of the U.N. Security Council to support the military action, and
in the face of significant international opposition.¶ Meanwhile, and perhaps equally difficult for
the parties involved, a young couple deliberated over whether they should purchase a large
home to accommodate their growing family or should sacrifice living space to reside in an area
with better public schools; elsewhere a college sophomore reconsidered his major and a senior
her choice of law school, graduate school, or a job. Each of these* situations called for decisions
to be made. Each decision maker worked hard to make well-reasoned decisions.¶ Decision
making is a thoughtful process of choosing among a variety of options for acting or thinking. It
requires that the decider make a choice. Life demands decision making. We make countless
individual decisions every day. To make some of those decisions, we work hard to employ
care and consideration; others seem to just happen. Couples, families, groups of friends, and
coworkers come together to make choices, and decision-making homes from committees to
juries to the U.S. Congress and the United Nations make decisions that impact us all. Every
profession requires effective and ethical decision making, as do our school, community, and
social organizations.¶ We all make many decisions even- day. To refinance or sell one's home, to
buy a high-performance SUV or an economical hybrid car. what major to select, what to have for
dinner, what candidate CO vote for. paper or plastic, all present lis with choices. Should the
president deal with an international crisis through military invasion or diplomacy? How should
the U.S. Congress act to address illegal immigration?¶ Is the defendant guilty as accused? Tlie
Daily Show or the ball game? And upon what information should I rely to make my decision?
Certainly some of these decisions are more consequential than others. Which amendment to
vote for, what television program to watch, what course to take, which phone plan to purchase,
and which diet to pursue all present unique challenges. At our best, we seek out research and
data to inform our decisions. Yet even the choice of which information to attend to requires
decision making. In 2006, TIMI: magazine named YOU its "Person of the Year." Congratulations!
Its selection was based on the participation not of ''great men" in the creation of history, but
rather on the contributions of a community of anonymous participants in the evolution of
information. Through blogs. online networking. You Tube. Facebook, MySpace, Wikipedia, and
many other "wikis," knowledge and "truth" are created from the bottom up, bypassing the
authoritarian control of newspeople. academics, and publishers. We have access to infinite
quantities of information, but how do we sort through it and select the best information for
our needs?¶ The ability of every decision maker to make good, reasoned, and ethical
decisions relies heavily upon their ability to think critically. Critical thinking enables one to
break argumentation down to its component parts in order to evaluate its relative validity and
strength. Critical thinkers are better users of information, as well as better advocates. ¶
Colleges and universities expect their students to develop their critical thinking skills and may
require students to take designated courses to that end. The importance and value of such
study is widely recognized.¶ Much of the most significant communication of our lives is
conducted in the form of debates. These may take place in intrapersonal communications, in
which we weigh the pros and cons of an important decision in our own minds, or they may
take place in interpersonal communications, in which we listen to arguments intended to
influence our decision or participate in exchanges to influence the decisions of others.¶ Our
success or failure in life is largely determined by our ability to make wise decisions for
ourselves and to influence the decisions of others in ways that are beneficial to us. Much of
our significant, purposeful activity is concerned with making decisions. Whether to join a
campus organization, go to graduate school, accept a job oiler, buy a car or house, move to
another city, invest in a certain stock, or vote for Garcia—these are just a few of the thousands
of decisions we may have to make. Often, intelligent self-interest or a sense of responsibility will
require us to win the support of others. We may want a scholarship or a particular job for
ourselves, a customer for out product, or a vote for our favored political candidate.
