1
Counterplan text: The aff should enter into prior, binding, and genuine
consultation with niggas over whether we should affirm the affirmative’s
advocacy before reading it.
To clarify this is not one or a few black persons but niggas as a whole.
Consultation is a surrender to blackness rather than merely claiming proximity
to blackness – rewarding non-black people for their relationship to blackness is
bad—you don’t have the right to claim solidarity prior to binding genuine
consultation.
Brady and Murillo 2014 [Nicholas and John, “Black Imperative: A Forum on Solidarity in the Age of Coalition,”
January 26, 2014, http://outofnowhereblog.wordpress.com/2014/01/26/black-imperative-a-forum-on-solidarity-in-the-age-ofcoalition/, John Murillo III is a PhD student in the English department at Brown University, and a graduate of the University of
California, Irvine, with bachelor’s degrees in Cognitive Science and English. His research interests are broad, and include extensive
engagements with and within: Black Studies–particularly Afro-Pessimism–Narrative Theory; Theoretical Physics; Astrophysics;
Cosmology; and Neuroscience. Nicholas Brady is an activist-scholar from Baltimore, Maryland. He was also a recent graduate of
Johns Hopkins with a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and currently a doctoral student at the University of California-Irvine Culture
and Theory program.]
“Surrender to blackness.” A grammatical imperative. Grammatical because syntactically
it marks a command to or demand of a generalized addressee: “(Everyone) surrender to
blackness.” Grammatical because the black flesh scarred and tattooed by these illegible hieroglyphics
enunciates at the level of symbolic and ontological world orders: “Surrender to
blackness” is a command at the level of the foundations of thought and being
themselves; grammatical. Imperative because if there is any hope for a revolutionary
praxis along any lines—race, class, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability—it must centralize,
which is to say look in the face of, which is to say begin to the work of real love for, the blackness [preposition] which “an
authentic upheaval might be born.” #BlackPowerYellowPeril failed to recognize this imperative as legible, let alone heed and
meet its command/demand. Created by Suey Park (@suey_park), the hashtag sought to draw from and build upon the accomplishments of Black womyn
activists on twitter and tumblr who have long mobilized to generate productive and revolutionary interjections into the world’s violently antiblack
discourses (see, for example, #solidarityisforwhitewomen, and #blackmaleprivilege) through extended, communal commentary, usually in direct
opposition to the censoring strictures of any kind of respectability politics. Discussions about and within the hashtag can be found here, here, here,
here(though this is very hasty, a bit shortsighted, and still not doing much more than glancing at, as opposed to engaging blackness), and here. But
broadly, the intentions of the hashtag are founded upon a belief in the possibility of solidarity/coalition politics between Blacks and Asians, seeking to
challenge persistent “tensions” between the communities for the sake of a common struggle against ‘white supremacy.’
For those nonblack
participants, the drive toward solidarity represents a purely innocent and unquestioned, unquestionable,
desire. All critiques of Asian antiblackness are rendered as derailing the move toward solidarity,
for they are to bring up the obvious – clearly we are all human, we make mistakes, but to continuously bring up the
“mistakes” and never “move on” is to foreclose the possibility of solidarity. And what a
wonderful thing the blacks of the conversation were foreclosing – this solidarity thing. What a wonderful thing others were offering to us and we simply
yet, the unthought question remains: have you truly earned the right to
act in solidarity, to form solidarity, to even believe in solidarity? And what is this solidarity thing we all hold near and dear to our hearts?
would not take. And
Have we ever experienced it or do we simply have images we have transformed into memories of a solidarity that never existed? I know Black people
and Asian people have worked together in the past, but have we ever formed a solid whole? And who is to blame for the fact that we have never had
solidarity? The hashtag implies that both “sides” play an equal part in the failure to form solidarity. In the face of this, confessing our sins to each other
forms the moment where we can form emotional bonds: “see, you were as racist as I, and how unfortunate it is that we let old whitey come between us.
This is the logic behind much of the Asian confessing – white
supremacy duped us into being antiblack racists – and also fed into the backlash
aimed at blacks – “stop playing oppression olympics, that’s what whitey wants.” It
Never again will whitey make us part.”
must be foregrounded here that antiblackness cannot be simplified as “anti-black racism” and it is a singularity
with no equivalent force – “anti-Asian” racism is not the flipside of antiblackness
nor is orientalism or islamophobia. Antiblackness predates white supremacy by at
least 300 years (and much more than that depending on how we trace our history) and we can understand
antiblackness as the general tethering of the very concept of life to the ontological
and unspeakable, unthinkable force of black death. That statement is a place to begin to define
antiblackness, it is not the end for this force weaves itself in infinite variety throughout all corners of the globe, forming globe into world. This is
not simply about the little racist microaggressions that people listed in their tweets, this is about a global force that the world –
not simply whites – bond over and form their lives inside of and through. What #BlackPowerYellowPeril
revealed, however, is that the underside of coalition politics remains a violent and virulent antiblackness. As blacks— John Murillo III
(@writedarkmatter), New Black School (@newblackschool), Nicholas Brady (@nubluez_nick), and others—raised questions and comments in the spirit
of that singular imperative—“Surrender to blackness”—antiblackness emerged in the violence of the response levied against it; one need only visit the
hashtag to bear witness. From
outright refusals to engage the antiblackness central to the histories and
politics of nonblack communities of color, to denials of the foundational, global, and singular
nature of antiblackness, and to the repeated calls to police and remove this disruptive
blackness and its imperative from the conversation, antiblackness exploded onto the scene. All
of this in the name of “coalition.” This is because “ coalition” politics and possibilities are fetishized, not loved.
The fetish denies the necessary recognition of antiblackness at coalition’s heart, and that antiblackness left
unattended renders the imperative illegible. It is a fetishization, then, of antiblackness. The fetish object at the heart of the
coalition has always been black flesh – a fetishization where pleasure and terror meet to create the bonds of solidarity people so
desire. Here, we open a forum on how the hashtag embodies this fetish, the distinction between fetish and love that must be made in excess of the hashtag
and ones like it, and the absolute imperativeness of the imperative.
Instead of fetishizing the object, you must surrender
to blackness.
Niggas are silenced and excluded within education systems and thus a
consultation requires you to listen to us. Net benefit is revealing antiblackness
Schnyder ‘8 Damien Michael Schnyder (PhD, University of California’s President’s Postdoctoral
Fellow) "First Strike,
Mrs. Fox’s clear disregard for her students belies a racist logic that dehumanizes Blackness while also reifying white supremacy. At
the crux of this logic is that Black students are destructive to civil society. As argued by Frank
Wilderson, III, “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”
(Wilderson III, 2003, 18). Given that the basis of Western society has been predicated upon particular notions of work/labor, the
construction of civil society is predicated upon forced labor. The function of society as dictated by capitalist interest is the
production of workers. For even as a worker, the threat to the system is merely reformist. For as Wilderson comments, “The worker
demands that productivity be fair and democratic” (Wilderson III, 2003, 22). Contrast to the position of the worker, Wilderson
argues, “The slave demands that production stop, without recourse to its ultimate democratization. Work is not an organic principle
forthe slave” (Wilderson III, 2003, 22). Black
bodies, through their collective experiences of subjugated
Blackness, become a threat to the very function of civil society. Blackness has to be contained
and managed in order to protect white supremacy. Crucial to Wilderson’s argument is that white
supremacy needs the reproduction of social relations of power (i.e. the identification of the worker) in
order to maintain its subjective advantage with respect to Blackness.45 It is at this moment when Blackness becomes identified as antithetical to the notions of work –that white supremacy
is able to unleash it’s fury upon the Black body. For it is within this space that the Black body
can have anything and everything done to protect the order of civil society.46 Thus in order to
contain the threat of Blackness, the Herculean managers of the hydra-like attack upon society are teachers (Linebaugh & Rediker,
2000).47 Within the development of civil society, the function of teachers is to both categorize states of being and enclose Blackness.
The categorization is clear by the actions of Ms. Fox while processes of enclosure are exemplified in Mr. Keynes’ classroom.
