ANTI-Blackness
AT: Afropess
ontology
Afro-Pessimism fails to understand failure. Transformative revolutions
can make new worlds through relational humanisms.
Gordon 17 (Lewis R, Professor of Philosophy @ UConn, “Thoughts on Afropessimism”,
Contemporary Political Theory, Volume 17, Issue, 1, pages 105-137, December 7)
I begin with this tale of philosophical abstraction to contextualize Afropessimism. Its main exemplars, such
as Jared Sexton and Frank Wilderson III, emerged from academic literary theory, an area dominated by
poststructuralism even in many cases that avow ‘‘Marxism.’’ Sexton (2010) and Wilderson (2007) divert from a
reductive poststructuralism, however, through examining important existential moves inaugurated, as Daniel
McNeil (2011, 2012) observed, by Fanon and his intellectual heirs. The critical question that Afropessimism addresses in this
fusion is the viability of posed strategies of Black liberation. (I’m using the capital ‘‘B’’ here to point not only to the racial
designation ‘‘black’’ but also to the nationalist one ‘‘Black.’’ Afropessimists often mean both, since blacks and Blacks have a
central and centered role in their thought.) The world that produced blacks and in consequence Blacks is, for Afropessimists, a
crushing, historical one whose Manichaean divide is sustained contraries best kept segregated. Worse, any effort of mediation
leads to confirmed black subordination. Overcoming this requires purging the world of antiblackness. Where cleansing the
world is unachievable, an alternative is to disarm the force of antiblack racism. Where whites lack power over blacks, they lose
relevance – at least politically and at levels of cultural and racial capital or hegemony. Wilderson (2008), for instance,
explores my concept of ‘‘an antiblack world’’ to build similar arguments. Sexton (2011) makes
similar moves in his discussions of ‘‘social death.’’ As this forum doesn’t afford space for a long critique, I’ll
offer several, non-exhaustive criticisms.
The first is that ‘‘an antiblack world’’ is
not identical with ‘‘the world is antiblack.’’ My argument is
that such a world is an antiblack racist project. It is not the historical achievement. Its
limitations emerge from a basic fact: Black people and other opponents of such a project
fought, and continue to fight, as we see today in the #BlackLivesMatter movement and many
others, against it. The same argument applies to the argument about social death. Such an achievement would have
rendered even these reflections stillborn. The basic premises of the Afropessimistic argument are, then,
locked in performative contradictions. Yet, they have rhetorical force. This is evident through the
continued growth of its proponents and forums (such as this one) devoted to it.
In Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, I argued that there are forms of antiblack racism offered under the guise of love, though I
was writing about whites who exoticize blacks while offering themselves as white sources of black value. Analyzed in terms of
bad faith, where one lies to oneself in an attempt to flee displeasing truths for pleasing falsehoods, exoticists romanticize
blacks while affirming white normativity, and thus themselves, as principals of reality. These ironic, performative
contradictions are features of all forms of racism, where one group is elevated to godlike status and another is pushed below
that of human despite both claiming to be human.
Antiblack racism offers whites self-other relations (necessary for ethics) with each other but not so for groups forced in a
‘‘zone of nonbeing’’ below them. There is asymmetry where whites stand as others who look downward to those who are not
their others or their analogues. Antiblack racism
is thus not a problem of blacks being ‘‘others.’’ It’s a
problem of their not-being-analogical-selves-and-not-even being-others. Fanon, in Black Skin,
White Masks (1952), reminds us that Blacks among each other live in a world of selves and
others. It is in attempted relations with whites that these problems occur. Reason in such contexts has a bad habit of
walking out when Blacks enter. What are Blacks to do? As reason cannot be forced, because that would be ‘‘violence,’’ they
must ironically reason reasonably with forms of unreasonable reason. Contradictions loom. Racism is, given these
arguments,
a project of imposing non-relations as the model of dealing with people designated
‘‘black.’’
In Les Damne´ de la terre (‘‘Damned of the Earth’’), Fanon goes further and argues that colonialism is an attempt to impose a
Manichean structure of contraries instead of a dialectical one of ongoing, human negotiation of contradictions. The former
segregates the groups; the latter emerges from interaction. The police, he observes, are the mediator in such a situation, as
their role is force/violence instead of the human, discursive one of politics and civility (Fanon, 1991). Such societies draw
legitimacy from Black non-existence or invisibility. Black appearance, in other words, would be a violation of those systems.
Think of the continued blight of police, extra-judicial killings of Blacks in those countries.
An immediate observation of many postcolonies is that antiblack attitudes, practices, and institutions aren’t exclusively white.
Black antiblack dispositions make this clear. Black antiblackness entails Black exoticism. Where this exists, Blacks
simultaneously receive Black love alongside Black rejection of agency. Many problems follow. The absence of agency bars
maturation, which would reinforce the racial logic of Blacks as in effect wards of whites. Without agency, ethics, liberation,
maturation, politics, and responsibility could not be possible.
Afropessimism faces the problem of a hidden premise of white agency versus Black
incapacity. Proponents of Afropessimism would no doubt respond that the theory itself is a form of agency reminiscent of
Fanon’s famous remark that though whites created le Ne`gre it was les Ne`gres who created Ne´gritude. Whites clearly did not
create Afropessimism, which Black liberationists should celebrate. We should avoid the
fallacy, however, of
confusing source with outcome. History is not short of bad ideas from good people. If
intrinsically good, however, each person of African descent would become ethically and epistemologically a switching of the
Manichean contraries, which means only changing players instead of the game.
We come, then, to the crux of the matter. If
the goal of Afropessimism is Afropessimism, its
achievement would be attitudinal and, in the language of old, stoic – in short, a symptom of antiblack
society. At this point, there are several observations that follow. The first is a diagnosis of the implications of Afropessimism
as symptom. The second examines the epistemological implications of Afropessimism. The third is whether a disposition
counts as a political act and, if so, is it sufficient for its avowed aims. There are more, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll simply
focus on these.
An ironic dimension of pessimism is that it is the other side of optimism. Oddly enough, both are connected to nihilism,
which is, as Nietzsche (1968) showed, a decline of values during periods of social decay. It emerges when people
no
longer want to be responsible for their actions. Optimists expect intervention from beyond.
Pessimists declare relief is not forthcoming. Neither takes responsibility for what is valued. The valuing,
however, is what leads to the second, epistemic point. The presumption that what is at stake is what can be
known to determine what can be done is the problem. If such knowledge were possible, the debate would
be about who is reading the evidence correctly. Such judgment would be a priori – that is, prior to events
actually unfolding. The future, unlike transcendental conditions such as language, signs, and
reality, is, however, ex post facto: It is yet to come. Facing the future, the question isn’t what will
be or how do we know what will be but instead the realization that whatever is done will be
that on which the future will depend. Rejecting optimism and pessimism, there is a
supervening alternative: political commitment.
The appeal to political commitment is not only in stream with what French existentialists call l’intellectuel
engage´ (committed intellectual) but also reaches back through the history and existential situation of
enslaved, racialized ancestors. Many were, in truth, an existential paradox: commitment to
action without guarantees. The slave revolts, micro and macro acts of resistance, escapes,
and returns help others do the same; the cultivated instability of plantations and other
forms of enslavement, and countless other actions, were waged against a gauntlet of forces
designed to eliminate any hope of success. The claim of colonialists and enslavers was that
the future belonged to them, not to the enslaved and the indigenous. A result of more than 500 years
of conquest and 300 years of enslavement was also a (white) rewriting of history in which African and First Nations’ agency
was, at least at the level of scholarship, nearly erased. Yet there
was resistance even in that realm, as
Africana and First Nation intellectual history and scholarship attest. Such actions set the
course for different kinds of struggle today.
Such reflections occasion meditations on the concept of failure. Afropessimism, the existential critique suggests,
suffers from a failure to understand failure. Consider Fanon’s notion of constructive failure,
where what doesn’t initially work transforms conditions for something new to emerge. To
understand this argument, one
must rethink the philosophical anthropology at the heart of a specific line of
Euromodern thought on what it means to be human. Atomistic and individual substancebased, this model, articulated by Hobbes, Locke, and many others, is of a non-relational being that thinks, acts,
and moves along a course in which continued movement depends on not colliding with
others. Under that model, the human being is a thing that enters a system that facilitates or obstructs its
movement. An alternative model, shared by many groups across southern Africa, is a relational version of
the human being as part of a larger system of meaning. Actions, from that perspective, are not about whether ‘‘I’’
succeed but instead about ‘‘our’’ story across time. As relational, it means that each human being is a
constant negotiation of ongoing efforts to build relationships with others, which means no one
actually enters a situation without establishing new situations of action and meaning. Instead of entering a game, their
participation requires a different kind of project – especially where the ‘‘game’’ was premised on their exclusion. Thus, where
the system or game repels initial participation, such repulsion is a shift
in the grammar of how the system
functions, especially its dependence on obsequious subjects. Shifted energy affords
emergence of alternatives. Kinds cannot be known before the actions that birthed them.
Abstract as this sounds, it has much historical support. Evelyn Simien (2016), in her insightful political study
Historic Firsts, examines the new set of relations established by Shirley Chisholm’s and Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns.
There could be no Barack Obama without such important predecessors affecting the demographics of voter participation.
Simien intentionally focused on the most mainstream example of political life to illustrate this point. Although
no
exemplar of radicalism, Obama’s ‘‘success’’ emerged from Chisholm and Jackson’s (and many
others’) so-called ‘‘failure.’’ Beyond presidential electoral politics, there are numerous examples of how prior, radical socalled ‘‘failures’’ transformed relationships that facilitated other kinds of outcome. The trail goes back to the Haitian
Revolution and back to every act of resistance from Nat Turner’s Rebellion in the USA,
Sharpe’s in Jamaica, or Tula’s in Curac¸ao and so many other efforts for social
transformation to come.
In existential terms, then, many ancestors of the African diaspora embodied what Søren Kierkegaard (1983) calls an
existential paradox. All the evidence around them suggested failure and the futility of hope. They first had to make a
movement of infinite resignation – that is, resigning themselves to their situation. Yet they must simultaneously act against
that situation. Kierkegaard called this seemingly contradictory phenomenon ‘‘faith,’’ but that concept relates more to a
relationship with a transcendent, absolute being, which could only be established by a ‘‘leap,’’ as there are no mediations or
bridge. Ironically, if Afropessimism appeals to transcendent intervention, it would collapse into faith. If, however, the
argument rejects transcendent intervention and focuses on committed political action, of taking responsibility for a future that
offers no guarantees, then the movement from infinite resignation becomes existential political action.
At this point, the crucial meditation would be on politics and political action. An attitude
of infinite resignation to
the world without the leap of committed action would simply be pessimistic or nihilistic.
Similarly, an attitude of hope or optimism about the future would lack infinite resignation. We see here the underlying failure
of the two approaches. Yet ironically, there
is a form of failure at failing in the pessimistic turn versus
the optimistic one, since if focused exclusively on resignation as the goal, then the ‘‘act’’ of
resignation would have been achieved, which, paradoxically, would be a success; it would
be a successful failing of failure. For politics to emerge, however, there are two missing elements in inward
pessimistic resignation.
The first is that politics is a social phenomenon, which means it requires the expanding options of a social world. Turning away
from the social world, though a statement about politics, is not, however, in and of itself political. The ancients from whom
much western political theory or philosophy claimed affinity had a disparaging term for individuals who resigned themselves
from political life: idio¯te¯s, a private person, one not concerned with public affairs, in a word – an idiot. I mention western
political theory because that is the hegemonic intellectual context of Afropessimism. We don’t, however, have to end our
etymological journey in ancient Greek. Extending our linguistic archaeology back a few thousand years, we could examine the
Middle Kingdom Egyptian word idi (deaf). The presumption, later taken on by the ancient Athenians and Macedonians, was
that a lack of hearing entailed isolation, at least in terms of audio speech. The contemporary inward resignation of seeking a
form of purity from the loathsome historical reality of racial oppression, in this reading, collapses ultimately into a form of
moralism (private, normative satisfaction) instead of public responsibility born of and borne by action.
The second is the importance of power. Politics makes no sense without it. But what is power? Eurocentric etymology points
to the Latin word potis as its source, from which came the word ‘‘potent’’ as in an omnipotent god. If we again look back
further, we will notice the Middle Kingdom (2000 BCE–1700 BCE) KMT/ Egyptian word pHty, which refers to godlike strength.
Yet for those ancient Northeast Africans, even the gods’ abilities came from a source: In the Coffin Texts, HqAw or heka
activates the ka (sometimes translated as soul, spirit, or, in a word, ‘‘magic’’), which makes reality. All this amounts to a
straightforward thesis on power as the ability with the means to make things happen.
There is an alchemical quality to power. The human world,
premised on symbolic communication,
brings many forms of meaning into being, and those new meanings afford relationships that
build institutions through a world of culture, a phenomenon that Freud (1989) rightly described as ‘‘a prosthetic god.’’ It
is godlike because it addresses what humanity historically sought from the gods: protection from the elements, physical
maledictions, and social forms of misery. Such power clearly can be abused. It is where those enabling capacities
(empowerment) are pushed to the wayside in the hording of social resources into propping up some people as gods that the
legitimating practices of cultural cum political institution decline and stimulate pessimism and nihilism. That
institutions in the Americas very rarely attempt establishing positive relations to Blacks is
the subtext of Afropessimism and this entire meditation.
The discussion points, however, to a demand for political commitment. Politics itself emerges under different names
throughout the history of our species, but the one occasioning the word ‘‘politics’’ is from the Greek polis, which refers to
ancient Hellenic city-states. It identifies specific kinds of activities conducted inside the city-state, where order necessitated
the resolution of conflicts through rules of discourse the violation of which could lead to (civil) war, a breaking down of
relations appropriate for ‘‘outsiders.’’ Returning to the Fanonian observation of selves and others, it is clear that imposed
limitations on certain groups amounts to impeding or blocking the option of politics. Yet, as a problem occurring within the
polity, the problem short of war becomes a political one.
Returning to Afropessimistic challenges, the question becomes this: If the problem of antiblack racism is conceded as political,
where antiblack institutions of power have, as their project, the impeding of Black power, which in effect requires barring
Black access to political institutions, then antiblack societies are ultimately threats also to politics defined as the human
negotiation of the expansion of human capabilities or more to the point: freedom.
Anti-politics is one of the reasons why societies in which antiblack racism is hegemonic are also those in which racial
moralizing dominates: moralizing stops at individuals at the expense of addressing institutions the transformation of which
would make immoral individuals irrelevant. As a political problem, it demands a political solution. It is not accidental that
Blacks continue to be the continued exemplars of unrealized freedom. As so many from Ida B. Wells-Barnett to Angela Davis
(2003) and Michelle Alexander (2010) have shown, the
expansion of privatization and incarceration is
squarely placed in a structure of states and civil societies premised on the limitations of
freedom (Blacks) – ironically, as seen in countries such as South Africa and the United States, in the name of
freedom.
That power is a facilitating or enabling phenomenon, a functional element of the human world, a viable response must be the
establishing of relations that reach beyond the singularity of the body. I bring this up because proponents of
Afropessimism might object to this analysis because of its appeal to a human world. If that world is abrogated, the site of
struggle becomes that which is patently not human. It is not accidental that popular race discourse refers today to ‘‘black
bodies,’’ for instance, instead of ‘‘black people.’’ As
the human world is discursive, social, and relational,
this abandonment amounts to an appeal to the non-relational, the incommunicability of
singularity, and appeals to the body and its reach. At that point, it’s perhaps the psychologist, psychiatrist, or
psychoanalyst who would be helpful, as turning radically inward offers the promise of despair, narcissistic delusions of
godliness, and, as Fanon also observed, madness. Even if that slippery slope were rejected, the performative contradiction of
attempting to communicate such singularity or absence thereof requires, at least for consistency, the appropriate course of
action: silence.
Ontology is contradictory, self-aggrandizing, and devolves into anti-political
moralizing – it ignores institutional engagement which is a better way to engage
anti-black racism.
Gordon 21 – Professor of Philosophy and Department Chair at University of Connecticut, PhD in Philosophy at Yale, founder
of the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies, Honorary Professor in the Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University, South Africa;
Chairperson of the American Philosophical Association Committee on Public Philosophy; and Chairperson of the Awards Committee
and Global Collaborations for the Caribbean Philosophical Association, of which he was the organization’s first president [Lewis,
Freedom, Justice and Decolonization, Chapter 5: Thoughts on Afropessimism, Copyright Year 2021]
At this point, the crucial meditation would be on politics and political action. An
attitude of infinite resignation to the
world without the leap of committed action would simply be pessimistic or nihilistic. Similarly, an attitude
of hope or optimism about the future would lack infinite resignation. We see here the underlying failure of the two approaches. Yet
ironically, there is a form of failure at failing in the pessimistic turn versus the optimistic one, since if focused exclusively on
resignation as the goal, then the “act” of resignation would have been achieved, which, paradoxically, would be a success; it would
be a successful failing of failure. For
politics to emerge, there are two missing elements in inward
pessimistic resignation to consider.
The first is that politics is a social phenomenon, which means it requires the expanding options of a
social world. It must transcend the self. Turning away from the social world, though a statement about politics, is not in and of
itself political. As we have seen, the ancients from whom much Western political theory or philosophy claimed affinity had a
disparaging term for an individual resigned from political life—namely, idiōtēs, a private person, one not concerned with public
affairs, in English: an idiot. I mention “Western political theory” because that is the hegemonic intellectual context of Afropessimism;
I have not come across Afropessimistic writings on thought outside of that framework. We do not have to end our etymological
journey in ancient Greek. Recall that extending our linguistic archaeology back a few thousand years we could examine the Middle
Kingdom (2000 BCE–1700 BCE) of Kmt’s Mdw Ntr word idi (deaf). The presumption, later taken on by the ancient Athenians and
other Greek-speaking peoples, was that a lack of hearing entailed isolation, at least in terms of audio speech. The
contemporary inward resignation of seeking a form of purity from the loathsome historical reality of racial
oppression, in this reading, retreats ultimately into a form of moralism (private, normative satisfaction) instead of
public responsibility born of and borne by action. The nonbeing to which Afropessimists refer is also a form of inaudibility.
The second is the importance of power. Politics makes no sense without it. As we have seen throughout our earlier
reflections on power, Eurocentric etymology points to the Latin word potis as its source, from which came the word “potent” as in
an omnipotent god. If we again look back farther, we will notice the Middle Kingdom Mdw Ntr word pHty, which refers to godlike
strength. Yet for those ancient Northeast Africans, even the gods’ abilities came from a source. In the Coffin Texts, HqAw or heka
activates the ka (sometimes, as we have seen, translated as soul, spirit, womb, or “magic”), which makes reality.20 All this amounts
to a straightforward thesis on power as the ability with the means to make things happen.
There is an alchemical quality of power. The
human world, premised on symbolic communication, brings
many forms of meaning into being, and those new meanings afford relationships that build
institutions through a world of culture, a phenomenon that Freud, we should recall, rightly described as “a prosthetic
god.” It is godlike because it addresses what humanity historically sought from the gods—protection from the elements, physical
maledictions, and social forms of misery. Such power clearly can be abused. It is where those enabling capacities (empowerment)
are pushed to the wayside in the hording of social resources into propping up some people as gods that the legitimating practices of
cultural cum political institutions decline and stimulate pessimism and nihilism. The institutions in Abya Yala and in Northern
countries, such as the United States and Canada, very rarely attempt to establish positive relations to blacks, and Blacks the subtext
of Afropessimism and this entire meditation.
The discussion points to a demand for political commitment. Politics is manifested under
different names throughout the history of our species, but the one occasioning the word “politics” is, as we have
seen, from the Greek pólis, which refers to ancient Hellenic city-states. It identifies specific kinds of activities conducted inside the
city-state, where order necessitated the resolution of conflicts through rules of discourse the violation of which could lead to (civil)
war, a breaking down of relations into those appropriate for “outsiders.” Returning to the Fanonian observation of selves and
others, it is clear that imposed limitations on certain groups amount to impeding or blocking the option and activities of politics. Yet,
as a problem occurring within the polity, the problem short of war becomes a political one.
Returning to Afropessimistic challenges, the question becomes this. If
the problem of antiblack racism is conceded
as political—where antiblack institutions of power have, as their project, the impeding of Black
power, which in effect requires barring Black access to political institutions—then antiblack
societies are ultimately threats also to politics defined as the human negotiation of the
expansion of human capabilities or, more to the point, appearance, speech, and freedom.
Antipolitics is one of the reasons why societies in which antiblack racism is hegemonic are also
those in which racial moralizing dominates; moralizing stops at individuals at the expense of
addressing institutions the transformation of which would make immoral individuals irrelevant. As a political
problem, it demands a political solution. It is not accidental that blacks continue to be the continued exemplars of
unrealized freedom and against whom violence is waged against appearance and speech. As so many from Ida B. Wells-Barnett to
Angela Y. Davis, Michelle Alexander, Angela J. Davis, Noël Cazenave have shown the
expansion of privatization and
incarceration is squarely placed in a structure of states and civil societies premised on the
limitations of freedom (Blacks)—ironically, as seen in countries such as South Africa and the United States, in the name of
freedom. 21
That power is a facilitating or enabling phenomenon, a functional element of the human world, a
viable response must be
the establishment of relations that reach beyond the singularity of the body. I bring this up because
proponents of Afropessimism might object to this analysis because of its appeal to a human world. If that
world is abrogated, the site of struggle becomes that which is patently not human. It is not accidental that popular race
discourse refers today to “black bodies” instead of “black people,” for instance. As the human world is
discursive, social, and relational, this abandonment amounts to an appeal to the nonrelational, the
incommunicability of radicalized singularity, and appeals to the body and its very limited reach, if not isolation. At
that point, it is perhaps the psychologist, psychiatrist, or psychoanalyst who would be helpful, as turning radically inward
offers the promise of despair, narcissistic delusions of divine power, and, as Fanon also observed, madness.22 Even if
that slippery slope were rejected, the performative contradiction of attempting to
communicate such singularity or absence thereof requires, at least for consistency, the appropriate
course of action: silence.
The remaining question for Afropessimism, especially those who are primarily academics, becomes this:
Why write?
It is a question for which, in both existential and political terms, I do not see how an answer could be
given from an Afropessimistic perspective without the unfortunate revelation of cynicism. The marketability
of Afropessimists in predominantly white institutions—perhaps as an exotic phenomenon that affirms white
standpoints as ontological sites of legitimacy—is no doubt in the immediate and paradoxical satisfaction in
dissatisfaction it offers. Indeed, if Afropessimists were correct, their only solace would be in
black institutions, but that, too, would pose a problem since the argument is that such
institutions lack agency because, as black, they are absent. This is not to say that critical black and Black thinkers should not
do their work in predominantly white spaces. It is simply that the argument of the impossibility of their doing so
makes their location in such places patently contradictory. We are at this point on familiar terrain. As
with ancient logical paradoxes denying the viability of time and motion, the best option, after a moment of
immobilized reflection, is, eventually, to move on, even where the pause is itself significant as an encomium of thought.