Preparation and clash—changing the topic post facto manipulates balance of
prep, which structurally favors the aff because they speak last and permute
alternatives—strategic fairness is key to engaging a well-prepared opponent
Topical fairness requirements are key to effective dialogue—monopolizing
strategy and prep makes the discussion one-sided and subverts any meaningful
neg role
Ryan Galloway 7, Samford Comm prof, Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Vol. 28,
2007
Debate as a dialogue sets an argumentative table, where all parties receive a relatively fair opportunity to voice their
position. Anything that fails to allow participants to have their position articulated denies one side of the argumentative table a fair
hearing. The affirmative side is set by the topic and fairness requirements. While affirmative teams have
recently resisted affirming the topic, in fact, the topic selection process is rigorous, taking the relative ground of each topic as its
central point of departure.¶ Setting the affirmative reciprocally sets the negative. The negative crafts approaches
to the topic consistent with affirmative demands. The negative crafts disadvantages, counter-plans, and critical arguments premised
on the arguments that the topic allows for the affirmative team. According to fairness norms, each side sits at a relatively balanced
argumentative table.¶ When one side takes more than its share,
competitive equity suffers. However, it also
undermines the respect due to the other involved in the dialogue. When one side excludes the
other, it fundamentally denies the personhood of the other participant (Ehninger, 1970, p. 110). A
pedagogy of debate as dialogue takes this respect as a fundamental component. A desire to be
fair is a fundamental condition of a dialogue that takes the form of a demand for equality of voice. Far from
being a banal request for links to a disadvantage, fairness is a demand for respect, a demand to
be heard, a demand that a voice backed by literally months upon months of preparation,
research, and critical thinking not be silenced.¶ Affirmative cases that suspend basic fairness
norms operate to exclude particular negative strategies. Unprepared, one side comes to the
argumentative table unable to meaningfully participate in a dialogue. They are unable to
“understand what ‘went on…’” and are left to the whims of time and power (Farrell, 1985, p. 114). Hugh
Duncan furthers this line of reasoning:¶ Opponents not only tolerate but honor and respect each other
because in doing so they enhance their own chances of thinking better and reaching sound
decisions. Opposition is necessary because it sharpens thought in action. We assume that argument, discussion, and talk, among
free an informed people who subordinate decisions of any kind, because it is only through such discussion that we
reach agreement which binds us to a common cause…If we are to be equal…relationships
among equals must find expression in many formal and informal institutions (Duncan, 1993, p. 196197).¶ Debate compensates for the exigencies of the world by offering a framework that
maintains equality for the sake of the conversation (Farrell, 1985, p. 114).¶ For example, an affirmative case
on the 2007-2008 college topic might defend neither state nor international action in the Middle East, and yet
claim to be germane to the topic in some way. The case essentially denies the arguments that
state action is oppressive or that actions in the international arena are philosophically or pragmatically
suspect. Instead of allowing for the dialogue to be modified by the interchange of the
affirmative case and the negative response, the affirmative subverts any meaningful role to
the neg ative team, preventing them from offering effective “counter-word” and undermining
the value of a meaningful exchange of speech acts. Germaneness and other substitutes for
topical action do not accrue the dialogical benefits of topical advocacy.
Case
Aff is not a radical reconceptualization of black feminism, but rather valorizes
the black female as the singular subject position to resolve oppression which
causes civil society to rescript the 1ac as a characterization of strong black
females and doesn’t create change in the way hypersexualization of black
women occurs
Melissa Robyn Stephens, A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English, spring 2013 (“Imagining Resistance and Solidarity in the
Neoliberal Age of U.S. Imperialism, Black Feminism, and Caribbean Diaspora”, University of Alberta)
Focusing on the respective works of Paule Marshall, Jamaica Kincaid, and ¶ Michelle Cliff, I consider how transnational, black-