Students are prevented from interjecting alternative versions of economic systems within
the framework of the discussion. Students must perform the perfunctory duty of work (basic memorization and
recitation skills) not to only to be awarded with a passing grade, but not to be penalized. The result is a silencing of
Black voices whose life experiences are in direct contradiction with hegemonic constructions
of economy (i.e. supply and demand) that was taught by Mr. Keynes. There was no space to analyze the racial
structure that frames economic modes of relation, nor was there opportunity to engage in
dialogue with regards to the economics of why many of the students had to work to support their families. Mr. Keynes’
classroom management and pedagogical style exemplifies the need of white supremacy to control, define and enclose racialized
subjects. The primary objective of Mr. Keynes in addition to Mr. Davis and Ms. Fox was to socialize the students as productive
workers in order to fit within the hierarchal confines of civil society. The
main thrust behind this socialization
effort was to define the students as subjects and remove the possibility for self-identification
that was not located within a white supremacist conception of being – for a self-assertion
outside of these parameters is the greatest threat to white supremacist modes of social
(re)production.48The veil of nobility and morality that cloaks the teaching profession has to be understood as a tool utilized
by the state to maintain its power. Inside of the walls of SCHS, teachers operated within a genealogy of Black subjugation that seeks
to enclose all sites of Black self-expression and thought/action and as stated by Wilderson ultimately “destroy the Black body.” In
it’s current manifestation, the process of Black subjugation functions within the logic of the
prison regime as outlined by Dylan Rodríguez. Within this logic, teachers serve as agents of dissemination, discipline and
socialization in order to preserve the economic, political, racial, sexual and gendered hierarchies established by the United States
the veil of white privilege is
removed as the logic of white supremacy that frames American nationalism is fully revealed
(Gilmore, 1993).49 In order to untangle the multifaceted issues within public education, it is
incumbent to analyze the root causes of inequality and inequity. In agreement with scholars such as
nation project. Further, during times of economic “crises” Ruth Wilson Gilmore notes that
Erica R. Meiners who advocate that white supremacy is the root cause, even teachers with the best of intentions have to realize that
their role is vital to the maintenance of state domination of Black subjects.
2
Debate is structured to exclude black bodies – communication is not a level
playing field but rather geared toward productivity and futurity. The slave’s
pleas are never heard and are pushed to the bottom of the communicative
register by the project of futurism.
Gillespie 17 – Jon Gillespie is a graduate student for the University of California, Irvine,
Comparative Literature, “On the Prospect of Weaponized Death”, Fall 2017,
https://www.academia.edu/34839874/On_the_Prospect_of_Weaponized_Death
-
brackets in original
Black life is lived in a white hyper-reality. By this I mean, black life is lived inside a constituted white fiction which
concretizes itself as fact. Black life is a life lived in non-existence; blackness “exists” as a symbol of
death that is, but is not. Blackness “exists” only insofar as White Being structures it onto a map
of anti-black violence.4 Achille Mbembe corroborates this in his Critique of Black Reason, stating: Racism consists, most of
all, in substituting what is with something else, with another reality. It has the power to distort the real and to fix affect, but it is also
a form of psychic derangement, the mechanism through which the repressed suddenly surfaces. When
the racist sees the
Black person, he does not see that the Black person is not there, does not exist, and is just a sign
of a pathological fixation on the absence of a relationship. We must therefore consider race as being both
beside and beyond being.5 The reality that replaces that which is a white hyper-reality. This white hyperrealism fixes
blackness as “a sign of a pathological fixation.” White hyper-realism is the paradigm whereby consciousness is
unable to distinguish between the fictions created by White Being and the Real. It is this fact that permits black death to be
subsumed in simulations by each and every (analytic) encounter with Whiteness and the World. Questions like, “Can the Black
suffer?” and “Is it capable for the Black to be wronged?” arise due to the inability to access a grammar of suffering to communicate a
harm that has never ended, a harm that can never end without ending the World itself. It is for this reason that viral videos of black
death, more than opening the possibility for liberal notions of justice, seem to suture the relationship between the mythical and the
real that perpetuates itself through the reification of black trauma. Black death, more than deconstructing the ontics of the Human,
seems to extend its hyper-reality. Black
death makes it harder to distinguish white fictions from any sense
of real harm being done to human flesh. The Black is meant to experience its death over and
over and over again; and the World itself recycles all its fictions-as-the-Real. Put differently, the White
World subjects the Black to perpetual, gratuitous violence, and then uses that violence as evidence to further suggest that the Black
is not Human. For how can a Human endure such a thing? The
experience of gratuitous violence secures the
semiotics of the white hyper-reality. White Disneyland stays intact. Blackness exists at the nexus of fact
and fiction, possibility and (non)value, inclusion and exclusion. Blackness is trapped even in saying it’s trapped
because the “trapped-ness” of the Black extends to locations where the diction and syntax of
White “words don’t go.”6 The Black does not have the grammar to speak against where and
how it is trapped since Blackness can only articulate itself through the semiotics of Whiteness.
That White Being continues to center black death as the matrix of possibility for its hyper-realist
structure indexes the promise of death insofar that White Being is promised futurity. The Black
was rendered fungible through the conjunction of the political and the libidinal economy of the
anti-Black world. Blackness gave birth to the commodity and the economy of signification that
structures the cartography of the Human’s coordinates. This could be said to be a still birth, insofar as the
nature of Black life in a white hyper-reality is conducted on a plane that guarantees natal alienation, social, and ontological death.
The Black body lives to die; the specter of death shadows it everywhere. What matters crucially here, in
our invocation of the hyper-real, is the importance of the Symbolic. The Symbolic is what “structures the libidinal economy of civil
society.”7 The Symbolic here is understood as “the representational process” that structures “the curriculum and order of
knowledge” and/or “the descriptive statement of the human” in our contemporary World.8 And in this World, white symbolism is
everywhere. In fact, in an anti-Black paradigm, white symbolism is everything. White
symbolism over-determines
itself as the Symbolic itself, and denounces anything that challenges its genre-specific mode of
knowing, seeing and understanding the World. In other words, white symbolism holds a monopoly on the Symbolic
in ways that operate “lawlikely so within the terms of their/our orderspecific modes of adaptive cognition-for, truth-for.”9 There is
no outside to whiteness, to white semiotics, to white constructs of value and reality, to white structuring of libidinal value. And for
this reason, like Wilderson, “[I] am more interested in the symbolic value of Whiteness (and the absence of Blackness's value)…”10
in a world of white hyper-reality. If Blackness is lived in the hyper-real, then there is a hyper-intensification—an
overrepresentation—of semiology that dictates the coercive violence of the Black’s (non)existence. The semiotics of White Being is
the factitious fiction that simulates the entire World. White Being and black death are part of a globally blood-soaked symbolic
exchange that has extended itself over the terrain of the World to such an extent that there can be no distinguishing between the
Real and the Non-Real. White
Being is that Being for whom ontological capacity exists, whereas the
Black is the antithesis to Being, that fleshly matter whose essence is incapacity. 11 If “language is the
house of being,”12 as Heidegger puts it, then Blackness is trapped at the very center of White Being. Dionne Brand puts it concisely
when she writes, “We
are people without a translator. The language we use already contains our
demise and any response contains that demise as each response emboldens and strengthens
the language it hopes to undermine.”13 This abject positionality was codified through a violence so epochal that
Modernity itself can be said to have been inaugurated through it. However, at the same time, “the center is, paradoxically, within
the structure and outside it.”14 That black death and anti-blackness exist in this liminal positionality posits the impossible possibility
of a rupture in the moment. For that which is inside the structure, only through being outside the structure, enables the possibility
of both sedimentation and disorientation. Jacques Derrida writes, “The function of this center was not only to orient; balance, and
organize the structure— one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure—but above all to make sure that the organizing
principle of the structure would limit what we might call the freeplay of the structure.”15 If black death centers the structure, then it
is somewhere in the perfection and expansion of this antagonism (the inside-outside antagonism) that the cartography of gratuitous
anti-Black violence is laid out. What might happen when what orients the structure becomes insurgent, attacking the structure
through that which centers its very Being? What might
happen if black death became weaponized in order
to further limit the freeplay of the structure—the expansion of White Being?
