This is America 1AC 2.0
Observation 1- The status quo
A: The world writ large and civil society are preconditioned on the destruction on the
Black American subject. The black positionality is a historical and virtual blank
occupying the position and level of absolute dereliction rendering it incapable of
possessing civil rights . The incoherence of the black body and society’s paradoxal
relationship with it allows for the magnetizing of bullets and legitimizing any and all
damage to it.
Wilderson 2007 [Frank B., “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s Silent Scandal” in Warfare in the
American Homeland ed. Joy James, p. 23-4]NJW
The Black American subject does not generate historical categories
of entitlement, sovereignty, and immigration for the record. We are "off the map" with respect to the
cartography that charts civil society's semiotics; we have a past, but not a heritage. To the data-generating demands
of the Historical Axis, we present a virtual blank, much like that which the Khoisan presented to the Anthropological Axis. This places us in a structurally impossible
Slavery is the great leveler of the Black subject's positionality.
position, one that is outside the articulations of hegemony. However, it also places hegemony in a structurally impossible position because--and this is key--our presence works back upon the
grammar of hegemony and threatens it with incoherence. If every subject--even the most massacred among them, Indians--is required to have analogs within the nation's structuring
narrative, and the experience of one subject, upon whom the nation's order of wealth was built, is without analog, then that subject's presence destabilizes all other analogs. Fanon (1968: 37)
"decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete
disorder." If we take him at his word, then we must accept that no other body functions in the Imaginary, the Symbolic, or the
Real so completely as a repository of complete disorder as the Black body. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of
the Real, for in its magnetizing of bullets the Black body functions as the map of gratuitous violence through which civil society is
possible: namely, those bodies for which violence is, or can be, contingent. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Symbolic, for Blackness in America
writes,
generates no categories for the chromosome of history, and no data for the categories of immigration or sovereignty. It is an experience without analog--a past without a heritage. Blackness is
whoever says 'rape' says Black" (Fanon), whoever says "prison" says
Black, and whoever says "AIDS" says Black (Sexton)--the "Negro is a phobogenic object" (Fanon). Indeed, it means all those things: a phobogenic object, a
the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Imaginary, for "
past without a heritage, the map of gratuitous violence, and a program of complete disorder. Whereas this realization is, and should be, cause for alarm, it should not be cause for lament, or
worse, disavowal--not at least, for a true revolutionary, or for a truly revolutionary movement such as prison abolition. If a social movement is to be neither social democratic nor Marxist, in
terms of structure of political desire, then it should grasp the invitation to assume the positionality of subjects of social death. If we are to be honest with ourselves, we must admit that the
"Negro" has been inviting whites, as well as civil society's junior partners, to the dance of social death for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps. They have been, and
remain today--even in the most anti-racist movements, like the prison abolition movement--invested elsewhere. This is not to say that all oppositional political desire today is pro-white, but it
is usually anti-Black, meaning it will not dance with death. Black liberation, as a prospect, makes radicalism more dangerous to the U.S. This is not because it raises the specter of an alternative
polity (such as socialism, or community control of existing resources), but because its condition of possibility and gesture of resistance function as a negative dialectic: a politics of refusal and a
One must embrace its disorder, its incoherence, and allow oneself to be
elaborated by it, if indeed one's politics are to be underwritten by a desire to take down this country. If this is not the desire that underwrites one's politics, then through what
refusal to affirm, a "program of complete disorder."
strategy of legitimation is the word "prison" being linked to the word "abolition"? What are this movement's lines of political accountability?
The history of War and militarism in the U.S. is intimately intertwined with
antiblackness, settlerism, islamophobia and poverty.
Mark Gruenberg 18(Mark Gruenberg, is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People's World. He is also the editor of Press
Associates Inc. (PAI), a union news service in Washington, D.C. that he has headed since 1999. BA in public policy from the University of
Chicago, Poor People’s Campaign: Barber says war and racism tightly linked, People's World, 5-7-2018,
https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/poor-peoples-campaign-barber-says-war-and-racism-tightly-linked/, 12-18-2018 NJW
the history and impact of war and
militarism on the U.S. economy and how they’re intertwined with the nation’s history of structural racism.∂
But Barber devoted his sermon in D.C.’s historic New York Avenue Presbyterian Church on Sunday night, May 6, explicitly to
Again quoting Dr. King’s famed 1967 anti-war sermon in New York’s Riverside Church, Barber declared, “A nation that spends more on its military than on social justice is a nation approaching
spiritual death.”∂ To prevent that, the U.S. must reorient its priorities away from militarism and war and towards domestic spending against poverty, income inequality, and for workers—
Militarism and war are long-time aspects of the U.S., Barber declared. The first European
settlers brought racism, militarism, and violence with them and used it against Native Americans and
against Africans brought over as slaves.∂ Settlers in New England, for example, waged war on indigenous people
not just with “guns that were more powerful than arrows.” In one case, they deliberately infected goods with diseases they knew the natives lacked
including the right to unionize.∂
defenses for.∂ Though Barber did not mention it, the other early European colonizers of the Americas—the Spaniards—defeated and wiped out the Aztecs in Mexico through infection from
smallpox, for which the natives lacked immunity.∂ That imperial war on indigenous people continued through the exterminations of the 1800s, the “Trail of Tears,” confinement on
reservations, and forced assimilation, Barber added. “Manifest destiny,” the U.S. expansionist slogan of the 1840s, was an excuse for killing and evicting natives.∂ Captured Africans,
The militarism against African-Americans, he said, even
includes the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—which gun advocates now use to justify their “right to keep and bear arms”—because
slaveholders wanted to make sure they had guns in case a slave uprising occurred.∂ Militarism and war
meanwhile, were brutally treated, whipped, and murdered after being brought to the Americas.
have extended down through the centuries in the U.S., Barber said. It is linked to corporate greed and profits, he added—and it’s targeted
black and brown people both at home and abroad.∂ Barber pointed out U.S. wars for the last half
century—dating back to Vietnam and ranging forward to “narcissist” GOP bombing of Syria by President Donald
Trump—have been waged against non-white people, including Southeast Asians and Muslims.∂ U.S. military spending,
he added, is more than that of the next seven nations in the world combined, including three times that of China and nine times that of Russia. That money goes into the pockets and profits of
military contractors. When war increases, so do their stock prices, Barber pointed out.∂ While a private in the U.S. military earns less than $30,000 yearly, the average CEO of a military
contractor earns $19 million. And most of the privates come from poor white rural communities or poor minority communities in inner cities, he noted. Barber called it “a poverty draft.”∂
The militaristic tilt and the racist tinge have occurred despite warnings from everyone from Abraham
Lincoln to Dwight Eisenhower. in his famed Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln blamed both North and South for the evil of
slavery and said the war was just retribution for it.∂ And Ike’s 1961 farewell address, warning against the baleful influence of the military-industrial
complex “was actually first written as the military-industrial-congressional complex,” Barber said.∂ “I come to connect the war economy to the five
systemic ills” the U.S. suffers and the Poor People’s Campaign is fighting against, Barber said. The other four are “a system of poverty that affects more
than 140 million people;” ecological disasters; “a distorted moral narrative;” and the combined oppressions of racism,
xenophobia, Islamophobia, and misogyny.∂ “To address those four, you have to address militarism,” he declared.∂ Addressing militarism
and reversing it, Barber says, includes not just cutting spending for war and on defense contractors, but also
foreign military aid and the militarization of U.S. police forces, particularly those patrolling minority
communities. And there was no reason, he said, for surplus military vehicles, given away by the Defense Department, to appear on the streets of Ferguson, Mo., after a police
officer shot unarmed African-American man Michael Brown to death.
Militarism is essential to the proper functioning and maintained existence of the
United States without it implosion is destined.
Dr.Pauwels 18, Jacques, PhD in History at York University, PhD in Political Science at University of Toronto, 9-8-2018, "Why
America Needs War," Global Research, https://www.globalresearch.ca/why-america-needs-war/5328631 ZH
Why Does the Trump administration need war, including a $1.2 trillion nuclear weapons
program? War against North Korea, Iran, Russia and China is currently on the drawing board of the
Pentagon. Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen…
A timely question:
Why has the US been at war for more than half a century … ? And we call that period “the post war era”.
And why do Americans support the US military agenda? * * * Wars are a terrible waste of lives and resources, and for that reason most people are in principle opposed to wars. The American President, on th e other hand, seems to love war. Why? Many commentators have sought
the answer in psychological factors. Some opined that George W. Bush considered it his duty to finish the job started, but for some obscure reason not completed, by his father at the time o f the Gulf War; others believe that Bush Junior expected a short and triumphant war which
would guarantee him a second term in the White House. I believe that we must look elsewhere for an explanation for the attitude of the American President. The fact th at Bush is keen on war has little or nothing to do with his psyche, but a great deal with the American economic
Without warm or cold wars, however, this
system can no longer produce the expected result in the form of the ever-higher profits the moneyed
and powerful of America consider as their birthright.
system. This system – America’s brand of capitalism – functions first and foremost to make extremely rich Americans like the Bush “money dynasty” even richer.