identified female protagonists ¶ are imagined to function as resisters and agents of latetwentieth-century ¶ neoliberal capitalism.6 I am particularly interested in how they endure neoliberal ¶ conditions
not only by critiquing them but also by entering into alignments with ¶ neoliberal culture and development agendas. For the
purposes of this project, I ¶ conceptualize a specific neoliberal condition that gives rise to the paradoxical ¶ configuration of labour
value as it is racialized and feminized. I consider how in literature this labour value can be calculated according to degrees of
association with the bio-politics of disposability and responsibility. By
tracking variations in the literary
representation of neoliberal conditions, we may become better ¶ prepared to challenge
literary analysis that obscures the socially destructive ¶ effects of neoliberalism through a
celebratory reading of black women's agency
¶ and resistance in
the neoliberal age. As Virginia Vargas contends, "[r]esistance to the forces of globalization and the elaboration of
new pathways and perspectives ¶ are informed by a novel conceptualization of the body, one that identifies it as a political site
affected by those very global forces. Proof is in the stigmas the body ¶ endures and the rights it struggles to attain" (323). She adds,
“it is the body as a political site that can be seen as an actively emerging absence, having failed to be recognized in previous
interpretive frameworks, in spite of the numerous signs of ¶ existence" (323). A range of critics have argued that neoliberal
discourse and ¶ policy thrives upon contradiction and ambiguity (Harvey, Hall, Hale, Ferguson, ¶ Wilson,
Brand and Sekler, Benn Michaels, Melamed, Goldberg); it is thus vital to ¶ read not only for signs of agency and resistance in
narratives of the neoliberal era, ¶ but also for
reconfigure d conditions of subalternity
that allow for the selective ¶
rendering of labouring figures as representative of and/or responsible for more ¶ heterogeneous subaltern constituencies.7
Transnational black female
protagonists ¶ are often praised by literary critics as figures who provide the
most significant ¶ critique of their societies; yet, the singular rendering of their critical
capacity ¶ discursively reproduces conditions of social exclusion and imaginatively
overburdens black women by associating them with exceptional capacities for ¶ social
responsibility .8Barbara Christian states, "Often I find that women of color are represented in ¶ scholarship by Afro-American
women, as if Chicanas, Asian Americans, or Native American ¶ women, not to mention women living outside
this country, did not have their own specific ¶ contexts. If we are to move beyond a stultifying and
false unity toward a more accurate, rich inquiry into the worlds of women, and therefore to new ideas about how
liberations might come about, we will have to do more than acknowledge or cite differences; we may
have to see the ¶ intersections of our many differences as central to the quality of our work"
(180).¶
2nc
Legalize means to confirm by law
Burton 98
[Partner in the law firm of D'Amato and Lynch, New York, New York. He has served as a New
York State Assistant Attorney General & as Assistant to the New York Special Prosecutor. from
Burton's Legal Thesaurus, Used with permission of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.,
http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/legalize]
legalize verb approve, authorize, bring into conformity with law, confirm, confirm by law, decree by
law, enact by law, ferre, legislate, legitimate, legitimatize, make lawful, make legal, order by law, permit by law,
pronounce legal, sanction, sanction by law, validate
See also: allow, approve, authorize, certify, confirm, constitute, establish, formalize, legitimate, notarize, pass, seal, validate
Debate needs middle of the road constraints; unbridled affirmation destroys
dialogue that are key to political discussion
Hanghoj 08
(Thorkild Hanghøj, Phd, DREAM (Danish Research Centre on Education and Advanced Media
Materials at the Institute of Literature, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Southern
Denmark. 2008
http://static.sdu.dk/mediafiles/Files/Information_til/Studerende_ved_SDU/Din_uddannelse/ph
d_hum/afhandlinger/2009/ThorkilHanghoej.pdf//wyoccd)
Debate games are often based on pre-designed scenarios that include descriptions of issues to
be debated, educational goals, game goals, roles, rules, time frames etc. In this way, debate
games differ from textbooks and everyday classroom instruction as debate scenarios allow
teachers and students to actively imagine, interact and communicate within a domain-specific
game space. However, instead of mystifying debate games as a “magic circle” (Huizinga, 1950), I