Remember that our evidence indicates that no black liberation happens
through the methods they will talk about, but only by being parasitic on the
spaces of optimism to end the world.
We’ll endorse the entirety of the affirmative except we reread it through
guerilla linguistics. We must engage in undercommon communication that
weaponizes our deaths to disrupts the semiotics of the anti-black world.
Gillespie 18 John D Gillespie University of California, Irvine, Comparative Literature, Graduate Student, 2-25-2018, On the
Prospect of Weaponized Death, https://www.academia.edu/34839874/On_the_Prospect_of_Weaponized_Death, Accessed: 7-72019 SJZD
The Black body lives to die; the specter of death shadows it everywhere. What matters crucially here, in our
invocation of the hyper-real, is the importance of the Symbolic. The Symbolic is what “structures the libidinal economy of civil society.”7 The Symbolic here is understood as “the
representational process” that structures “the curriculum and order of knowledge” and/or “the descriptive statement of the human” in our contemporary World.8 And in this
World, white symbolism is everywhere. In fact, in an anti-Black paradigm, white symbolism is everything. White symbolism over-determines itself as the Symbolic itself, and
denounces anything that challenges its genre-specific mode of knowing, seeing and understanding the World. In other words, white symbolism holds a monopoly on the
Symbolic in ways that operate “lawlikely so within the terms of their/our order- specific modes of adaptive cognition-for, truth-for.”9 There is no outside to whiteness, to white
semiotics, to white constructs of value and reality, to white structuring of libidinal value. And for this reason, like Wilderson, “[I] am more interested in the symbolic value of
Whiteness (and the absence of Blackness's value)...”10 in a world of white hyper-reality. Propter Nos 2:1 (Fall 2017) 7 If Blackness is lived in the hyper-real, then there is a hyperintensification—an overrepresentation—of semiology that dictates the coercive violence of the Black’s (non)existence. The semiotics of White Being is the factitious fiction that
White Being and black death are part of a globally blood-soaked symbolic
exchange that has extended itself over the terrain of the World to such an extent that there
can be no distinguishing between the Real and the Non-Real. White Being is that Being for whom ontological capacity
simulates the entire World.
exists, whereas the Black is the antithesis to Being, that fleshly matter whose essence is incapacity.11 If “language is the house of being,”12 as Heidegger puts it, then Blackness
is trapped at the very center of White Being. Dionne Brand puts it concisely when she writes, “We are people without a translator. The language we use already contains our
demise and any response contains that demise as each response emboldens and strengthens the language it hopes to undermine.”13 This abject positionality was codified
through a violence so epochal that Modernity itself can be said to have been inaugurated through it. However, at the same time, “the center is, paradoxically, within the
structure and outside it.”14 That black death and anti-blackness exist in this liminal positionality posits the impossible possibility of a rupture in the moment. For that which is
inside the structure, only through being outside the structure, enables the possibility of both sedimentation and disorientation. Jacques Derrida writes, “The function of this
center was not only to orient; balance, and organize the structure— one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure—but above all to make sure that the organizing
principle of the structure would limit what we might call the freeplay of the structure.”15 If black death centers the structure, then it is somewhere in the perfection and
expansion of this antagonism (the inside-outside antagonism) that the cartography of gratuitous anti-Black violence is laid out. What might happen when what orients the
What might happen if black death became
weaponized in order to further limit the freeplay of the structure—the expansion of White
Being? Afro-Pessimist thinkers, in favor of a diagnostic analysis, tend to veer away from the tradition of critical social theory that prescribes solutions to the analysis in the
conclusion of their work. However, one finds throughout Afro-Pessimist literature a battle cry, a prophetic vision, a pulsing pessimist hope for the “end of the World.”
For if Whiteness ended Worlds through its colonial simulations and violent transmutations of Africans into Blacks, then the only way out is an end to
the White World. White Being is irredeemable, and so is the World it fosters. Sexton says, “In a world structured by the twin axioms of white superiority and
structure becomes insurgent, attacking the structure through that which centers its very Being?
black inferiority, of white existence and black non-existence, a world structured by a negative categorical imperative—‘above all, don’t be black’—in this world, the zero degree
of transformation is the turn toward blackness, a turn toward the shame, as it were, that ‘resides in the idea that 'I am thought of as less than human.’”16 It’s only through black
vigilance that the simulacra of White Being is made clear and the spectacle of Propter Nos 2:1 (Fall 2017) 8 gratuitous freedom is made visible. It is somewhere in this structural
antagonism, that on the one hand conditions the possibility of the World, and on the other hand conditions the possibility of its end, its limitations, its disorientation, that we
found the language to say the unsayable and do the undoable. As Frank Wilderson reminds us: Black Studies in general and Afro-Pessimism in particular present non-Black
academics with more than an intellectual problem. It presents them with an existential problem. The reason is because there’s an aspect of Afro-Pessimism that we don’t talk
about...which is that were you to follow it to its logical conclusion, it’s calling for the end of the world...it wants the death of everyone else in the same way that we experience
our death, so that one could not liberate Blacks through Afro- Pessimism and be who one was on the other side of that. That’s the unspoken dynamic of Afro-Pessimism.
If
we are engaging in a war in which the symbolic value, the semiotics of this World itself,
positions “the Black as death personified, the White as personification of diversity, of life
itself,”18 then resistance needs an “unspoken dynamic.” It needs a space where “words don’t
go”—a form of guerrilla linguistics, a submarined syntax, an undercommon communication. Perhaps, here, where the
conversation is blackened, and the theory is phobogenic, and the journal is Propter Nos, we can allow ourselves to excavate insurgent dictions still lost in
the lingua franca of White Being, but full of the specter of black terror, black disorientation. If the Black is death
personified, then what might happen if we weaponized our death? What might happen if we
recognized the inevitability of that death? What if we began to think that the non-uniqueness
of that death was an opening towards the “end of Humanity?” In The Spirit of Terrorism, Jean Baudrillard writes, “When
global power monopolizes the situation to this extent, when there is such a formidable condensation of all functions in the technocratic machinery, and when no alternative
Terrorism consists of the militaristic tactics
used by those who are facing globalized White Being with asymmetrical technologies of
terror, violence, intimidation and war. A terrorist is any armed vigilante willing to rupture the
system of semiotics through an equally cofounding semiotic. A semiotic that returns one to the “desert of the [Black]
Real”—where a “project of total disorder” is unleashed upon the semiotic system.20 Black terrorism is a violence that re-appropriates
the death embedded in the Black’s ontological incapacity in order to enable the possibility of a
radical capacity—gratuitous freedom. White Being itself is a decentralized onto- epistemic deployment of violence, and if violent insurgency is
form of thinking is allowed, what other way is there but a terroristic situational transfer?”19
necessary, then the decentralized approach of the black terrorist is necessary to counter the terror of White Being. This being said, black terrorism is perhaps better understood
as counter-terror terrorism. We do not have the power to end the World with life.
We Propter Nos 2:1 (Fall 2017) 9 only have the power to end
the World through death. As Baudrillard writes, “The radical difference is that the terrorist, while they have at their disposal weapons that are the
system’s own, possess a further lethal weapon: their own deaths.”21 The United States has an international military force, a storehouse of nuclear arms, and the capacity, within
their police state alone, to “terrorize” not just one block in Baltimore, but the whole entire world. Black terrorism is what happens when we heed the Afro-Pessimist call that “A
Black Terrorism is
(non)ontological fugitivity that disavows any need to focus on social life—black terrorism
steals black death itself from White Being. It is for this reason that Baudrillard speaks to his own White Being and the specter of terror
living death is as much a death as it is a living,”22 it is what happens when we take seriously the unsayable in Afro-Pessimism.
when he says: When Western culture sees all of its values extinguished one by one, it turns inward on itself in the very worst way. Our death is an extinction, an annihilation.