Social death theory is wrong---conflates the oppressors’ view with the truth of
black of existence, which re-centers the slave owner’s perspective and prevents
struggles for re-humanization
George Lipsitz 17. Professor of Black Studies and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. 2017. “What is this
Black in the Black Radical Tradition?” in Futures of Black Radicalism, ed. by Johnson and Lubin, 2017. p. 108-110.
Three miracles seem to characterize the history of Black people in the United States. The very survival of Black people in the face of murderous brutality and genocidal intent
The enduring reality of Black humanity in a society that has used every means at its
disposal to destroy Black dignity and deny Black people the opportunity to exercise their full humanity appears
miraculous. The historical record of democratic aspiration and achievement by Black people, of
creating democratic opportunities for themselves and extending them to others, seems to defy
normal rational explanations. Despite the social death at the center of the slave system and the
organized abandonments of today's neoliberal capitalism, despite beatings, lynchings, shootings,
mass incarceration and systematic impoverishment, Black people have survived and thrived. In
slavery, African people in the Americas owned virtually nothing, not even the skin on their backs. They had
every reason to give in to despair. Yet they somehow managed to survive, to extend recognition and
respect to each other while in bondage, and to maintain a commitment to the linked fate of all
humans. Time and time again, Black people have countered vicious dehumanization with
qualifies as a miracle.
determined and successful re-humanization. Insisting on their own humanity and the humanity
of all people, even that of their oppressors, they have been at the forefront of what Dr. King called “the
bitter but beautiful struggle” for a more just and better world. From the egalitarian politics of
abolition democracy in the wake of the Civil War and the participatory democracy of the civil
rights movement to the contemporary insurgencies waged under the banners of #BlackLivesMatter and
#SayHerName, struggles for Black survival and Black humanity have repeatedly linked the termination of
existing racist policies to the creation of new democratic practices and institutions. Forced to cope with the
nadir of political evil over centuries, Black people have responded consistently by forging advanced concepts of a deeply politicized love. Perhaps precisely because brutality and
African people in America have been adept at finding ways to
perceive something left to love inside themselves and in others. That ability has enabled their survival,
the preservation of their humanity, and their emergence as the nation's foremost champions of democracy and social justice. The people who were
oppression can make people decidedly unlovable,
systematically denied access to the fruits and benefits of democratic citizenship and social membership turned out to be the people who valued democracy the most and who
did the most to extend it to others. [END PAGE 108] Cedric Robinson has demonstrated that the three miracles were not really miracles at all, but rather products of a collective
intelligence developed over generations of struggle. In Black Marxism, Robinson defines the Black Radical Tradition as “the continuing development of a collective consciousness
informed by the historical struggles for liberation and motivated by the shared sense of obligation to preserve the collective being, the ontological totality.”1 Thus in many ways,
The “Black” in the
Black Radical Tradition is a politics rather than a pigment, a culture rather than a color. Yet this
Blackness does not presume a unified homogenous community with only one set of interests,
needs, and desires. On the contrary, Robinson's research reveals that the key building blocks for Black survival, Black
humanity, and Black democracy came from the lower rungs of Black society, from the
plantations and slave quarters, out of the contradictions of the rural regimes of slavery and debt
peonage and the living conditions in ghettos of northern and western cities. Experience taught
the Black poor and the Black working class that racial capitalism entailed “an unacceptable
standard of human conduct”2 that they needed to counter with a politics that was “inventive rather than
imitative, communitarian rather than individualistic, democratic rather than republican, Afro-Christian rather
than secular and materialist.”3 Robinson's emphasis on political struggle as the main explanation for Black
survival, humanity, and democracy reminds us not to confuse the grandiose aspirations and illusions of the
powerful with the actual lived experiences of those they control. Slavery did mandate legally
and militarily supported social death, but slaves worked assiduously and effectively each day,
every day, each year, and every year to create a rich social life.4 As Robinson argues, “Slavery gave the lie
to its own conceit: one could not create a perfect system of oppression and exploitation.”5
Domination produces resistance, and resistance plants the seeds of a new society within the
shell of the old. As Robinson explains in Black Movements in America, "The resistances to slavery were the [END PAGE 109] principal grounds for the radically
the greatest achievement of the Black community was itself, its emergence as an aggrieved and insurgent polity committed to social justice.
alternative political culture that coalesced in the Black communities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the era of revolutionary, liberal and nationalist impulses among
Declaring Blacks to be less than human could not make them so, even in the
eyes of their oppressors. Research by John Blassingame, George Rawick, Sterling Stuckey, Herbert Gutman, and Stephanie Camp (among others)
reveals how slaves fused African retention and New World invention to forge a culture that
affirmed their humanity and the humanity of others.7 They recognized this common humanity
through multicultural, multiracial alliances with poor whites and others in maroon communities.
8 In colonial Louisiana, Blacks reached out to Native Americans for help in resisting slavery.9 Slave
owners, however, were less successful in preserving their own humanity. In order to maintain the illusion
of complete control, they tortured, whipped, hanged, burned, and dismembered their
"property" when it displayed signs of having human will.10 Black people witnessed white people's
inhumanity and pitied them. As early as the 1820s, David Walker argued that while whites lost the
moral capacity to perceive the evil they enacted, they nonetheless knew "in their hearts" that
Blacks were human. He argued that it was precisely this recognition that propelled their cruelty and brutality: they presumed that Blacks resented them and, if
given the opportunity, would do to whites what whites had done to Blacks.11 In his history of the New Orleans slave market, Walter
Europeans in North America.” 6
Johnson notes a similar loss of humanity among slave owners. Whites invested more than money in the slave system;
they looked to it to elevate them beyond the status of ordinary mortals and became outraged when
their chattel refused to conform to the roles they had been assigned. Johnson notes: The greater the transformative
hopes slaveholders took with them to the slave market, the more violent their reactions to the inevitable disappointment of their efforts to get real slaves to act like imagined
ones ... If they had to, they would use brutality to close the distance between the roles they imagined for themselves and the failings of the slaves they bought as props for their
performance. 12 [END PAGE 110]
Their ontological and libidinal readings of blackness are inaccurate and
undermine liberation---a history of black resistance disproves the rigidity
of it as a metaphysical category.
Stephens 17. (R. L. Stephens is the A. Philip Randolph Fellow at Jacobin. Between the Black
Body and Me. May 31, 2015. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/ta-nehisi-coates-racismafro-pessimism-reparations-class-struggle)
Liza Bramlett was a slave. She lived on a cotton plantation in the Mississippi Delta during the nineteenth
century. White men raped her repeatedly throughout her life. They traded her body amongst themselves in exchange for calves and piglets. In the end,
Liza gave birth to twenty-three children, twenty of whom were conceived by rape. One
of Liza’s daughters, Ella Townsend, was
born after emancipation, but remained in the bondage of sharecropping in rural Mississippi. As an adult, she carried a pistol with her in
the fields, determined to protect herself and the surrounding children. One day, a white man on horseback rode into the fields. He had come to abduct
a young black girl. Ella, carrying her pistol in a lunch pail, intervened. “You don’t have no black children and you’re not going to beat no black children,”
she told the intruder. “If you step down off that horse, I’ll go to Hell and back with you before Hell can scorch a feather.” “ I
do not believe
that we can stop them … because they must ultimately stop themselves,” Ta-Nehisi Coates says of
white racists in the final paragraph of his bestseller Between the World and Me, written as an open letter to his son. Coates describes
racism as galactic, a physical law of the universe, “a tenacious gravity” and a “cosmic injustice.” When a cop kills a
black man, the police officer is “a force of nature, the helpless agent of our world’s physical laws.” Society is equally
helpless against the natural order. “The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed,” says Coates. In a widely replicated gesture, Coates locates the experience
of racism in the body, in a racism that “dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth.” In the slim volume,
fewer than two hundred pages, the word “body” or “bodies” appears more than three hundred times. “In America,” he writes, “it is traditional to
destroy the black body.” Another brooding passage dwells on the inevitability of this violence. It had to be blood. It had to be nails driven through a
tongue and ears pruned away. It had to be the thrashing of a kitchen maid for the crime of churning the butter at a leisurely clip. It could only be the
employment of carriage whips, tongs, iron pokers, handsaws, stones, paperweights or whatever might be handy to break the black body. Yet
Coates’s descriptive language and haunting narrative are not mere metaphors. They act as a kind of
ontological pivot, mystifying racism even as it is anchored in its physical effects. Metaphor has
long been used to capture racism’s almost unimaginable brutality. Lynching became “strange fruit” in Abel
Meerpool’s song, made famous by Billie Holiday. In a wry, tragic innuendo, rape was referred to in Black communities as “nighttime integration.” The
use of metaphor is not in itself an obfuscation. But Coates wields metaphor to obscure rather than illuminate the reality of racism. What
we
find all too often in Coates’s narrative universe are bodies without life and a racism without
people. To give race an ontological meaning, to make it a reality all its own, is to drain it of its place in
history and its roots in discrete human action. To deny the role of life and people — of politics
— as Coates does is to also foreclose the possibility of liberation. No Helpless Agent Ella knew her mother
Liza’s unimaginable suffering, but her memory was not a yoke on her shoulders. It provoked something in Ella. As an adult, she did not
see the white predator stalking the fields as some helpless agent. She took matters into her own hands. There was no gravity strong enough to break
her will or loosen her grip on her pistol. Her efforts rippled beyond those cotton fields. Ella
taught her own daughter, Fannie Lou
Hamer, not only to struggle, but to resist. Fannie Lou was born into a sharecropping family in
rural Mississippi but would go on to become a beacon of the Civil Rights movement. She is best
known for her work registering black voters in Mississippi, most famously during 1964’s Freedom Summer, at great personal
risk. Police arrested and beat her. White racists shot at her. Lyndon Johnson dismissed her as an
illiterate. In 1973, an interviewer asked her, “Do you have faith that the system will ever work
properly?” By then, Fannie Lou had seen a decade of setbacks and false dawns since first walking off her plantation in 1962 to fight for Civil Rights.
She responded, We have to make it work. Ain’t nothing going to be handed to you on a silver
platter. That’s not just black people, that’s people in general, masses. See, I’m with the masses…
You’ve got to fight. Every step of the way you’ve got to fight. She marched. She sang freedom
songs. She testified. She co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. For her, the
logical solution was political: uniting a powerless many against a powerful few. White racists
could be stopped. Black people could resist, and Fannie Lou and so many others did just that. Fannie Lou knew that the wages
of racism were measured on the body. “A black woman’s body was never hers alone,” she once remarked. White doctors sterilized her
without her consent during a minor surgery, a barbaric intrusion so common she called it a “Mississippi appendectomy.” However,
though she knew racism’s physical toll, she drew inspiration from stories of black resistance
passed down orally across the generations. Hamer recalled her grandmother’s will to survive and her mother’s weapon of
protection. These intergenerational resistance narratives, according to Charles Cobb in his book This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed, “underlay a deep
and powerful collective memory that was invisible to whites but greatly affected the shape and course of the modern Freedom Movement.” As a result,
Fannie Lou and so many others possessed an intimate knowledge not only of their own human
dignity, despite the racist brutality they endured, but also of the human frailty of their racial
oppressors. In the years before Fannie Lou’s political struggle began, whole communities, black
women and men, rose up against the violence that was forced on black women’s bodies. Feminist
historian Danielle McGuire argues this anti-rape community organizing in Alabama laid the foundation for what eventually became the Montgomery
Bus Boycott. She observes, “The majority of leaders active in the Montgomery Improvement Association in 1955 cut their political teeth demanding
justice for black women who were raped in the 1940s and early 1950s.” Despite
being a poor, black sharecropper
drowning in the poverty and racial terror endemic to rural Mississippi, Fannie Lou held fast to her forbearers’ stories of
resistance. She did not resign herself to fatalism, as Coates does. The "Birthmark of Damnation" Coates too takes a
multigenerational view. Between the World and Me is framed as a letter to his son. However, rather than seeing a legacy of resistance, he finds a
lineage of blackness defined by fear and dysfunction. “When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully,
adamantly, dangerously afraid,” he writes. “I felt the fear in the visits to my Nana’s home in Philadelphia,” Coates continues. “And I saw it in my own
father.” My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat
me as if someone might steal me away, because that is exactly what was happening all around us. Coates describes his condition, and that of all black
people, as a “birthmark of damnation.” The resistance stories passed down to Fannie Lou and so many others spurred them to march. Coates’s
narrative, riddled with fear and futility, begs us to retreat. Though
Coates has never explicitly cited it as his theoretical
framework, the dour outlook of his work evokes the themes of Afro-Pessimism. The pivot to the
ontological that is apparent in Coates’s rhetoric is a hallmark of Afro-Pessimism. “Ontology by definition is the
study of being, and to speak of Blackness as an ontological condition means analyzing the state
of Black bodies through the lens of slavery,” Afro-Pessimist scholar Michael Barlow, Jr., writes in the academic journal Inquiries.
However, for Barlow, the relation of slavery that ontologically defines blackness is not a matter of
political economy, but rather a “libidinal economy.” In this telling, labor and ownership — that is, political
economy — are merely incidental to racial slavery. Instead, it’s the white imagination and its depraved “metaphysical
desires for Black flesh” that both predated and catalyzed racialized chattel slavery. Racism is
reduced to the spiritual, more a matter of a sinful nature than a political struggle. Coates has
echoed this retreat to interiority, to the spiritual, to consciousness. It’s the ontological pivot that
leads Frank Wilderson, perhaps the world’s foremost Afro-Pessimist, to declare in his foundational text “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither
the Slave in Civil Society?” that black people are no more than cows in a slaughterhouse. Wilderson
posits that “death of the black body is foundational to the life of American civil society,” just
as a cow’s death is essential to the slaughterhouse. Flippantly, Wilderson asks, “how would the cows fare under a
dictatorship of the proletariat?” Coates adopts a similar sense of impotence. He characterizes struggle as aimless toil — an apolitical end in itself. “The
struggle is really all I have for you,” he tells his son, “because it is the only portion of this world under your control.” Yet how are we to struggle against
earthquakes and physical laws? How can we fight gravity? Both Coates and Wilderson speak of power in terms of dreams. Coates writes of monolithic
white “Dreamers,” those whose investment in the American Dream requires a faith in their own whiteness. Similarly, Wilderson sees America as
enacting two distinct dreams. For Wilderson, “the dream of black accumulation and death” is separate from “the dream of worker exploitation.”
Ultimately, in both Coates’s and Wilderson’s respective frameworks, solidarity
is unimaginable and class struggle is
rendered futile. Though Coates does not go to the lengths Wilderson does to position himself in opposition to materialist politics, the result is
effectively equivalent: a separation of race and class combined with a deep skepticism of class-based solidarity, reforms, or even revolution. This is a
turn away from the Freedom Tradition embodied by Fannie Lou Hamer. For her, the problem of racism wasn’t cosmology or ontology — it was an
expression of politics implicated in class antagonism. Fannie Lou Hamer stood “with the masses,” both white and black. Solidarity through struggle from
below, including class struggle, formed her path to victory. Coates’s ontological pivot is more muddled than Wilderson’s. Fleetingly peppered
throughout his work are allusions to material reality, betraying the imposition of metaphysical abstraction that ultimately drives his perspective. “We
did not choose our fences,” he writes. “They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible.” Coates
knows that Virginia planters did not invent gravity or earthquakes. Yet this historicizing impulse does not prevent him from essentializing racism when
he confronts it head on. In string of tweets from December 2016, Coates conceded that racism is not transcendental, noting that “at its very root it was
always economic.” But acknowledging racism’s economic impact has not led him to embrace class struggle. Even Frank Wilderson can acknowledge
that racism has an economic impact, but he still believes that class struggle and racism exist on distinct planes. Coates holds a similar belief; that racism
is wholly different in kind from class. In the same series of tweets, he concluded that “in America, ‘class’ isn’t the only kind of class.” Just
as he
mystifies racism, even while locating its impact in the bodies of black people, here he again
pivots. Coates cannot address material politics on its own terms, preferring instead to retreat to
a contrived mystification. He replaces action with interiority. As he recently told an auditorium
of eager Northwestern students, “The process should not be… people looking out at the world
and saying, ‘I would like for there to be change in the world, how do I do that?’” Instead, he
implored the crowd to engage from the “inside-out, not outside-in… because if you are in the
business of justice, and making this society more democratic, you might get a lot of
disappointment.” Consciousness matters, of course. “Baby you just got to love ’em,” Fannie Lou Hamer would say of the white
segregationists who routinely threatened her life. “Hating just makes you sick and weak.” This was Hamer in a reflexive moment, but it was no retreat.
In the very next breath, she warned, “I keep a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom and the first cracker even look like he wants to throw some
dynamite on my porch won’t write his mama again.” Fannie Lou truly was her mother’s daughter. Reflection, whether through intergenerational story
or her own thoughts, enhanced her resistance. The same cannot be said of Coates. Instead
of finding relief in political action,
Coates finds it in a cookout at Howard University’s homecoming, surrounded by black people. He
fantasizes that he is “disappearing into all of their bodies,” as the music and dancing, the black
cultural zeitgeist of the moment, cure him of the “birthmark of damnation.” The curse is lifted.
Blackness is transfigured, becoming a space “beyond the Dream.” It’s another ontological pivot,
this time allowing Coates to conclude that The Mecca’s” — his term for Howard — cookout has
a “power more gorgeous than any voting rights bill.” It’s a fantasy of retreat, as if black culture were
beyond the machinations of capitalism, as though black cultural expression existed in the world but was not of it and were enough to take us to a new
one. Between the World and Me concludes with Coates considering climate change. He sees climate change as a manifestation of a polluted white
consciousness, rather than the unfettered excess of industrial capitalism. It is a “noose around the neck of the earth,” allegedly resulting in large part
from white flight, the mid-century exodus of negrophobic white families to the suburbs and the pollution caused by the cars that took them there.
Coates’s words here are poetic but grossly inaccurate. They mimic Afro-Pessimism’s
emphasis on the white libido, relegating his rhetoric to the realm of interior life, the souls of
white folks, and stopping well short of the political domain. For Coates, the Civil Rights movement was not
a struggle to alter a material world; rather the “hope of the movement” was merely to “awaken the Dreamers.” Black politics is only relevant as far as it
can arouse white consciousness, which he sees as a largely futile exercise, due to “the small chance of the Dreamers coming into consciousness.”
Coates sees common interest between the black elite and the black poor, as he marvels at “the entire diaspora,” from lawyers to street hustlers,
present at Howard’s homecoming. Yet he cannot conceive of anti-capitalist class solidarity across racial identity. He has a darker vision, of a kind that
Corey Robin has described as “apocalypticism.” Coates’s ultimate hope is not in collective human action, but rather the total annihilation of the world
and all those living in it— another feature that unites him with Afro-Pessimism, which calls explicitly for the “end of the world.” As he says of the
Dreamers, “the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all.” Paradoxically, though he can see
a collective fate in apocalypse, he rejects shared struggle for liberation. “The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves,” he declares. The
problem is, the whole of capitalist enterprise, both past and present, cannot be reduced to race as Original Sin. Left out of Coates’s mythology is the
fact that colonial enterprise, in what would become the United States, relied first on European indentured servants, most of whom died within a
handful of years after arriving on the continent. It’s
Coates’s reading of race as sin that pushes him to imagine a
perverted form of salvation in the fantasy of apocalypse. In this racial fatalism,
reparations for slavery emerges as the anticipation of the inevitable Judgement Day. It is therefore no
surprise that Coates has taken up racial reparations as his cross to bear — not to change the world, but to condemn it.
Their ontological and libidinal readings of blackness are inaccurate and
undermine liberation---a history of black resistance disproves the rigidity
of it as a metaphysical category.
Stephens 17. (R. L. Stephens is the A. Philip Randolph Fellow at Jacobin. Between the Black
Body and Me. May 31, 2015. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/ta-nehisi-coates-racismafro-pessimism-reparations-class-struggle)
Liza Bramlett was a slave. She lived on a cotton plantation in the Mississippi Delta during the nineteenth
century. White men raped her repeatedly throughout her life. They traded her body amongst themselves in exchange for calves and piglets. In the end,
Liza gave birth to twenty-three children, twenty of whom were conceived by rape. One
of Liza’s daughters, Ella Townsend, was
born after emancipation, but remained in the bondage of sharecropping in rural Mississippi. As an adult, she carried a pistol with her in
the fields, determined to protect herself and the surrounding children. One day, a white man on horseback rode into the fields. He had come to abduct
a young black girl. Ella, carrying her pistol in a lunch pail, intervened. “You don’t have no black children and you’re not going to beat no black children,”
she told the intruder. “If you step down off that horse, I’ll go to Hell and back with you before Hell can scorch a feather.” “ I
do not believe
that we can stop them … because they must ultimately stop themselves,” Ta-Nehisi Coates says of
white racists in the final paragraph of his bestseller Between the World and Me, written as an open letter to his son. Coates describes
racism as galactic, a physical law of the universe, “a tenacious gravity” and a “cosmic injustice.” When a cop kills a
black man, the police officer is “a force of nature, the helpless agent of our world’s physical laws.” Society is equally
helpless against the natural order. “The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed,” says Coates. In a widely replicated gesture, Coates locates the experience
of racism in the body, in a racism that “dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth.” In the slim volume,
fewer than two hundred pages, the word “body” or “bodies” appears more than three hundred times. “In America,” he writes, “it is traditional to
destroy the black body.” Another brooding passage dwells on the inevitability of this violence. It had to be blood. It had to be nails driven through a
tongue and ears pruned away. It had to be the thrashing of a kitchen maid for the crime of churning the butter at a leisurely clip. It could only be the
employment of carriage whips, tongs, iron pokers, handsaws, stones, paperweights or whatever might be handy to break the black body. Yet
Coates’s descriptive language and haunting narrative are not mere metaphors. They act as a kind of
ontological pivot, mystifying racism even as it is anchored in its physical effects. Metaphor has
long been used to capture racism’s almost unimaginable brutality. Lynching became “strange fruit” in Abel
Meerpool’s song, made famous by Billie Holiday. In a wry, tragic innuendo, rape was referred to in Black communities as “nighttime integration.” The
use of metaphor is not in itself an obfuscation. But Coates wields metaphor to obscure rather than illuminate the reality of racism. What
we
find all too often in Coates’s narrative universe are bodies without life and a racism without
people. To give race an ontological meaning, to make it a reality all its own, is to drain it of its place in
history and its roots in discrete human action. To deny the role of life and people — of politics
— as Coates does is to also foreclose the possibility of liberation. No Helpless Agent Ella knew her mother
Liza’s unimaginable suffering, but her memory was not a yoke on her shoulders. It provoked something in Ella. As an adult, she did not
see the white predator stalking the fields as some helpless agent. She took matters into her own hands. There was no gravity strong enough to break
her will or loosen her grip on her pistol. Her efforts rippled beyond those cotton fields. Ella
taught her own daughter, Fannie Lou
Hamer, not only to struggle, but to resist. Fannie Lou was born into a sharecropping family in
rural Mississippi but would go on to become a beacon of the Civil Rights movement. She is best
known for her work registering black voters in Mississippi, most famously during 1964’s Freedom Summer, at great personal
risk. Police arrested and beat her. White racists shot at her. Lyndon Johnson dismissed her as an
illiterate. In 1973, an interviewer asked her, “Do you have faith that the system will ever work
properly?” By then, Fannie Lou had seen a decade of setbacks and false dawns since first walking off her plantation in 1962 to fight for Civil Rights.