The great strength of American capitalism is also its great weakness, namely, its extremely high productivity. In the historical
development of the international economic system that we call capitalism, a number of factors have produced enormous increase s in productivity, for example, the mechanization of the production process that got under way in England as early as the 18th century. In the early
20th century, then, American industrialists made a crucial contribution in the form of the automatization of work by means of new techniques such as the assembly line. The latter was an innovation introduced by Henry Ford, and those techniques have therefore become
collectively known as “Fordism.” The productivity of the great American enterprises rose spectacularly. For example, already in the 1920s, countless vehicles rolled off the assembly lines of the automobile factories of Michigan every single day. But who was supposed to buy all
those cars? Most Americans at the time did not have sufficiently robust pocket books for such a purchase. Other industrial pr oducts similarly flooded the market, and the result was the emergence of a chronic disharmony between the ever-increasing economic supply and the
lagging demand. Thus arose the economic crisis generally known as the Great Depression. It was essentially a crisis of over production. Warehouses were bursting with unsold commodities, factories laid off workers, unemployment exploded, and so the p urchasing power of the
American people shrunk even more, making the crisis even worse. It cannot be denied that in America the Grea t Depression only ended during, and because of, the Second World War. (Even the greatest admirers of President Roosevelt admi t that his much-publicized New Deal
policies brought little or no relief.) Economic demand rose spectacularly when the war which had started in Europe, and in which the USA itself was not an active participant before 1942, allowed American industry to prod uce unlimited amounts of war equipment. Between 1940
and 1945, the American state would spend no less than 185 billion dollar on such equipment, and the military expenditures’ share of the GNP thus rose between 1939 and 1945 from an insignificant 1,5 per c ent to approximately 40 per cent. In addition, American industry also
supplied gargantuan amounts of equipment to the British and even the Soviets via Lend-Lease. (In Germany, meanwhile, the subsidiaries of American corporations such as Ford, GM, and ITT produced all sorts of plan es and tanks and other martial toys for the Nazi’s, also after Pearl
Harbor, but that is a different story.) The key problem of the Great Depression – the disequilibrium between supply and demand – was thus resolved because the state “primed the pump” of economic demand by means of huge orders of a military nature. As far as ordinary
Americans were concerned, Washington’s military spending orgy brought not only virtually full employment but also much higher wages than ever before; i t was during the Second World War that the widespread misery associated with the Great Depression came to an end and
that a majority of the American people achieved an unprecedented degree of prosperity. However, the greatest beneficiaries by far of the wa rtime economic boom were the country’s businesspeople and corporations, who realized extraordinary profits. Between 1942 and 1945,
writes the historian Stuart D. Brandes, the net profits of America’s 2,000 biggest firms were more than 40 per cent higher th an during the period 1936-1939. Such a “profit boom” was possible, he explains, because the state ordered billions of dollars of military equipment, failed to
institute price controls, and taxed profits little if at all. This largesse benefited the American business world in general, but in particular that relatively restricted elite of big corporations known as “big business” or “corporate America.” During the war, a total of less than 60 firms
obtained 75 per cent of all lucrative military and other state orders. The big corporations – Ford, IBM, etc. – revealed themselves to be the “war hogs,” writes Brandes, that gormandized at the plentiful trough of the state’s military expenditures. IBM, for example, increased its
annual sales between 1940 and 1945 from 46 to 140 million dollar thanks to war-related orders, and its profits skyrocketed accordingly. America’s big corporations exploited their Fordist expertise to the fullest in order to boost production, but even that was not sufficient to meet
the wartime needs of the American state. Much more equipment was needed, and in order to produce it, America needed new facto ries and even more efficient technology. These new assets were duly stamped out of the ground, and on account of this the total value of all
productive facilities of the nation increased between 1939 and 1945 from 40 to 66 billion dollar. However, it was not the pri vate sector that undertook all these new investments; on account of its disagreeable experiences with overproduction during the thi rties, America’s
businesspeople found this task too risky. So the state did the job by investing 17 billion dollar in more than 2,0 00 defense-related projects. In return for a nominal fee, privately owned corporations were permitted to rent these brand -new factories in order to produce…and to make
money by selling the output back to the state. Moreover, when the war was over and Washington decided to divest itself of these investments, the nation’s big corporations purchased them for half, and in many cases only one third, of the real value. How did America finance the
war, how did Washington pay the lofty bills presented by GM, ITT, and the other corporate suppliers of war equipment? The answer is: partly by means of taxation – about 45 per cent -, but much more through loans – approximately 55 per cent. On account of this, the public debt
increased dramatically, namely, from 3 billion dollar in 1939 to no less than 45 billion dollar in 1945. In theory, this debt should have been reduced, or wiped out altogether, by levying taxes on the huge profits pocketed during the war by America’s big corporations, but the reality
was different. As already noted, the American state failed to meaningfully tax corporate America’s windfall profits, allowed the public debt to mushroom, and paid its bills, and the interest on its loans, with its general revenues, that is, by means of the income gener ated by direct
and indirect taxes. Particularly on account of the regressive Revenue Act introduced in October 1942, these taxes were paid increasingly by workers and other low-income Americans, rather than by the super-rich and the corporations of which the latter were the owners, major
shareholders, and/or top managers. “The burden of financing the war,” observes the American historian Sean Dennis Cashman, “[ was] sloughed firmly upon the shoulders of the poorer members of society.” However, the American public, preoccupied by the war and blinded by the
bright sun of full employment and high wages, failed to notice this. Affluent Americans, on the other hand, were keenly aware of the wonderful way in which the war generated money for themselves and for their corporations. Incidentally, it was also from the rich businesspeople,
bankers, insurers and other big investors that Washington borrowed the money needed to finance the war; corporate America thu s also profited from the war by pocketing the lion’s share of the interests generated by the purchase of the famous war bonds. In theory, at least, the
rich and powerful of America are the great champions of so-called free enterprise, and they oppose any form of state intervention in the economy. During the war, howev er, they never raised any objections to the way in which the American state managed and financed the
economy, because without this large-scale dirigist violation of the rules of free enterprise, their collective wealth could never have proliferated as it d id during those years. During the Second World War, the wealthy owners and top managers of the big corporations learned a ver y
important lesson: during a war there is money to be made, lots of money. In other words, the arduous task of maximizing profi ts – the key activity within the capitalist American economy – can be absolved much more efficiently through war than through peace; however, the
benevolent cooperation of the state is required. Ever since the Second World War, the rich and powerful of America have remained keenly conscious of this. So is their man in the White House today [2003, i.e. George W. Bush], the scion of a “money dynasty” who was parachuted
In the spring of 1945 it
was obvious that the war, fountainhead of fabulous profits, would soon be over
During the war, Washington’s purchases of military
equipment, and nothing else, had restored the economic demand
With
the return of peace, the ghost of disharmony between supply and demand threatened to return to
haunt America again
into the White House in order to promote the interests of his wealthy family members, friends, and associates in corporate America, the interests of money, privilege, and power. Obama’s Permanent War Agenda
. What would happen then? Among the economists, many
Cassandras conjured up scenarios that loomed extremely unpleasant for America’s political and industrial leaders.
and thus made possible not only full employment but also unprecedented profits.
, and the resulting crisis might well be even more acute than the Great Depression of the “dirty thirties,” because during the war years the productive capacity of the nation had increased considerably, as we have seen. Workers
would have to be laid off precisely at the moment when millions of war veterans would come home looking for a civilian job, and the resulting unemployment and decline in purchasing power would aggravate the demand deficit. Seen from the perspective of America’s rich and powerful,
Military state expenditures were the
source of high profits. In order to keep the profits gushing forth generously, new enemies and new war
threats were urgently needed now that Germany and Japan were defeated. How fortunate that the
Soviet Union existed
the coming unemployment was not a problem; what did matter was that the golden age of gargantuan profits would come to an end. Such a catastrophe had to be prevented, but how?
, a country which during the war had been a particularly useful partner who had pulled the chestnuts out of the fire for the Allies in Stalingrad and elsewhere, but also a partner whose communist ideas and practices allowed it to be
Most American historians now admit that in 1945 the Soviet Union, a country
that had suffered enormously during the war, did not constitute a threat at all to the economically and
militarily far superior USA, and that Washington itself did not perceive the Soviets as a threat
easily transformed into the new bogeyman of the United States.
. These historians also
acknowledge that Moscow was very keen to work closely together with Washington in the postwar era. Indeed, Moscow had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, from a conflict with superpower America, which was brimming with confidence thanks to i ts monopoly of the atom
America – corporate America, the America of the super-rich – urgently needed a new enemy in
order to justify the titanic expenditures for “defense” which were needed to keep the wheels of the
nation’s economy spinning at full speed also after the end of the war
It is for this reason that the Cold War was unleashed in 1945, not by the Soviets but by the American
“military-industrial” complex, as President Eisenhower would call that elite of wealthy individuals and
corporations that knew how to profit from the “warfare economy.”
More and
more martial equipment had to be cranked out, because the allies within the so-called “free world”,
which actually included plenty of nasty dictatorships, had to be armed to the teeth with US equipment.
In addition, America’s own armed forces never ceased demanding bigger, better, and more
sophisticated tanks, planes, rockets, and, yes, chemical and bacteriological weapons and other weapons
of mass destruction
bomb. However,
, thus keeping profit margins at the required – or rather, desired – high levels, or even to increase
them.
In this respect, the Cold War exceeded their fondest expectations.