Herein lies our poverty. When a singularity throws its own death into the ring, it escapes this slow extermination, its dies its own natural death. This is an immense game of
double or quits. In committing suicide, the singularity suicides the other at the same time— we might say that the terrorist acts literally ‘suicided’ the West. A death for a death,
But precisely, we have
devastated this world, it still has to be destroyed. Destroyed symbolically. This is not at all the
same undertaking. And though we did the first part, only others are going to be able to do the
second.23 We are the others. Tasked with the (un)fortunate task of ending White hyper-realism, the White World, and White Being. Well aware that if
then, but transfigured by the symbolic stakes. ‘We have already devastated our world, what more do you want?’ says Muray.
White Fascism continues the project of black annihilation,
the only choice we will have is to fight. Not because we want
to, but because we have to. But, ultimately, we must remember the words of Huey Newton: “[T]he first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a
doomed man.”24 In the age of Trump, the perfection of slavery reaches its horizon.25 The disavowal of the lives of
refugees is White Being attempting to reconcile the “Nation- State” simulation with the free track and flow of bodies it’s been attempting to murder; the deportation of
undocumented immigrants in conjunction with the materialization of borders is White Being attempting to secure its linguistic and economic integrity; the rise of the private
prison and the militarization of the police force is White Being attempting to innovate the system of enslavement and necropolitics for the 21st Century; the plundering of
indigenous land and bodies is White Being attempting to finish off the project of genocide; the disregard for the Earth is White Being ensuring the Anthropocene will also be the
Trump is a reinvigoration, a call to arms, for White Being, and White Being can only be
“destroyed symbolically.” Black terrorism transfigures the symbolic stakes because it Propter Nos 2:1
(Fall 2017) 10 steals away that condition of White Being’s possibility in a kind of fugitivity that is a
zero-transformation into Blackness. This being said, we all know that the only thing that follows the absolute loss of hope is this Black Spring, this
Apocalypse.
Neo-Fanonian violence, this blackened terroristic situational transfer. In Baudrillard’s words, in the Age of Trump, let us remember the gift of immorality, “Terrorism is immoral.
The World Trade Center event, that symbolic challenge, is immoral, and it is a response to a globalization which is itself immoral. So, let us be immoral...”26l/
3
We’ll endorse the entirety of the affirmative except we reread it in nommo. The
feds should stop tripping and let niggas do the aff
Nommo is a critical linguistic technique to survive white oppression by BLACK
FOLK. This is only accessible to the black – the perm is a form of
commodification of blackness. The text of the aff in black linguistic is the
endorsement of black culture.
Smitherman 06, University Distinguished Professor Emerita, Department of English at
Michigan State University, 2006 (Geneva Smitherman, , Co-Founder and Executive Committee,
African American and African Studies, Core Faculty, African Studies Center, Founder and Advisor,
My Brother’s Keeper Program,, "Word from the Mother: Language and African Americans",
Routledge, accessed 10/14/13, Ben)
Black or African American Language (BL or AAL) is a style of speaking English words with Black flava—with Africanized semantic,
grammatical, pronunciation, and rhetorical patterns. AAL comes out of the experience of U.S. slave descendants. This shared
experience has resulted in common speaking styles, systematic patterns of grammar, and common language practices in the Black
community. Language is a tie that binds. It provides
solidarity with your community and gives you a
sense of personal identity. AAL served to bind the enslaved together, melding diverse African
ethnic groups into one community. Ancient elements of African speech were transformed into a new language forged
in the crucible of enslavement, U.S. style apartheid, and the Black struggle to survive and thrive in the face of
dominating and oppressive Whiteness. Kitchen became not only the name of the room for cooking and eating, but
also the hair at the neckline, very tightly curled, typically the most African part of Black hair. Yella/high yella, red/redbone, lightskinnded became references to light-complexioned Africans. Ashy was used to refer to the whitish appearance of Black skin due to
exposure to wind and cold weather. Loan translations from West African languages were maintained, like the Mandingo phrase, a ka
nyi ko-jugu, literally, “it is good badly,” that is, it is very good, or it is so good that it’s bad! The
Africanization of U.S.
English has been passed on from one generation to the next. This generational continuity
provides a common thread across the span of time, even as each new group stamps its own linguistic imprint on
the Game. Despite numerous educational and social efforts to eradicate AAL over time, the language has not only survived, it has
thrived, adding to and enriching the English language. From several African languages: the tote in tote bags, from Kikongo, tota,
meaning to carry; cola in Coca-Cola, from Temne, kola; banjo from Kimbundu, mbanza; banana, from Wolof and Fulani. Even the
good old American English word, okay, has African language roots. Several West African languages use kay, or a similar form, and
add it to a statement to confirm and convey the meaning of “yes, indeed,” “of course,” “all right.” For example, in Wolof, waw kay,
waw ke; in Fula, eeyi kay; among the Mandingo, o-ke. The
roots of African American speech lie in the counter
language, the resistance discourse, that was created as a communication system unintelligible
to speakers of the dominant master class. Enslaved Africans and their descendants assigned
alternate and sometimes oppositional semantics to English words, like Miss Ann and Mr. Charlie, coded
derisive terms for White woman and White man. This language practice also produced negative
terms for Africans and later, African Americans, who acted as spies and agents for Whites—terms
such as Uncle Tom/Tom, Aunt Jane, and the expression, run and tell that, referring to traitors within the community who would run
and tell “Ole Massa” about schemes and plans for escape from enslavement. It was a language born in the crucible of Black
economic oppression: tryna make a dolla outta fifteen cent—or to cast that age-old Black expression in today’s Hip Hop terms, tryna
make a dolla outta 50 cent. This
coded language served as a mark of social identity and a linguistic
bond between enslaved Africans of disparate ethnicities, and in later years, between African Americans of
disparate socioeducational classes. Today African American Language, which may also be labeled U.S. Ebonics, is all over the nation
and the globe. From enslavement to present-day, Africans in America continue to push the linguistic envelope. Even though AAL
words may look like English, the meanings and the linguistic and social rules for using these words are totally different from English.
The statement, “He been married” can refer to a man who is married or divorced, depending on the pronunciation of “been.” If
“been” is stressed, it means the man married a long time ago and is still married. Let me remind you that those
who do not
learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. In spite of recently reported gains in Black student writing, chronicled
by the NAEP and higher scores on the SAT, the rate of functional illiteracy and drop-outs among America’s underclass is moving
faster than the Concorde. A
genuine recognition of such students' culture and language is desperately
needed if we as a profession are to play some part in stemming this national trend. I write genuine
because, in spite of the controversy surrounding policies like the "Students' Right to Their Own Language," the bicultural, bilingual
model has never really been tried. Lip-service is about all most teachers gave it, even at the height of the social upheaval described
earlier. You see, the
game plan has always been linguistic and cultural absorption of the Other into
the dominant culture, and indoctrination of the outsiders into the existing value system (e.g.,
Sledd 1972), to remake those on the margins in the image of the patriarch, to reshape the
outsiders into talking, acting, thinking, and (to the extent possible) looking like the insiders (e.g.,
Smitherman 1973). In bilingual education and among multilingual scholars and activists, this issue is framed as one of
language shift vs. language maintenance (see Fishman 1966, 1983). That is, the philosophy of using the
native language as a vehicle to teach and eventually shift native speakers away from their
home language, vs. a social and pedagogical model that teaches the target language-in this
country, English-while providing support for maintaining the home language-Spanish, Polish, Black English, etc. All along, despite a
policy like the "Students' Right," the system has just been perping-engaging in fraudulent action. I am a veteran of the language
wars, dating to my undergraduate years when I was victimized by a biased speech test given to all those who wanted to qualify for a
teaching certificate. I flunked the test and had to take speech correction, not because of any actual speech impediment, such as
aphasia or stuttering, but because I was a speaker of Black English. Such misguided policies have now been eradicated as a result of
scientific enlightenment about language and the renewed commitment to cultural pluralism that is the essence of the American
experiment. A few years after my bout with speech therapy, I published, in the pages of this journal, my first experimental attempt
at writing the "dialect of my nurture": "English Teacher, Why You Be Doing the Thangs You Don’t Do?" (Smitherman 1972).