She responded, We have to make it work. Ain’t nothing going to be handed to you on a silver
platter. That’s not just black people, that’s people in general, masses. See, I’m with the masses…
You’ve got to fight. Every step of the way you’ve got to fight. She marched. She sang freedom
songs. She testified. She co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. For her, the
logical solution was political: uniting a powerless many against a powerful few. White racists
could be stopped. Black people could resist, and Fannie Lou and so many others did just that. Fannie Lou knew that the wages
of racism were measured on the body. “A black woman’s body was never hers alone,” she once remarked. White
doctors sterilized her
without her consent during a minor surgery, a barbaric intrusion so common she called it a “Mississippi appendectomy.” However,
though she knew racism’s physical toll, she drew inspiration from stories of black resistance
passed down orally across the generations. Hamer recalled her grandmother’s will to survive and her mother’s weapon of
protection. These intergenerational resistance narratives, according to Charles Cobb in his book This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed, “underlay a deep
and powerful collective memory that was invisible to whites but greatly affected the shape and course of the modern Freedom Movement.” As a result,
Fannie Lou and so many others possessed an intimate knowledge not only of their own human
dignity, despite the racist brutality they endured, but also of the human frailty of their racial
oppressors. In the years before Fannie Lou’s political struggle began, whole communities, black
women and men, rose up against the violence that was forced on black women’s bodies. Feminist
historian Danielle McGuire argues this anti-rape community organizing in Alabama laid the foundation for what eventually became the Montgomery
Bus Boycott. She observes, “The majority of leaders active in the Montgomery Improvement Association in 1955 cut their political teeth demanding
justice for black women who were raped in the 1940s and early 1950s.” Despite
being a poor, black sharecropper
drowning in the poverty and racial terror endemic to rural Mississippi, Fannie Lou held fast to her forbearers’ stories of
resistance. She did not resign herself to fatalism, as Coates does. The "Birthmark of Damnation" Coates too takes a
multigenerational view. Between the World and Me is framed as a letter to his son. However, rather than seeing a legacy of resistance, he finds a
lineage of blackness defined by fear and dysfunction. “When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully,
adamantly, dangerously afraid,” he writes. “I felt the fear in the visits to my Nana’s home in Philadelphia,” Coates continues. “And I saw it in my own
father.” My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat
me as if someone might steal me away, because that is exactly what was happening all around us. Coates describes his condition, and that of all black
people, as a “birthmark of damnation.” The resistance stories passed down to Fannie Lou and so many others spurred them to march. Coates’s
narrative, riddled with fear and futility, begs us to retreat. Though
Coates has never explicitly cited it as his theoretical
framework, the dour outlook of his work evokes the themes of Afro-Pessimism. The pivot to the
ontological that is apparent in Coates’s rhetoric is a hallmark of Afro-Pessimism. “Ontology by definition is the
study of being, and to speak of Blackness as an ontological condition means analyzing the state
of Black bodies through the lens of slavery,” Afro-Pessimist scholar Michael Barlow, Jr., writes in the academic journal Inquiries.
However, for Barlow, the relation of slavery that ontologically defines blackness is not a matter of
political economy, but rather a “libidinal economy.” In this telling, labor and ownership — that is, political
economy — are merely incidental to racial slavery. Instead, it’s the white imagination and its depraved “metaphysical
desires for Black flesh” that both predated and catalyzed racialized chattel slavery. Racism is
reduced to the spiritual, more a matter of a sinful nature than a political struggle. Coates has
echoed this retreat to interiority, to the spiritual, to consciousness. It’s the ontological pivot that
leads Frank Wilderson, perhaps the world’s foremost Afro-Pessimist, to declare in his foundational text “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither
the Slave in Civil Society?” that black people are no more than cows in a slaughterhouse. Wilderson
posits that “death of the black body is foundational to the life of American civil society,” just
as a cow’s death is essential to the slaughterhouse. Flippantly, Wilderson asks, “how would the cows fare under a
dictatorship of the proletariat?” Coates adopts a similar sense of impotence. He characterizes struggle as aimless toil — an apolitical end in itself. “The
struggle is really all I have for you,” he tells his son, “because it is the only portion of this world under your control.” Yet how are we to struggle against
earthquakes and physical laws? How can we fight gravity? Both Coates and Wilderson speak of power in terms of dreams. Coates writes of monolithic
white “Dreamers,” those whose investment in the American Dream requires a faith in their own whiteness. Similarly, Wilderson sees America as
enacting two distinct dreams. For Wilderson, “the dream of black accumulation and death” is separate from “the dream of worker exploitation.”
Ultimately, in both Coates’s and Wilderson’s respective frameworks, solidarity
is unimaginable and class struggle is
rendered futile. Though Coates does not go to the lengths Wilderson does to position himself in opposition to materialist politics, the result is
effectively equivalent: a separation of race and class combined with a deep skepticism of class-based solidarity, reforms, or even revolution. This is a
turn away from the Freedom Tradition embodied by Fannie Lou Hamer. For her, the problem of racism wasn’t cosmology or ontology — it was an
expression of politics implicated in class antagonism. Fannie Lou Hamer stood “with the masses,” both white and black. Solidarity through struggle from
below, including class struggle, formed her path to victory. Coates’s ontological pivot is more muddled than Wilderson’s. Fleetingly peppered
throughout his work are allusions to material reality, betraying the imposition of metaphysical abstraction that ultimately drives his perspective. “We
did not choose our fences,” he writes. “They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible.” Coates
knows that Virginia planters did not invent gravity or earthquakes. Yet this historicizing impulse does not prevent him from essentializing racism when
he confronts it head on. In string of tweets from December 2016, Coates conceded that racism is not transcendental, noting that “at its very root it was
always economic.” But acknowledging racism’s economic impact has not led him to embrace class struggle. Even Frank Wilderson can acknowledge
that racism has an economic impact, but he still believes that class struggle and racism exist on distinct planes. Coates holds a similar belief; that racism
is wholly different in kind from class. In the same series of tweets, he concluded that “in America, ‘class’ isn’t the only kind of class.” Just
as he
mystifies racism, even while locating its impact in the bodies of black people, here he again
pivots. Coates cannot address material politics on its own terms, preferring instead to retreat to
a contrived mystification. He replaces action with interiority. As he recently told an auditorium
of eager Northwestern students, “The process should not be… people looking out at the world
and saying, ‘I would like for there to be change in the world, how do I do that?’” Instead, he
implored the crowd to engage from the “inside-out, not outside-in… because if you are in the
business of justice, and making this society more democratic, you might get a lot of
disappointment.” Consciousness matters, of course. “Baby you just got to love ’em,” Fannie Lou Hamer would say of the white
segregationists who routinely threatened her life. “Hating just makes you sick and weak.” This was Hamer in a reflexive moment, but it was no retreat.
In the very next breath, she warned, “I keep a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom and the first cracker even look like he wants to throw some
dynamite on my porch won’t write his mama again.” Fannie Lou truly was her mother’s daughter. Reflection, whether through intergenerational story
or her own thoughts, enhanced her resistance. The same cannot be said of Coates. Instead
of finding relief in political action,
Coates finds it in a cookout at Howard University’s homecoming, surrounded by black people. He
fantasizes that he is “disappearing into all of their bodies,” as the music and dancing, the black
cultural zeitgeist of the moment, cure him of the “birthmark of damnation.” The curse is lifted.
Blackness is transfigured, becoming a space “beyond the Dream.” It’s another ontological pivot,
this time allowing Coates to conclude that The Mecca’s” — his term for Howard — cookout has
a “power more gorgeous than any voting rights bill.” It’s a fantasy of retreat, as if black culture were
beyond the machinations of capitalism, as though black cultural expression existed in the world but was not of it and were enough to take us to a new
one. Between the World and Me concludes with Coates considering climate change. He sees climate change as a manifestation of a polluted white
consciousness, rather than the unfettered excess of industrial capitalism. It is a “noose around the neck of the earth,” allegedly resulting in large part
from white flight, the mid-century exodus of negrophobic white families to the suburbs and the pollution caused by the cars that took them there.
Coates’s words here are poetic but grossly inaccurate. They mimic Afro-Pessimism’s
emphasis on the white libido, relegating his rhetoric to the realm of interior life, the souls of
white folks, and stopping well short of the political domain. For Coates, the Civil Rights movement was not
a struggle to alter a material world; rather the “hope of the movement” was merely to “awaken the Dreamers.” Black politics is only relevant as far as it
can arouse white consciousness, which he sees as a largely futile exercise, due to “the small chance of the Dreamers coming into consciousness.”
Coates sees common interest between the black elite and the black poor, as he marvels at “the entire diaspora,” from lawyers to street hustlers,
present at Howard’s homecoming. Yet he cannot conceive of anti-capitalist class solidarity across racial identity. He has a darker vision, of a kind that
Corey Robin has described as “apocalypticism.” Coates’s ultimate hope is not in collective human action, but rather the total annihilation of the world
and all those living in it— another feature that unites him with Afro-Pessimism, which calls explicitly for the “end of the world.” As he says of the
Dreamers, “the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all.” Paradoxically, though he can see
a collective fate in apocalypse, he rejects shared struggle for liberation. “The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves,” he declares. The
problem is, the whole of capitalist enterprise, both past and present, cannot be reduced to race as Original Sin. Left out of Coates’s mythology is the
fact that colonial enterprise, in what would become the United States, relied first on European indentured servants, most of whom died within a
handful of years after arriving on the continent. It’s
Coates’s reading of race as sin that pushes him to imagine a
perverted form of salvation in the fantasy of apocalypse. In this racial fatalism,
reparations for slavery emerges as the anticipation of the inevitable Judgement Day. It is therefore no
surprise that Coates has taken up racial reparations as his cross to bear — not to change the world, but to condemn it.
Refuse ontology frames---Black isn’t coterminous with Slave but is an agent of a
shared history of humanity---ceding democratic ideals to slaves is inaccurate,
racially paternalistic, and zeroes pragmatic harms reduction
McCarthy 20 (Jesse McCarthy is an assistant professor in the departments of English and of African and African American
Studies at Harvard University. “On Afropessimism.” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/on-afropessimism/ //shree)
Nonetheless, the fact that the main current of Afropessimist
thinking runs counter to all of Black political
history and tradition thus far; the fact that the foundational thinker for this perspective, Frantz
Fanon, came to completely opposing conclusions with respect to the nature of politics and solidarity
in struggle; the fact that the theory often appears to evade scrutiny or contestation by proclaiming
itself “meta-theoretical” and “ontological”; the fact that it asserts a “mandate” for which no
empirical evidence is provided and in the face of overwhelming evidence that it constitutes at best a minoritarian and
class-specific position — all of this has to be reckoned with by those who want to take Afropessimism to heart.
Perhaps it’s worth reminding ourselves that when he was murdered, Fred Hampton was encouraging poor whites to analogize their
position to that of poor Blacks. At the time of his assassination, Malcolm X was embracing and actively seeking to incorporate a
cross-racial coalition into his new organization. Ella Baker actively encouraged the deepening of organizational ties and activist links
across different communities by emphasizing common struggle and common oppression. What
evidence do we have, on
the power behind the status quo is quaking at the thought of Black folk
gathering in isolation to mourn the end of the world?
the other hand, that
If the challenge is more narrowly intellectual and what is needed are correctives to white Marxist hubris, Cedric Robinson’s Black
Marxism (1983) already exists. Black feminist thought offers its own counternarratives. Of course, Wilderson doesn’t have to agree
with Robinson or the Combahee River Collective. But isn’t it a problem that they aren’t cited even once in his books? Are we to
jettison our entire tradition? Were all those who came before us so hopelessly naïve? Are we going to cast aside Vincent Harding’s
There Is a River and read nothing but Fanon, Lacan, and Heidegger? Is Bantu philosophy overdetermined by social death even if its
worldview was constructed in the absence of the white gaze? Afropessimism has yet to tackle these questions, to take its
opponent’s counterarguments and positions seriously.
David Marriott, who is cited by Wilderson as a fellow Afropessimist, asks in his own work: whither Fanon? I wonder this, too.
Wilderson says he is the figure he modeled himself on as a young man. Clearly Fanon is central to all of his thinking; indeed, all
Afropessimist theorists consider Black Skin, White Masks (1952) a cornerstone text. It is an extraordinary philosophical work, and
they are right that it is too often underappreciated. But it is also an extremely complicated intellectual experiment. The third
sentence of that book is: “I’m not the bearer of absolute truths.” Fanon proposes to work through the problem of the abjection of
Blackness, and that process extends beyond the book into the engaged existentialist revolt and the analysis of colonial relations that
he explicitly argues involves the colonized subject, regardless of their race, in The Wretched of the Earth (1961). But even if one
were to read only Black Skin, White Masks, it is impossible to miss the humanist assumptions that it opens onto in its conclusion.
What else can one make of Fanon stating that “I am not a slave to slavery that dehumanized
my ancestors,” and that “the density of History determines none of my acts. I am my own
foundation”? How can one miss the assumption of a shareable humanity when he insists that
“at the end of this book we would like the reader to feel with us the open dimension of every
consciousness.” How can Fanon’s trajectory into the Algerian War of Independence be reconciled with the null trajectories
that Afropessimism proposes?
If Afropessimism pushes us to pose harder and sharper questions as Fanon prayed his Black body always would, if it serves to break
the shallow cant of the media class and its operatives — then certainly it will have done some good. But on the terms of its own
presiding genius it needs to be understood as a waystation and not a terminus on the road to disalienation that Fanon argued is the
only path to freedom for Black people in the modern world. That path, which he described in terms of building a “new man,”
required him to first understand the depth of abjection that Blackness had been cast into, and then to undo that abjection by
mobilizing its ejection from the political order of the West in a grand historical struggle to reconstruct that civilization from the side
of the oppressed, an embrace that clearly involves a radical solidarity with non-Black people. This was the mission Fanon was on
when he died, and it was a mission he believed Black peoples would have a special, indeed, foundational role in ultimately seeing
through.
Realizing these goals does not mean adhering to a formulaic principle or that Black people need to think, act, or speak as a monolith.
Fanon and Wilderson are both fond of citing Aimé Césaire’s phrase about “the end of the world”
from his poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land:
One must begin somewhere.
Begin what?
The only thing in the world worth beginning:
The End of the world of course.
These lines do not appear at the end of the poem, however, but roughly halfway through it. The interjection, “of course,” stands in
here for the French word “parbleu,” which, even in the late 1930s when Césaire was composing his poem in Paris, carried a folksy
and bathetic ring that is only dimly captured in the English but is easier to hear if you imagine these lines as having strayed from a
play by Samuel Beckett. Wilderson
intones this phrase repeatedly in his book, wielding it like a totemic
hammer portending world-destroying events that, in light of the commitments of his own theory, seem to suggest,
and possibly wish for, a zero-sum war between the races. But Césaire’s usage is far more ambivalent and
ironic, the cry of a man whose revolutionary action must first and foremost be directed inwardly toward a poetic reconstruction of
the self, a liberation that requires a self-determined and self-realizing pursuit of truth.
Fanon admired and respected no other intellectual more than Césaire. We know from his letters to his French publisher François
Maspero that he imagined his writings as adressed, in no small part, to and for him. The idiosyncratic prose style of Black Skin, White
Masks is Fanon’s way of signifying upon a correspondence with Césaire’s poetics. Both writers are acutely aware that the Black
thinker is poised precariously between the poles of reflection and action. But both are committed to a humanistic pursuit of truth
and both believe in the promise of a radiant Blackness whose time is not yet come. This is why, even as the Algerian War raged
around him, Fanon continued his psychiatric research, convinced that understanding the traumas of war and torture would be
necessary for healing the postrevolutionary body politic. He wrote for the present and for the future in pursuit of an understanding
of himself and of human nature, and for the cause of a political independence and freedom that he hoped would set the entire
African continent on a new course. Had he lived, he would have persevered until every colonialist regime from Algiers to Cape Town
(the title he had in mind for his last book was Alger-Le Cap) had been driven off the continent. Fanon
was no pessimist:
true revolutionaries never are.
¤
But must
we revolve around Fanon in the first place? Today many activists are more inspired by Fannie Lou Hamer. The
US context has its own problems that Fanon only barely understood and addressed. Why not return
instead, in this hour of national contestation, to a figure like David Walker and his Appeal to the Coloured
Citizens of the World; But in Particular and Very Expressly to those of the United States of America from 1829? We still
underappreciate the importance of this text, one of the seminal documents that captures the first great
Black intellectual debate in the United States, which was an argument over whether or not we
ought to stay in the country at all. Walker believed we should, and he was the first to define and defend the
monumental implications of that choice. He attacked the mighty lobby of the American Colonization
Society, which included the powerful senator Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln, and many leading Black
intellectuals of the day, who were convinced full equality for Blacks in America was neither
possible nor desirable and advocated emigration. Their plans revolved around evacuating the Black population to
the Pepper Coast, now the country of Liberia, which emerged from colonial schemes like “Mississippi-in-Africa” that the American
Colonization Society founded in the 1830s.
We could have abandoned the country. History could have taken a very different course. American slaves could have
returned to Africa and the United States could have become a white ethno-state, a second Europe. The 1820s
and ’30s were the last possible moment of undoing or preventing the existence of a Black America. But Black American
intellectuals made the choice to stay — to hold this ground and make something new here that
the world had never seen. As the political scientist Melvin Rogers points out, Walker’s Appeal not only staked this
argument in terms of a principled Black nationalist claim based on the enormous sacrifice of “blood and tears” in slavery; the
rhetorical address of the text was also intended
to awaken Black Americans to their own potential as a
nationally self-consciously political community with a global outlook. “[F]or [Walker],” Rogers writes,
“African Americans did not need a prophet to whom they should blindly defer. Rather they needed a community willing to confront
practices of domination, capable of responding to their grievances, and susceptible to transcending America’s narrow ethical and
political horizon.”
Wilderson’s Afropessimism
insists that we are still slaves. Walker insisted in 1829 that the slaves are (and
were even then) “colored citizens” of the United States and of the world. That if we are oppressed it is only because
we are ignorant of our true strength, because we have been taught to disbelieve and disavow our worth to the world, to the nation,
and to each other. Which
of these two views is the correct one? I think the historical record and the
present state of our politics tells us all we need to know on that score. For it is no coincidence that today it is
Black Americans who are once again trying to save the country, to invest in finishing the work of making this place a home that we
can live in. In what is a long-standing pattern, the
“coloured citizens” of this country are at the forefront of
practicing civics. Indeed, what could be more republican than risking one’s health to restore the health of the body politic? To
ensure that one of the most basic promises of the state is properly fulfilled: that it apply its law
enforcement equally, humanely, and in a manner accountable to the people it serves.
As in past struggles, our principled defense of an ethical civil code has attracted others with its moral force. We have seen a massive
response, including from sources traditionally opposed to these concerns, who recognize the profoundly dysfunctional culture of US
policing, prisons, and courts. Even many of those who do not agree that these are the result of actively racist policies and attitudes
no longer deny that our exceptionally poor record cannot plausibly be unrelated to a long history of antiblack violence and
antagonism. For this same reason, likeminded
people around the world are hoping for a decisive break
with the past‚ taking to the streets across the globe to demand that state actors acknowledge
that there really is a history of injury that needs to stop being denied, and that we can and
should work together to design a new social contract that will restore the perceived legitimacy of
law enforcement and criminal justice in the eyes of all citizens and not just some.
The generation undertaking these
endeavors does not seem to require a narrative of optimism in order to
have a healthy indifference to both optimism and pessimism
alike. Perhaps it results from the demands of carrying out politics in the real world. The incredibly
difficult task of organizing and strategizing in order to elevate and amplify the best responses and to
rein in and temper the counterproductive ones that delay and diminish a good cause. That’s hard to
take the great risks they have incurred. They
do in the best of cases: in a turbulent, paranoid, and instantly videotaped public sphere, it’s a Sisyphean task that bad-faith
commentators take advantage of.
None of this diminishes the fundamental need for greater self-capacity of the kind Walker called for 200 years ago. Much of the
work ahead will necessarily involve a growing capacity for self-reflection, self-criticism, irony, and joy in our politics. It will require
acknowledging that struggles against white oppression will never be successful without deepened self-healing in our communities:
repairing the relations in families, between men and women; ending the violence directed at trans, queer, and otherwise nonconforming people in our neighborhoods; ending the heinous blood feuds between rival gangs and sets; restoring education and
communal trust as our highest priorities and most cherished aspirations. These will always remain preconditional to the realization
of freedom and autonomy. It is pursuing these aims as an ongoing collective activity that will make unavoidable the realization as
Walker said, that this country is “more ours” than anyone else’s — that we are a historic people
with a world-historical destiny that understands our suffering as endowing us with both the
right and the responsibility of civilizing the United States in such a way that it reflects the values
that our historical experiences bring to it, the freedoms, equalities, and cultural pluralisms that we have
made vital and central to its identity.
One doesn’t need to hang on desperately to a mirage of hope. If we look to history, we can see
more than enough concrete evidence and example to support the conclusion that a racially
defined caste system is unlikely to ever again prevail. Of course, that doesn’t mean history is a
smoothly upward-trending curve. We have known terrible setbacks. Yes, the violent defeat of
Reconstruction was successful. But the building of Black institutions and the Niagara Movement
proceeded anyway. Tulsa was burned to the ground. But its Black citizens turned right around and rebuilt it
out of the ashes. The Civil Rights movement was checked by the forces of reaction and the assassin’s bullet;
but the world of unquestioned white superiority and authority that George Wallace hoped to preserve is
reduced now to a twinkle in David Duke’s blue eye. Yes, creepy white supremacists still crawl out from under
mossy stones at opportune moments to wail about their Nordic fantasies in their over-sized khaki pants. Yes, like the militants of the
Islamic State, they are capable of carrying out horrific acts of terror and violence. But like that barbaric and fanatical sect, white
supremacy is permanently confined to such rear-guard actions because it has already lost — it is trying to reverse a clock going
forward — which explains the virulence and incoherence of its outbursts of spastic violence.