. For these goods, the Pentagon was always ready to pay huge sums without asking difficult questions. As had been the case during the Second World War, it was again primarily the large corporations who were allowed to fill the
orders. The Cold War generated unprecedented profits, and they flowed into the coffers of those extremely wealthy individuals who happened to be the owners, top managers, and/or major shareholders of these corporations. (Does it come as a surprise that in th e United States
newly retired Pentagon generals are routinely offered jobs as consultants by large corporations involved in militar y production, and that businessmen linked with those corporations are regularly appointed as high-ranking officials of the Department of Defense, as advisors of the
President, etc.?) During the Cold War too, the American state financed its skyrocketing military expenditures by means of loans, and this caused the public debt to rise to dizzying heights. In 1945 the public debt stood at “only” 258 billion dollar, but in 1990 – when the Cold War
ground to an end – it amounted to no less than 3.2 trillion dollar! This was a stupendous increase, also when one takes the inflation rate into account, and it caused the American state to b ecome the world’s greatest debtor. (Incidentally, in July 2002 the American public debt had
reached 6.1 trillion dollar.) Washington could and should have covered the cost of the Cold War by taxing the huge profits achieved by the corporations involved in the armament orgy, but there was never any question of such a thing. In 1945, when the Second World War come to
an end and the Cold War picked up the slack, corporations still paid 50 per cent of all taxes, but during the course of the Cold War this share s hrunk consistently, and today it only amounts to approximately 1 per cent. This was possible because the nation’s big corporations largely
determine what the government in Washington may or may not do, also in the field of fiscal policy. In addition, lowering the tax burden of corporations was made easier because after the Second World War these corporations transformed themselves in to multinationals, “at home
everywhere and nowhere,” as an American author has written in connection with ITT, and therefore find it easy to avoid paying meaningful taxes anywhere. Stateside, where they pocket the biggest profits, 37 per cent of all American multinationals – and more than 70 per cent of
all foreign multinationals – paid not a single dollar of taxes in 1991, while the remaining multinationals remitted less than 1 per cent of their profits in taxes. The sky-high costs of the Cold War were thus not borne by those who profited from it and who, incidentally, also continued
to pocket the lion’s share of the dividends paid on government bonds, but by the American workers and the American middle class. These low- and middle-income Americans did not receive a penny from the profits yielded so profusely by the Cold War, but they did receive their
share of the enormous public debt for which that conflict was largely responsible. It is they, therefore, who were really sad dled with the costs of the Cold War, and it is they who continue to pay with their taxes for a disproportionate share of the burden of the public debt. In oth er
words, while the profits generated by the Cold War were privatized to the advantage of an extremely wealthy elite, its costs were ruthlessly socialized to the great detriment of all other Americans. During the Cold War, the American economy degenerated into a gigantic swindle,
into a perverse redistribution of the nation’s wealth to the advantage of the rich and to the disadvantage not only of the poor and of the working class but also of the middle class, whose members tend to subscribe to the myth that the American capitalist system serves their
interests. Indeed, while the wealthy and powerful of America accumulated ever-greater riches, the prosperity achieved by many other Americans during the Second World War was gradually eroded, and the general standard of living declined slowly but steadily. During the Second
World War America had witnessed a modest redistribution of the collective wealth of the nation to the advantage of the less privileged members of society. During the Cold War, however, the ric h Americans became richer while the non-wealthy – and certainly not only the poor –
became poorer. In 1989, the year the Cold War petered out, more than 13 per cent of all Americans – approximately 31 million individuals – were poor according to the official criteria of poverty, which definitely understate the problem. Conversely, today 1 per cen t of all Americans
own no less than 34 per cent of the nation’s aggregate wealth. In no major “Western” country is the wealth distributed more unevenly. The minuscu le percentage of super-rich Americans found this development extremely satisfactory. They loved the idea of accumulating more and
more wealth, of aggrandizing their already huge assets, at the expense of the less privileged. They wanted to keep things that way or, if at all possible, make this sublime scheme even more efficient. However, all good things must come to an end, and i n 1989/90 the bountiful Cold
War elapsed. That presented a serious problem. Ordinary Americans, who knew that they had borne the costs of this war, expected a “peace dividend.” They thought that the money the state had spent on military expenditures might now b e used to produce benefits for
themselves, for example in the form of a national health insurance and other social benefits which Americans in contrast to m ost Europeans have never enjoyed. In 1992, Bill Clinton would actually win the presidential election by dangling out the prospect of a national health plan,
which of course never materialized. A “peace dividend” was of no interest whatsoever to the nation’s wealthy elite, because the provision of social services by the state does not yield profits for entrepreneurs and corporations, and certainly not the lofty kind of profits generated by
America, or rather, corporate America, was
orphaned of its useful Soviet enemy, and urgently needed to conjure up new enemies and new threats
in order to justify a high level of military spending. It is in this context that in 1990 Saddam Hussein
appeared on the scene like a kind of deus ex machina. This tin-pot dictator had previously been
perceived and treated by the Americans as a good friend, and he had been armed to the teeth so that
he could wage a nasty war against Iran; it was the USA – and allies such as Germany – who originally
supplied him with all sorts of weapons. However, Washington was desperately in need of a new enemy,
and suddenly fingered him as a terribly dangerous “new Hitler,” against whom war needed to be waged
urgently,
military state expenditures. Something had to be done, and had to be done fast, to prevent the threatening implosion of the s tate’s military spending.
even though it was clear that a negotiated settlement of the issue of Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait was not out of the question. George Bush Senior was the cas ting agent who discovered this useful new nemesis of America, and who unleashed the Gulf War,
during which Baghdad was showered with bombs and Saddam’s hapless recruits were slaughtered in the desert. The road to the Iraqi capital lay wide -open, but the Marines’ triumphant entry into Baghdad was suddenly scrapped. Saddam Hussein was left in power so that the
threat he was supposed to form might be invoked again in order to justify keeping America in arms. After all, the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union h ad shown how inconvenient it can be when one loses a useful foe. And so Mars could remain the patron saint of the American
economy or, more accurately, the godfather of the corporate Mafia that manipulates this war-driven economy and reaps its huge profits without bearing its costs. The despised project of a peace dividend could be uncere moniously buried, and military expenditures could remain
the dynamo of the economy and the wellspring of sufficiently high profits. Those expenditures increased relentlessly during the 1990s. In 1996, for example, they amounted to no less than 265 billion dollars, but when one adds the unofficial and/o r indirect military expenditures,
However, with only a considerably
chastened Saddam as bogeyman, Washington found it expedient also to look elsewhere for new
enemies and threats. Somalia temporarily looked promising, but in due course another “new Hitler” was
identified in the Balkan Peninsula in the person of the Serbian leader, Milosevic.
. The “warfare economy” could thus continue to
run on all cylinders also after the Gulf War. However, in view of occasional public pressure such as the
demand for a peace dividend, it is not easy to keep this system going
such as the interests paid on loans used to finance past wars, the 1996 total came to approximately 494 billion dollar, amoun ting to an outlay of 1.3 billion dollar per day!
During much of the nineties, then, conflicts in the former
Yugoslavia provided the required pretexts for military interventions, large-scale bombing operations, and the purchase of more and newer weapons
. (The media present no problem, as newspapers, magazines, TV stations, etc. are either owned
by big corporations or rely on them for advertising revenue.) As mentioned earlier, the state has to cooperate, so in Washing ton one needs men and women one can count upon, preferably individuals from the very own corporate ranks, individuals totally committed to use the
instrument of military expenditures in order to provide the high profits that are needed to make the very rich of America eve n richer. In this respect, Bill Clinton had fallen short of expectations, and corporate America could never forgive his original sin, namely, that he had
managed to have himself elected by promising the American people a “peace dividend” in the form of a system of health insuran ce. On account of this, in 2000 it was arranged that not the Clinton-clone Al Gore moved into the White House but a team of militarist hardliners,
virtually without exception representatives of wealthy, corporate America, such as Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice, and of course George W. Bush himself, son of the man who had shown with his Gulf War how it could be done; the Pentagon, too, was directly represented in the Bush
Cabinet in the person of the allegedly peace-loving Powell, in reality yet another angel of death. Rambo moved into the White House, and it did not take long for the resu lts to show. After Bush Junior had been catapulted into the presidency, it looked for some time as if he was
going to proclaim China as the new nemesis of America. However, a conflict with that giant loomed somewhat risky; furthermore , all too many big corporations make good money by trading with the People’s Republic. Another threat, preferably less dangerous and more credible,
was required to keep the military expenditures at a sufficiently high level. For this purpose, Bush and Rumsfeld and company could have wished for nothing more convenient than the events of September 11, 2001; it is extremely likely that they were aware of the preparations for
these monstrous attacks, but that they did nothing to prevent them because they knew that they would be able to benefit from them. In any event, they did take full advantage of this opportunity in order to militarize America more than ever before, to shower bombs on people
who had nothing to do with 9/11, to wage war to their hearts’ content, and thus for corporations that do business with the Pentagon to ring up unprecedented sales. Bush declared war not on a country but on terrorism, an abstract concept against which one cannot really wage
war and against which a definitive victory can never be achieved. However, in practice the slogan “war against terrorism” meant that Washington now reserves the right to wage war worldwide and permanently against whomever the White House defines as a terrorist. And so the
problem of the end of the Cold War was definitively resolved, as there was henceforth a justification for ever-increasing military expenditures. The statistics speak for themselves. The 1996 total of 265 billion dollar in military expen ditures had already been astronomical, but thanks
to Bush Junior the Pentagon was allowed to spend 350 billion in 2002, and for 2003 the President has promised approximately 390 billion; however, it is now virtually certain that the cape of 400 billion dollar will be rounded this year. (In order to finance this military spend ing orgy,
money has to be saved elsewhere, for example by cancelling free lunches for poor children; every little bit helps.) No wonder that George W. struts around beaming with happiness and pride, for he – essentially a spoiled rich kid of very limited talent and intellect – has surpassed
the boldest expectations not only of his wealthy family and friends but of corporate America as a whole, to which he owes his job. 9/11 provided Bush with carte blanche to wage war wherever and against whomever he chose, and as this essay has purported to make clear, it does
not matter all that much who happens to be fingered as enemy du jour. Last year, Bush showered bombs on Afghanistan, presumab ly because the leaders of that country sheltered Bin Laden, but recently the latter went out of fashion and it was once again Saddam Hussein who
allegedly threatened America. We cannot deal here in detail with the specific reasons why Bush’s America absolutely wanted war with the Iraq of Saddam Hussein and not with, say, North Korea. A major reason for fighting this particular war was that Iraq’s large reserves of oil are
lusted after by the US oil trusts with whom the Bushes themselves – and Bushites such as Cheney and Rice, after whom an oil tanker happens to be named – are so intimately linked. The war in Iraq is also useful as a lesson to other Third World countries who fail to dance to
The America of wealth and
privilege is hooked on war, without regular and ever-stronger doses of war it can no longer function
properly
this addiction, this craving is being satisfied by means of a conflict
Washington’s tune, and as an instrument for emasculating domestic opposition and ramming the extreme right-wing program of an unelected president down the throats of Americans themselves.
, that is, yield the desired profits. Right now,
against Iraq, which also happens to be
dear to the hearts of the oil barons. However, does anybody believe that the warmongering will stop once Saddam’ scalp will join the Taliban turbans in the trophy display case of George W. Bush? The President has already pointed his finger at those whose turn will soon come, namely,
the “axis of evil” countries: Iran, Syria, Lybia, Somalia, North Korea, and of course that old thorn in the side of America, Cuba. Welcome to the 21st century, welcome to George W. Bush’s brave new era of permanent war!