Encouraged by former EJ editor, Stephen Tchudi (then Judy), I went on to produce a regular EJ col- umn, "Soul N Style," written in a
mixture of Black English Vernacular and the Language of Wider Communication (i.e., Edited American English), and for which I won a
national award (thanks to Steve Tchudi, who believed in me-Yo, Steve, much props!). In the 1977 edition of Talkin and TestiJyin: the
Language of Black America, I called for a national language policy, the details of which I had yet to work out. A decade later, I had
come to realize that such a policy was needed, not just for African Americans and other groups on the margins, but for the entire
country, and that the experience of African Americans could well be the basis for what I called a tripartite language policy
(Smitherman 1987). Like I said, I been on the battlefield for days.
4
Welcome yet again to the realm of the slave! We call for the end of the world!
Right here, right now! Civil society requires gratuitous violence to blackness to
function. The fact that whiteness could not enslave their own grafts dirty, slave,
and criminal onto black bodies.
Wilderson 10, [Frank, Professor at UC Irvine, “Red, White, and Black: Cinema and Structure of
US Antagonisms”, P. 22-8]
David Eltis is emphatic in his assertion that European civil society’s decision not to hunt for slaves along the banks of the Thames or other rivers in the lands of White people or in prisons or poor houses was a bad business decision that slowed the pace of economic
development in both Europe and the “New World.” Eltis writes: No Western European power after the Middle Ages crosses the basic divide separating European workers from full chattel slavery. And while serfdom fell and rose in different parts of early modern
serfs were not outsiders either before or after enserfment
He goes on to show how population growth patterns in Europe during the 1300s, 1400s,
and 1500s far outpaced population growth patterns in Africa
Europe and shared characteristics with slavery,
. The phrase “long distance serf trade” is an
oxymoron. (1404)
. He makes this point not only to demonstrate how devastating the effect of chattel slavery was
on African population growth patterns—in other words, to highlight its genocidal impact—but also to make an equally profound but commonly overlooked point. Europe was so heavily populated that had the Europeans been more invested in the economic value of
chattel slavery than they were in the symbolic value of Black slavery and hence had instituted “a properly exploited system drawing on convicts, prisoners and vagrants...[they] could easily have provided 50,000 [White slaves] a year [to the New World] without
serious disruption to either international peace or the existing social institutions that generated and supervised these potential European victims” (1407). I raise Eltis’s counterposing of the symbolic value of slavery to the economic value of slavery in order to debunk
two gross misunderstandings: One is that work—or alienation and exploitation—is a constituent element of slavery. Slavery, writes Orlando Patterson, “is the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons.”ix Patterson goes to
great lengths to delink his three “constituent elements of slavery” from the labor that one is typically forced to perform when one is enslaved. The forced labor is not constitutive of enslavement because whereas it explains a common practice, it does not define the
structure of the power relation between those who are slaves and those who are not. In pursuit of his “constituent elements” of slavery, a line of inquiry that helps us separate experience (events) from ontology (the capacities of power—or lack thereof—lodged
within distinct and irreconcilable subject positions, e.g., Humans and Slaves), Patterson helps us denaturalize the link betw een force and labor, and theorize the former as a phenomena that positions a body, ontologically (paradigmatically), and the latter as a
possible but not inevitable experience of someone who is socially dead.x The other misunderstanding I am attempting to correct is the notion that the profit motive is the consideration within the slaveocracy that trumps all others. David Marriott, Saidiya Hartman,
slavery is and connotes an ontological status
for Blackness; and that the constituent elements of slavery are not exploitation and alienation
but accumulation and fungibility (Hartman): the condition of being owned and traded
Ronald Judy, Hortense Spillers, Orlando Patterson, and Achille Mbembe have gone to considerable lengths to show that, in point of fact,
. As these Black writers
have debunked conventional wisdom pertaining to the grammar of slave suffering, so too has David Eltis provided a major corrective on the commonsense wisdom that profit was the primary motive driving the African slave trade. Eltis meticulously explains how the
Shipping costs from Europe to America were
considerably lower than shipping costs from Europe to Africa and then on to America
costs of enslavement would have been driven exponentially down had White slaves been taken en masse from European countries.
. He notes that “shipping
costs...comprised by far the greater part of the price of any form of imported bonded labor in the Americas. If we take into account the time spent collecting a slave cargo on the African coast as well, then the case for sailing directly from Europe with a cargo of
Eltis sums up his data by concluding that if European merchants, planters, and
statesmen imposed chattel slavery on some members of their own society— say, only 50,000
White slaves per year—then not only would European civil society have been able to absorb
the social consequences of these losses, in other words class warfare would have been
unlikely even at this rate of enslavement, but civil society “would [also] have enjoyed lower
labor costs faster development of the Americas
But what Whites
would have gained in economic value, they would have lost in symbolic value; and it is the
latter which structures the libidinal economy of civil society
[Whites] appears stronger again” (1405).
,a
, and higher exports and income levels on both sides of the Atlantic” (1422).
. White chattel slavery would have meant that the aura of the social contract had been completely
stripped from the body of the convict, vagrant, beggar, indentured servant, or child. This is a subtle point but one vital to our understanding of the relationship between the world of Blacks and the world of Humans. Even under the most extreme forms of coercion in
the late Middle Ages and in the early modern period—for example, the provisional and selective enslavement of English vagrants from the early to mid-1500s to the mid-1700s—“the power of the state over [convicts in the Old World] and the power of the master
takes note of the
unconscious
libidinal—costs to civil society
to enslave Whites
though widespread
anti-vagabond laws
all passed ordinances
which
proclaimed that: [I]f anyone refuses to work, he shall be condemned as a slave to the person
who has denounced him as an idler
over [convicts in the New World] was more circumscribed than that of the slave owner over the slave” (Eltis 1410). Marx himself
, had European elites been willing
preconscious political—and, by implication,
(Capital Vol. 1, 896-905). In fact,
of King Edward VI (1547), Queen Elizabeth (1572), King James I, and France’s Louis XVI (1777)
similar to Edward VI’s
. The master shall feed his slave on bread and water, weak broth and such refuse meat as he thinks fit. He has the right to f orce him to do any work, no matter how
disgusting, with whip and chains. If the slave is absent for a fortnight, he is condemned to slavery for life and is to be branded on the forehead or back with the letter S...The master can sell him, bequeath him, let him out on hire as a slave, just as he can any other
personal chattel or cattle...All persons have the right to take away the children of the vagabonds and keep them as apprentices, the young men until they are 24, the girls until they are 20. (897) These laws were so controversial, even among elites, that they could
I am more interested in the symbolic value of Whiteness (and the
absence of Blackness’s value)
Symptomatic of civil
society’s libidinal safety net is the above ordinance’s repeated use of the word “if.” If anyone
refuses to work...if the slave is absent for a fortnight... The violence of slavery is repeatedly
checked, subdued into becoming a contingent violence for that entity which is beginning to
call itself “White;”
a gratuitous violence for that entity which is being
called (by Whites) “Black.”
never take hold as widespread social and economic phenomena. But
, gleaned from a close reading of the laws themselves, than I am in a historical account of the lived experience of the White poor’s resistance to, or the White elite’s ambivalence
toward, such ordinances. The actual ordinance(s) manifests the symptoms of its own internal resistance long before either parliament or the poor themselves mount external challenges to it.
at the very same moment that it is being ratcheted up to
All the ordinances of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries which Marx either quotes at length or discusses are ordinances which seem, on their face, to debunk my claim that slavery for Whites
these ordinances are riddled with contingencies, of which frequent
and unfettered deployment of the conjunction “if” is emblematic
the archive of
African slavery shows no internal recognition of the libidinal costs of turning human bodies
into sentient flesh. From Marx’s reports on proposed vagabond-into-slave legislation, it
becomes clear that the libidinal economy of such European legislation is far too unconsciously
invested in “saving” the symbolic value of the very vagabonds such laws consciously seek to
enslave.
the law would rather shoot itself (that is, sacrifice the economic development of
the New World) in the foot than step into a subjective void where idlers and vagabonds might
find themselves without contemporaries, with no relational status to save.