We are not at the end, but near the beginning of something new. The pandemic and the multiple underlying crises and fractures it
has revealed make vivid that one
need not wait so very long for “the end of the world.” The problem, as
a morning after the end of the world. And
one after that too. The hardest truth is that all the uncertainties that govern the question of what can
be done, what will be done, and the difference between the two, remain in our hands. What would
generations of millenarians have discovered, is that it turns out there’s
Frantz Fanon, or David Walker, or Ella Baker tell us if they saw the streets today? Surely, not that we are at an impasse against an
implacable enemy. They
at our backs. We
would insist that we lift each other and rise together with the spirit of history
have done it before. Every time we do it’s a new day.
Afro pessimism is wrong---ignores history, demobilizes anti-racist action,
totalizes black experience, and is coopted by the neoliberal university
AP™ = Afropessimism
Okoth 20 MPhil in Political Theory at University of Oxford Kevin Ochieng Okoth, "The Flatness
of Blackness: Afro-Pessimism and the Erasure of Anti-Colonial Thought by Kevin Ochieng Okoth,"
Salvage, 1-16-2020, https://salvage.zone/the-flatness-of-blackness-afro-pessimism-and-theerasure-of-anti-colonial-thought/, accessed 7-15-2022 WMK
II. The Flatness of Blackness
Afro-pessimism in this original sense has reflected a disastrous approach to, and had disastrous
consequences for Africa and its inhabitants. So how can we understand the bizarre use of this
historically loaded term (complete with its own history of colonial and imperialist exploitation)
by numerous African-American intellectuals and activists? The use of the term ‘Afropessimism’ is symptomatic of the historical ignorance of the Afro-pessimist™ (or what Greg
Thomas has recently called Afro-pessimism 2.0), whose grasp of African history is about as solid
as that of Hegel. In its initial iteration, Afro-pessimism 2.0 (from now on AP™) is a product of
middle-class academia; a framework either consciously or subconsciously created to allow
relatively well-off academics to view themselves as the most discriminated and oppressed
people in the world. Characterised by misinterpretations and clever appropriations of Black
radicals like Frantz Fanon and Silvia Wynter, the theories of the AP™ have spilled over into
activist circles, contaminating the global political discourse on race.
The central premise of the AP™ is that anti-Black violence is the structuring regime of the
modern world. Drawing on Orlando Patterson’s concept of ‘social death’, Frank Wilderson,
arguably the most prominent and controversial AP™ intellectual, asserts that the Black condition
is not characterised by oppression or exploitation, like that of the Marxist proletariat or the
(neo)colonial subject, but rather by the distinction between the Human and the Slave. For
Wilderson, the Black is a priori a slave and therefore we cannot speak of Blackness without
reference to the Slaveness that constitutes it on an ontological level. In his essay ‘Ante-AntiBlackness: Afterthoughts’, fellow University of California professor Jared Sexton argues that
the condition of the Black/Slave is a state of total powerlessness, natal alienation (‘the loss of
ties of birth in both ascending and descending generations’) and generalised dishonour. In
short, Black existence is an ontological absence of sorts, and the Black/Slave is a living dead
(non-entity) in the modern world.
In ‘The Black Liberation Army and the Paradox of Political Engagement’, Wilderson offers
some further meditations on the concept of ‘social death’, explaining that ‘the point of
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’. Unlike colonial
racisms perpetuated by the rational systems of white supremacy, neo-colonialism or
imperialism, or women’s oppression and exploitation driven by patriarchy and capitalism’s
need for reproductive labour, anti-Black violence is humanity’s irrational desire for violence
against Black people. As Wilderson declares in an interview with C. S. Soong, ‘violence against
Black people is a mechanism for the usurpation of subjectivity, of life of being’. What settlers
wanted from Indians is land, so they killed Indians ‘in the main’ to get it, whereas what nonBlacks want from Blacks is not land but ‘being’. Anti-Blackness is thus qualitatively different
from the regimes of violence that affect the Marxist proletariat; or the non-Black person of
colour; or the non-Black woman; or the non-Black woman of colour; or (as Wilderson has
famously claimed) Palestinians. Black suffering is incomparable and unique: to speak of any
experience of oppression without reference to the ontological disparities between Black/nonBlack people is ultimately an act of ‘anti-Blackness’.
But what exactly is it about the makeup of modern society that displaces the Black/Slave from
the realm of politics and precludes the articulation of concrete political demands? For Wilderson
and Sexton, the very foundations of political discourse are inherently anti-Black. Or, to put it in
terms of Giorgio Agamben’s political ontology (of which the AP™ are rather fond), the political
– i.e. the ontological character of a political situation that separates it from other social actions –
or what he calls ‘the Symbolic Order’, is skewed against the Black/Slave. The Symbolic Order
is based on the recognition of the ‘other’s’ humanity, which then enables this ‘other’ to
challenge the order on the grounds of, for instance, political economy. Since the Black is a priori
a Slave, and Blackness and Slaveness are coterminous, the Black/Slave cannot participate in the
Symbolic Order as her status is not that of the Human. And because the category of humanity is
founded and relies on the existence of the slave, there is no way the Black/Slave can ever gain
the recognition required to assert political demands and identities in the realm of the Symbolic
Order. It is for this reason that, as Sexton points out in his essay ‘The Social Life of Social
Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism’, we must posit a ‘political ontology dividing
the Slave from the world of the Human in a constitutive way’ and take this as our analytical
starting point.
Wilderson’s and Sexton’s work contributes to a wider debate on the nature of Black studies
in the United States, which is frequently tied into discussions on Black performance art,
evidenced by the titles of Wilderson’s Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of US
Antagonisms, Kara Keeling’s The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the
Image of Common Sense or Fred Moten’s essays on Black Operations/Black Optimism in
musical performance. Despite various disagreements and differences among these scholars,
they are united by the common interest in ‘the afterlife of slavery’ – first described by
Saidiya Hartman in her 2006 memoir Lose Your Mother. For Hartman – whose project is not that
of AP™ and should not be mistaken for this essay’s target – official abolition in the United
States did not engender a decisive break with the racialised violence of slavery; in contemporary
society, we can see traces of such violence in the ‘skewed life chances, limited access to health
and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment’ of African-Americans.
The ‘afterlife of slavery’ she describes constitutes Black studies’ object, and loosely ties a
range of scholars together into a coherent discourse.
It is worth briefly considering Fred Moten’s work to understand the AP™’s ability to co-opt or
usurp other approaches to Black Studies and activism. Moten attempted to counter the AP™
conception of social death by foregrounding Black agency and asserting that it is ontologically
prior to the all-encompassing anti-Blackness of the modern world. In the unpublished paper ‘
Black Optimism/Black Operation’, Moten attempts to counter the ‘anti-essentialism’ of
radical discourses that disavow Black studies’ own object i.e. Blackness. For Moten, this
Blackness exists in what he (along with his frequent collaborator Stefano Harney) has famously
called ‘the undercommons’ – a space outside of official social structures, where Black people
can assert their ‘right to refuse’.
But as Annie Olaloku-Teriba points out in her excellent critique ‘Afro-Pessimism and the
(Un)Logic of Anti-Blackness’, the AP™ finds a ‘comfortable antagonist’ in Moten, whose
Black Ops can be neatly reintegrated into the concept of social death. It is also telling that
Sexton, in ‘Ante-Anti-Blackness’, rather successfully merges the AP™ conception of social
death with Moten’s Black Ops by arguing that:
A living death is as much a death as it is living. Nothing in Afro-pessimism suggests that there is
no black (social) life, only that black life is not social life in the universe formed by the codes of
state and civil society, of citizen and subject, of nation and culture, of people and place, of
history and heritage, of all the things that colonial society has in common with the colonised, of
all the things that capital has in common with labour – the modern world system.
Sexton shows that Moten’s Black Ops is nothing other than what he instead calls ‘the social
life of social death’. There is no either/or distinction between social life and social death: we
can think both together by positing that Black life is lived in the underground. Moten even
acknowledges, in ‘Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh)’, that the AP™ and
Black Ops are engaged in the same theoretical project:
In the end, though life and optimism are the terms under which I speak, I agree with Sexton – by
way of the slightest most immeasurable reversal of emphasis – that Afro-pessimism and black
optimism are not but nothing other than one another. I will continue to prefer the black
optimism of his work just as, I am sure, he will continue to prefer the Afro-pessimism of mine.
For both Afro-pessimists and Black Optimists, the afterlife of slavery is characterised by the
social death of the Black/Slave and a heavily distorted version of Fanon’s concept of the ‘fact
of blackness’. This assumption, however, precludes the participation of Black Ops in radical
politics and confines resistance to spaces of Black performance art.
By confining Black resistance to spaces outside of the anti-Black structures of civil society, and
by undercutting the possibility for anti-imperialist solidarity between racialised people across
the world, the AP™ theories have opened up a space for the corporate capture of Blackness.
We need only recall last year’s Nike campaign, prominently featuring the face of former NFL
quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who has been blackballed by the league for kneeling during the
national anthem. Since the incident, he has taken on the role of radical Black activist, complete
with Panther-esque leather jackets, an afro and Afrocentric jewellery. While Kaepernick’s
struggle against the racist and exploitative NFL owners and executives is, of course, legitimate
and necessary, the co-optation of his struggle by a large corporation is certainly a cause for
concern. Nike is notorious for its use of sweatshop labour (including both forced and child
labour), and its history of exploitative labour practices has been well-documented throughout
the years. By detaching the struggles of African-Americans from those of racialised workers in
the Global South, Nike can present itself as a progressive vehicle for Black emancipatory politics,
while completely sidelining the plight of non-white workers outside of the US. Here we might
recall a powerful statement by Fred Hampton to illustrate just how far from revolutionary Black
politics we find ourselves:
We don’t think you fight fire with fire best; we think you fight fire with water best. We’re
going to fight racism not with racism, but we’re going to fight with solidarity. We say we’re
not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we’re going to fight it with socialism […
] We’re going to fight […] with all of us people getting together and having an international
proletarian revolution.
Wilderson and Sexton have been captured by corporate interests in much the same way. In
their case, however, it is not a large corporation that co-opts Blackness, but rather the
neoliberal university. Is it at all surprising that two professors working within the prestigious
University of California system promote a theoretical framework that requires no political
action from Black writers and activists other than simply being Black? Not only is AP™ a product
of the neoliberal university, it also promotes its authors survival and flourishing within the
corporate structures of higher education. When asked about his framework for psychological
and physical resistance by the hosts of iMiXWHATiLiKE, Wilderson neatly dodges any
commitment to radical politics with the excuse that it could cost him his academic job.
This is so much a part of what it means to be a professor. I feel like cussing people out all the
time. But if I do, I violate University of California’s civility laws, tenure or not I’m out the
door, right? And that tempers my speech. So, I think that what I have to offer is not a way out.
What I have to offer is an analysis of the problem. And I don’t trust me as much as I trust Black
people on the ground.
Wilderson is aware that the AP™ rely on their activist supporters and social media following to
maintain their privileged position within the university – without the activists and organisers
on the ground, the AP™ could not prove the market value of its work to the neoliberal
institution. By creating a framework for the analysis of race that lends itself to co-optation by
corporate interests, the AP™ has certainly demonstrated that it can convert Blackness into
profit. All the while, these theorists delude themselves that they are spearheading a truly
radical Black movement. In the introduction to a collection of essays on AP™, the editors (who
presumably include Sexton and Wilderson) even have the audacity to claim that they are ‘
motivated by a desire to contribute to […] bringing these writings out of the ivory towers of the
academy’ and that they wish to ‘remove the materials from this sitting place and see them
proliferate among those in the streets and prisons’. True, they have succeeded in
disseminating a watered-down version of their musings to activists and organisers; but what
they have passed on is nothing short of anti-Black, in the sense that it works against the true
liberation of Black people of all classes.
Today, such Blackness (and the pseudo-politics that is attached to it) is more useful for academic
promotions, Instagram hashtags, and Nike adverts than for any revolutionary or emancipatory
politics worthy of the name. The people who truly benefit – or rather profit – from the AP™
brand are the academics and the various university presses and journals who jump at every
opportunity to unleash a plethora of AP™ books and articles onto the academic book market.
While the AP™ may seem like a niche theoretical discourse, its influence extends far beyond the
university: as Olaloku-Teriba argues, the AP™’s theoretical framework provides ‘the
structuring logic of various political formations in the era of #BlackLivesMatter’. What is at
stake in the debate, therefore, is nothing less than the possibility of a revolutionary Black
politics. Maybe African-Americans on the streets or in prison would do well to reach for George
Jackson’s Soledad Brother and steer clear of the AP™ and Black Ops.
III. The Afterlives of Slavery
The retreat of the AP™ and Black Ops from politics poses a problem for activists and scholars
looking to engage in struggles that take seriously the political economy of race and the need for
cross-racial solidarity. But how have these key themes of radical Black movements from the
1960s and 70s – from the Black Panthers to African anti-colonial struggles – disappeared in the
AP™’s theories? The erasure of radical Black and anti-colonial struggles rests almost entirely on
misreading – or in some cases not reading – Marxist contributions to the study of race,
colonialism and slavery. And this unfounded dismissal of the entire Marxist tradition allows the
AP™ to kill two birds with one stone: on the one hand, it can position itself as a radical critique of
Eurocentric left discourses. On the other hand, it allows the AP™ to disregard a vast body of
Marxist scholarship that has ‘raced’ the history of capitalism and developed a nuanced
analysis of the relationship between New World Slavery and capitalist accumulation on a global
scale. Thus, the AP™ can ignore the specificities of how different Black populations are racialised
and displace the study of political economy (and particularly of imperialism) in favour of
ontological questions.
In the interview ‘We’re trying to destroy the world: Anti-Blackness & Police Violence after
Ferguson’ Wilderson makes the bizarre claim that ‘slaveness is something that has
consumed Blackness and Africanness, making it impossible to divide slavery from Blackness’.
If this assumption sounds familiar, look no further than the Afro-pessimism of old, with its
conflation of Africanness and Blackness and its disregard for the African continent and its
inhabitants. But how has an approach that attempts to grapple with the complexities of Black
being ended up rehashing the same assumptions and prejudices of Eurocentric discourse
designed to dehumanise Black people on the African continent in the first place? The AP™’s
theoretical position is riddled with contradictions: how can Blackness be separated from white
supremacy, neocolonialism or imperialism and women’s reproductive labour, when these are
the mechanisms that structure the quotidien experience of most people racialised as Black on
a global scale? Moreover, if the Black/Slave exists in a state of powerlessness and natal
alienation – characterised by the loss of ties of birth in ascending and descending generations –
how do we theorise the Blackness of those whose ancestors remained in Africa throughout the
translatlantic slave trade?
Anti-Blackness isn’t historically calcified and their reading runs counter to the
Black radical tradition.
Kelley 17 Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA (Robin D.G., “Robin D.G. Kelley
& Fred Moten In Conversation,” transcribed from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fP2F9MXjRE, 1:57:36-2:02:56, dml)
KELLEY: Um, Fred—Fred will take most of these questions. So that's why I'm going to begin first because he's gonna, he's gonna—
he's gonna end it because he, he, he has the answer to all these questions ‘cause I turn to him for these questions. On the specific,
on the first question, I just want to make sure I understand it because I'm, you know, I don't always recognize, uh, it may be because
I'm just old, but I
don't always recognize, uh, that black politics, black [unclear—maybe “guys”] work politics have
been structured or defined by white supremacy. I mean, white supremacy is there. And I guess maybe because I'm
such a student of Cedric Robinson, you know, not everything is about, or in response to, white supremacy.
And in fact, one of the critiques coming out of doing Southern history was this idea that race relations framework, that race relations
defines, uh, African-American history or Black history. And it's
simply not true because much of what people do
in terms of, of social formation, community building, um, is, is, is what Raymond Williams might call alternative
cultures. In other words, it may be structured in dominance in some ways, but not defined by it. And
Cedric's Black Marxism, you know, really made this point. He talks about the ontological totality, you know, the, this
sense of being and making ourselves whole, in that we come out of an experience, again, structured by white supremacy, structured
by violence, structured
by enslavement and dispossession, but, but one in which western hegemony
didn't work, you know, that modes of thinking wasn't defined by Enlightenment modes of thinking. In other words, that, that
part of the Black radical tradition is a refusal to be property, to even admit that human beings
could be property. You know, so we sometimes give white supremacy way too much credit, and maybe
I misunderstood the question. And so I think that there's lots of things that happen outside of joy and survival, and survival is
important, but survival is not the end all, you know. So I think, and I'll give you one very, very specific example, and now I'm not
gonna say anything else after this. The
way we have tended to more recently treat slavery, Jim Crow and
mass incarceration as a piece, as the reinstantiation of the same thing, the continuation, that
denies the fact that these systems are actually distinct, that they are historically specific, and in
fact they’re responses to, in many ways, to the weakness of this as a racial regime. So if you think of like the
whole idea of the new Jim Crow to me is very, very problematic. Um, although that book by Michelle Alexander is very, very
powerful and very useful in terms of educating people about prisons. Jim
Crow was not the continuation of
slavery. It was not. Jim Crow was a response to the Black Democratic, uh, upsurge after slavery. It was
a revolution of Reconstruction. It was a way to try to suppress that. The fact that, that, you know, there was this
incredible response. That's why there's a, there's a huge gap between 1877 at the official end of
Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, which is the 1890s, disfranchisement, lynching. That's because
you've had 13, 14, 15, 20, 25 years of a democratic possibility and struggle. The same thing
with mass incarceration—yes, we've had incarceration, but it's, but that, that, that, that upward swing
has a lot to do with, again, responses to the struggles in the 1960s, the assault on the Keynesian welfarewarfare state, the fact that you know the, the war on political, the formation of political prisoners, those struggles in fact was the
state's response to opposition. And so if
we don't acknowledge that, then what we end up doing is thinking
that somehow there's a structure of white supremacy that's unchanging, fixed, and so powerful
we can't do anything about it when in fact it's the opposite. White supremacy is fragile. White
supremacy is weak. Racial regimes actually are always having to shore themselves up precisely
because they're unstable. We can see that. We can't see it because the whole system of hegemony is to
give us the impression that it is so powerful, there's no space out. And yet it’s working overtime
to, to respond to our opposition. Right. That may not answer your question, but that's sort of a way I think about it.
Maybe it’s not satisfactory, but yeah.
Libidinal
Socialization better explains their libidinal thesis
Hudis 15 [Peter, Professor of English and History @ Queens College, 2015, “Frantz
Fanon: Philosopher of the Barricades,” p. 35-37]
Fanon’s vantage point upon the world is his situated experience. He is trying to understand the inner psychic life of racism, not
provide an account of the structure of human existence as a whole. Racism is
not, of course, an integral part of
the human psyche; it is a Social construct that has a psychic impact. Any effort to
comprehend social distress that accompanies racism by reference to some a priori
structure- be it the Oedipal Complex or the Collective Unconscious- is doomed to failure.
Carl Jung sought to deepen and go beyond Freud's approach by arguing that the subconscious is grounded in a universal layer
of the psyche- which he called "the
collective unconscious:' This refers to inherited patterns of
thought that exist in all human minds, regardless of specific culture or upbringing, and which
manifest themselves in dreams, fairy tales, and myths. Jung referred to these universal patterns as "archetypes:' It may seem,
on a superficial reading, that 1 Fanon is drawing from Jung, since he discusses how white people tend to unconsciously
assimilate views of blacks that are based on negative stereotypes. Even the most "progressive" white tends to think of blacks a
certain way (such as "emotional;' "physical," or / "aggressive"), even as they disavow any racist animus on their part. However,
Fanon denies that such collective delusions are part of a psychic structure; they are not
permanent features of the mind. They are habits acquired from a series of social and
cultural impositions. While they constitute a kind a collective unconscious on the part of
many white people, they are not grounded in any universal "archetype." The unconscious
prejudices of whites do not derive from genes or nature, nor do they derive from some form independent of culture or
upbringing. Fanon contends that Jung "confuses habit with instinct." Fanon objects to Jung's "collective
unconscious" for the same reason that he rejects the notion of a black ontology. His phenomenological approach brackets out
ontological claims on both a social and psychological level insofar as the examination of race and racism is concerned. He
writes, "Neither Freud nor Adler nor even the cosmic Jung took the black man into consideration in the course of his research.”
This does not mean that Fanon rejects their contributions tout court. He does not deny the existence of the unconscious. He
only denies that the inferiority complex of blacks operates on an unconscious level. He does
not reject the Oedipal
Complex. He only denies that it explains (especially in the West Indies) the proclivity of the
black "slave" to mimic the values of the white "master." And as seen from his positive remarks on Lacan's
theory of the mirror stage, he does not reject the idea of psychic structure. He only denies that it can substitute for an historical
understanding of the origin of neuroses .23 Fanon adopts a socio-genetic approach to a study of the psyche because that is
what is adequate for the object of his analysis. For Fanon, it is
the relationship between the socio-economic
and psychological that is of critical import. He makes it clear, insofar as the subject matter of
his study is concerned, that the socio-economic is first of all responsible for affective
disorders: "First, economic. Then, internalization or rather epidermalization of this inferiority."24 Fanon never misses an
opportunity to remind us that racism owes its origin to specific economic relations of domination- such as slavery, colonialism,
and the effort to coopt sections of the working class into serving the needs of capital. It is hard to mistake the Marxist influence
here. It does not follow, however, that what comes first in the order of time has conceptual or strategic priority. The inferiority
complex is originally born from economic subjugation, but it takes on a life of its own and expresses itself in terms that surpass
the economic. Both sides of the problem-the socio-economic and psychological-must be combatted in tandem: "The black man
must wage the struggle on two levels; whereas historically these levels are mutually dependent, any unilateral
liberation is flawed, and the worst mistake would be to believe their mutual dependence automatic:''5 On these
grounds he argues that the problem of racism cannot be solved on a psychological level. It is not an
"individual" problem; it is a social one. But neither can it be solved on a social level that ores the psychological. It is
small wonder that although his name never appears in the book, Fanon was enamored of the work of Wilhelm Reich. This
important Freudian-Marxist would no doubt feel affinity with Fanon's comment, "Genuine disalienation will have been
achieved only when things, in the most materialist sense, have resumed their rightful
place:'27
Neurological, racial bias is flexible and determined by coalitional habit forming
in the brain---orienting groups around institutional change best breaks down
bias. This is offense because their theory rejects these solutions.
Cikara and Van Bavel 15. (Mina Cikara is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Director
of the Intergroup Neuroscience Lab at Harvard University. Her research examines the conditions
under which groups and individuals are denied social value, agency, and empathy. Jay Van Bavel
is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Director of the Social Perception and Evaluation
Laboratory at New York University. The Flexibility of Racial Bias: Research suggests that racism is
not hard wired, offering hope on one of America’s enduring problems. June 2, 2015.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-flexibility-of-racial-bias/)
The city of Baltimore was rocked by protests and riots over the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old African American man who died in police custody.