will try to overcome the epistemological dichotomy between “gaming” and “teaching” that
tends to dominate discussions of educational games. In short, educational gaming is a form of
teaching. As mentioned, education and games represent two different semiotic domains that
both embody the three faces of knowledge: assertions, modes of representation and social
forms of organisation (Gee, 2003; Barth, 2002; cf. chapter 2). In order to understand the
interplay between these different domains and their interrelated knowledge forms, I will
draw attention to a central assumption in Bakhtin’s dialogical philosophy. According to
Bakhtin, all forms of communication and culture are subject to centripetal and centrifugal
forces (Bakhtin, 1981). A centripetal force is the drive to impose one version of the truth, while
a centrifugal force involves a range of possible truths and interpretations. This means that any
form of expression involves a duality of centripetal and centrifugal forces: “Every concrete
utterance of a speaking subject serves as a point where centrifugal as well as centripetal
forces are brought to bear” (Bakhtin, 1981: 272). If we take teaching as an example, it is always
affected by centripetal and centrifugal forces in the on-going negotiation of “truths” between
teachers and students. In the words of Bakhtin: “Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside
the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in
the process of their dialogic interaction” (Bakhtin, 1984a: 110). Similarly, the dialogical space of
debate games also embodies centrifugal and centripetal forces. Thus, the election scenario of
The Power Game involves centripetal elements that are mainly determined by the rules and
outcomes of the game, i.e. the election is based on a limited time frame and a fixed voting
procedure. Similarly, the open-ended goals, roles and resources represent centrifugal
elements and create virtually endless possibilities for researching, preparing, presenting,
debating and evaluating a variety of key political issues. Consequently, the actual process of
enacting a game scenario involves a complex negotiation between these
centrifugal/centripetal forces that are inextricably linked with the teachers and students’
game activities. In this way, the enactment of The Power Game is a form of teaching that
combines different pedagogical practices (i.e. group work, web quests, student presentations)
and learning resources (i.e. websites, handouts, spoken language) within the interpretive frame
of the election scenario. Obviously, tensions may arise if there is too much divergence between
educational goals and game goals. This means that game facilitation requires a balance
between focusing too narrowly on the rules or “facts” of a game (centripetal orientation) and a
focusing too broadly on the contingent possibilities and interpretations of the game scenario
(centrifugal orientation). For Bakhtin, the duality of centripetal/centrifugal forces often
manifests itself as a dynamic between “monological” and “dialogical” forms of discourse.
Bakhtin illustrates this point with the monological discourse of the Socrates/Plato dialogues in
which the teacher never learns anything new from the students, despite Socrates’ ideological
claims to the contrary (Bakhtin, 1984a). Thus, discourse becomes monologised when “someone
who knows and possesses the truth instructs someone who is ignorant of it and in error”,
where “a thought is either affirmed or repudiated” by the authority of the teacher (Bakhtin,
1984a: 81). In contrast to this, dialogical pedagogy fosters inclusive learning environments that
are able to expand upon students’ existing knowledge and collaborative construction of
“truths” (Dysthe, 1996). At this point, I should clarify that Bakhtin’s term “dialogic” is both a
descriptive term (all utterances are per definition dialogic as they address other utterances as
parts of a chain of communication) and a normative term as dialogue is an ideal to be worked
for against the forces of “monologism” (Lillis, 2003: 197-8). In this project, I am mainly
interested in describing the dialogical space of debate games. At the same time, I agree with
Wegerif that “one of the goals of education, perhaps the most important goal, should be
dialogue as an end in itself” (Wegerif, 2006: 61).
1nr
The erasure of native womyn in the context of anti-blackness is problematic.
They cannot win that the root cause of native womyn being raped and violently
excluded is because of antiblackness
Gibson ‘03
[Lisa, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, “Innocence and purity vs.
deviance and immorality: the spaces of prostitution in Nepal and Canada,” September 03, pg.