White-onWhite violence is put in check (a) before it becomes gratuitous
was/is experiential and that for Blacks it was/is ontological. And yet all of
. Both Spillers and Eltis remind us that
In other words,
In this way,
, or structural, before it can shred the fabric of civil society beyond mending; and (b)
before conscious, predictable, and sometimes costly challenges are mounted against the legislation despite its dissembling lack of resolve. This is accomplished by the imposition of the numerous “on condition that...” and “supposing that...” clauses bound up in the
word “if” and also by claims bound up in the language around the enslavement of European children: a White child may be enslaved on condition that s/he is the child of a vagabond, and then, only until the age of 20 or 24. Hortense Spillers searched the archives for
a similar kind of stop-gap language with respect to the African—some indication of the African’s human value in the libidinal economy of Little Baby Civil Society. She came up as empty handed: Expecting to find direct and amplified reference to African women
during the opening years of the Trade, the observer is disappointed time and again that this cultural subject is concealed beneath the overwhelming debris of the itemized account, between the lines of the massive logs of commercial enterprise [e.g., a ship’s cargo
record] that overrun the sense of clarity we believed we had gained concerning this collective humiliation. (Spillers 210) It would be reassuring to say that Europeans rigorously debated the ethical implications of forcing the social death of slavery upon Africans
African slavery did not present an ethical
dilemma for global civil society. The ethical dilemmas were unthought.
before they went ahead with it; but, as Marx, Eltis, and Spillers make abundantly clear, it would be more accurate simply to say that
Debate is parasitic on blackness. Period. Cx shows they think extinction is worst
kinf of violence and their claim that solvency matters
Wilderson 16 (Frank B Wilderson III, associate professor of African American Studies and
Drama at UC Irvine, PhD in Rhetoric and Film Studies from UC Berkeley, February 25 2016, “HSI
Podcast 52,” http://www.podcastgarden.com/episode/hsi-podcast-52_71843, transcribed from audio 5:33-12:25,
modified)
But here’s why I would say that the things can’t be reconciled and why I’m fascinated with the way high school and college debaters are using it. I think
it was—I don’t know what sociologist—Max Weber (you know, I quote all sorts of people except right out fascists)—I believe he said that the
power to pose the question is the greatest power of all. And the way that the question is posed
in the world of debate in January—the question that carries one through the entire twelve months—
is posed in a way that cannot be reconciled with the basic lens of interpretation of Afropessimism . The
question is always posed on what I call and others call an arch of redemption. In other words, the question
assumes an instance of plenitude, say, the free association and the free assembly—the right to free
assembly—of citizens, and then it moves from that assumption to a rupture. So it moves from
equilibrium to disequilibrium, which is to say the manifestation of the surveillance state. And so the third move in the
tripartite arc of narrative is, of course, the move of redemption, which is to say how can the
plenitude—whether it’s a historical materialist plenitude, a social formation having its rights and
liberties disrupted—how can that be restored. It’s that movement from equilibrium to
disequilibrium to equilibrium restored which is precisely at the center of the critique of
Afropessimism. Afropessimism is not an offering for historical redemption; it’s not an offering
for the restoration of a body in need of redress the way that postcolonialism is, the way that
Marxism is, the way that radical feminism is, the way that indigenism is. It’s a critique of the
rhetorical structure of those lenses of interpretation, critiquing them as to a) what they don’t or
are unable to say about the violence that subjugates and positions Blacks and b) why it is that
they actually need Blackness as slaveness to be outside of their lens of interpretation. So there’s a
way in which—to come full circle to where I started—there’s a way in which the rhetorical structure of debate, the
demand of debate, the protocols are already ideologically laden. It doesn’t matter what
question you pour into those protocols. The protocols, themselves, are all ideological straightjackets
[constrictions] which preclude the kind of investigation of suffering. In order for Black suffering to
be part of the debate question, it would have to go through a structural adjustment to begin
to look like the suffering of some other group. The way Hartman talks about this is by
suggesting that what you have in the world of subalterns—degraded humans who suffer—you have
narratives of the possibility of real or imagined redemption, which is to say, narratives which are
structured around the question of how to relieve the suffering that didn’t happen before the
invasion of some sorts. But what she says with respect to Blacks is that you cannot tell the story of
before the invasion, before the destruction. So, without being able to do that, she says when you
think of narrating Blackness, you have to think of repetition as opposed to redemption. And so
when we were off the air, one of the things I said to Marquis and to Josh is that one of the foreseeable problems with the
future of Afropessimism is people kind of cherry-picking from it to enhance the explanatory
power of their own suffering. And that cherry-picking will actually, inevitably, leave by the
wayside the very deliberate absence in Afropessimism, and that is the absence of redemptive
theorization, which is present in everything else. Redemptive theorization is theorized through
all three volumes of Das Kapital; it’s theorized in the psychoanalytic feminism of Hartman and people like
Julia Kristeva; it’s theorized in the work of Ward Churchill and Vine Deloria. It’s not only
theorized. I should take a step back. It’s assumed. It’s assumed. And so, these are metacritiques of relationality.
What Afropessimism is is a metacritique of the metacritique, to show how pure and simple
relations are dependent upon—they’re parasitic—using blacks as a parasitic host
1] Ontological damnation is the root cause of your impacts – there is no
suffering or problems without the prior exclusion of blackness
2] Outweighs on severity – destructing antiblackness is a pre-requisite to
combatting material oppression and violence
Subsidies were never accessible to Black people in the first place, so the
discussion of the 1AC comes at the prior exclusion of blackness. The biggest
impact to this environment is racism because it is a site of ongoing policing,
exclusion and oppression to black communities. Blackness MUST be at the
center of environmental discussions
Wright and Conway 19. October 3, 2019. Jacqueline Luqman talks with Prof. Willie Jamaal Wright and Eddie Conway
about how the many facets of anti-Black racism contribute to environmental racism, and whether enough is being done to elevate
this discussion in and for communities of color. “The Many Ways Anti-Black Racism Contributes To Environmental Racism”
https://therealnews.com/stories/anti-black-racism-contributes-to-environmental-racism SJZD
Throughout rural America, we see the proliferation of hog CAFOs or these confinement feeding operations. But what I try to make
the argument for in the essay is that… And I think a lot of scholarship is coming out that corroborates this. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
has a book coming out, Race for Profit, where she and others are talking about how what is known as the ghetto was actually a
project that was created by the federal government as well as private industries like the real estate industry and banks. Black
communities and black families were spatially contained in these communities and kept from
accessing the kind of housing subsidies that white, upwardly mobile, and working class
communities were given access to, say, in the 40s and 50s. So what I argue is that in the present context, what we
see is the generations of spatial containment and lack of access to subsidies, lack of access to
adequate public schooling is in and of itself creating this environment that is a form of
environmental racism–it’s creating this dejected environment or this environment that people
think of as having no value. For me, I argue that that too is a form of environmental racism because
it’s impacting the life expectancy of black families, black communities. But it’s also impacting
the environment itself, because then we see that certain kinds of pollutant industries and
landfills and waste transfer stations are sited in those same communities. And I’m thinking about
Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. One of the things that you see that he’s reporting is that–this was the psychiatrist that looked
at the Algerian Revolution–is that there’s a piece in there that says that over the weekend, the natives in their villages are killing
each other, and the colonialists outside don’t know that this stuff is happening down in that area. And it’s creating–in this particular
case in urban cities–creating open-air jails. There’s
certain areas that’s designated to be policed and
oppressed and keep those dissidents in there. Because they’re not even citizens. Keep them in there and let them
do all of the stuff that they need to do. Scientific studies will show you that when you crowd any species together, there’s always
violence within that species itself, you know, because of the overcrowdedness. This is what’s happening in our environments.
We’re being put in those environments, and then there’s violence in those environments.