Tragically, Gray’s death was only one of a recent in a series of racially-charged, often violent, incidents. On April 4th, Walter Scott was fatally shot by a
police officer after fleeing from a routine traffic stop. On March 8th, Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity members were caught on camera gleefully chanting,
“There Will Never Be A N***** In SAE.” On
March 1st, a homeless Black man was shot in broad daylight by a
Los Angeles police officer. And these are not isolated incidents, of course. Institutional and
systemic racism reinforce discrimination in countless situations, including hiring, sentencing,
housing, and even mortgage lending. It would be easy to see in all this powerful evidence that
racism is a permanent fixture in America’s social fabric and even, perhaps, an inevitable aspect
of human nature. Indeed, the mere act of labeling others according to their age, gender, or race
is a reflexive habit of the human mind. Social categories, like race, impact our thinking quickly,
often outside of our awareness. Extensive research has found that these implicit racial biases—negative thoughts and feelings about
people from other races—are automatic, pervasive, and difficult to suppress. Neuroscientists have also explored racial prejudice by exposing people to
images of faces while scanning their brains in fMRI machines. Early studies found that when people viewed faces of another race, the amount of activity
in the amygdala—a small brain structure associated with experiencing emotions, including fear—was associated with individual differences on implicit
measures of racial bias. This work has led many to conclude that racial biases might be part of a primitive—and possibly hard-wired—neural fear
response to racial out-groups. There is little question that categories such as race, gender, and age play a major role in shaping the biases and
stereotypes that people bring to bear in their judgments of others. However,
research has shown that how people
categorize themselves may be just as fundamental to understanding prejudice as how they
categorize others. When people categorize themselves as part of a group, their self-concept
shifts from the individual (“I”) to the collective level (“us”). People form groups rapidly and favor
members of their own group even when groups are formed on arbitrary grounds, such as the
simple flip of a coin. These findings highlight the remarkable ease with which humans form
coalitions. Recent research confirms that coalition-based preferences trump race-based
preferences. For example, both Democrats and Republicans favor the resumes of those affiliated
with their political party much more than they favor those who share their race. These coalitionbased preferences remain powerful even in the absence of the animosity present in electoral
politics. Our research has shown that the simple act of placing people on a mixed-race team can
diminish their automatic racial bias. In a series of experiments, White participants who were
randomly placed on a mixed-race team—the Tigers or Lions—showed little evidence of implicit
racial bias. Merely belonging to a mixed-race team trigged positive automatic associations with
all of the members of their own group, irrespective of race. Being a part of one of these
seemingly trivial mixed-race groups produced similar effects on brain activity—the amygdala
responded to team membership rather than race. Taken together, these studies indicate that
momentary changes in group membership can override the influence of race on the way we see,
think about, and feel toward people who are different from ourselves. Although these coalition-based
distinctions might be the most basic building block of bias, they say little about the other factors that cause group conflict. Why do some groups get
ignored while others get attacked? Whenever we encounter a new person or group we are motivated to answer two questions as quickly as possible:
“is this person a friend or foe?” and “are they capable of enacting their intentions toward me?” In other words, once we have determined that
someone is a member of an out-group, we need to determine what kind? The nature of the relations between groups—are we cooperative,
competitive, or neither?—and their relative status—do you have access to resources?—largely determine the course of intergroup interactions. Groups
that are seen as competitive with one’s interests, and capable of enacting their nasty intentions, are much more likely to be targets of hostility than
more benevolent (e.g., elderly) or powerless (e.g., homeless) groups. This is one reason why sports rivalries have such psychological potency. For
instance, fans of the Boston Red Sox are more likely to feel pleasure, and exhibit reward-related neural responses, at the misfortunes of the archrival
New York Yankees than other baseball teams (and vice versa)—especially in the midst of a tight playoff race. (How much fans take pleasure in the
misfortunes of their rivals is also linked to how likely they would be to harm fans from the other team.) Just as a particular person’s group membership
can be flexible, so too are the relations between groups. Groups that have previously had cordial relations may become rivals (and vice versa).
Indeed, psychological and biological responses to out-group members can change, depending on
whether or not that out-group is perceived as threatening. For example, people exhibit greater
pleasure—they smile—in response to the misfortunes of stereotypically competitive groups
(e.g., investment bankers); however, this malicious pleasure is reduced when you provide
participants with counter-stereotypic information (e.g., “investment bankers are working with
small companies to help them weather the economic downturn). Competition between “us” and “them” can even
distort our judgments of distance, making threatening out-groups seem much closer than they really are. These distorted perceptions can serve to
amplify intergroup discrimination: the more different and distant “they” are, the easier it is to disrespect and harm them. Thus,
not all outgroups are treated the same: some elicit indifference whereas others become targets of
antipathy. Stereotypically threatening groups are especially likely to be targeted with violence,
but those stereotypes can be tempered with other information. If perceptions of intergroup
relations can be changed, individuals may overcome hostility toward perceived foes and become
more responsive to one another’s grievances. The flexible nature of both group membership
and intergroup relations offers reason to be cautiously optimistic about the potential for greater
cooperation among groups in conflict (be they black versus white or citizens versus police). One
strategy is to bring multiple groups together around a common goal. For example, during the fiercely contested
2008 Democratic presidential primary process, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama supporters gave more money to strangers who supported the same
primary candidate (compared to the rival candidate). Two months later, after the Democratic National Convention, the supporters of both candidates
coalesced around the party nominee—Barack Obama—and this bias disappeared. In
fact, merely creating a sense of cohesion
between two competitive groups can increase empathy for the suffering of our rivals. These
sorts of strategies can help reduce aggression toward hostile out-groups, which is critical for
creating more opportunities for constructive dialogue addressing greater social injustices. Of course,
instilling a sense of common identity and cooperation is extremely difficult in entrenched intergroup conflicts, but when it happens, the benefits are
obvious. Consider how the community leaders in New York City and Ferguson responded differently to protests against police brutality—in NYC political
leaders expressed grief and concern over police brutality and moved quickly to make policy changes in policing, whereas the leaders and police in
Ferguson responded with high-tech military vehicles and riot gear. In the first case, multiple groups came together with a common goal—to increase
the safety of everyone in the community; in the latter case, the actions of the police likely reinforced the “us” and “them” distinctions. Tragically, these
types of conflicts continue to roil the country. Understanding the psychology and neuroscience of social identity and intergroup relations cannot undo
the effects of systemic racism and discriminatory practices; however, it can offer insights into the psychological processes responsible for escalating the
tension between, for example, civilians and police officers. Even in cases where it isn’t possible to create a common identity among groups in conflict, it
may be possible to blur the boundaries between groups. In one recent experiment, we sorted participants into groups—red versus blue team—
competing for a cash prize. Half of the participants were randomly assigned to see a picture of a segregated social network of all the players, in which
red dots clustered together, blue dots clustered together, and the two clusters were separated by white space. The other half of the participants saw
an integrated social network in which the red and blue dots were mixed together in one large cluster. Participants who thought the two teams were
interconnected with one another reported greater empathy for the out-group players compared to those who had seen the segregated network. Thus,
reminding people that individuals could be connected to one another despite being from different groups may be another way to build trust and
understanding among them. A mere month before Freddie Gray died in police custody, President Obama addressed the nation on the 50th anniversary
of Bloody Sunday in Selma: “We do a disservice to the cause of justice by intimating that bias and discrimination are immutable, or that racial division is
inherent to America. To deny…progress – our progress – would be to rob us of our own agency; our responsibility to do what we can to make America
better." The president was saying that we, as a society, have a responsibility to reduce prejudice and discrimination. These recent findings from
psychology and neuroscience indicate that we, as individuals, possess this capacity. Of course this capacity is not sufficient to usher in racial equality or
peace. Even when the level of prejudice against particular out-groups decreases, it does not imply that the level of institutional discrimination against
these or other groups will necessarily improve. Ultimately,
only collective action and institutional evolution can
address systemic racism. The science is clear on one thing, though: individual bias and
discrimination are changeable. Race-based prejudice and discrimination, in particular, are
created and reinforced by many social factors, but they are not inevitable consequences of our
biology. Perhaps understanding how coalitional thinking impacts intergroup relations will make
it easier for us to affect real social change going forward.
Pessimism Bad
Their account of hope overgeneralizes – they are right about the
problem with absolute faith in the government, but that’s not our
argument – a pragmatic understanding of hope as inseparable from
political life is necessary to mobilize activism and prefigurative politics
Stitzlein 18. Sarah M. Stitzlein is a Professor at the University of Cincinnati School of
Education. "Hoping and Democracy." Contemporary Pragmatism 15: 228-250. Emory
Libraries.
What ought I hope for? This question guides our pursuit of the good life and its answer is often shaped by
our social, political, and educational experiences. We aren’t born with ready-made hopes; rather, we shape them
through our interactions with others, our growing sense of what is possible as we learn about our environment, and our
experiments with the world to see what we can do within it and to change it. Other people play
an important role in this process, especially through institutions like schools, social arrangements like
families, and political practices like democracy. They shape the traditions and expectations we inherit, as well as the
ways in which we test, challenge, and revise what has been passed on to us. Despite this, hope is too often described in
individualist terms that fail to encapsulate the full process of hoping and its potential
impact on shared living. Many theologians link hope with an individual’s faith in a deity who will act
on his or her behalf, 1 some philosophers employ a narrow understanding of hope as an
individual’s desire for an outcome in the face of uncertainty, 2 while many more psychologists describe hope
as an individual’s use of willpower and “waypower” to achieve clear goals. 3 Instead, I will offer a pragmatist account of
hope, which is firmly rooted in the experiences of individuals and grows out of real life circumstances,
yet cannot be disconnected from social and political life. 4 I extend my account to show how a pragmatist
view of hope is necessarily connected to other people and can be used to enrich our experiences
in communities. Moreover, such hope can help us to better face current political struggles
and social problems , all the while building a democratic identity together. 5 In this article, I will explain how pragmatism
offers an enhanced understanding of hope and its role in our lives together. To examine the ways in which shared hoping
and the shared content of our hopes shape our identity and our work together in democracy, I consider both how and what we hope. Unlike
other accounts of hope that are largely divorced from life’s circumstances, such as
theological accounts that direct our attention to deities and psychological accounts that tell us we
must hope for our goals regardless of real world constraints, pragmatist hope is noteworthy
because it is firmly rooted in reality. 6 Moreover, a pragmatist account addresses some of the current
obstacles we face in American democracy and is capable of transforming or improving
them. Perhaps more importantly, such hope can be directly and indirectly cultivated within citizens,
thereby offering a feasible way that democratic life can be strengthened. 1 Present Context Before looking at
hope in detail, let’s briefly first take stock of current conditions that relate to hopelessness in personal and political life. In pragmatist spirit, the
account I offer here must attend to real conditions. Unfortunately, these are conditions where hope is struggling, where democracy may be in
jeopardy, and where the dominant form of hope that we do see is largely privatized. To begin, a recent study using the World Values Survey and
other polling sources finds that democratic citizens
have “become more cynical about the value of
democracy as a political system, less hopeful that anything they do might influence public policy,
and more willing to express support for authoritarian alternatives .” 7 Those citizens have
increasingly withdrawn from democratic participation, whether that be through formal
institutions or alternatives in the public or civic spheres, such as joining in movements or protests. There has
been a dramatic shift in how the wealthy view democracy, with 16 percent of them now believing that military rule is a better way of living and
an astounding 35 percent of rich young Americans holding such a view. 8 There are likely many factors impacting this current state of affairs and
I will touch on a few here. 9 First, in terms of hope most overtly, Alan Mittleman rightly notes that “ the
legitimacy of politics is
damaged in proportion to its failure to fulfil the hopes it has engendered.” 10 Indeed, several recent
American candidates ran on messages of hope and yet the visions evoked have often failed to be fulfilled in reality, crushing the heightened
expectations of citizens. Politicians
often use the rhetoric of hope, but they tend to distort what hope
really is and what it requires of citizens, as I will explain later. Instead, they make reference to the supposed destiny of the
nation with God as its backer. Or, as in the cases of Barack Obama and Donald Trump, some citizens place their hope in the leader himself,
invoking a messianic figure. These forms of hope entail no more citizen action than, perhaps, donating to a campaign or wearing an iconic t-shirt
proclaiming “hope.” Instead, I will argue that, rather than passively relying on the hope promised by politicians, citizens must participate in
shaping and fulfilling hope, making such hope more genuine and robust. Second, structural
violence and inequality,
common amongst poor and racial minority communities in America, has wreaked havoc on
hope. In some cases, it has eroded hope. 11 In others it has rendered hope exhausting, 12 ***footnote 12 begins***
Calvin Warren , “Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope,” cr: The New Centennial Review, 15 (2015), pp. 215–248. Shannon
Sullivan, “Setting aside hope: A pragmatist approach to racial justice,” in Pragmatism and Justice, ed. by Susan Dielman, David Rondel, and
Christopher Voparil (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).***footnote 12 ends*** with
marginalized citizens told that
they must never give up hope and that they must keep trying to earn a better life for
themselves, in part through improving their own character regardless of the stagnant harmful
practices of others. Many of those citizens are left either nihilistically without hope or
perpetually chasing a vision of justice that is (perhaps sometimes intentionally kept) out of reach. 13 ***footnote
13 begins***
Calvin Warren , “Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope,” cr: The New Centennial Review, 15 (2015): 215–248.
***footnote 13 ends*** I intend to describe
a form of hope that is more sustainable and more attuned
to the real conditions of life that we can control and others where we have limited control.
Third, citizenship in America has increasingly become centered on individuals, personal responsibility,
entrepreneurship, and private success. Historical accounts of rugged individualism have now joined forces
with calls to educate children in grit and expectations that one will fight to earn one’s position and
goods in a competitive marketplace. 14 This environment lacks trust in others and discourages
collaborative effort. Often those who have not been successful in the past, or do not see viable avenues for
being so in the future, fatalistically accept these conditions and become passive about countering
or changing them. While others who have enough resources and power to be comfortable with the
present conditions, indulge in the privilege of being cynical or apathetic. Some spread these states
of hopelessness or jaded negativity through memes and messages on social media, especially about the role
and effectiveness of government, rendering cynicism a collective practice . 15 Cynics, left
believing that their political efforts are useless or ineffective and perhaps that everyone acts
on self-interest, are left to look out merely for themselves, without a sense of responsibility
to act on behalf of themselves and others. Indeed, cynics may mock others who do not hold
such views as naïve and out of touch with reality. Cynicism functions as a distancing
maneuver, separating citizens from each other, from formal democratic institutions, and
from civic organizations, where visions of an improved world and action to achieve it tend
to occur. My notion of hope aims to span those divides. Finally, what is left of hope has become
privatized . 16 This is exacerbated as neoliberalism continues to assert Margaret Thatcher’s claims,
“There is no such thing as society, only individuals and families,” and “there is no alternative
to the market.” Hope is reduced to a mere drive to achieve one’s own limited dreams, or those of
one’s children, typically only through financial terms and material goods. When citizens are rendered isolated competitors, they lose the
ability to detect social problems and the motivation to ameliorate them, especially if
the effects on one’s self or family are not immediate. Economist Tyler Cowen describes these citizens as the new
“complacent class,” who are content with the way things are as long as they are not directly harmed and as long as they can
stay surrounded by people and things that confirm their experience of the world. In their
complacency, the members of the complacent class are unable to “inspire an electorate with any kind of strong positive visions, other than some
marginal adjustments.” 17 I aim to show how hope is better understand as a social and political endeavor that brings us into contact with others
as we craft visions of the future. In sum, these
changes in citizens’ lives and views debilitate individual
citizens and democracy as a whole . They keep us from recognizing and solving collective
problems and from leading better lives together. Citizens sit around waiting for reasons to hope, sometimes
becoming swept up in campaign rhetoric when election cycles come around, rather than acknowledging that hope is generated
through action as subjects working together, as I will argue. I will turn now to depict a pragmatist account of
hope that can be formally cultivated in schools and informally in our lives together—a way of hoping together
that may better support democratic life in these challenging times. 2 Pragmatist Hope I offer here a
pragmatist account of hope, largely based in the philosophy of John Dewey. Notably, Dewey himself does not provide such an account, even
though hope underlies much of his work and was evident in his own personal life as he encountered considerable despair at the loss of two of his
children and his wife, while also facing two world wars. I construct a view of hope from Dewey’s well-articulated elements of inquiry, growth,
truth, meliorism, and habits. Pragmatism
begins with the real and complicated conditions of our
world. It brings together intelligent reflection with inquiry, habits, and action so that we can
understand and change our environments to better align with our needs and desires. Hope
plays an important role in that process. Inquiry, Growth, and Truth For Dewey, hope often arises within the
midst of despair, when we have lost our way and are struggling to move forward. Dewey
describes these moments as “indeterminate situations.” He turns to the process of inquiry via the empirical
method to help us explore those situations, consider possible courses of action, and test out various solutions. It is inquiry that helps us to
understand, act upon, and reconstruct our environments and our experiences so that we are able to move forward out of the indeterminate
situation. In a richly cognitive and often social practice, inquiry
invokes curiosity and problem solving to move
us out of ruts. Indeed, this method combats the stagnation of fatalism by urging us to
formulate and try out solutions . Growth describes how reconstructions of our
experiences through inquiry develops physical, intellectual, and moral capacities,
actualizing them and helping them inform one another so that they continue in a chain that
enables one to live satisfactorily . We grow when we learn from inquiry into
indeterminate situations and create ways to re-establish smooth living that carries us
from one activity to the next. Many people wrongly assume that growth necessarily has an
end —as if it were “movement toward a fixed goal.” 18 We tend to think of growth as only progression toward some specific outcome, such as
mastering bicycle riding or graduating from high school. But this way of thinking tends to place the emphasis on
the static terminus, rather than focusing on the process of growing as itself educative
and worthwhile . Dewey’s alternative view of growth does not neatly and linearly move toward
a fixed goal. Instead, he describes trajectories that are more complicated, often shifting with the
environment. Moreover, holding onto a fixed goal may be undesirable because doing so employs
a limited or possibly foreclosed vision of the future. Instead, as changes occur in one’s
environment, Dewey asserts that people must continually inquire into moments of uncertainty and
changing circumstances, develop new hypotheses about those situations, and revise their
aims. Dewey works with what he calls “ends-in-view,” which are relatively close and feasible, even if
difficult to achieve, rather than overarching goals at some final endpoint in the future. Those
ends-in-view guide our decisions and hypotheses along the way, keeping us resourceful in the present. In Dewey’s words,
the discovery of how things do occur makes it possible to conceive of their happening at will, and gives us a start on selecting and combining the
conditions, the means, to
command their happening…there must be a realistic study of actual
conditions and the mode or law of natural event, in order to give the imagined or ideal object
definite form and solid substance—to give it, in short, practicality and constitute it as a working
end. 19 For Dewey, ends and means are intelligently considered in light of each other, with both
being revisable, and neither abstracted from the other. Each fulfilled end-in-view sustains
our hope by highlighting meaningful headway and directing our further action. Ends-in-view
later become means to future ends, working in an ongoing continuum. This sustenance of
hope differs from theological accounts which are difficult to sustain on faith alone and
may leave believers frustrated at an apparent lack of action or improvement. It also differs from
positive psychology and grit literature which tends to focus on large, far-off, and challenging goals that one holds tenaciously. Many
people think of hope as goal-directed and future-oriented. While objects of hope for
pragmatists may temporarily serve as ends-in-view, the practice of hope moves us forward
through inquiry and experimentation as we pursue our complicated trajectory. It helps to
unify our past, present, and future. Hope, then, is not just about a vision of the future, but
rather a way of living in the present that is informed by the past and what is anticipated to
come. Whereas utopian views of what could be may actually immobilize one and may
exhaust one in the present, pragmatist hope is always tied to what one is doing and
feasibly can do in the present, especially when equipped with knowledge of the past. Central
to pragmatist philosophy, ideas become true insofar as they “work” for us, fruitfully combine our
experiences, and lead us to further experiences that satisfy our needs. Pragmatists are
concerned with the concrete differences in our lived experiences that an idea’s being true
will make. Pragmatic truth expresses “the successful completing of a worthwhile leading.” 20
Unlike truth as a corresponding match between proposition and reality, pragmatist truth is something that occurs when the
goals of human flourishing are satisfied, at least temporarily. Built into these criteria is consideration of the well-being of
others, for successful leading through experiences almost always necessarily requires working and communicating with others. Additionally, the
differences an idea will make are quite limited, and therefore less truthful, if relevant only to one person. While not a comprehensive vision of
the good life, certain
norms including equality and just communication are entailed both in these
deliberations and the determination of truth. 21 We must consider how to flourish alongside others as we craft our
ends-in-view. This differs considerably from other philosophical and psychological accounts of hope based on the desire of objects or states of
affairs regardless of whether they are good for us or other people. Meliorism Pragmatists like Dewey recognize the difficulty of present
circumstances, yet approach them practically, rather than idealistically, with thoughtful action, believing that circumstances can be improved. 22
Unlike simple optimists, however, they do not hold that the situation will necessarily work out for the best, but rather they believe people should
make efforts to contribute to better outcomes. Such efforts are rarely undertaken alone, instead they are tied to others who are working together
to solve problems. In the words of contemporary pragmatist Cornel West, “Optimism adopts the role of the spectator who surveys the evidence
in order to infer that things are going to get better. Yet when we know that the evidence does not look good…Hope enacts the stance of the
participant who actively struggles against the evidence.” 23 Meliorism entails action in the face of difficulties. Dewey
sees hope as a
way of living aligned with meliorism, “the idea that at least there is a sufficient basis of
goodness in life and its conditions so that by thought and earnest effort we may constantly
make better things.” 24 Meliorism is not a belief in inevitable progress, but rather a call to
human action, especially in the midst of struggle and uncertainty. Dewey firmly argued that it would
be foolish to believe that there is “an automatic and wholesale progress in human affairs,”
insisting instead that betterment “depends upon deliberative human foresight and socially
constructive work.” 25 Martin Luther King, a champion and practitioner of hope, was enshrined on the floor of Obama’s oval office
with his phrase: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Importantly, given how many hopes fell flat under the
messianic figure of Obama, King later explained in a pragmatist spirit of meliorism, “ Human
progress never rolls on wheels
of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without
this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use
time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.” 26 We cannot wait until we
have a clear picture of our final future goals; rather, we must act now in intelligent ways and through inquiry to
bring about better conditions and, thereby, truth. 27 And we must be flexible to change and
redirect our efforts as they unfold. Meliorism is an alternative to both pessimism and
optimism . It cultivates hope, growth, and better worlds . For some pragmatists, like Colin Koopman, this
meliorism-based hope is “the pragmatist affect par excellence: ‘hope is the mood of meliorism ’ (27),
‘the characteristic attitude of pragmatism is hope’ (17).” 28
Racial pessimism is the political view of Clarence Thomas – their strategy
reinforces a nihilistic, pull yourself up by your bootstraps view that can never
embrace social progress
Illing and Robin, 19 [Corey Robin is an American political theorist, journalist and professor of
political science at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Sean Illing is the Interviews Writer for Vox. Before publishing things on the Internet, he taught
politics and philosophy at a university. Before that, he served in the United States Air Force. The
racial pessimism of Clarence Thomas]
-
The way this kind of goes beyond cede the political is in the idea that – if you go far
enough left, you end up back on the right – and so, Clarence Thomas can oppose school
integration, prison reform etc. all because of his foundational nihilism
Sean Illing One of the strangest parts of all this is the fact that Thomas has
managed to preserve his core black
nationalist beliefs on the court while at the same time, as you put it, “remaining a hero to some
of the most racist elements of the American polity.” Is this just a case of his supporters not bothering to
understand what he actually thinks and why he thinks it? Or do many of them understand it and just don’t care? Corey Robin I think
they haven’t bothered to understand what he thinks. It’s clear that most white conservatives just don’t see it. Even the best
scholarship on the right just doesn’t touch this dimension of Thomas’s thought, at least not as far as I can tell. And this continues to
be part of the paradox of Clarence Thomas. He’s probably the most well-known member of the court, everybody knows who he is,
and yet no one really knows who he is. Sean Illing I think this is true on the left as well, but we’ll get to that. First I’d like to ask you
how these background assumptions structure Thomas’s judicial philosophy. One of the contradictions you explore in the book is the
fact that Thomas is an avowed originalist, someone committed to applying the Constitution as it was adopted in 1789, and yet he
acknowledges that that Constitution was written by and for slaveholders. Corey Robin Well, the first thing I’d say is that Thomas’s
originalism is pretty inconsistent, but let’s not get into the weeds on that. Here’s
why I think originalism is important
to Thomas and it’s partly for the reason you just mentioned: He sees it as a kind of permanent
reminder of the constraints written into the Constitution under which African Americans have
labored for over three centuries. Thomas sees value in this, and he’s very upfront about it. It would
be too strong to say that he would like to rewrite the Constitution as if it were a Jim Crow Constitution, but he really does believe in
his heart of hearts that black people, particularly black men, flourished under the heavy yoke of subjugation that was Jim Crow. And
this is where his ideology is pretty straightforwardly conservative: he believes that under the conditions of extreme hardship, the
strongest wills have a way of bashing their way through those constraints in order to overcome them, and he thinks this is what the
African American community did when it was oppressed by the white majority. Sean Illing You say that “the story of Clarence
Thomas is the story of the last half century of American politics and the long shadow of defeat that hangs over it.” This gets at the
sense of racial despair a lot of people — on the left and right — feel right now. As the gains of the civil rights movement are eroding,
as white nationalism subsumes the White House, it’s hard not to sympathize with Thomas’s pessimism about the possibilities of
political progress. Is that how you feel after writing this book?Corey Robin I didn’t need Clarence Thomas to convince me that the
gains of the civil rights movement and the black freedom struggle had been cut back in a big way — that movement has been in
reverse motion for quite some time. But engaging
with Thomas did clarify for me how strong this ambient
mood of racial despair is right now, and I think many people on the left think that that signifies
the mark of progressive values. But I don’t think that’s true at all. The beginning of the left tradition — and
I say this as someone on the left — is the recognition that oppression can be undone and transformed.