36-49//wyo-hdm]
As I have shown in the previous sections, the colonisation of Canada was dependent on the imposition of European norms of
morality, behaviour and racist hierarchies. Because European
explorers came to understand the ‘New World’
according to their familiar terms of reference, the construction of ‘the Aboriginal woman’
came to reflect the pre-existing virgin- whore dichotomy that operated to control the
behaviour and socialisation of European women. In the context of racialised, sexualised and
classed ideologies of the Euro-Canadians, the virgin- whore dichotomy became translated into the
dichotomous framing of the ‘Indian princess’ and the ‘squaw’, a construction that continues to
place boundaries around the representations of Aboriginal women.¶ Rayna Green’s (1975)
examination of the ‘Pocahontas Perplex’ traces the construction of the Indian ‘queen’ and
‘princess’, and the subsequent ‘squaw’ which emerged as her contrary identity. Green (1975) argues
that from 1575 until 1765, the image of the bare-breasted, Amazonian Native American Queen
reigned as the familiar Mother-Goddess figure which embodied ‘the opulence and peril of the
New World’ (702). The Queen’s daughter, the Princess surfaces at the end of the eighteenth century when the colonies begin
to move towards independence, and is younger, leaner, and framed as Brittannia’s daughter. The princess becomes distinctly
Caucasian, though her skin colour is slightly darker than her white counterparts, and she is portrayed as virginal, exotic, submissive
and less Latin than her mother. The
legend of Pocahontas, the Indian woman who saved John Smith
from a supposedly torturous death has become the quintessential ‘Indian princess’. Her
subsequent marriage to John Rolfe and move to England exemplify the requirements of the
‘Indian princess’ in rejecting her own culture, embracing the white man’s sense of morality
and rescuing or helping the white man (Green 1975). In fact, the model ‘Indian princess’ is not really
Indian at all. As Acoose (1995) argues, ‘before a so-called good Christian white man could have
relations with an “Indian” woman...she had to be elevated beyond an ordinary Indigenous
woman’s status...[S]uch Indian women were thus accorded the status of royalty’ (43). Thus the
‘Indian princess’ not only justified white relations with Aboriginal women but also fed into
what Klein and Ackerman (1995) call the ‘self-deceptive lure of royalty’ through which white
settlers could express pride in their ‘royal’ Indian ancestry. However, the death of Pocahontas in England in
1617 is rarely part of the story (Klein and Ackerman 1995: 6)¶ The ‘squaw’ is the darker counterpart to the
‘Indian princess’ and the more common identity ascribed to Aboriginal women. Emma Laroque, a
Métis woman scholar has commented that:¶ The portrayal of the squaw is one of the most degraded,
most despised and most dehumanized anywhere in the world. The ‘squaw’ is the female
counterpart to the Indian male ‘savage’ and as such she has no human face; she is lustful,
immoral, unfeeling and dirty. Such grotesque dehumanization has rendered all Native
women and girls vulnerable to gross physical, psychological and sexual violence ... (in Manitoba
1991: vol.1, ch.6)¶ The image of the ‘squaw’ is constructed through tales of ‘Indian whores [and]
their alcoholic and sexual excesses with white trappers and hunters’ (Green 1975: 711). Even visual
representations of the ‘squaw’ portray her as darker and more ‘Indian’ than her counterpart
(ibid). Green describes how ‘the presence of overt and realised sexuality converts the image from
positive to negative’ (Green 1975: 711), or from the ‘Indian princess’ to the ‘squaw’. This sexualised
understanding of the ‘Indian woman’ in the colonial context served very specific purposes,
particularly in providing a justification for white men’s sexual deviance. As Acoose (1995) argues, the
‘lustful’ nature of the ‘squaw’ became a way of resolving the conflict between a Christian
sense of morality and the European desire for Aboriginal women. Moreover, the moral reform
movement of the 1880s also exploited images of the dirty ‘squaw’ ‘in an effort to keep the
races segregated and to keep the white race pure’ (Anderson 2000: 104). This corresponded to the
institution of the virgin-whore dichotomies in Victorian England through such legal
mechanisms as the Contagious Diseases Acts. In the same way that the Contagious Diseases
Acts threatened any woman who behaved like a prostitute (Walkowitz 1980), the ‘squaw’ identity
threatens to define all Aboriginal women as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ through expressions of
sexuality. Even Pocahontas, particularly Walt Disney’s version, is presented as oversexualised, an image
that has become a controlling metaphor for the experience of all Aboriginal women. It is her
sexuality, constructed through tropes of race,
There is no permutation- Women are constructed as subjects of life within the
biopolitical regime of colonialism whereas Natives are subjects of death- this
understanding conditioned and informs politics, we are the only prerequisite
Smith 10 (Andrea “Queer Theory and Native Studies: The Heteronormativity of Settler
Colonialism” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 16, Number 1-2, 2010, pp. 4268 (Article) //)
Thus normative
futurity depends on an “origin story.” The future is legitimated as a continuation of the past.