Then in turn, there’s massive policing in those environments. And then the people that can flee those
environments, and this is where the devastation come in, that the people that can flee with degrees, with skills, with upward
mobility intentions, the people that can get out, get out of those environments and go into environments with more space and
relaxed policing and so on. But what’s left in our environments then is pretty much people growing up with no role models, people
walking around unemployed or halfway unemployed. There’s a certain amount of apathy there, because there’s always a powerful
presence of police. Then there’s that transferred aggression among each other in that environment. So all of those things are
designed, and they’ve been designed since the concentration camps, since reservations, and they’re directed to not only keep this
out of sight of the people that’s benefiting from it, so they don’t see it on Saturday, Sundays, or at late night. You know, they hear
about it and say, “Oh, it’s really bad. Don’t go in there.” The value of that whole area is lowered, and even though now what they’re
finding out is that there’s million-dollar blocks. They’re
making money off of locking up people in those
areas, and the criminal justice system and the… Well, the criminal justice system and the prison industrial complex
are getting rich off of that. So it really goes way past–like Professor Wright said–way past the dumping or putting
polluting industries in the community. It’s really how you contain and cause that community
to deteriorate and those people to deteriorate, and use that as an excuse to devalue them just
like you devalue the community. This hiding of this geography of devalued people is how
these environmental and different kinds of environmental racist practices, or different
expressions of environmental racism, play out outside of the purview of the rest of society. You
just said that different organizations are going to focus on different things in different areas. I’ve
been thinking about that. Because this push for climate justice, this push to address climate change is growing and becoming very
palpable. It’s almost like we can feel it growing. And there are various perspectives being brought to the fore, whether that’s a
carbon neutrality by 2050 or reducing emissions by 40% to 60% by 2030. What
I feel like is missing in this
conversation are the arguments that were being made by various organizations coming up
through the movement for black lives, the push to build better black futures that the Black Youth Project 100 stated
in their agenda, Black Lives Matter. I think on the face, many people just saw what was being done and stood by these organizations
as a push against police brutality. But black communities
don’t have the luxury of just focusing on one
issue, right? And that police brutality issue is tied into a housing issue. It’s also tied into an
environmental issue. And I think for me, what’s missing right now in this conversation is bringing back into the fore
arguments that were made by these organizations, by BYP100, by Black Lives Matter. Because those issues around
police brutality were also an issue around climate justice and environmental justice. There’s a
generation growing up in these environments right now that’s being destroyed, and we need
to look at that and look at how just the houses, just the boarded up houses itself is
environmental racist. Because you don’t see that anywhere else except in our communities, and
you don’t see it being addressed. And we’re not addressing it. We just walk past it and we see it. And we have to do
something about that, because that’s us in our village. Because you brought up, I think, an incredibly important point:
the fact that black people need to be at the forefront of this discussion on how the
environment and environmental injustice and climate change impacts us. There have been maybe 19
or 20 young black or other activists of color, native, First Nations, Asian, activists of color who have been sounding the alarm for
climate change, for the governments of the world to do something about climate change, for quite some time. And we’re sprinkled–
we meaning black people, of course, African sAmerican–throughout the crowd. But we’re not the engine and we’re not the body
that’s pushing this. So of course they’re going to have someone that’s representative of what those huge crowds look like, and that’s
around the world. And we’re struggling for survival. So we’re struggling about eating, we’re struggling about paying rent, we’re
struggling about being safe, we’re struggling about getting clothes. And right now, that keeps our hands full. So we don’t have the
luxury or the disposable income to be taking the day off and go out and do this kind of stuff. That’s why we’re not engaged. But the
planet goes down, we go down, too. So we need to start figuring out how to get involved more.
Case
A2 Haider 18
[1] they concede race is structured by whiteness reason why blackness is
defined in opposition that’s our libidinal economy warrant
[2] spilling out random instances of slavery doesn’t disprove the k but rather
doesn’t link because we say the slave is not defined by forced labor but by
accumulation and fungibility- social death brands blacks as the only true slaves
of the world
[3] card proves libidinal economy because they didn’t have to enslaves Africans
and it certainly wasn’t cheaper
Antiblackness is a prerequisite to solving every other form of oppression
implemented by the state
Sexton 10 – Sexton, Jared. (2010). People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery.
Social Text. 28. 31-56. 10.1215/01642472-2009-066.
The upshot of this predicament is that obscuring the structural position of the category of
blackness will inevitably undermine multiracial coalition building as a politics of radical
opposition and, to that extent, force the question of black liberation back to the center of
discussion. Every analysis that attempts to understand the complexities of racial rule and the
machinations of the racial state without accounting for black existence within its framework
— which does not mean simply listing it among a chain of equivalents or returning to it as an
afterthought — is doomed to miss what is essential about the situation. Black existence does
not represent the total reality of the racial formation — it is not the beginning and the end of
the story — but it does relate to the totality; it indicates the (repressed) truth of the political and economic
system. That is to say, the whole range of positions within the racial formation is most fully understood from this vantage point, not
unlike the way in which the range of gender and sexual variance under patriarchal and heteronormative regimes is most fully
understood through lenses that are feminist and queer.75 What is lost for the study of black existence in the proposal for a
decentered, “postblack” paradigm is a proper analysis of the true scale and nature of black suffering and of the struggles — political,
aesthetic, intellectual, and so on — that have sought to transform and undo it. What is lost for the study of nonblack nonwhite
existence is a proper analysis of the true scale and nature of its material and symbolic power relative to the category of blackness.76
This is why every attempt to defend the rights and liberties of the latest victims of state
repression will fail to make substantial gains insofar as it forfeits or sidelines the fate of
blacks, the prototypical targets of the panoply of police practices and the juridical
infrastructure built up around them. Without blacks on board, the only viable political option
and the only effective defense against the intensifying cross fire will involve greater alliance
with an antiblack civil society and further capitulation to the magnification of state power. At
the apex of the midcentury social movements, Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton wrote in their 1968 classic, Black Power: The
Politics of Liberation, that black freedom entails “the necessarily total revamping of the society.”77 For Hartman, thinking of the
entanglements of the African diaspora in this context, the necessarily total revamping of the society is more appropriately
envisioned as the creation of an entirely new world: I
knew that no matter how far from home I traveled, I
would never be able to leave my past behind. I would never be able to imagine being the kind
of person who had not been made and marked by slavery. I was black and a history of terror
had produced that identity. Terror was “captivity without the possibility of flight,” inescapable
violence, precarious life. There was no going back to a time or place before slavery, and going
beyond it no doubt would entail nothing less momentous than yet another revolution.78
The aff is complicit in the attempt to perfect an antiblack world and traps
blackness into cruel optimism. This is the genocide of blackness that focuses on
the future but leaves the slave unprotected against capture, mutilation, and
torture.