Oppression is the product of politics and it can be dismantled through politics — we risk
forgetting this when we become overly pessimistic. I hope wrestling with Thomas’s conservatism
opens up a discussion across the country about where we think racial pessimism leads necessarily.
Identifying the structures of oppression is critical, but it’s only constructive if we also identify
the vulnerabilities of those structures. This is the job of the left and we’ll lose if we cease to do it.
Reject fatalism – devaluing political engagement reinforces self-hatred and
precludes positive coalitional politics, collapsing into white divide and conquer.
Massa ’14 (Andre; 12/16/14; Undergraduate student of philosophy at George Mason University, citing historians and
Professors of Philosophy Carter Woodson, Mellville Herskovits, Jared Sexton, Vincent Brown, literary critique and Professor at
Columbia University, Gayatri Spivak, Professor of Humanities, David Marriot, and the historiography of Orlando Patterson; The
Historical Nerds, “Implications of Wilderson’s Afro-Pessimism,” https://thehistoricalnerds.com/2014/12/16/implications-ofwildersons-afro-pessimism/; RP)
By disproving Wilderson’s claim that the Black Body is in a perpetual state of ontological death because of the violence of the Middle
Passage and showing that the Black Body is not socially dead, then the
possibilities of legal reform and coalitional
politics become possible and desirable. For Wilderson, coalitional politics are just attempts to feign the ontological capacity
of Blacks to shape their own future. He refers to white people and colored immigrants specifically who try to engage in coalitional
politics with the Black Body as “the junior and senior partners of civil society” who pretend as if the Black is coherent and human.
(Wilderson, Red, White and Black, pg. 39). It is this kind of ontological absolutism that Wilderson adheres to that David Marriott
criticizes when he writes, “Wilderson is prepared to
say that black suffering is not only beyond analogy, it also refigures
the whole of being. It is not hard when reading such sentences to suspect a kind of absolutism at work here, and one that
manages to be peculiarly and dispiritingly dogmatic: throughout Red, White, and Black, despite variations in tone and
emphasis, there is always the desire to have black lived experience named as the worst, and the politics of such a
desire inevitably collapses into a kind of sentimental moralism: for the claim that ‘Blackness is
incapacity in its most pure and unadulterated form’ means merely that the black has to embody this abjection
without reserve (p. 38). This logic—and the denial of any kind of ‘ontological integrity’ to the Black/Slave due to
its endless traversal by force does seem to reduce ontology to logic, namely, a logic of non-recuperability.”
(Mariott, Black Cultural Studies, pg. 37-66). Wilderson’s insistence of absolute negativity destroys the possibility
for coalitional politics because it will always frame the Black Body as something that will always stand in an
antagonistic position to the world. In engaging in this form of ontological absolutism, Wilderson effectively
creates an "us against the world” logic whereby its best to either succumb to the negativity
surrounding the Black Body or destroy the world to free the Black Body. Furthermore, as Mariott points out, this dogmatic
ontological absolutism essentializes the Black experience to its most negative point, a kind of negativity
that reproduces a form of self-hatred that contributes to the destruction of positive coalitional politics.
When one comes to believe that they themselves are ontologically dead, this encourages the logic of
political apathy where one refuses to attempt to engage with agents of change because they curse
their own identity and believe that there is nothing they can do about their situation because Blackness is
an ontological condition. To put it in Lehman’s term, “why go vote if I’m socially dead?”. This form of disengagement
from the political is problematic when racism is entrenched in our law, as Ian Haney Lopez points out in his book
White By Law when he writes, “law is implicated in the construction of the contingent social systems of meaning
that attach in our society to morphology and ancestry, the meaning system we commonly refer to as race. The legal
system influences what we look like, the meanings ascribed to our looks, and the material reality that
confirms the meanings of our appearances. Law constructs race.” (Lopez, White By Law, pg. 16). If the
precedent set by court cases, as Lopez points out, were responsible for creating the precedents that shaped how
we see race as a social construction, then the need to challenge racism through legal reform
becomes more apparent. Wilderson’s ontological absolutism destroys the possibility to form the kind of
coalitions that are necessary to engaging with the legal systems that use the law to shape our social
perceptions of race. The kind of self-hatred that Wilderson perpetuates through his ontological construction
of Blackness will only re-entrench racism because the Black Body will refuse to engage in the forms of
legal reform necessary to change the law and they way it shapes how we view race as a social construction. If the
law is what truly shapes the social construction of race and if the Black Body is truly capable of engaging with these
institutions, then Wilderson’s Afro-pessimism must be firmly rejected to usher in a politics of hope that is
necessary to mobilize coalitions against dominant power structures. The idea of embracing a politics of hope and
solidarity is a concept that would seem absolutely foreign to Wilderson. Indeed, with the recent events surrounding the likes of Eric
Garner and Michael Brown, the credibility surrounding the Afro-pessimist school of thought is increasing. Yet it is precisely these
events that necessitate a politics of hope and solidarity that Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her pen name Bell
Hooks, advocates for in her 1996 book Killing Rage: Ending Racism when she writes, “Black Americans are succumbing to and
internalizing the racist assumption that there can be no meaningful bonds of intimacy between blacks and whites. It is fascinating to
explore why it is that black people trapped in the worst situation of racial oppression—enslavement—had the foresight to see that it
would be disempowering for them to lose sight of the capacity of white people to transform themselves and divest of white
supremacy, even as many black folks today who in no way suffer such extreme racist oppression and exploitation are convinced that
white people will not repudiate racism. Contemporary black folks, like their white counterparts, have passively accepted the
internalization of white supremacist assumptions. Organized white supremacists have always taught that there can never be trust
and intimacy between the superior white race and the inferior black race. When
black people internalize these
sentiments, no resistance to white supremacy is taking place, rather we become complicit in
spreading racist notions. It does not matter that so many black people feel white people will never repudiate racism
because of being daily assaulted by white denial and refusal of accountability. We must not allow the actions of white
folks who blindly endorse racism to determine the direction of our resistance. Like our white allies in struggle
we must consistently keep the faith, by always sharing the truth that white people can be anti-racist, that racism is not
some immutable character flaw.” (Bell Hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism, pg. 269-270). Bell Hooks avoids falling into the colonial
trap of Wilderson by speaking for herself and her own experiences. By acknowledging that there are many anti-racist whites, she has
created a space where Black folk who believe that they have a future can speak of their own experiences and contribute to
meaningful dialogue about how Black
folk should take steps forward in the context of legal reform. Unlike
Wilderson who universalizes the Black experience, Bell Hooks acknowledges that internalizing
racist assumptions of the Black Body, or in the context of Wilderson, their own ontological construction, will only give
into White supremacy because the cycle of self-hatred creates a sense of powerlessness that
prevents the Black Body from ever getting out in the first place. Furthermore, Wilderson’s ontological
absolutism is a tactic of White supremacy, because, as pointed out by Bell Hooks, it creates a sense of
distrust that plays into the divide and conquer mentality that is crucial to White supremacy’s grip
on society. For Bell Hooks, when the Black community gives into its own pessimism, White supremacists
win because there is no motivation for resistance. In the wake of recent events, embracing a politics of hope
and solidarity is more important than ever as racism begins to become more apparent. Hope offers the crucial first step
towards encouraging the first steps towards resistance, a step that Wilderson’s extreme negativity prevents from ever been taken.
Instead of imagining the end of the world, we must imagine a world with a better future.
Perm
Permutation do both---saving the Earth from its excesses is in line with Black
radical scholarship
Moten and Kelley, 17—professor of Performance Studies at New York University AND Gary
B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA (Fred and Robin D.G., “Robin D.G. Kelley & Fred
Moten In Conversation,” transcribed from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fP-2F9MXjRE,
31:49-55:57, dml)
MOTEN: Well, first of all, I just want to say how much I appreciate having a chance to be here with all of you tonight, and thank you,
Rinaldo, and, uh, Alicia, and Afua, of course. Robin, as always, uh, an honor to be, have a chance to hang out with you, and uh, and
to learn from you, and um, let me see. Um, well, I tend to think of Black studies not so much as an academic discipline or
confluence of disciplines but as the atmosphere in which I grew up, and so, and I love that, that atmosphere. I love the way that it
felt, and I love the way that it smelled, and I love the flavors, and I love the sounds, and I love the movements. Um, and so, it is,
again, something that I think has
a certain place, maybe, in the university, and what it meant, what it has meant for
probably done much
more for the university than it has for Black studies, and, and that’s something worth thinking about. And I
don’t say that because I’m trying to advocate some withdrawal from the university of Black
studies, but I’m thinking that, you know, that at this stage of the game in having done the work of
attempting to actually bring, um, the university into some sense of its own, of what ought to be its own
intellectual mission, Black studies has the right to look out for itself now, for a little bit, um, and I think
it’s worth it to do that. And insofar as Black studies has earned a right to look out for itself, what that
really means, I think, is that Black studies has earned the right to try again to take its fundamental
responsibility, which is to be, uh, a place where we can look out for the Earth. Um, I think that Black
studies has a fundamental and specific, though not necessarily exclusive mission, and that
mission is to try to save the Earth, or at least to try to save, not, well, on the most fundamental level
to save the Earth, and on a secondary level, to try to save the possibility of human existence on
the Earth. Um, and I know that’s a big statement, and I don’t wanna take up all the time, but I’m happy to try to say more about
Black studies to take that place in the university has had both, has been both good and bad. I think it’s
what I think I mean by that later on, but, um, but I think maybe it’s important just to leave that big statement out there for a minute,
and just to make sure that you know that I knew that I said it when I said it. KELLEY: Okay, well, actually I wanna echo, uh, Fred’s
sentiments, that it’s really an honor to be here, in this space. Um, this is the second time that we’ve had kind of a public
conversation, and it’s always packed, you know, and it’s always a lot of people, and expectations are always high, and one of my
favorite things on the planet, besides just talking to my daughters, talking to Fred Moten, um, you know, and it’s just really, you
know, I learn so much from it, and in fact, let me just begin by saying that one of the pieces that Rinaldo was referring to was an
essay I wrote called, uh, “Black Study, Black Struggle,” which was entirely inspired by, uh, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s, uh,
book, “The Undercommons.” It was a way of the application of the notion of the undercommons to understanding what was
happening at that moment, which in, in the fall of 2015, there was like an explosion of, um, Black protests on, on campus, and, you
know, I won’t repeat what’s in the article, uh, but it, it’s not an accident that some of those struggles, uh, were products of what was
happening in the streets. In other words, what happened in Ferguson, and what happened in Baltimore, what happened all over the
country, and what happened in places like here in Toronto, were the catalyst for, um, a kind of explosion on campuses, where, uh,
students were trying to figure out their place in the university. They’re dealing with racism, and microaggressions on university
campuses, uh, they’re dealing with a, a kind of deracinated, you know, curriculum where ethnic studies wasn’t what it was, in its
inception. Um, and, I was also dealing with, or many
of us were also dealing with, uh, a culture of, and I hate to put it this
way, but a culture of anti-intellectualism in, in a different sort of way. I mean, universities are often antiintellectual, in that they actually disavow certain forms of knowledge and put other knowledge
above that, which is an anti-intellectual position by the way. Um, but then when you’re assaulted by that all the
time, uh, sometimes you end up mirroring that culture. And you’re saying “well I’m not gonna
read this, I’m not gonna read that, because so-and-so wrote it,” as opposed to saying that
there’s nothing off the table, uh, that Black studies, and Fred knows this ‘cause he repeats it more than I do, that
our mutual, uh, teacher, Cedric Robinson, who paraphrased C. L. R. James, said you know, Black studies is a critique of
Western civilization, and if that is the case, then we both have to dismantle it, recognize the
weak edifice upon which it’s built, but also know everything that’s happening within it. But
anyway, let me just back up, um, so, I just, so the three points I wanna make in reference to the question, one is that, uh, social
movements have always been the catalyst for Black studies. When Fred was talking about, you know, Black studies as, as, uh, kinda,
kinda like a way of life, as an atmosphere in which he grew up and which I grew up and many of us grew up, that’s so true. I never
thought about it that way, but, you know, that’s so true. And in fact, um, if anything, Black Studies is not a multidiscipline but a
project, a project for liberation, whatever that means, and liberation is an ongoing project. Um, Ruthie Gilmore, uh, who
was at USC, uh, with me and Fred, had come up with this idea of renaming ethnic studies “liberation studies.” And, you know, we
were actually serious about that, we were like, trying to figure out how to do that, and never filled it, but it
reminds us that,
you know, it’s not about, um, it’s not about a body. It’s not about bodies. It’s about ideas, and about
the future, you know. It’s about recognizing the past and the construction of a new future. And so I
think, in that respect, in order to understand the future of Black studies, we gotta understand the movements that produced it—
that, that the Movement for Black Lives, that, um, uh, We Charge Genocide, that Black Youth Projects 100—all these struggles that
erupted have, in fact, uh, pointed the way for Black Studies. The problem is, is that what gets constituted as the institutional space of
Black studies, in many cases, isn’t really that. And I hate to bring people down, because we’re supposed to be up, right? But there
are a lot of departments that I wouldn't call Black studies departments that have that name, you know, there are a lot of, there's
a lot of scholarship that goes on that has no relationship at all to the project of transformation,
or to people, to actual people in community. And one of the important things to always remember is that, um, we
wouldn't have Black studies if it wasn't—in the United States, that is, I'm talking about the US—if it wasn't for Watts, if it wasn't for
Detroit in 67, and if it wasn't for those kinds of urban rebellions, if it wasn't for the struggles in the South, that's where Black
studies comes from. Uh, and so it moves into the university as a, as a transformative project. Um, it's not—
and that's why I think there was a disconnect between some of the, the protests and what was
happening in the academy. Finally, there’s this question of, of ethnic studies versus, or against, or for, or within or bedded
in Black studies. And one of the things that, that I think a lot of us are trying to figure out is to deepen the relationship between
indigenous studies and Black studies. Um, to understand that this was what I call second wave ethnic studies in the 1990s was itself
a project that was, believe it or not, in a, a response to neoliberalism. And I think we don't always see that because we, we tend to
read backwards in the 1990s and 1980s as, like, ethnic studies as identity politics in the narrowest sense of the word, that somehow
this was about producing a sense of, of pride and a sense of identity devoid of the question of power. But if you actually look at the
struggles for ethnic studies in the 80s and 90s, it was all about power. That, that what we think of as comparative or critical ethnic
studies was, wasn't about the celebration of difference. It wasn't liberal multiculturalism. It was an assault on a neoliberal turn. And
we, we sometimes forget that and, and, and then we write the history. And so I think I want to at some point talk more about that,
but I think that's something to remember, because, right now, if
we don't have Black studies as a critique in
response to the neoliberal neofascist turn, then it's sort of worthless. You know, it's going to
continue to exist. Maybe not in the academy though. So I'll just stop there. WALCOTT: So, um, Robin, where you
ended, and, and where Fred began, it’s a, is a good segue into getting you, both of you, to talk about the work that you've been
doing around questions of Palestinian struggle and freedom. Fred, the work that, the tremendous work that you did in the ASA, um,
American Studies Association, for which the Association is still living true, and, and Robin the work that you continue to do with um,
um, with faculty for Palestine. But I'm thinking about Fred's provocation here that Black studies about saving the Earth and if Black
studies is indeed about saving the Earth, which I'm very willing to fall right into right now, you know, first to kind of maybe think
about this relationship between the struggle and, and freedom of Palestine and the relationship between ongoing settler
colonialisms globally, because it seems to me that one of the most powerful things that, um, the kind of Black studies that has taken
to the streets recently has done is to make those kinds of concerns present, right? BLM visits to Palestine, BLM in Toronto, always
making sure that the invocation of the politics of settler colonialism is a part of a political organizing, and, um, their intimate
relations with indigenous communities. So maybe this is a way for us to begin to talk about what's really at stake in this
contemporary political moment where, um, or, or a radical politics, a politics that wants to think a different kind of future formation,
is grappling with, um, settler colonialism in various kinds of ways. But Palestine being central to that, given that we know as we sit in
this university is that often, um, what we call our senior administrators have an entirely different relationship with the question of
freedom for Palestine. MOTEN: Well, um, first, I mean, the work I did around, um, you know, the ASA’s, um, you know, decision to
endorse the academic and cultural boycott of Israel was really minimal and minor compared to a lot of other people who were really
out front, um, and, and have been working tirelessly for that for many, many years. Um, and I think, you know, the, my contribution
was more, you know, rhetorical in many ways in, in, in, and, and maybe, maybe theoretical only in the most minimal sense, in the
sense that what I wanted to do was a couple of things. First, to recognize that, um, you know, let's say that the
conditions of
what people call modernity, um, in, in, in, in, or global modernity, that the fundamental conditions that
make that up are, you know, settler colonialism. And I think we can talk about settler colonialism in
ways that are broader than the normal way that we usually think of them as a set of violent and
brutal relations between Europe and the rest of the world. Because I think it's really important. And, and, and
again, our, our mutual friend and mentor Cedric Robinson, pointed this out emphatically, and in brilliant ways early on, that settler
colonialism is also an intra-European affair. Um, and it's important to understand that. It's important to understand this historic
relationship between settler colonialism in the enclosure of the commons, um, which is part and, part of the origins of, of what we
now know or understand as capitalism. But if we understand that settler
colonialism, that the transatlantic slave
trade, um, and that, you know, the emergence of a set of philosophical formulations that essentially
provide for us some modern conception of self that has as its basis a kind of possessive,
heteronormative, patriarchal individuation, right? That's what it is to be yourself on the most
fundamental level. You know, and if you ask anybody in the philosophy department, they'll tell you that that's true, you
know, and they won’t be joking, right, that, um, that, these, that these constitute the basis of, of our modernity. But for most of the
people who live in the world, actually for
everybody who lives in the world, although most of the people
in live in the world are actually able to both recognize this and say this, that modernity is a social
and ecological disaster that we live, that we now attempt to survive. Okay? And if we take that up, then
part of what's at stake is that we recognize that feminist and queer interventions against
heteronormative patriarchy, that Black interventions against the theory and practice of
slavery, which is ongoing, that indigenous interventions against settler colonialism constitute
the general both practical and intellectual basis for not only our attempts to survive, but also
our attempts to, as I said before, save the Earth. And, and I put it in terms that the great poet Ed Roberson puts it; not
just to save the Earth, but to see the Earth before the end of the world. And this is an emergency
that we're in now and it's urgent. Um, and I believe that there’s a specific convergence of black
thought and indigenous thought that situates itself precisely in relation to, and is articulated
through, the interventions of queer thought and feminist thought that we want to take up. And,
and it, and it strikes me as, for me at least, it's, it's a way of taking up a kind an—it's, it’s a way of imagining how one might
be able to, how we might be able to walk more lightly on the Earth. To honor the Earth as we walk
on it, as we stand on it. To not stomp on it, to not stomp all over it, where every step you take
is a claim of ownership. And, and this is one way to put it, would be to not so presumptuously imagine that the Earth can
be reduced to something so paltry and so viciously understood as what we usually call home. This is part of the reason why the
queer and the feminist critique is so important. It's a critique of a general problematic notion of domesticity. It's
like another
way of being on the Earth that doesn't allow you in some vicious and brutal way to claim that it
is yours, right? Um, this is important and this is so, you know, often the methods that we use to claim the Earth as ours involved
fences, borders. This manifests itself on a private level from household to household, but it also manifests itself on a national level,
and at the level of the nation state, and it's not an accident that settler colonial states take it upon themselves to imagine
themselves to be the living embodiment of the legitimacy of the nation state as a political and social form. For me, there's two
reasons to be in solidarity with the people of Palestine. One is because they're human beings and they're being treated with
absolute brutality, but the other is that there's a specific resistance to Israel as a nation state. And for my money, to be perfectly
clear about this, I believe that this nation state of Israel is itself an artifact of antisemitism. If we thought about Israel and Zionism,
not just as a form of racism that results in the displacement of Palestinians, but if we also think about them as artifacts of the
historic displacement of Jews from Europe, right, in the same way that we might think of, let's say Sierra Leone or Liberia as artifacts
of racist displacement, okay. If we think about it that way, okay, and another, and the reason I'm saying this is just to make sure that
you know that there's a possible argument against the formulation that criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic when we know that Donald
Trump is a staunch supporter, that people like Pat Robertson in the United States are staunch supporters that help us to the fact
that you can be deeply anti-Semitic and support the state of Israel. These things go together. They're not antithetical to one another.