Next is the metaphor of impossibility This is Wilderson in 10
(Frank B. Wilderson, Professor of African American Studies @ UC Irvine, 2010, “Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S.
Antagonisms” pg. 1-5)NJW
WHEN i WAS a young student at Columbia University in New York there was a Black woman who used to
stand outside the gate and yell at Whites, Latinos, and East and South Asian students, staff, and faculty
as they entered the university She accused them of having stolen her sofa and of selling her into slavery
She always winked at the Blacks, though we didn't wink back. Some of us thought her outbursts bigoted and out of step
with the burgeoning ethos of multicultural-ism and "rainbow coalitions." But others did not wink back because we were too fearful of the
possibility that her isolation would become our isolation, and we had come to Columbia for the precise, though largely assumed and unspoken,
purpose of foreclosing on that peril. Besides,
people said she was crazy. Later, when I attended the University of California
Berkeley, I saw a Native American man sitting on the sidewalk of Telegraph Avenue. On the ground in
front of him was an upside-down hat and a sign informing pedestrians that here they could settle the
"Land Lease Accounts" that they had neglected to settle all of their lives. He, too, was "crazy."
at
Leaving aside for the moment
their state of mind, \. Thus, they would have to be crazy, crazy enough to call not merely the actions of the world but the world itself to account, and to account for them no less! The woman at Columbia was not demanding to be a participant in an unethical network of distribution: she
was not demanding a place within capital, a piece of the pie (the demand for her sofa notwithstanding). Rather, she was articulating a triangulation between two things. On the one hand was the loss of her body, the very dereliction of her corporeal integrity, what Hortense Spillers charts
as the transition from being a being to becoming a "being for the captor,"1 the drama of value (the stage on which surplus value is extracted from labor power through commodity production and sale). On the other was the corporeal integrity that, once ripped from her body, fortified
and extended the corporeal integrity of everyone else on the street. She gave birth to the commodity and to the Human, yet she had neither subjectivity nor a sofa to show for it. In her eyes, the world—not its myriad discriminatory practices, but the world itself—was unethical. And yet,
the world passes by her without the slightest inclination to stop and disabuse her of her claim. Instead, it calls her "crazy." And to what does the world attribute the Native American mans insanity? "He's crazy if he thinks he's getting any money out of us"? Surely, that doesn't make him
crazy. Rather it is simply an indication that he does not have a big enough gun. What are we to make of a world that responds to the most lucid enunciation of ethics with violence? What are the foundational questions of the ethico-political? Why are these questions so scandalous that
they are rarely posed politically, intellectually, and cinematically—unless they are posed obliquely and unconsciously, as if by accident? Give Turtle Island back to the "Savage." Give life itself back to the Slave. Two simple sen-tences, fourteen simple words, and the structure of U.S. (and
perhaps global) antagonisms would be dismantled. An "ethical modernity" would no longer sound like an oxymoron. From there we could busy ourselves with important conflicts that have been promoted to the level of antagonisms, such as class struggle, gender conflict, and immigrants'
rights. One cannot but wonder why questions that go to the heart of the ethico-political, questions of political ontology, are so unspeakable in intellectual meditations, political broadsides, and even socially and politically engaged feature films. Clearly they can be spoken, even a child
could speak those lines, so they would pose no problem for a scholar, an activist, or a filmmaker. And yet, what is also clear—if the filmogra-phies of socially and politically engaged directors, the archive of progressive scholars, and the plethora of left-wing broadsides are anything to go
by—is that what can so easily be spoken is now (500 years and 250 million Settlers/Masters on) so ubiquitously unspoken that these two simple sentences, these fourteen words not only render their speaker "crazy" but become themselves impossible to imagine
Observation 2- The Advocacy
Thus Like the lady in front of Columbia demanding her couch the aff places the
impossible demand on the United states to recognize itself as an authoritarian regime
and cease its internal military aid.
Wilderson ’10 (Frank B. Wilderson, Professor of African American Studies @ UC Irvine, 2010, “Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the
Structure of U.S. Antagonisms” pg. 1-5)NJW
WHEN i WAS a young student at Columbia University in New York there was a Black woman who used to stand outside the gate and yell at Whites, Latinos, and East and South Asian students,
staff, and faculty as they entered the university She accused them of having stolen her sofa and of selling her into slavery She always winked at the Blacks, though we didn't wink back. Some of
us thought her outbursts bigoted and out of step with the burgeoning ethos of multicultural-ism and "rainbow coalitions." But others did not wink back because we were too fearful of the
possibility that her isolation would become our isolation, and we had come to Columbia for the precise, though largely assumed and unspoken, purpose of foreclosing on that peril. Besides,
people said she was crazy. Later, when I attended the University of California at Berkeley, I saw a Native American man sitting on the sidewalk of Telegraph Avenue. On the ground in front of
him was an upside-down hat and a sign informing pedestrians that here they could settle the "Land Lease Accounts" that they had neglected to settle all of their lives. He, too, was "crazy."
Thus, they would have to be crazy, crazy enough to call not merely the
actions of the world but the world itself to account, and to account for them no less! The woman at
Columbia was not demanding to be a participant in an unethical network of distribution: she was not
demanding a place within capital, a piece of the pie (the demand for her sofa notwithstanding). Rather, she
was articulating a triangulation between two things. On the one hand was the loss of her body, the very dereliction of
her corporeal integrity, what Hortense Spillers charts as the transition from being a being to becoming a "being for the captor,"1 the drama of value (the stage on which surplus value is
Leaving aside for the moment their state of mind, \.
extracted from la
through commodity production and sale). On the other was the corporeal integrity that, once ripped from her body, fortified
and extended the corporeal integrity of everyone else on the street. She gave birth to the commodity and to the Human, yet she had
neither subjectivity nor a sofa to show for it. In her eyes, the world—not its myriad discriminatory practices, but the world itself—was unethical. And
yet, the world passes by her without the slightest inclination to stop and disabuse her of her claim.
Instead, it calls her "crazy." And to what does the world attribute the Native American mans insanity?
"He's crazy if he thinks he's getting any money out of us"? Surely, that doesn't make him crazy. Rather it
is simply an indication that he does not have a big enough gun. What are we to make of a world that responds to the most lucid
bor power
enunciation of ethics with violence? What are the foundational questions of the ethico-political? Why are these questions so scandalous that they are rarely posed politically, intellectually, and
Give Turtle Island back to the "Savage." Give life itself
back to the Slave. Two simple sen-tences, fourteen simple words, and the structure of U.S. (and perhaps
global) antagonisms would be dismantled. An "ethical modernity" would no longer sound like an oxymoron. From there we could busy ourselves with
cinematically—unless they are posed obliquely and unconsciously, as if by accident?
important conflicts that have been promoted to the level of antagonisms, such as class struggle, gender conflict, and immigrants' rights. One cannot but wonder why questions that go to the
heart of the ethico-political, questions of political ontology, are so unspeakable in intellectual meditations, political broadsides, and even socially and politically engaged feature films. Clearly
they can be spoken, even a child could speak those lines, so they would pose no problem for a scholar, an activist, or a filmmaker. And yet, what is also clear—if the filmogra-phies of socially
and politically engaged directors, the archive of progressive scholars, and the plethora of left-wing broadsides are anything to go by—is that what can so easily be spoken is now (500 years and
these fourteen words not only render their speaker
"crazy" but become themselves impossible to imagine
250 million Settlers/Masters on) so ubiquitously unspoken that these two simple sentences,
Observation 3-Solvency
The insistence on a politics of impossibility affirms a political strategy capable of
reorienting society towards liberation. The decision to act, even knowing that failure
may ensue, is a necessary tactic of bodies defined outside the definition of life by the
state
Taryn ’14 (Jordan, "The Politics of Impossibility: CeCe McDonald and Trayvon Martin— the Bursting of
Black Rage." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2014.)Wardn/NJW
politics of impossibility is a way to name our era
I see the
possibility in impossibility as a larger political strategy that is interested in a strategic reorganization
of society towards liberatory pursuits. To understand what is possible in the impossibility is to become
comfortable with the possibility of failure. One must not think only of the outcome of an action
instead the possibility in impossible politics is focused upon the decision to act, with the intention that
action may result in something, but knowing deep inside it may result in failure or something else
entirely Hence the need for a politics of impossibility that is expansive in its interventions in our current
moment; it requires a diversity of tactics for non-beings within a complex web of relationality and
kinship.
to think of the implications of a politics that calls
into question the very foundation of the nation- state.
The
of neoliberal individualist, post- race and post-feminist time. In other words we live in a post – post impossible political reality;
.
I find our era of impossibility, with all of its sharp edges and devastating reality, hopeful; it is not too soon... or too late to begin
Thus impossible demands affirming the black positionality are key to the destruction
of civil society as we know it.
(Frank B. Wilderson, Professor of African American Studies @ UC Irvine, “The Prison Slave
as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal”, 2003)
There is something organic to black positionality that makes it essential to the destruction of civil
society. There is nothing willful or speculative in this statement, for one could just as well state the claim the other way around: There is
something organic to civil society that makes it essential to the destruction of the Black body. Blackness is a positionality of
"absolute dereliction" (Fanon), abandonment, in the face of civil society, and therefore cannot establish itself, or be
established, through hegemonic interventions. Blackness cannot become one of civil society's many junior partners:
Black citizenship, or Black civic obligation, are oxymorons.