Dillon 13 PhD in American Studies at U of Minn, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory “It's here, it's that time:”
Race, queer futurity, and the temporality of violence in Born in Flames. Stephen Dillon. University of Minnesota, MN, USA Published
online: 23 May 2013
In one of the first lines of the film, a
state newscaster covering the celebration of the revolution’s tenth
anniversary says that the news program will look “at the progress of the last ten years, and will
look forward to the future.” Progress is central to the discourses produced by the revolutionary state and is the liberal
conception of time that the Women’s Army attempts to undo. Progress is named as a time that is cyclical and
forcefully forgetful (Söderbäck 2012, 303). Indeed, progress, patience, and reform are the temporalities used by
the state to justify and erase the violence that continues under the names of justice, equality,
and democracy. The state describes the future as a space of safety and security in order to
maintain the violence of the present, and to temper the rage of those who refuse to wait for the
future’s warm embrace to arrive. According to the state media, the Women’s Army is not “interested in the progress of all of us”
because their actions and demands contradict the teleology of state development and reform. The state declares change will
come, to be patient, to trust in the progress of time. Critically, this narrative is not just produced by the state, but also by
the white feminist editors of the Socialist Youth Review. When asked about the actions of the Women’s Army, and more specifically about the
continuation of sexual violence in the revolution, they respond: Well, I think statistics will show you that the percentage of rape and prostitution at this
point is lower than it was in pre-revolutionary society and that obviously it’s an advancement, it’s a step forward. It’s impossible to talk about the
complete, you know, abolition [of sexual violence], because this is not the nature of this government, they don’t abolish … it’s a question of a gradual
move toward something, and I think everything is leading up to the point where those things will no longer exist. Here, white feminism aligns itself with
the state through its adherence to liberal Western notions of time and history. This is a notion of history where the passage of time washes away the
violence of then and now so that the future is free from the horrors of the past. In this way, the past is constructed as a space of radical alterity, an
aberration to the progress of the future. Sexual violence will be left behind by the progress of the revolution. Time will temper terror. Yet, the very
ability of the editors to believe in the progress of time is tied to the immunity of whiteness from structural
forms of racial violence, regulation, and social death. For instance, when Adelaide Norris, the black lesbian leader of the Women’s Army, goes to
the editors of the Socialist Youth Review to ask for their support, their conversation highlights the divergent temporalities of black feminism and white
feminism. When Norris tells the editors, “You’re oppressed too and it’s pathetic that you can’t even see it!” they respond, “There
are
problems, we know. But things are so much better than they were before. Things are not going to happen overnight. It’s
important that the party remains strong so progress can be made. ” 7 Norris’s response sutures gender and race
to a different theorization of time: You know the way my mom brought us up; there were eight of us and she took care of the domestic work all by
herself. And abortions; she couldn’t even think of abortions. And daycare – hmph – we took care of ourselves, no one took care of us. And there are
plenty of women who are living now in the same manner: Black women, Latin women, young women living in that same lifestyle. 8 For the editors, the
future of the revolution will be free from state and non-state forms of racialized and gendered violence because the reforms sutured to time’s
progression will undo the horrors of the present. But for Norris, gendered racism built into the banality of everyday life undoes the imagined progress
of time, so that time’s
passage is merely the modification and intensification of older modes of subjection and
subjugation. For those bearing the brunt of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy, the past,
present, and future are not distinct temporal spaces. In other words, Born in Flames documents
the amplification, modification, and protraction of the past in the present, where the past is not
an isolated aberration of what is here, but, rather, is an anticipation of the present and future.
The past is an image of the future because the future will be a repetition of the past. In this way, the
film critiques normative notions of time and a liberal conception of history. In Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of
History, Ian Baucom argues for a conception of history that undoes liberal notions of progress, change, and time. Baucom’s theory of history centers on
the massacre of 132 slaves aboard the slave ship The Zong in 1781. Over three days, the slaves were handcuffed and thrown overboard in order to
collect the insurance money that sealed their value even in death. For Baucom, the massacre is the paradigmatic event of modernity. It encompasses
the racial, financial, and epistemological regimes that have not only failed to dissolve with the passage of time, but instead, have intensified so that our
current moment finds itself anticipated and enveloped by this event. As Baucom argues: “Time does not pass, it accumulates” (Baucom 2005, 24). Time
does not erase what has happened, dissolving terror and violence into the progress of the future, nor is the past passively sedimented in the present.
Rather, the past returns to the present in expanded form so that the present “finds stored and accumulated within itself a nonsynchronous array of
past times” (29). The present is possessed by the logics and protocols of racial capitalism’ s past – by a perfectly routine massacre that was and is
repeated endlessly across space and time in the (post)colony, prison, frontier, torture room, plantation, reservation, riot zone, and on and on. Racial
terror returns from a past that is not an end to take hold (of bodies, institutions, infrastructure, discourse, and libidinal life) and does not let go. In this
way, the past and present are not ontologically discrete categories, but are, rather, complex human constructs. The present is not a quarantined,
autonomous thing. What was begun does not end but instead intensifies so that the past and present become indistinguishable. Hortense Spillers
provides a powerful theorization of time as accumulation in her classic essay, “ Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book: ” Even
though the captive flesh/body has been “ liberated,” and no one need pretend that even the quotation marks do not matter , dominant symbolic
activity, the ruling episteme that releases the dynamics of naming and valuation, remains grounded in originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation
so that it is as if neither time nor history, nor historiography or its topics, show movement, as the human subject is “ murdered ” over and over again by
the passions of a blood-less and anonymous archaism, showing itself in endless disguise.
Their focus on “Existential threats” such as warming, or climate change ignore
and undermine the existential threat Black people face by just living
Hegler 19 Mary Annaïse Heglar Feb 18, 19 “Climate Change Ain’t the First Existential Threat”
https://medium.com/s/story/sorry-yall-but-climate-change-ain-t-the-first-existential-threat-b3c999267aa0 SJZD
Dear Climate Movement: I’m with you when you say that climate change is the most important issue facing humankind. I’ll even go
so far as to say it’s the most important one ever. But, when
I hear folks say—and I have heard it—that the
environmental movement is the first in history to stare down an existential threat, I have to
get off the train. This game of what I call “existential exceptionalism” is a losing one. It is not only inaccurate,
shortsighted, and arrogant—it’s dangerous. It serves only to divorce the environmental
movement from a much bigger “arc of history.” And for me, as a Black woman from the South, it’s
downright insulting. I’ll grant that we’ve never seen an existential threat to all of humankind before. It’s true that the planet
itself has never become hostile to our collective existence. But history is littered with targeted—but no less
deadly—existential threats for specific populations. For 400 years and counting, the United
States itself has been an existential threat for Black people. Let’s be clear that slavery didn’t end
with freedom; it just morphed into a marginally more sophisticated, still deadly machine. I want
you to know that Jim Crow—far too tame a name for its reality—was never about water fountains or bus seats or lunch counters. It
wasn’t about “integration.” Instead, I want you to imagine living in constant, crippling fear of humiliation, rape, torture, and
murder—in a word: terrorism. Lynching
was not some abstract threat or a one-time event. It was
omnipresent. It hung in the air like humidity. Or the stench of burning flesh. And it wasn’t a quick death. Maybe you were
dragged by a speeding truckload of drunken, hysterical men practically frothing at the mouth for your blood. Maybe you were tarred
and feathered. Maybe your unborn child was carved out of your womb while you were still alive. Maybe after you were beaten
within an inch of your life, you were castrated and hanged in front of a frenzied, bloodthirsty mob, a sea of faces illuminated in the
night only by their whiteness. Maybe your fingers and toes were severed and passed out to the children. As souvenirs. Maybe
there’s a postcard with you on it. Imagine
living under a calculated, meticulous system dedicated to and
dependent on your oppression and being surrounded by that system’s hysterical,
brainwashed guardians. Now imagine your children growing up under that system, watching
your daughter and the “ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental
sky,” as Martin Luther King Jr. described. How’s that for existential? I want you to understand how
overwhelming, how insurmountable it must have felt. I want you to understand that there was no end in sight. It felt futile
for them too. Then, as now, there were calls to slow down. To settle for incremental remedies for an untenable situation. They, too,
trembled for every baby born into that world. Sound familiar? You
don’t fight something like that because you
think you will win. You fight it because you have to. Because surrendering dooms so much more than yourself,
but everything that comes after you. Acquiescence, in this case, is what James Baldwin called “the sickness
unto death.” Now you understand what Fannie Lou Hamer meant when she said, “What was
the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me, and it kinda seemed like
they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.” What, now, do you have to
lose? What else can you be but brave? “History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does
not refer principally to the past,” Baldwin also wrote. “On the contrary, the
great force of history comes from the
fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is
literally present in everything we do.” I want you to know that the people who survived all this, the
people who fought, are not far away from me. They are my grandaddy, my grandmama, Aunt Juanita, Uncle Biddy, Aunt Maude,
Uncle Tweet, Aunt Jewel, Uncle Brother, Papa Dee, Mama Ora. My mama, Aunt Jackie, Uncle June, Aunt Joan, Uncle Harold, Aunt
Anne. They are
not my “ancestors”—they raised me. Many of them are still very much alive. They
next time you want to “educate” communities
of color about climate change, remember that they have even more to teach you about
building movements, about courage, about survival. Nothing scares me more than climate change, but I made
taught me so much, and they have so much to teach you. So the
up my mind to face it head-on because of my debt to future generations and to previous generations. So much of this story is mine,
but this history belongs to all of us. And I
want you to know it too. You can’t afford not to.
Their extinction impacts are terminally non-unique: the world ended for black
people when the slave trade began with the new world. They do not consider
the way in which African culture was obliterated in the middle passage, or the
ways in which the effects of environmental issue have and always plagued the
black community.