So that it becomes important for us to be able to suggest that resistance to the state of Israel is also resistance to the idea of the
legitimacy of the nation state. It's not an accident that Israel has taken upon itself, that when Israel takes upon itself, when the
defense of Israel manifests itself as a defense of its right to exist, this is important. It's a defense, not just of Israel's right to exist, but
of the nation state as a political form’s right to exist. And nation states don't have rights. What they're supposed to be are
mechanisms to protect the rights of the people who live in them, and that has almost never been the case, and to the extent that
they do protect the rights of the people who live in them, it's in the expense, it's at the expense of the people who don't, okay. So
part of what's at stake, one of the reasons why it's at, it's important to pay particular attention to this issue, why we ought to resist
the ridiculous formulation that singling out Israel at this moment is itself anti-Semitic is because it's important to recognize that
Israel is the state. [KELLEY: Right.] MOTEN: For reasons that I think are totally bound up with antisemitism, right? Israel is the state
that, insofar as it makes the claim about its right to exist, is also making the claim about the nation state’s right to exist as such. It's
this, it's that same kind of argument that, I remembered the—and I'm sorry to keep going on so long, but there's—there's those
formulations that people often make about Black people in it or indigenous people as if they were the essence of the human, right,
so that every time Black people or indigenous people do something that supposedly we're not supposed to do, it constitutes a
violation to the very idea of the human. Right, because somehow as a function of the nobility of our suffering, we constitute the very
idea of humanity, right? And there's nothing more brutal, right? Nothing more vicious than having been being consigned to that
position. Similarly, Israel as a function of anti-Semitism has now been placed in the position of protecting the very idea of the nation
state. So for me, first and foremost, it's important to have solidarity with the Palestinian people, but second of all, it's important to
actually have some solidarity with the Jewish people insofar as they can and must be separated from the Israeli state because
ultimately the fate of the Jewish people, if it is tied to this, to the nation state of Israel, will be more brutal than anything that has yet
been done or can be imagined, and I mean everything that you think I mean when I say that.
Extinction / death bad
Voting for the status quo is anti-black, too – evaluate consequences before
ethical alignments
Mathew R. Silliman 3, Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts,
2003, Theory & Research in Education, Vol. 1, No. 3, p. 307-309
it will not I think be possible to validate, understand, and
thereby combat the various levels upon which racism operates without finding a place in
moral reasoning for outcomes as well as intentions. Blum is attracted, for what I take to be entirely sound reasons, to a nonconsequentialist view of morality. On such a view, unintended consequences that are morally
undesirable are unfortunate, but not wrong in a strictly moral sense of the term, unless closely connected in some
way to actual bad intentions. I share with Blum a preference for this deontological approach to moral analysis, but as the persistence of structural
racism shows, we need some way to admit the robust moral significance even of unintended
consequences or seriously risk the irrelevance of our moral theory. This is not as difficult to do as it appears, for the idea that
This brings me to my second proposal about the source of the problem:
these two strains of modern moral thought, consequentialism and deontology, are wholly contradictory is more a product of 18th century intellectual politics than of anything
admitting that consequences matter morally need not involve capitulation to
the slippery slope of utilitarian calculation. One fairly inexpensive way to bridge the imaginary gap is
just to parse the utilitarian demand as a deontological obligation (and it need not even be the highest of our prima facia
duties): one of our moral duties is to live our lives, within the limits of our knowledge and ability, so as to make the
world a better and more just place overall. Simple as this seems, and easy to reconcile with principles like the dignity of persons, it is
subversive, for it removes a bias in favor of the (oppressive, unjust, racist) social status quo sometimes thought
inherent in their moral insights;
to characterize deontic moral theories. It also revises the relation between individuals and their enabling communities from accidental association to mutual obligation: social
structures owe individuals support, (relative) independence, and the best available approximation of justice, whereas individuals in turn owe those same social institutions the
impetus for continual moral revitalization.
Critique despite certain death reinscribes domination
Murray 8 Rolland Murray, Associate Professor of English @ Brown. Black Crisis Shuffle: Fiction, Race, and Simulation Source:
African American Review, Vol. 42, No. 2 (Summer, 2008), pp. 215-233 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of
African American Review (St. Louis University) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40301207 Accessed: 12-03-2018 15:12 UTC
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/40301207.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3Aa229b4c3c0ca72e196ab632b748d88ba
The questions that Blanchot raises with respect to death's possibilities only multiply as one addresses works of literature that equate commodification
with death. In Beatty's novel, the difficulties of that risky proposition are nowhere more apparent than in the novel's evocation of suicide as a national
poetics. Frustrated simultaneously by
the absence of viable political alternatives for black Americans and
his own inability to slip the noose of commodification, Gunnar inadvertendy posits black suicide as an
option. This prospect comes about at Boston University where Gunnar serves double duty as poet and basketball celebrity. After being asked to give
a speech at a divestment rally, Gunnar laments, "today's black leadership isn't worth shit." These "telegenic negroes not willing to die. Back in the old
days, if someone spoke up against the white man, he or she was willing to die" (200). Retooling one of Martin Luther King's civil rights era maxims,
I'm just ready to die" (200). In
this articulation Gunnar acknowledges the impossibility of reviving the modes of bodily sacrifice that civil
rights activists forged, and begins to articulate suicide as an alternative. Gunnar eventually proposes to
consolidate human agency and autonomy by determining his own death. He articulates this logic in a conversation with
his friend Psycho Loco who sees suicide as "taking the easy way out" (226). Viewing America's treatment of black men as
inevitably lethal, Gunnar retorts, "Might as well kill myself, right? Why give you the
satisfaction" (226). To take away the nation's capacity to issue death is thus to reclaim the autonomy of the subject by rendering morbidity a
Gunnar pronounces, "I ain't ready to die for anything, so I guess I'm just not fit to live. In other words,
possession that can be reclaimed. It is this very instrumental notion of death that might lead readers to interpret the novel as one that holds a lingering
nostalgia for the wholeness of civil rights activism or black nationalism. The
text elaborates this interpretive prospect when blacks
across the nation become utterly seduced by the idea of national suicide. Gunnar's speech inspires a black
nationalist named Dexter Waverly to abandon his superficial rhetoric and kill himself in protest against Boston University's financial support of a
corrupt African leader. The fact that this suicide actually forces the university to rescind its financial commitment to the African nation seems to
confirm the instrumental use of death and makes Gunnar a national celebrity. Reports "of black people killing themselves indiscriminately across the
United States" soon emerge in the national media (201). Additionally, at Gunnar's request, masses of people begin forwarding him their suicide poems.
Gunnar recommends a poetics and politics that seeks to
reassert black national agency by rewriting death as a possibility. Or to frame this challenge to
commodification somewhat differently, black suicide offers an intriguing twist on Baudrillard's
vision of agency within capital. In his formulation, late capital achieves its hegemony through a symbolic
substitution of labor for death. The "equivalence of wages and labour power presupposes the death of the worker," for a "man must
In a world in which all blackness has been thoroughly commodified
die to become labour power. He converts this death into a wage" (Symbolic 39). In this sense, then, the wage labor system is always a curious
commutation of an execution that capital itself has already performed. Capital's "gift" is the sleight of hand whereby it induces the worker's symbolic
death by making him a wage earner and then allows that worker the "gift" of buying his own resurrection through labor. This is the unilateral nature of
the gift that sustains capital's dominance. But if "domination comes from the system's retention of the exclusivity of the gift without countergift . . .
the only solution is to turn the principle of its power back against the system itself: the
impossibility of responding or retorting. To defy the system with a gift to which it cannot respond save by its
own collapse and death" (Symbolic 36-37; original italics). Following a parallel logic, national suicide in Beatty's novel draws
its power from its simulation of capital's own unilateral gift, the production of black death as
that which refuses exchange.
then
Despite the allure of death's possibility, the novel ultimately negates this gambit. Gunnar consistently
refuses his role as the messianic leader of the masses. His rise to eminence brings increased surveillance by the police and almost
constant media scrutiny. After returning to Hillside, the scopophilia becomes so acute that Gunnar and his pregnant wife leave their apartment to take
up residence at the La Ciénega Motor Lodge and Laundromat. In his exile, he hopes that he can find a more authentic mode of expression. He
subsequently founds the Bacchanalian MiseryFest, an open-mike poetry session that takes place under the "simple but effective" stage lighting
provided by orbiting LAPD helicopters (219). While the events do allow for a communal experience of artistic expression - "neighborhood players read
poetry, held car shows, sang, danced" - the political and aesthetic integrity of the events seem compromised by their very spectacular nature (219).
One night, in commemoration of Nick Scoby's suicide, Gunnar reads a poem and stages an act of self-mutilation
that underscores the limits of death as a paradigm of symbolic resistance. The poem articulates
the model of suicide as resistance that asserts death as a unilateral gift. The piece submits that the most
potent effects of slave rebellion lie not in the effects of infanticide on the "consciousness / of a
murderous parent" but "in the slave owner's anguished cries / upon discovering / his property
permanently damaged." After the master "calculates his losses / fore casts the impact on this
year's crop," he "will notice the textual eyes of murder/ suicide / read 'caveat emptor' / let the buyer beware"
(222). In one sense, this seems a perfect allegory for death as that which refuses exchange; the poem
thus reads as a Baudrillardian offensive against capitalism. But Gunnar's subsequent mutilation
of himself - his cutting off of his own finger - complicates this politics considerably: "I reeled for a moment, then meticulously
wrapped the speckled red and-white handkerchief around the severed finger, exactly as I'd seen Robert Mitchum do in some American yakuza movie.
Staring at the space where my finger used to be, I held my hand high above my head" (223). His audience of "distraught minions interpreted my
masochistic act as sincerity, the media as lunacy. The more I tried to deny my ascendency, the more beloved I became" (223). The spectacle of
mutilation must be seen as the enactment of the masochism that underwrites the poem's strategy of resistance. Both depend on a vulgar display of
black self-mutilation. Gunnar's
cynical response also confirms the ultimate bankruptcy of these strategies.
Prisoner of both the police and the media at the moment in which he is most resistant to the system, his rebellion is being recycled as part of the
dominant order's simulative strategies. He
cannot imagine a form of agency without deriving it from a
Hollywood film. In this respect, the reclamation of death as a radical subversion of capital is
itself vulnerable to the social order that the strategy seeks to challenge. In short-circuiting the
Utopian potential of revolt, the novel foregrounds the absoluteness of the system's dominance, the
inescapability of its atomizing effects. The core contradiction of Beatty's novel, then, does not reside in a vexed nostalgia for coherent community, but
in the fact that the text draws euphorically on the abstractions of commodification while foregrounding its insinuation into every sphere of
contemporary African American life.
By refusing an equation between death and political agency the novel not only works contrary to
Baudrillard's Marxism but also in contradistinction to a seminal current in black cultural theory. Influential works by Sharon Holland and
Paul Gilroy imagine that dwelling among and even "resurrecting" the dead serves as both a means to confirm the agency of the individual subject and
the racial com munity. Holland's reading of Morrison's Beloved construes the novel as a labor to resurrect "the 'ghost' of slavery in order to let the dead
speak to the living, in order to allow silence to manifest itself in language" (40). By opening up the possibility of communion between the dead child and
the living black subjects in the novel, Beloved brings "about the repair of the psychic damage of slavery and serves as an antidote to the beleaguered
status of black women in contemporary America" (52). The dead thus make possible a series of reversals, from silence to speech, from damaged to
recovered, and from beleaguered to unburdened. Along the same lines, Gilroy's account of transatlantic performances that commemorate the dead
also serve to consolidate at once the subjectivity of the black performer and a racial community as such. As he phrases it, the "turn towards death" also
"points to the ways in which black cultural forms have hosted and even cultivated a dynamic rap port with the presence of death and suffering" (198).
Gilroy interprets musical forms like the blues and jazz as "mnemonic" devices that "preserve and cultivate . . . the distinctive rapport with the presence
of death which derives from slavery ..." (198, 203). Cultural practices thereby facilitate the reproduction of the death and negativity that attended the
African's bondage in New World slavery. It is in this remembrance that Gilroy locates the grounds for a black "racial counterculture" and thus political
agency (200). By contrast, in
Beatty's work death provides no Utopian opposition against late capitalism.
Even as Beatty evokes the legacy of death in slavery, he insists that the fantasy of black agency
must also be subject to the limits of late capitalist hegemony. The result of the strategy is that it insists on the
primacy of the problematic that attends contemporary political economy. This approach contains an implicit charge that
insisting on the Utopian possibility of the slave's death is in some sense to evade the quandaries of
contemporary political economy.
An ambivalence about the achievement of agency through death surfaces in James's
Negrophobia in very different terms. A passage featuring a character named Talking Dreads
develops a scenario that parallels James's evocation of Voodoo. Whereas Maid fails to use Voodoo effectively because she does not
understand the power of simulation to reproduce every act of resistance as part of itself, Talking Dreads overcomes that liability. This being from
another planet appears to Bubbles Brazil at times as a "disembodied, dreadlocked head" and at others as an "empty white linen suit" (123). He
recounts the story of how he was used by a Scottish female author as the inspiration for a text with the title Ul' Black Zambo. Of course, the title and
authorial biography point to Helen Bannerman's notoriously racist chil dren's story Uttle Black Sambo. Therefore, when readers learn that UV Black
Zambo is a text based on its author's inability to see Talking Dreads as anything but the racist caricatures in her imagination, the novel implicates
Bannerman's text in the same process of misrecognition. Moreover, as the linguistic blend of "zombie" and "Sambo" in the title suggests, the text of Uly
Black Zambo can be read as a represen tation in which James's investment in Voodoo and the commodity converge. That is, the orthographic changes
invoking Voodoo zombies also underscore the text's play with the dead signifiers of racial representation. The
text recodes the
commodified blackness in Bannerman's original text in order to produce a simulation that takes
the original to task. The strategy is evident in the first lines of the simulated text.
IiP Black Zambo was a little nigger boy. Or Pickaninny. Or jigaboo. Or any number of names we have for little colored children - shine,
smoke, snowball, dinge, dust, inky, egg plant, and chocolate moonpie. And since IiT Black Zambo lived with his mammy in a one room hut
made of mud and leaves near a croc-infested swamp in the Jungle, we can call him 'gator bait, too. (124-25)
The incongruity between the dulcet rhetoric of the children's tale and the crude abjection of Zambo in this stockpiling of racial epithets places the
concealed vio lence of Bannerman's text at the forefront of its simulation. And in this way occu pying the dead form of the commodity allows
Negrophobia to make the kind of instrumental counter to racism that James imagines as "subverting the perversion." Still, despite James's claim
regarding Voodoo, it is Bannerman's commodified repre sentation that allows him to make such a maneuver. The invocation of Voodoo mystifies a set
of social relations that have more to do with capital than Haitian reli gion as such. Moreover, the rebellion that Talking Dreads engages in is more accu
rately described as simulation than Voodoo. This becomes all the more apparent when he shows Bubbles a secret project to defeat white racism. It
involves a simu lated town called Garvey's Corner in which all of the citizens appear to be white Americans but are in fact blacks "trained to look, act
and think white" (139). These simulated
whites are reproduced to "undermine all the rights and freedoms
American society has to offer the white race without the slightest detection" (139). In a sense then, the
tactic here is to undermine white supremacy by becoming as adept in simulation as the
dominant culture.
Ever consistent in its disintegrative aesthetic, however, the novel upsets the utopia that Talking Dreads endorses. In a parallel episode
the narrative focuses on the Zombie Master, a self-styled "revolutionary" character. He aims to
overthrow white supremacy by building an army of zombies out of the bodies of dead
celebrities. JFK and Elvis are among the corpses that he reconstructs in his laboratory. The chief manifestation of the white
supremacy that the Zombie Master aims to destroy is Walt Disney. In a brilliant parody of white supremacist
ideology, Walt Disney uses all of his mass-culture resources to foment the rage of white Americans and thereby destroy the black race. Giving a speech
modeled on the Gettysburg Address, he asks the white Nation to embrace his enduring nativist creed: "Hang the nigger and burn the Jew!" (99). The
Zombie Master counters this nationalist plot when he sends hordes of his zombies in to destroy
Walt Disney and his theme park, the Disney Magic Mall. As the assault on the park unfolds, the Zombie Master and his favorite Zombie, Elvis,
discover Disney asleep in his sub basement casket. Zombie Master begins to drive "the stake into Walt's heart"
when he realizes that Disney is literally a robot and therefore "a puppet in his own mad
design!" (111). The scene anatomizes a chief problem with investing in the radical insurgency of
the dead. A political battle between simulations could turn out to be just that, an empty
symbolic endeavor with no consequential stakes. The culture of simulation may have the effect
of rendering even symbolic gestures of resistance obsolete; it is this dystopian possibility that
the radical visions of Talking Dreads and Baudrillard fail to address.
For both James and Beatty then, the tensions between the aesthetic possibilities of simulated
blackness and the fraught prospects of political agency in a world inundated by simulation pose
the problem of black postmodernity in terms that exceed the discourse of crisis. One cannot read these
texts exclusively as indexes of a crisis in belonging, for they begin with the premise that whatever made older forms of communion possible now only
exists as spectral reproduction. And if there is no returning to the past, then these are novels inordinately concerned with the cartography of the
present. They
probe the possibilities and limits of literature and politics within late capitalism.
While they traffic in the recombination made available by simulated blackness, they are also
shrewdly aware that these same mechanisms install new forms of racial domination. The timely
genius of the novels is that they are neither seduced entirely by the prospect of a radically recoding
simulation in the manner of poststructuralists like Baudrillard and Foster, nor held prisoner by Blanchot's suggestion that death makes
available only a set of dubious performative operations. Employing the archive of dead signifiers that produce racial difference as mediating terms
between death's erasure and possibility, these texts insist on our reconsideration of existing frameworks for reading contemporary black culture.
Indeed, the refusal to invest in a politics of authenticity militates against the persistent critical desire to find racial affirmation in black art. It is this
longing that shapes the ongoing controversies surrounding not only Darius James but also die visual art of Michael Ray Charles and Kara Walker.10
Critics take issue with this work because in their minds it reproduces the denigrating minstrel representations of the past. What such commentaries
have not addressed is how the
art itself challenges the very foundations of this critique by undermining
the concept of a Utopian black expressive culture that transcends or inverts capital. As I have argued, a
useful alternative to indicting the work for its complicity in racist representation is to interpret it as an aesthetic tendency that both grapples with the
difficulties posed by late capitalist political economy and formalizes its own ideological implication in the contra dictions produced by that system. To
wish that this art were like that of another time is to evade a present not adequately examined
and perhaps to refuse the potentially unreal future of race.
Misc
voters
Black voters make political change—Stacey Abrams mobilized voters that
swung Georgia blue in 2020
Fedor 20 - US POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT (Lauren Fedor, “Stacey Abrams credited for mobilising
black voters in Georgia,” Financial Times, 12/6/2020, https://www.ft.com/content/bba74f61-fc1a47f6-85f6-54bb86e83e7e)//mcu
Nine months later and Stacey Abrams is earning similar plaudits for her significant efforts in the battle to defeat Donald
Trump. Ms Abrams, a voting rights activist and former Democratic state legislator in Georgia, is widely
credited as the architect behind grassroots efforts to turn “blue” a state that has not voted for
a Democratic presidential candidate in nearly 30 years. Ben Rhodes, a former top adviser to Barack Obama,
spoke for many of Mr Biden’s supporters when he said: “As Democrats chart a course forward as a party, the first
person they should turn to is Stacey Abrams.” In 2014, Ms Abrams set up a group called the New Georgia
Project focused on registering and mobilising black voters . Two years ago, she formed another
organisation, Fair Fight Action, to tackle voter suppression after she lost the Georgia governor’s race to
Republican Brian Kemp by less than a percentage point. Since then, some 800,000 new voters have
been registered in the state, many of them African-American. As of Friday afternoon, ballots were still being
counted in Georgia. But it looked increasingly likely that Mr Biden would emerge the victor there, after early and mail-in votes
from black communities in and around the city of Atlanta were tabulated, allowing him to overtake Mr Trump in the vote
count. Voter registration figures, early voting data and county-level election results suggest similar patterns helped Mr Biden
edge out Mr Trump in other battleground states, notably Pennsylvania and Michigan. Had we not seen this level of
engagement and intensity and enthusiasm, among voters of colour . . . we would be looking at a very
different outcome Tom Bonier, TargetSmart “We have a really strong data set and pool of evidence that the black
vote was crucial, especially as you look at the narrow margins in some of these key states,” said Tom
Bonier, chief executive of TargetSmart, a Democratic data company. He added that voter registration figures in Georgia
and nationwide showed a surge of black people signing up to cast ballots in the wake of the killing of
George Floyd at the start of the summer. “Had we not seen this level of engagement and intensity and enthusiasm,
among voters of colour . . . we would be looking at a very different outcome,” he said. Democratic activists have for years
recognised that African-Americans were key to their party’s prospects at the ballot box, especially after the 2016 election,
when black voter turnout nationwide fell for the first time in two decades. Even though 91 per cent of black voters cast their
ballots for Hillary Clinton, compared with just 6 per cent who backed Mr Trump, analysts said the fact black voters stayed at
home in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan — which Mr Trump won by razor-thin margins of 44,000, 22,700 and 10,700
votes, respectively — probably cost Mrs Clinton victory. “One of the shortcomings of the 2016 election for Democrats was
black voter turnout lagged behind 2012, especially among younger black men,” Mr Bonier said. “The evidence we have now in
this election is those numbers rebounded, and then some, to historic levels.” LaTosha Brown, right, co-founder of the Black
Votes Matter Fund © Dean Anthony ll Ms Abrams wrote on Twitter on Friday that her heart was “full”, adding that “so many
deserve credit” for Georgia’s surge towards the Democrats. Georgia voters have not backed a Democratic
presidential candidate since 1992. Before that, the last Democrat to be successful in Georgia was Jimmy Carter, a
native of the state, back in 1976. One of the groups Ms Abrams cited was the Black Voters Matter Fund, an Atlantabased grassroots organisation co-founded by LaTosha Brown. Ms Brown, who has spent recent weeks on a multi-state bus
tour meeting black community leaders, said the election results were the culmination of years of work in engaging
underserved communities that politicians had historically ignored. “Community based organising works. Investing
on the ground can make the difference,” she said, explaining that her group’s strategy was to support and fund
grassroots organisations rather than take a top-down approach. Ms Brown led a multi-state bus tour to register black voters ©
Dean Anthony ll “We know our community. It’s going to take the churches, it’s going to take the civic groups, it’s going to take
the activists, it’s going to take the organisers, it’s going to take the businesses,” she added. “We’ve shown that when you
invest in people on the ground, these are the results that you get.” Antjuan Seawright, a Democratic strategist
based in South Carolina and an adviser to Mr Clyburn, agreed. “This is why so many of us, for so long, have been screaming that
you have to treat the black vote as an investment, not an expense,” he said. “ Black people knew that this election was
about survival, and they voted as such. “The truth of the matter is when democracy needed recalibration, it
was the most consequential voting bloc in American history.”