The Role of the ballot in this debate to endorse the debater who best preforms their
method in route to liberation of the oppressed. 2 reasons
1. Anti-Blackness structurally underpins all violence—while racialized violence is still a
daily reality for people, the rhetoric of “oppression” or “exploitation” alone asks only
how we might redeem this failed American experiment. There is no analogy for the
structural suffering of the Black subject, meaning authentic engagement with social
violence must begin with the anti-human void known as Blackness
(Yumi Pak ‘12, PhD in literature from UC-San Diego, “Outside Relationality: Autobiographical
Deformations and the Literary Lineage of Afro-pessimism in 20th and 21st Century African American
Literature,” Dissertation through Proquest)NJW
Because the four authors I examine focus intensively on untangling and retangling the nexus of race, gender, and sexuality in autobiographical narratives, this project originally relied most heavily on the frameworks provided by queer theory and performance studies, as the structural
organization and methodology behind both disciplines offered the characteristic of being “‘inter’ – in between... intergenric (sic), interdisciplinary, intercultural – and therefore inherently unstable” (“What is Performance Studies Anyway?” 360). My abstract ideation of the dissertation was
one which conceptualized the unloosening of the authors’ respective texts from the ways in which they have been read in particular genres. Yet the investigative progression of my research redirected me to question the despondency I found within Toomer, Himes, Baldwin and Jones’ novels,
What does it mean,
to suffer beyond the
individual, beyond the collective, and into the far reaches of paradigmatic structure What does it mean to
exist beyond “social oppression” and veer into
structural suffering
a despondency and sorrow that seemed to reach beyond the individual and collective purportedly represented in these works.
they seem to speculate,
?
instead
what Frank B. Wilderson, III calls “
” (Red, White & Black 36)? Briefly, Wilderson utilizes what he calls
Others may be oppressed,
indeed, may suffer
but only the black, the paradigmatic slave, suffers structurally
The structural
suffering of blackness seeps into all elements of American history, culture, and life
To theorize blackness is to begin with the slave ship, in a space that
is in actuality no place
is not only the complete and total deracination of
native from soil, but rather the evisceration of subjectivity from blackness, the evacuation of will and
desire from the body in other words, we see that even before the black body there is flesh, “that zero
degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or
the reflexes of iconography” (67). Black flesh, which arrives in the United States to be manipulated and
utilized as slave bodies
“seared, divided, ripped-apartness
Frantz Fanon’s splitting of “the hair(s) between social oppression and structural suffering”; in other words, Wilderson refutes the possibility of analogizing blackness with any other positionality in the world.
experientially,
. Afro-pessimism, the theoretical means by which I
attempt to answer this query, provides the integral term and parameters with which I bind together queer theory, performance studies, and autobiography studies in order to propose a re-examination of these authors and their texts.
, and thus I begin my discussion with an analysis of Hortense
Spillers’ concept of an American grammar in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.”
.7 In discussing the transportation of human cargo across the Middle Passage, Spillers writes that this physical theft of bod ies was “a willful and violent (and unimaginable from this distance) severing of the captive body from its
motive will, its active desire” (Spillers 67). She contends here that in this mass gathering and transportation, what becomes illuminated
;
, is “a primary narrative” with its
, riveted to the ship’s hole, fallen, or ‘escaped’ overboard” (67). These markings – “lacerations,
woundings, fissures, tears, scars, openings, ruptures, lesions, rendings, punctures of the flesh” – are indicative of the sheer scale of the structural violence amassed against blackness, and from this beginning Spillers culls an “American grammar” that grounds itself in the “rupture and a
radically different kind of cultural continuation,” a grammar that is the fabric of blackness in the United States (67, 68).
riveted to the ship’s hole, fallen, or ‘escaped’ overboard” (67). These
markings – “lacerations, woundings, fissures, tears, scars, openings, ruptures, lesions, rendings, punctures of the flesh” – are indicative of the sheer scale of the structural violence amassed
against blackness, and from this beginning Spillers culls an “American grammar” that grounds itself in the “rupture and a radically different kind of cultural continuation,” a grammar that
“Africans went into the ships and came out as Blacks” (Red,
in the same moment they are (re)born as blacks, they are doomed to death as slaves. This
is the fabric of blackness in the United States (67, 68). As Wilderson observes,
White & Black 38). In other words,
rupture, I argue, is evident in the definitions of slavery set forth by Orlando Patterson in his seminal volume, Slavery and Social Death: natal alienation, general dishonor and openness to
gratuitous violence. The captive body, which is constructed with torn flesh, is laid bare to any and all, and it is critical to note here that Patterson, in line with Afro-pessimists, does not
what defines him/her as such is that as a dishonored and violated object, the master’s whims for
can be carried out without ramifications. Rather, the slave’s powerlessness is heightened to the greatest possible capacity,
align slavery with labor. The slave can – and did – work, but
him/her to work, or not work,
wherein s/he is marked by social death and the “permanent, violent domination” of their selves (Patterson 13). Spillers’ “radically different kind of cultural continuation” finds an
articulation of the object status of blackness in the United States, one which impugns the separation of “slave” and “black.” As Jared Sexton and Huey Copeland inquire, “[h]ow might it
feel to be… a scandal to ontology, an outrage to every marker of the human? What, in the final analysis, does it mean to suffer?” (Sexton and Copeland 53). Blackness functions as a
black suffering forms the ethical backbone of civil society. He writes, [c]hattel
slavery did not simply reterritorialize the ontology of the African. It also created the Human out of cultural disparate identities from Europe to the
scandal to ontology because, as Wilderson states,
East… Put another way, through chattel slavery the world gave birth and coherence to both its joys of domesticity and to its struggles of political discontent, and with these joys and
the Human was born, but not before it murdered the Black, forging a symbiosis between the
political ontology of Humanity and the social death of Blacks. (Red, White & Black 20 – 21) Again, the African is made black,
and in this murder both ontological and physical, humanity gains its coherence. It is not my intention (nor of other Afropessimists) to argue that violence has only ever been committed against black individuals and communities in the United States, or in the world, but rather that the structural
suffering that defines blackness, the violence enacted against blackness to maintain its positioning
outside of civil society, that demarcates the black as slave, has no horizontal equivalent and, indeed,
provides the logical ethos of existence for all othered subjectivities; by this I mean that all other subjects (and I use this
word quite intentionally) retain a body and not the zero degree of flesh. As Sexton writes, “we might say of the colonized: you may lose your
motherland, but you will not ‘lose your mother’ (Hartman 2007)” (“The Curtain of the Sky” 14). This is precisely why Sexton offers the succinct definition of Afro-pessimism as
“a political ontology dividing the Slave from the world of the Human in a constitutive way” (“The Social Life of Social
struggles,
Death” 23). Furthermore, Afro-pessimists contest the idea that the modern world is one wherein the price of labor determines the price of being equally for all people. In this capitalistic
reading of the world, we summon blacks back into civil society by utilizing Marxism to assume “a subaltern structured by capital, not by white supremacy” (“Gramsci’s Black Marx” 1).
what defines
enslavement is accumulation and fungibility, alongside natal alienation, general dishonor, and
openness to gratuitous violence; the slave, then, is not constituted as part of the class struggle. 8 While it is true “that
labor power is exploited and that the worker is alienated in it,” it is also true that “workers labor on the commodity, they are not the
commodity itself, their labor power is” (Red, White & Black 50). The slave is, then, invisible within this matrix, and, to a more detrimental effect, invisible
While it is undeniable, of course, that black bodies and labor were used to aid in the economic growth of the United States, we return again to the point that
within the ontology of lived subjects entirely. The slave cannot be defined as loss – as can the postcolonial subject, the woman, or the immigrant – but can only be configured as lack, as
there is no potential for synthesis within a rubric of antagonism. Wilderson sets up the phrase “rubric of antagonism” in opposition to “rubric of conflict” to clarify the positionality of
blacks outside relationality. The former is “an irreconcilable struggle between entities, or positions, the resolution of which is not dialectical but entails the obliteration of one of the
positions,” whereas the latter is “a rubric of problems that can be posed and conceptually solved” (Red, White & Black 5). He continues, “[i]f
a Black is the very antithesis
of a Human subject… then his or her paradigmatic exile is not simply a function of repressive practices on the part of institutions” (9). Integrating Hegel and Marx, and
returning to Spillers, Wilderson argues that within this grammar of suffering, the slave is not a laborer but what he calls “antiHuman, against which Humanity establishes, maintains, and
In contrast to imagining the black other in opposition to whiteness, Wilderson and
blackness as being absent in the dialectic, as “anti-Human.”
renews its coherence, its corporeal integrity” (11).
other Afro-pessimists theorize
2. Blackness is the prior ontological void upon which the rest of society is constructed.
Pak 12 (Yumi, PhD in literature from UC-San Diego, “Outside Relationality: Autobiographical Deformations and the Literary Lineage of Afro-pessimism in 20th
and 21st Century African American Literature,” 2012. Dissertation through Proquest)
I turn here to Hartman’s work in African American cultural studies, wherein she problematizes the notion of empathy as a useful or neutral structure of feeling. In Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, Hartman recounts John Rankin’s letter
to his brother, where he describes how deeply moved he was after witnessing a slave coffle. He writes that his imagination forces him to believe, “‘for the moment, that I myself was a slave, and with my wife and children placed under the reign of terror. I began in reality to feel for
myself, my wife, and my children’” (Scenes of Subjection 18, emphasis mine). This notation of beginning to “feel,” where the feeling supplants “reality,” is the point of Hartman’s contention and my intervention. As she writes, “in making the slave’s suffering his own, Rankin begins to feel
for himself rather than for those whom this exercise in imagination presumably is designed to read.” Or, in other words, “the ease of Rankin’s empathic identification is as much due to his good intentions and heartfelt opposition to slavery as to the fungibility of the captive body” (19).