Native activists say, “Let us not work on domestic or other
forms of gender violence now, we must work on survival issues first.”25 Of course, since Native
Here I am reminded of how I have often heard
women are the women most likely to be killed by acts of gender violence in the United
States , they are clearly not surviving. The many works on Native women and feminism that
say that we are “American Indian women in that order,” that position gender justice as
something to be addressed after decolonization, all speak to how this politics of futurity sacrifices the lives of
women and those who are not gender nor-mative for the indefinitely postponed postcolonial future. As Denetdale notes, the Native
nationhood that becomes articulated under this strategy of futurity is one that supports heteropatriarchy, U.S. imperialism,
antiblack racism, and capital- ism. As Edelman states: “Political programs are programmed to reify difference and thus to secure in
the form of the future, the order of the same.”26 Edelman calls us to queer “social organization as such” to show how our efforts to
secure a better future for our children lead us to excuse injustice in the present.27 At the same time, however, this subjectless
critique has its limits with regard to decolonization. For instance, Edelman’s analysis lapses into a vulgar construc- tionism by
creating a fantasy that there can actually be a politics without a political program that does not always reinstantiate what it
deconstructs, that does not always also in some way reaffirm the order of the same. Edelman’s “anti-oppositional” politics in the
context of multinational capitalism and empire ensures the continu- ation of that status quo by disabling collective struggle
designed to dismantle these systems. That is, it seems difficult to dismantle multinational capitalism, settler colonialism, white
supremacy, and heteropatriarchy without some kind of politi- cal program, however provisional it may be. Here, Native studies can
temper this subjectless critique by engaging queer of color critique in particular. José Esteban Muñoz notes, for example, that an
anti-oppositional politic ultimately opts out of relationality and politics. “Relationality is not pretty, but the option of simply opting
out of it . . . is imaginable only if one can frame queerness as a singular abstraction that can be subtracted and isolated from a larger
social matrix.”28 Furthermore, an anti-oppositional politic can quickly lapse into a leftist cynicism, in which all politics are dismissed
as “reproductive” with no disruptive potential. This cynicism then becomes an apology for maintaining the status quo. As Muñoz
argues: “The here and now is simply not enough. Queerness should and could be about a desire for another way of being in both
the world and time, a desire that resists mandates to accept that which is not enough.”29 A politics of “opting out” clearly privileges
those who are relatively more comfortable under the current situation. For
indigenous peoples, however, who face
genocide, as well as all peoples subjected to conditions of starvation, violence, and war,
opting out is simply not an option. The question then arises, who will be left when we opt out of a struggle against
white supremacy, settler colonialism, and capitalism? Those most imme- diately sacrificed in this “anti-oppositional” politic are
indigenous peoples, poor peoples, and all those whose lives are under immediate attack. Thus, while Edel- man contends that the
Child can be analytically separated from actual children, Muñoz demonstrates that Edelman’s Child is nonetheless a disavowed
white Child. “The future is the stuff of some kids. Racialized kids, queer kids, are not the sovereign princes of futurity. [Edelman’s]
framing nonetheless accepts and repro- duces this monolithic future of the child that is indeed always already white.”30 An
indigenous critique must question the value of “no future” in the con-text of genocide, where Native peoples have already been
determined by settler colonialism to have no future. If the goal of queerness is to challenge the repro- duction of the social order,
then the Native child may already be queered. For instance, Colonel John Chivington, the leader of the famous massacre at Sand
Creek, charged his followers to not only kill Native adults but to mutilate their reproductive organs and to kill their children because
“nits make lice.”31 In this context,
the Native Child is not the guarantor of the reproductive future of
white supremacy; it is the nit that undoes it . In addition, while both “tradition” and “the future” must be critically
engaged, it does not follow that they can be dismissed. As with identity, the notion of a tradition-free subject simply reinstantiates
the notion of a liberal subject who is free from past encumbrances. As Elizabeth Povinelli’s work suggests, the liberal subject
articulates itself as an autological subject that is completely self- determining over and against the “genealogical” subject (i.e., the
indigenous sub- ject) trapped within tradition, determined by the past and the future.32 Essentially then, this call for “no future”
relies on a primitivizing discourse that positions the [white] queer subject in relation to a premodern subject who is locked in
history. The “Native” serves as the origin story that generates the autonomous present for the white queer subject.