Rankin can feel black because blackness is fungible: blackness is simultaneously tradable and replaceable. This is precisely what Wilderson critiques as the “ruse of analogy.” He writes that this ruse “erroneously locates Blacks in the world – a place where they have not been since the
dawning of Blackness,” and continues that this attempt at “analogy is not only a mystification, and often erasure, of Blackness’s grammar of suffering” (Red, White & Black 37). In other words, Rankin is able to feel for himself, his wife and his children precisely because the slave is erased
in that feeling. He reads himself as analogous to the slave as a means of understanding his subject status when that analogy misreads and misplaces blackness. I contend Himes is making the same argument: by creating a figure that critically displaces the idea of a “shared humanity,” by
making Jimmy white, he negates an identificatory practice which grounds itself on an eventual recognition of subjectivity, or an insertion into civil society. Hence, Himes voids the novel of blackness (except for the most periphery figures) precisely because blackness is constituted through
the absence of relationality itself. Furthermore, I posit that Jimmy’s whiteness is symptomatic of Afro-pessimism via the quandary David Marriott poses in his scholarship, where he challenges us to question “how we can understand black identity when, through an act of mimetic desire,
this identity already gets constructed as white” (Haunted Life 208). Marriott re-reads Fanon’s seminal encounter with a young white boy in Black Skin, White Masks, and an anecdote of a little black girl attempting to scrub herself clean of racial markings, not as encounters of
interpellation, but as intensely fraught moments of violent phobic recognition of the self as something hateful and hated. Marriott states, “[i]n these two scenes a suppressed but noticeable anger and confusion arises in response to the intruding other” (the other being the little white
child for Fanon, and her own image for the little girl) and that this response has “to do with the realization that the other, as racial imago, has already occupied and split the subject’s ego” (210).49 It is not that blackness is set in Hegelian opposition to whiteness as the O/other, but rather
blackness is not “something missing,” but “the addition of
something
that fragments the body
.” This “addition” of blackness results in
“the self’s desire to hurt
blackness is null and void. The black body is occupied by a white unconscious,
.
that blackness is dependent on whiteness always already having been present. In other words,
undesirable and dirty
rather
by destroying all positive semblances of the self
the imago of the body in a passionate bid to escape it” (210). In this reading of Fanon, Marriott offers his contribution to the field of Afro-pessimism: even on a psychic level, within the discourse of self and ontology,
one that loves his/herself as white, and hates his/herself as black 50 As
Marriott writes in the introduction to On Black Men, “[t]he black man is, in other words, everything that the wishful-shameful fantasies of culture want him to be, an enigma of inversion and of hate – and this is our existence as men, as black men” (On Black Men x). themselves,” that
indeed, “this prototypical identification with whiteness” is “a foundational culture and tradition which can be neither avoid ed nor eluded” (55 – 56). The absence of a black interiority is also addressed by Kevin Bell as he examines the 1953 meeting between Himes, Richard Wright and
James Baldwin at Les Deux Magots in Paris. Bell writes that many of Himes’s literary contemporaries, including Wright and Baldwin, are mostly invested in “sonorities, colors, and movements that... constitute little more than added flavorings, punct uations and accents by which to
augment an already- established, normative ‘white’ interiority” (“Assuming” 853). This is in contrast to Himes, who waylays coherence and a structured black subjectivity for the “suffocating thickness of a crazy, wild-eyed feeling” which is the discord always present in the black
unconscious, or the realization that one has always been, and will always be, at war with oneself (856). Jimmy thinks that “he could see his mind standing just beyond his reach, like a white, weightl ess skeleton” (Yesterday 52). His mind is not his to grasp, always “just beyond his reach,”
it is impossible to bring blackness into relationality, or to
enfold him within civil society.
t]he black man can
destroy America completely, destroy it as a nation of any consequence.
. It can be
destroyed completely
to make blackness relational is to lead to the incoherence and
dismantling of civil society as it currently stands.
and is imagined as a white figure of death.
It is impossible to incorporate Jimmy and his mind in much the same way as
To do so would lead to the logical unfolding present in Wilderson’s work, and one which Himes’ articulates forty years earlier during an interview: “[
It can just fritter away in the world
” (“My Man Himes” 46). In other words,
Radical Politics demand the questioning of U.S ethics and existence-Paradigmatic
analysis resolves this as it poses the necessary questions
Wilderson 2010 (Frank, Associate Professor at UC Irvine’s Department of Drama and African American Studies, Red,
White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, 8-10, )
Soon it will be forty years since radical politics, Left-leaning scholarship, and socially engaged feature films began to speak the unspeakable .ii In the 1960s and early 1970s
scholarship were not “Should the U.S. be overthrown
the questions asked by radical politics and
but rather when and how
?” or even “Would it be overthrown?”
—and, for some, what—would
come in its wake. Those steadfast in their conviction that there remained a discernable quantum of ethics in the U.S. writ large (and here I am speaking of everyone from Martin Luther King, Jr., prior to his 1968 shift, to the Tom Hayden wing of SDS, to the Julian Bond and Marion Barry
Radicals and progressives
could not dismiss revolution-as-ethic because they
could not make a convincing case—by way of a paradigmatic analysis—that the U.S. was an ethical
formation and still hope to maintain credibility as radicals and progressives.
faction of SNCC, to Bobbie Kennedy Democrats) were accountable, in their rhetorical machinations, to the paradigmatic zeitgeist of the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, and the Weather Underground.
could deride, reject, or chastise armed struggle mercilessly and cavalierly with respect to tactics and the possibility of “success,” but they
Even Bobby Kennedy (a U.S. attorney general and presidential candidate)
mused that the law and its enforcers had no ethical standing in the presence of Blacks.iii One could (and many did) acknowledge America’s strength and power. This seldom, however, rose to the level of an ethical assessment, but rather remained an assessment of the so-called “balance
The political discourse of Blacks,
, circulated too widely to credibly wed the U.S. and
ethics
the power of Blackness and Redness to pose the
question—and the power to pose the question is the greatest power of all
of forces.”
and to a lesser extent Indians
. The raw force of COINTELPRO put an end to this trajectory toward a possible hegemony of ethical accountability. Consequently,
—retreated as did White radicals and progressives who “retired” from struggle. The
question’s echo lies buried in the graves of young Black Panthers, AIM Warriors, and Black Liberation Army soldiers, or in prison cells where so many of them have been rotting (some in solitary confinement) for ten, twenty, thirty years, and at the gates of the academy where the
“crazies” shout at passers-by. Gone are not only the young and vibrant voices that affected a seismic shift on the political landscape, but also the intellectual protocols of inquiry, and with them a spate of feature films that became authorized, if not by an unabashed revolutionary polemic,
then certainly by a revolutionary zeitgeist
The affirmative is a performance of self-abolition, as a non-black indiviudal. This
negative identity politics does not seek to remedy lost wholeness, but rather to call
the entire framework of humanity into question.
Aarons 16 ~K, researcher in philosophy, Meta Mute, NO SELVES TO ABOLISH: AFROPESSIMISM, ANTI-POLITICS AND THE END OF THE
WORLD, http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/no-selves-to-abolish-afropessimism-anti-politics-and-end-world ZH
It is on the basis of this orienting problematic of social death that
afropessimists attempt to demonstrate the one-sided,
regional, and limited character of Marxist, anarchist, feminist, and post-colonial visions of emancipation.
Each of these traditions remains external to the paradigm of Blackness because of the way in which their
grammar of suffering frames the subject of revolutionary practice – the working class, the subaltern,
non-Black women – on the basis of ‘mediating objects’ that allow it to analogise itself with White civil
society, and which in each case are absent and unavailable to those positioned by social death. Such
mediating objects can include ‘land, labour-power, and cultural artefacts (such as language and customs)’. As Wilderson writes, ‘social
death is a condition, void, not of land, but of a capacity to secure relational status through
transindividual objects – be those objects elaborated by land, labour, or love’. [7] Since the ability to analogise or
humanise oneself is the condition of a struggle in which the social coordinates of identity can serve as an
orienting axis for struggle – i.e. it is the condition of any positive identity politics, wherein one seeks to
valorise and augment the social standing or symbolic caché of one’s group either by recognition from
the State, or by constituting a community bound together by common values, cultural and familial ties,
etc. – those who struggle against oppression therefore need to consider the difference between those
groups accorded a sufficient quanta of social capital to become ‘junior partners’ of White civil society
and Black subjects who remain shut out of this economy of symbolic recognition. In short – and this
point really cannot be overemphasised – if afropessimism is anything, it is the wreck of affirmative
identity politics, both Black and non-Black: whereas Black existence is stripped of the symbolic ‘capacity’ to lastingly transform dominant
structures of signification (at least, through hegemonic means), since its gestures don’t register in the symbolic except on condition of being
structurally ‘whitened’, White life cannot effect such shifts ‘in the name of Black existence’ without reinforcing the latter’s nullity at the same
time, by speaking in a voice that precisely draws its signifying power from Black nihilation. Black
and non-Black identity
politicians who nonetheless continue to pursue a symbolic valorisation of Black life (e.g. in certain
currents of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement) do so only provided they ‘structurally adjust’ or whiten
the grammar of Black suffering to suit a Human grammar. In this way, rather than seeking a way out of the desert, they in
fact only deepen it. Autonomy and Self-Abolition [We live in a period in which] the struggle to defend one’s condition tends to merge with the
struggle against one’s condition. [8] I take it to be a libertarian axiom of our times that, where it is desired, autonomous organisation around
one’s own characteristic grammar of suffering is a non-negotiable condition of struggle. [9]What interests me is how groups can orient
themselves in their struggles around the specificity of the suffering they experience, without attempting to lay claim to a positivity for
themselves on the basis of transindividual objects unavailable to Black flesh, thereby crowding out a linkage between these other struggles and
Blackness. How
can non-Black persons who are struggling against the miserable lives they are offered do
so in ways that do not, as Wilderson puts it, ‘fortify and extend the interlocutory life’ of the anti-Black
existential commons? A few preliminary theses can be outlined from outset, which take the form of
rhetorical and practical strategies that must be avoided across the board. 1. We must reject any appeal
to the register of ‘innocence’. To claim that someone deserves freedom or protection because of an
absence of transgression – that one is experiencing ‘undeserved’ oppression – implicitly distances
oneself from the a priori or gratuitous nature of the violence that the Black body magnetises, the
tautological absence of any pretence that occasions it. This would be a baseline: stop defending one’s ‘innocence’. [ HYPERLINK
"http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/no-selves-to-abolish-afropessimism-anti-politics-and-end-world"10 HYPERLINK
"http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/no-selves-to-abolish-afropessimism-anti-politics-and-end-world"] 2.
Should a chain of
local revolts spread and intensify to the point where it manages to destitute the constituted power
structures enveloping us, collapsing their symbolic hold over the hearts and minds of its subjects and
exposing the coup de force that always underpins them, we must attack any effort to replace it with a
newly signifying ‘constituent power’. As some friends stated recently, The legitimacy of ‘the people’, ‘the
oppressed’, the ‘99%’ is the Trojan horse by which the constituent is smuggled back into insurrectionary
destitution. This is the surest method for undoing an insurrection – one that doesn’t even require defeating it in the streets. To make the
destitution irreversible, therefore, we must begin by abandoning our own legitimacy. We have to give up the idea that one
makes the revolution in the name of something, that there’s a fundamentally just and innocent entity
which the revolutionary forces would have the task of representing. One doesn’t bring power down to earth in order
to raise oneself above the heavens. [11] 3. In other words, the revolutionary process must not be understood as the
constitution of a new law or constituent social body, but should rather be measured by our capacity to
destitute the governmental and economic mechanisms of labour, and of the capture of life more
broadly. Beyond the simple destruction of power lies its deactivation. [12] 4. We must call into question the entire
framework of expropriation in the widest sense of the term: the expropriation of once-possessed land,
of culture, of relational capacity and of labour from the hands of the State and the capitalist, patriarchal
class. We must no longer envision the remedy for suffering as entailing the recovery of a lost
wholeness, entitlement or plenitude of which one is presently deprived. This is undoubtedly a more difficult
conversation (particularly in the case of indigenous struggles), but one which I think is worth having. In the past 15 years of radical feminist,
anarchist, queer and left-communist theory, we can see a widespread tendency to gravitate in the direction of thoughts such as these. What
cuts across these tendencies and links them to one another beyond their otherwise significant differences is the way people have begun to
wrestle seriously with a fundamental tension that will animate any future revolutionary or insurrectional practice to come, namely, the tension
between autonomy and self-abolition. Though with very different emphases, this tension between autonomist organisation and identity
abolitionism can be found in Tiqqun, in US insurrectionary queer anarchism of the late 2000’s (e.g. the informal Bash Back! network), recent
currents in materialist and nihilist feminism, as well as in communisation theory (journals like Théorie Communiste, Troploin, Meeting, Riff Raff,
Endnotes, Blaumachen, Sic, etc.). A few quotes might serve to illustrate this tension: Autonomy
is a means by which we develop
shared affinities as a basis for abolishing the relations of domination that make that self-organization
necessary. And yet, even as we do this, we want to be freed of the social relations that make us into
women, queers, women of colour, trans*, et cetera. We want to be liberated from these categories
themselves, but experience teaches us that the only way out is through. LIES: A Journal of Materialist Feminism [13] Identity Politics
are fundamentally reformist and seek to find a more favourable relationship between different subject
positions rather than to abolish the structures that produce those positions from the beginning. Identity
politicians oppose ‘classism’ while being content to leave class society intact. Any resistance to society
must foreground the destruction of the subjectifying processes that reproduce society daily, and must
destroy the institutions and practices that racialise and engender bodies within the social order. […] With
the revolution complete and the black flag burned, the category of queer must too be destroyed. […] [Bash Back] isn’t
about sustaining identities, it’s about destroying them. Queer Ultraviolence: A Bash Back! Anthology [14] [I]t is no longer
possible to imagine a transition to communism on the basis of a prior victory of the working class as working class. […] There is nothing to
affirm in the capitalist class relation; no autonomy, no alternative, no outside, no secession. […] [I]n any actual supersession of the capitalist
class relation we ourselves must be overcome; ‘we’ have no ‘position’ apart from the capitalist class relation…[I]t is a rupture with the
reproduction of what we are that will necessarily form the horizon of our struggles. Endnotes [15] Despite
tremendous and
certainly irreconcilable differences between these groups, what these theoretical camps share is the
assumption that an overcoming of the existing conditions of suffering and exploitation will ultimately
require not a valorisation, empowerment, or even autonomisation of presently existing oppressed
subject positions, but rather the simultaneous abolition of the conditions of oppression and the social
relations and the identities they produce: the liquidation rather than the consolidation and
empowerment of identity. This emphasis on the liquidation of present forms of desire, selfidentification, and subjectification is arguably something relatively ‘new’. For example, it very clearly runs counter to
classical anarchism’s emphasis on individual self-expression, freedom and the like. As some friends recently pointed out, For more than a
century, the figure of the anarchist indicate[d] the most extreme point of western civilization. The anarchist is the point where the most hardlined affirmation of all western fictions – the individual, freedom, free will, justice, the death of god – coincides with the most declamatory
negation. The anarchist is a western negation of the west. [16] We
might do well to ask whether, from an afropessimist
point of view, insurrectional anarchism, queer theory and communisation theory remain ‘humanist
negations of the Human’? If so, is this necessarily so? My hypothesis is this: to the extent that they can
escape this, it is in the direction of a thought of self-abolition. That is, to the extent that struggles
actively refuse to validate, affirm, or strengthen the forms of subjectivity presently produced under
capitalism, white supremacy and cis-sexist patriarchy, these struggles can be potentially aligned with –
or at least, less likely to stomp all over – the Black struggle against its own objecthood. [17] Self-abolition
therefore constitutes the only possible horizon for a non-Black struggle that does not reinforce antiBlackness. This leads to what might be characterised as a negative identity politics. [18] Put differently, when
read through an afropessimist logic (as I understand it), what is vital in the queer, anarchist or communist tendencies toward self-abolition is
generally not their theorisation of race, which often remains unsatisfactory, [19] but their tendency to locate the means and aims of
revolutionary struggle in the immediate self-abolition of and by their respectively oppressed group per se. Though this may take its point of
departure from a grammar of suffering marked by the exploitation of variable capital, or the marginalisation of one’s queer identity, both of
which constitute ‘Human grammars’ on Wilderson’s reading, by refusing to regard the plenitude of existing subjectivity (labour power, or the
marginalised subjectivity of queers, etc.) [20] as in need of affirmation, they at least potentially avoid recomposing the human community
around this same grammar and community, thereby opening up the possibility for an overlap with the struggle against White supremacy from
other directions. Since
it draws its affective coordinates not from Black suffering (analogy) but from a
disidentification with the human community emerging from the position in which it occupies, selfabolition remains a regulative idea rather than an actionable maxim. The role of it as an idea is to confer
a sort of negative coherency on empirical acts. Again, that this must be ideational rather than
empirically empathic is necessitated by the ‘ruse of analogy’, i.e. the fact that Black suffering cannot
appear phenomenally to non-Black bodies except on condition of being ‘structurally adjusted’ to nonBlack grammars. Hence there is only an indirect or ideational liaison between these paradigms, i.e.
between the self-abolitionism of non-Black life and the anti-political program of the slave that
Wilderson (drawing from Césaire) distils into the phrase: ‘the end of the world’. As distinct ideas, selfabolition and the end of the world are not synthetic or integral. Instead, they are perhaps best
conceived of as parallel vectors, parallel precisely insofar as their potential crossing constitutes a
presently unthinkable vanishing point in socio-historical conjuncture. Despite this paradigmatic distance, the past year
has witnessed moments that defy this schema, moments in which, under the aleatory impetus of an event, the social hostility configuring each
line leads them to converge. This is what happened during the seventeen-day revolt in the San Francisco Bay Area following the Darren Wilson
non-guilty verdict in December of 2014, in which diverse groups of people were led to collectively block freeways, rail lines, roads and ports, to
frontally attack the police, as well as to paralyze the quotidian functioning of the metropolis through the widespread looting and destruction of
commercial spaces. Such intensely conflictual ruptures enact a kind of larval, potential, and fugitive convergence between paradigmatic lines,
yet whose miserable separation must resume as soon as order is restored on the ground, and the situation becomes once again governable. **
I will close with some tentative theses: 1. That we
find ourselves fighting a common enemy does not mean that we
have a common experience of that enemy, nor does it preclude the possibility that we may actually
stand in antagonistic relations to one another at another level. We must therefore reject any model of
solidarity premised on reciprocal recognition, on empathy, sympathy or charity, or on the assumption of common interests. 2.
The only consistent and honest fight is one we engage in for our own reasons, oriented immanently
around our own idea of happiness. By the latter is meant not an individual psychological state, but
rather the affective complicity and feeling of increased power that arises between people who, based
on a shared perception of the lines of force surrounding them, act together to polarise situational
conflicts in pursuit of ungovernable forms of life, in whatever experimental forms this might take in the
present. 3. If we [21] fight because our own lives compel us to, and it is our own idea of happiness that
orients us in these struggles, what is left of ‘anti-racist solidarity’? While the notion of a ‘solidarity’ with
Black suffering cannot be stripped of a certain paradigmatic incoherence, if it means anything at all it
must be premised not on an attempt to identify, recognise, or render visible Black suffering, but on a
disidentification with ourselves. That self-abolition is a regulative Idea means that it is inexistent in the
present. If my struggles can be said to align themselves with Black struggle, this is not in the moment I
declare my ‘support’ for it, or my willingness to be ‘authorised’ by whatever initiative the nearest Black
person is calling for. [22]Rather, it is when we collectively clear the path for an assault on the conditions
that enforce those identities which paradigmatically constitute a ‘self’ that we contribute to making
things easier for others. 4. At what Wilderson refers to as the ‘paradigmatic’ level, the geometry of self-abolitionist solidarity is
therefore one of parallel rather than convergent lines. My own struggles and those of the friends I’m closest to proceed as if along a parallel
line with the Black body’s struggle against objecthood or enslavedness, a struggle which we must make every effort to avoid obstructing as we
continue to dismantle the conditions reproducing our own identities. Perhaps we can put things this way: the
meeting point between
Blackness’s war on enslavedness and those who might envision themselves as its ‘allies’ is not in a
paradigmatic commonality to affirm between us; it lies, rather, in what we wish to negate in ourselves
that might free the way for us all to find something more powerful than the selves presently available to
us and denied to them. [23] 5. This nonlinear thought of self-abolition is not a re-centring of white or
non-Black identity, but rather decentring and multiplication of the fronts from which the material and
symbolic apparatus of Humanity can be destituted. To orient our struggles around such a paradigmatic geometry in no way
denies the importance of insurrectional moments such as the revolts in Ferguson, Oakland, Baltimore, etc. in which the aleatory power of
events led parallel lines to cross momentarily, producing explosive and fugitive moments in which distinct grammars of suffering pushed people
together into the same streets, elaborating shared gestures and complicities – rags, gasoline, knowing looks – that they might together attack
the forms of social mediation through which Humanity and anti-Black capitalism as a whole is reproduced. The fires started in these moments
still burn in the hearts of those who lived and witnessed them. Yet while their light may serve as a passional orientation for an uncertain future,
we need paradigmatic cartographies to pursue it.
Fairness claims are an attempt to create a white fantasy space that selectively
includes blacks and browns only to the point they’re willing to assimilate and uphold
the system.
Wilderson 2008
Frank B., Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid South End Press, pg. 406-411
Just two years ago, in December of 1999, I'd written a letter and stuffed it, late one night, in the faculty mailboxes. It began with what must have appeared to the faculty's confused eyes as a
red herring. It spoke not about my excruciating encounters with them, but began, instead, out of left field by discussing the plight of two students whose troubles with the College had been
the topic of recent debate. Reading of Sonia Rodriguez's and Selma Thornton's troubles with the Student Senate and its White liberal adviser Tim Harold reawakened my disdain for Cabrillo as
an institution and for the English Division as one of its flagship entities. I then went on to explain how Selma and Sonia had resigned their posts in the Student Senate in protest over Harold's
decision not to allow thirty students of color to have funds to travel to a conference on race at Hartnell College. Instead, Harold spent the money on T-shirts. He had also put the sign-up sheet
for the conference not in the Student Center, but in some obscure location where it would never be found thus sabotaging the excursion further. This seemed like a trivial enough matter, but
it compounded the hurt and sense of isolation and rebuke which so many Black and Latino students felt at Cabrillo but could not name. I felt a piqued kinship with their unspeakable pain and
used the rare moment of it having turned into a tangible event as a way into what I wanted to say to the faculty and administration...and to Alice. In defense of his actions, and as a way of
indicating the absurdity of Selma and Sonia's objections, Harold issued a public statement in which he did not comment (or at least the newspaper did not report his comments) on his funding
priorities; rather, he simply said "The sign-up sheet was posted for a week, the same way we treat any workshop." To this, I wrote: Whereas Selma Thornton attempts an institutional analysis
a ready made institutional defense and, later in the article, a
defense of his integrity (a personalized response to an institutional analysis). He brings the scale of abstraction back down to the level most
comfortable for White people: the individual and the uncontextualized realm of fair play. It's the White person's safety
zone. I'm a good person, I'm a fair person, I treat everyone equally, the rules apply to everyone. Thornton and Rodriguez's comments don't indict Harold for being a
"good" person, they indict him for being White: a way of being in the world which legitimates institutional practices (practices which
of the Student Senate by way of a critique of Tim Harold and his practices, Harold responds with
Thornton and Rodriguez object to) accepts, and promotes, them as timeless—without origin, consequence, interest, or allegiance—natural and inevitable. "The sign-up sheet was posted for a
week, the same way we treat any workshop."
The whole idea that we treat everyone equally is only slightly more odious than the discussion or how we
can treat everyone equally; because the problem is neither the practice nor the debates surrounding it, but the fact that White people can come together and wield enough institutional power
"We" are fair and
balanced is as odious as "We" are in control—they are derivations of the same expression: "We" are the
police. The claim of "balance and fair play" forecloses upon, not only the modest argument that the practices
of the Cabrillo Student Senate are racist and illegitimate, but it also forecloses upon the more extended, comprehensive, and antagonistic
argument that Cabrillo itself is racist and illegitimate. And what do we mean by Cabrillo? The White people who
constitute its fantasies of pleasure and its discourse of legitimacy. The generous "We." So, let's bust "We" wide open and start at the end:
to constitute a "We." "We" in the Student Senate, "We" in Aptos, "We" in Santa Cruz, "We" in the English department, "We" in the boardrooms.
White people are guilty until proven innocent. Fuck the compositional moves of substantiation and supporting evidence: I was at a conference in West Oakland last week where a thousand
Black folks substantiated it a thousand different ways. You're free to go to West Oakland, find them, talk to them, get all the proof you need. You can drive three hours to the mountains, so
you sure as hell can cut the time in half and drive to the inner city. Knock on any door. Anyone who knows 20 to 30 Black folks, intimately—and if you don't know 12 then you're not living in
Whites are guilty of being friends with each other, of
standing up for their rights, of pledging allegiance to the flag, of reproducing concepts like fairness, meritocracy, balance, standards, norms, harmony between the
races. Most of all. Whites are guilty of wanting stability and reform. White people, like Mr. Harold and those in the English Division, are
guilty of asking themselves the question. How can we maintain the maximum amount of order (liberals at
Cabrillo use euphemisms like peace, harmony, stability), with the minimum amount of change, while presenting ourselves—if but only to
ourselves—as having the best of all possible intentions. Good people. Good intentions. White people are the only species, human or otherwise, capable of
transforming the dross of good intentions into the gold of grand intentions, and naming it "change." ... These passive revolutions, fire and brimstone
conflicts over which institutional reform is better than the other one, provide a smoke screen—a diversionary
play of interlocutions—that keep real and necessary antagonisms at bay. White people are thus able to go home each night, perhaps a little
wounded, but feeling better for having made Cabrillo a better place...for everyone... Before such hubris at high places makes us all a
America, you're living in White America—knows the statement to be true. White people are guilty until proven innocent.
little too giddy, let me offer a cautionary note: it's scientifically impossible to manufacture shinola out of shit. But White liberals keep on trying and end up spending a lifetime not knowing shit
Because White people love their jobs, they love their institutions, they love their country, most of all they love each other. And every
Black or Brown body that doesn't love the things you love is a threat to your love for each other. A threat to your fantasy
space, your terrain of shared pleasures. Passive revolutions have a way of incorporating Black and Brown bodies to either term of the debate. What choice
does one have? The third (possible, but always unspoken) term of the debate, White people are guilty of structuring debates which
reproduce the institution and the institution reproduces America and America is always and everywhere a bad thing this term is never
from shinola.
on the table, because the level of abstraction is too high for White liberals. They've got too much at stake: their friends, their family, their way of life. Let's keep it all at eye level, where whites
can keep an eye on everything.
So the Black body is incorporated. Because to be unincorporated is to say that what White liberals find valuable I have no use for.
This, of course, is anti-institutional and shows a lack of breeding, not to mention a lack of gratitude for all the noblesse oblige which has been extended to the person of color to begin with.
We will incorporate colored folks into our fold, whenever possible and at our own pace, provided
they're team players, speak highly of us, pretend to care what we're thinking, are highly qualified, blah, blah, blah...but, and this is key, we won't entertain
the rancor which shits on our fantasy space. We've killed too many Indians, worked too many Chinese
and Chicano fingers to the bone, set in motion the incarcerated genocide of too many Black folks, and
we've spent too much time at the beach, or in our gardens, or hiking in the woods, or patting each other on the literary back, or teaching
"
Shakespeare and the Greeks, or drinking together to honor our dead at retirement parties ("Hell, Jerry White let's throw a party for Joe White and Jane White who gave Cabrillo the best White
years of their silly White lives, that we might all continue to do the same White thing." "Sounds good to me, Jack White. Say, you're a genius! Did you think of this party idea all on your own?"
"No, Jerry White, we've been doing it for years, makes us feel important. Without these parties we might actually be confronted by our political impotence, our collective spinelessness, our
insatiable appetite for gossip and administrative minutia, our fear of a Black Nation, our lack of will." "Whew! Jack White, we sound pathetic. We'd better throw that party pronto!" "White you
too much time White-bonding in an effort to forget how hard
we killed and to forget how many bones we walk across each day just to get from our bedrooms to
Cabrillo...too, too much for one of you coloreds to come in here and be so ungrateful as to tell us the
very terms of our precious debates are specious." But specious they are, as evidenced by recent uproar in the Adjunct vs. Minority
Hire debates, or whether or not English 100 students should be "normed." The very terms of the debates suture discussions around
White entitlement, when White entitlement is an odious idea. Whites are entitled to betray other Whites, nothing else... Beyond that
are, Jerry." "Jack White, you old fart, you, you're still a genius, heh, heh, heh.")
you're not entitled to anything. So how could you possibly be entitled to a job? How could you possibly be entitled to decide who should pass and who should fail? How could you possibly be
entitled to determining where the sign-up sheet for Diversity Day buses will or will not be placed, and how funds should be allocated? Okay...so some of you want to hire a "minority" as long
as s/he's "well mannered and won't stab us in the back after s/he's in our sacred house;" and some of you want to hire an adjunct (Jill or Jeffery White) because, "What the hell—they've been
around as long as Jack, Joe, Jerry, and Jane White, and shucks fair is fair, especially if you're entitled." And entitlement is a synonym for Whiteness. But there's only one job, because for years
you've complained about the gate, while breathing collective (meaning White) sighs of relief that it was there to protect you from the hordes. (Somewhere down the street in Watsonville an
Somewhere up the road in
Oakland a teen is going to San Quentin for writing graffiti on a wall. And you're in here trying to be "fair"
to each other, while promoting diversity—whatever that means. By the time you've arrived at a compromise over norming or faculty
immigrant is deciding whether to give his daughter or his wife up for the boss to fuck that he might have a job picking your fruit.
hires—your efforts to "enlighten" whoever doesn't die in the fields or fall from the earth into prison—the sista has been raped and the brotha busted. But then you've had a difficult day as
well.) So, do what you always do. Hire the most qualified candidate. Here are some questions and guidelines to speed the search committee on its way and make everyone feel entitled.
2AR