Passive voice
Passive voice is key – it boosts minority participation and expands dominant
discourse into critical theory
Dillard-Knox 14 (Tiffany Yvonne Dillard-Knox, Knox is analyzing the History of Black discourse
within debate @ U of Louisville, “Against the grain: The Challenge of Black discourse within
inter-collegiate policy debate”,
https://ir.library.louisville.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3166&context=etd, Published
December 2014, Accessed 2/5/19, pg 69-70, Lex RM)
topics that have been selected have been constructed utilizing the active voice as opposed to a
passive voice. An active voice example would be, ―Resolved: The United States Federal
Government should substantially increase statutory and/or judicial restrictions on the war
powers authority of the President of the United States. A passive voice example would be,
―Resolved: The war powers authority of the President of the United States should be
substantially restricted. The active voice topics require debaters to defend that the United States Federal
Government ―do something in a more limited capacity whereas a passive voice could allow
debaters
to defend a variety of interpretations of ―something being done by or to the
Government. The active voice topic always gives the agency to act to the United States Government.
many marginalized students come to
Debate from communities that have historically been excluded from these positions of power a passive
topic that removes agency from the United States Federal Government allows debaters flexibility to
choose who has agency
more empowering to this population
These students would
then be more motivated to participate in
debate through which they can acquire
skill
sets from politician to
activists
the lit base used to construct the topic failed to
include perspectives found within the race literature,
little attention has been given to Critical
Critical Legal Studies within the chosen
controversy areas, such as Immigration
the topic paper sets the definition
of what is
topical. If
limited to the language
of the dominant, then so too will debates be limited to the
language and perspective of the dominant.
the topic does not account for discourse
strategies of marginalized populations and could be an additional source of exclusion from
Debate.
Historically, the
,
topic
the opportunity
United
States Federal
For students that see themselves as having the possibility to access these positions of power, acquiring these skills become empowering. However,
. Having
the
and
thus becomes
the
of students.
the process of
community
. Secondly,
a variety of
erature
has
such as the legal and political scholarship of Derrick Bell (1992), Cornel West (1994), and bell hooks (1995). Very
, if any,
Race Theory or
and Supreme Court Cases. Even when topic papers are submitted that do include this literature, they are rarely, if ever selected in the voting process. This is
important to the conversation of debating the topic in that
al guidelines
and perspective
considered
the topic paper is
the
Thus, it could be argued that
the
Policy debates good
No broad offense- policy debates are uniquely key to prevent rollback of
antiracist gains- we assume your authors
David Gillbor,et al*, Sean Demack , Nicola Rollocka and Paul Warmington A University of
Birmingham, UK; b Sheffield Hallam University, UK; c University of Warwick, UKNo Publication,
10-x-2017
http://www.blackfeministpedagogies.com/uploads/2/5/5/9/25595205/moving_the_goalposts_education_policy_and_25_years_of_the_black_white_achievement_gap.pdf//DG
Our analysis begins by looking
at how the Black/White achievement gap has featured in the changing
landscape of relevant academic and policy debates over the period. We then set out the methods and data
sources that provide the material for our analysis. The paper concludes by discussing the wider lessons that can be
drawn, especially concerning the role of education policy, the uncertainty of progressive antiracist gains and the
speed with which they can be rolled back by apparently technical changes in how ‘standards’ are
measured and debated. First, it is useful to be explicit about the parameters for our analysis. Framework and focus: What this paper
is, and is not, about This paper charts the inequality of achievement between Black and White students at the end of compulsory
schooling over a 25-year period (1988–2013). Our analytic framework is informed
by Critical Race Theory (CRT), an
approach that views race as a social construction whose definition and deployment (in policy and practice) is
highly complex, contingent and fluid (Crenshaw et al., 1995; Delgado, 1995; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Dixson &
Rousseau, 2006; Taylor et al., 2016). Critical race theorists do not view racism as merely encompassing crude and obvious acts of
race hatred. Rather, CRT also focuses on ‘business-as-usual forms of racism’ (Delgado & Stefancic, 2000, p. xvi), i.e. the everyday,
mundane and taken-for-granted processes and assumptions that shape society in the interests of people identified as ‘White’ and
against the interests of particular minoritised groups.2
AT: Surrender to Blackness
“Surrender to Blackness” is worse for community formation, reifies trauma, and
actively strengthens anti-Black structures by marginalizing the Black people
who were never here to surrender to in the first place.
Táíwò, 20—assistant professor of philosophy at Georgetown University (Olúfémi, “Being-inthe-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference,” The Philosopher, vol. 108, no. 4,
dml)
I think it’s less about the core ideas and more about the prevailing norms that convert them into practice. The call to “listen to the
most affected” or “centre the most marginalized” is ubiquitous in many academic and activist circles. But it’s never sat well with me.
In my experience, when
people say they need to “listen to the most affected”, it isn’t because they
intend to set up Skype calls to refugee camps or to collaborate with houseless people. Instead, it
has more often meant handing conversational authority and attentional goods to those who
most snugly fit into the social categories associated with these ills – regardless of what they
actually do or do not know, or what they have or have not personally experienced. In the case of my
conversation with Helen, my racial category tied me more “authentically” to an experience that neither of us had had. She was
called to defer to me by the rules of the game as we understood it. Even where stakes are high – where potential researchers are
discussing how to understand a social phenomenon, where activists are deciding what to target – these rules often prevail.
The trap wasn’t that standpoint epistemology was affecting the conversation, but how. Broadly, the
norms of putting standpoint
epistemology into practice call for practices of deference: giving offerings, passing the mic, believing.
These are good ideas in many cases, and the norms that ask us to be ready to do them stem from admirable motivations: a desire to
increase the social power of marginalized people identified as sources of knowledge and rightful targets of deferential behaviour.
But deferring
in this way as a rule or default political orientation can actually work counter to
marginalized groups’ interests, especially in elite spaces.
Some rooms have outsize power and influence: the Situation Room, the newsroom, the bargaining table, the
conference room. Being in these rooms means being in a position to affect institutions and broader
social dynamics by way of deciding what one is to say and do. Access to these rooms is itself a
kind of social advantage, and one often gained through some prior social advantage. From a societal standpoint, the
“most affected” by the social injustices we associate with politically important identities like gender, class, race, and
nationality are disproportionately likely to be incarcerated, underemployed, or part of the 44 percent of the world’s
population without internet access – and thus both left out of the rooms of power and largely ignored by
the people in the rooms of power. Individuals who make it past the various social selection
pressures that filter out those social identities associated with these negative outcomes are most likely to be in the room. That
is, they are most likely to be in the room precisely because of ways in which they are
systematically different from (and thus potentially unrepresentative of) the very people they
are then asked to represent in the room.
I suspected that Helen’s offer was a trap. She was not the one who set it, but it threatened to ensnare us both all the same. Broader
cultural norms – the sort set in motion by prefacing statements with “As a Black man…” – cued up a set of standpoint-respecting
practices that many of us know consciously or unconsciously by rote. However, the
forms of deference that often follow
are ultimately self-undermining and only reliably serve “elite capture”: the control over political
agendas and resources by a group’s most advantaged people. If we want to use standpoint
epistemology to challenge unjust power arrangements, it’s hard to imagine how we could do worse.
To say what’s wrong with the popular, deferential applications of standpoint epistemology, we need to understand what makes it
popular. A number of cynical answers present themselves: some (especially the more socially advantaged) don’t genuinely want
social change – they just want the appearance of it. Alternatively, deference to figures from oppressed communities is a
performance that sanitizes, apologizes for, or simply distracts from the fact that the deferrer has enough “in the room” privilege for
their “lifting up” of a perspective to be of consequence.
I suspect there is some truth to these views, but I am unsatisfied. Many of the people who support and enact these deferential
norms are rather like Helen: motivated by the right reasons, but trusting people they share such rooms with to help them find the
proper practical expression of their joint moral commitments. We don’t need to attribute bad faith to all or even most of those who
interpret standpoint epistemology deferentially to explain the phenomenon, and it’s not even clear it would help. Bad “roommates”
aren’t the problem for the same reason that Helen being a good roommate wasn’t the solution: the problem emerges from how the
rooms themselves are constructed and managed.
To return to the initial example with Helen, the issue wasn’t merely that I hadn’t grown up in the kind of low-income, redlined
community she was imagining. The epistemic situation was much worse than this. Many of the facts about me that made my life
chances different from those of the people she was imagining were the very same facts that made me likely to be offered things on
their behalf. If I had grown up in such a community, we probably wouldn’t have been on the phone together.
Many aspects of our social system serve as filtering mechanisms, determining which interactions happen and between whom, and
thus which social patterns people are in a position to observe. For the majority of the 20th century, the U.S. quota system of
immigration made legal immigration with a path to citizenship almost exclusively available to Europeans (earning Hitler’s regard as
the obvious “leader in developing explicitly racist policies of nationality and immigration”). But the 1965 Immigration and Nationality
Act opened up immigration possibilities, with a preference for “skilled labour”.
My parents’ qualification as skilled labourers does much to explain their entry into the country and the subsequent class advantages
and monetary resources (such as wealth) that I was born into. We are not atypical: the Nigerian-American population is one of the
country’s most successful immigrant populations (what no one mentions, of course, is that the 112,000 or so Nigerian-Americans
with advanced degrees is utterly dwarfed by the 82 million Nigerians who live on less than a dollar a day, or how the former fact
intersects with the latter). The selectivity of immigration law helps explain the rates of educational attainment of the Nigerian
diasporic community that raised me, which in turn helps explain my entry into the exclusive Advanced Placement and Honours
classes in high school, which in turn helps explain my access to higher education...and so on, and so on.
It is easy, then, to see how this
deferential form of standpoint epistemology contributes to elite capture at
scale. The rooms of power and influence are at the end of causal chains that have selection
effects. As you get higher and higher forms of education, social experiences narrow – some
students are pipelined to PhDs and others to prisons. Deferential ways of dealing with identity
can inherit the distortions caused by these selection processes.
But it’s equally easy to see locally – in this room, in this academic literature or field, in this conversation – why this
deference seems to make sense. It is often an improvement on the epistemic procedure that preceded it: the person deferred to
may well be better epistemically positioned than the others in the room. It may well be the best we can do while
holding fixed most of the facts about the rooms themselves: what power resides in them, who is
admitted.
But these are the last facts we should want to hold fixed. Doing better than the epistemic norms we’ve
inherited from a history of explicit global apartheid is an awfully low bar to set. The facts that explain who ends up in
which room shape our world much more powerfully than the squabbles for comparative
prestige between people who have already made it into the rooms. And when the conversation
is about social justice, the mechanisms of the social system that determine who gets into which
room often just are the parts of society we aim to address. For example, the fact that incarcerated people
cannot participate in academic discussions about freedom that physically take place on campus is intimately related to the fact that
they are locked in cages.
Deference epistemology marks itself as a solution to an epistemic and political problem. But not
only does it fail to solve these problems, it adds new ones. One might think questions of justice
ought to be primarily concerned with fixing disparities around health care, working conditions,
and basic material and interpersonal security. Yet conversations about justice have come to be
shaped by people who have ever more specific practical advice about fixing the distribution of
attention and conversational power. Deference practices that serve attention-focused
campaigns (e.g. we’ve read too many white men, let’s now read some people of colour) can fail on their own highly
questionable terms: attention to spokespeople from marginalized groups could, for example, direct
attention away from the need to change the social system that marginalizes them.
Elites from marginalized groups can benefit from this arrangement in ways that are compatible
with social progress. But treating group elites’ interests as necessarily or even presumptively
aligned with full group interests involves a political naiveté we cannot afford. Such treatment of
elite interests functions as a racial Reaganomics: a strategy reliant on fantasies about the
exchange rate between the attention economy and the material economy.
Perhaps the lucky few who get jobs finding the most culturally authentic and cosmetically
radical description of the continuing carnage are really winning one for the culture. Then, after
we in the chattering class get the clout we deserve and secure the bag, its contents will
eventually trickle down to the workers who clean up after our conferences, to slums of the
Global South’s megacities, to its countryside.
But probably not.
A fuller and fairer assessment of what is going on with deference and standpoint epistemology would go beyond technical
argument, and contend with the emotional appeals of this strategy of deference. Those in powerful rooms may be “elites” relative
to the larger group they represent, but this guarantees nothing about how they are treated in the rooms they are in. After all, a
person privileged in an absolute sense (a person belonging to, say, the half of the world that has secure access to “basic needs”) may
nevertheless feel themselves to be consistently on the low end of the power dynamics they actually experience. Deference
epistemology responds to real, morally weighty experiences of being put down, ignored, sidelined, or silenced. It thus has an
important non-epistemic appeal to members of stigmatized or marginalized groups: it intervenes
directly in morally consequential practices of giving attention and respect.
The social dynamics we experience have an outsize role in developing and refining our political subjectivity, and our sense of
ourselves. But this very strength of standpoint epistemology – its
recognition of the importance of perspective
– becomes its weakness when combined with deferential practical norms. Emphasis on the
ways we are marginalized often matches the world as we have experienced it. But, from a
structural perspective, the rooms we never needed to enter (and the explanations of why we
can avoid these rooms) might have more to teach us about the world and our place in it. If so,
the deferential approach to standpoint epistemology actually prevents “centring” or even
hearing from the most marginalized; it focuses us on the interaction of the rooms we occupy,
rather than calling us to account for the interactions we don’t experience
. This fact about who is in the room, combined with the fact that speaking for others generates its own set of important problems
(particularly when they are not there to advocate for themselves), eliminates pressures that might otherwise trouble the centrality
of our own suffering – and of the suffering of the marginalized people that do happen to make it into rooms with us.
The dangers with this feature of deference politics are grave, as are the risks for those outside of
the most powerful rooms. For those who are deferred to, it can supercharge group-
undermining norms. In Conflict is Not Abuse, Sarah Schulman makes a provocative observation about the psychological
effects of both trauma and felt superiority: while these often come about for different reasons and
have very different moral statuses, they result in similar behavioural patterns. Chief among these are
misrepresenting the stakes of conflict (often by overstating harm) or representing others’
independence as a hostile threat (such as failures to “centre” the right topics or people). These
behaviours, whatever their causal history, have corrosive effects on individuals who perform
them as well as the groups around them, especially when a community’s norms magnify or
multiply these behaviours rather than constraining or metabolizing them.
For those who defer, the habit can supercharge moral cowardice. The norms provide social
cover for the abdication of responsibility: it displaces onto individual heroes, a hero class, or a
mythicized past the work that is ours to do now in the present. Their perspective may be clearer on
this or that specific matter, but their overall point of view isn’t any less particular or
constrained by history than ours. More importantly, deference places the accountability that is all of
ours to bear onto select people – and, more often than not, a hyper-sanitized and thoroughly
fictional caricature of them.
The same tactics
of deference that insulate us from criticism also insulate us from connection and
transformation. They prevent us from engaging empathetically and authentically with the
struggles of other people – prerequisites of coalitional politics. As identities become more and more finegrained and disagreements sharper, we come to realize that “coalitional politics” (understood as
struggle across difference) is, simply, politics. Thus, the deferential orientation, like that
fragmentation of political collectivity it enables, is ultimately anti-political.
Deference rather than interdependence may soothe short-term psychological wounds. But it
does so at a steep cost: it can undermine the epistemic goals that motivate the project, and it
entrenches a politics unbefitting of anyone fighting for freedom rather than for privilege, for
collective liberation rather than mere parochial advantage.
How would a constructive approach to putting standpoint epistemology into practice differ from a deferential approach? A
constructive approach would focus on the pursuit of specific goals or end results rather than
avoiding “complicity” in injustice or adhering to moral principles. It would be concerned
primarily with building institutions and cultivating practices of information-gathering rather
than helping. It would focus on accountability rather than conformity. It would calibrate itself directly to the
task of redistributing social resources and power rather than to intermediary goals cashed out
in terms of pedestals or symbolism. It would focus on building and rebuilding rooms, not regulating traffic within and
between them – it would be a world-making project: aimed at building and rebuilding actual structures of social connection and
movement, rather than mere critique of the ones we already have.
The water crisis in Flint, Michigan presents a clear example of both the possibilities and limitations of refining our epistemic politics
in this way. Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ), a government body tasked with the support of “healthy
communities”, with a team of fifty trained scientists at its disposal, was complicit in covering up the scale and gravity of the public
health crisis from the beginning of the crisis in 2014 until it garnered national attention in 2015.
The MDEQ, speaking from a position of epistemic and political authority, defended the status quo in Flint. They claimed that “Flint
water is safe to drink”, and were cited in Flint Mayor Dayne Walling’s statement aiming to “dispel myths and promote the truth
about the Flint River” during the April 2014 transition to the Flint River water source. That transition was spearheaded under the
tenure of the city’s emergency manager Darnell Earley (an African-American, like many of the city residents he helped to poison).
After the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) circulated a leaked internal memo from the federal Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) in July of 2014 expressing concern about lead in Flint water, the MDEQ produced a doctored report that put the overall
measure of lead levels within federally mandated levels by mysteriously failing to count two contaminated samples.
The reaction from residents was immediate. The month after the switch in water source, residents reported that their tap water was
discoloured and gave off an alarming odour. They didn’t need their oppression to be “celebrated”, “centred”, or narrated in the
newest academic parlance. They didn’t need someone to understand what it felt like to be poisoned. What they needed was the
lead out of their water. So they got to work.
The first step was to develop epistemic authority. To achieve this they built a new room: one that put Flint residents and activists in
active collaboration with scientists who had the laboratories that could run the relevant tests and prove the MDEQ’s report to be
fraudulent. Flint residents’ outcry recruited scientists to their cause and led a “citizen science” campaign, further raising the alarm
about the water quality and distributing sample kits to neighbours to submit for testing. In this stage, the alliance of residents and
scientists won, and the poisoning of the children of Flint emerged as a national scandal.
But this was not enough. The second step – cleaning the water – required more than state acknowledgement: it required
apportioning labour and resources to fix the water and address the continuing health concerns. What Flint residents received,
initially, was a mix of platitudes and mockery from the ruling elite (some of this personally committed by a President that shared a
racial identity with many of them). This year, however, it looks as though the tireless activism of Flint residents and their expanding
list of teammates has won additional and more meaningful victories: the ongoing campaign is pushing the replacements of the
problematic service lines to their final stage and is forcing the state of Michigan to agree to a settlement of $600 million for affected
families.
This outcome is in no way a wholesale victory: not only will attorney fees cut a substantial portion of payouts, but the settlement
cannot undo the damage that was caused to the residents. A constructive epistemology cannot guarantee full victory over an
oppressive system by itself. No epistemic orientation can by itself undo the various power asymmetries between the people and the
imperial state system. But it can help make the game a little more competitive – and deference epistemology isn’t even playing.
The biggest threats to social justice attention and informational economies are not the absence
of yet more jargon to describe, ever more precisely or incisively, the epistemic, attentional, or
interpersonal afflictions of the disempowered. The biggest threats are the erosion of the practical
and material bases for popular power over knowledge production and distribution, particularly that which could
aid effective political action and constrain or eliminate predation by elites. The capture and
corruption of these bases by well-positioned elites, especially tech corporations, goes on unabated and
largely unchallenged, including: the corporate monopolization of local news, the ongoing destruction and looting of the
journalistic profession, the interference of corporations and governments in key democratic processes, and the domination of elite
interests in the production of knowledge by research universities and the circulation of the output of these distorted processes by
established media organizations.
Confronting these threats requires leaving some rooms – and building new ones.
The constructive approach to standpoint epistemology is demanding. It asks that we swim upstream: to be
accountable and responsive to people who aren’t yet in the room, to build the kinds of rooms
we could sit in together, rather than merely judiciously navigating the rooms history has built for us. But this weighty
demand is par for the course when it comes to the politics of knowledge: the American philosopher Sandra Harding famously
pointed out that standpoint epistemology, properly understood, demands more rigour from science and knowledge production
processes generally, not less.
But one important topic stands unaddressed. The
deferential approach to standpoint epistemology often comes
packaged with concern and attention to the importance of lived experience. Among these,
traumatic experiences are especially foregrounded.
At this juncture, scholarly analysis and argument fail me. The remainder of what I have to say skews more towards conviction than
contention. But the life of books has taught me that conviction has just as much to teach, however differently posed or processed,
and so I press on.
I take concerns about trauma especially seriously. I grew up in the United States, a nation
structured by settler colonialism, racial slavery, and their aftermath, with enough collective and historical
trauma to go round. I also grew up in a Nigerian diasporic community, populated by many who had
genocide in living memory. At the national and community level, I have seen a lot of traits of norms, personality, quirks of
habit and action that I’ve suspected were downstream of these facts. At the level of individual experience, I’ve watched and
felt myself change in reaction to fearing for my dignity or life, to crushing pain and humiliation. I
reflect on these traumatic moments often, and very seldom think: “That was educational”.
These experiences can be, if we are very fortunate, building blocks. What comes of them depends on how the blocks are put
together: what standpoint epistemologists call the “achievement thesis”. Briana Toole clarifies that, by itself, one’s social location
only puts a person in a position to know. “Epistemic privilege” or advantage is achieved only through deliberate, concerted struggle
from that position.
I concede outright that this is certainly one possible result of the experience of oppression: have no doubt that humiliation,
deprivation, and suffering can build (especially in the context of the deliberate, structured effort of “consciousness raising”, as Toole
specifically highlights). But these same experiences can also destroy, and if I had to bet on which effect would win most often, it
would be the latter. As Agnes Callard rightly notes, trauma (and even the righteous, well-deserved anger that often accompanies it)
can corrupt as readily as it can ennoble. Perhaps more so.
Contra the old expression, pain – whether borne of oppression or not – is a poor teacher. Suffering is partial, short-sighted, and selfabsorbed. We shouldn’t have a politics that expects different: oppression is not a prep school.
When it comes down to it, the thing I believe most deeply about deference
epistemology is that it asks something of
trauma that it cannot give. Demanding as the constructive approach may be, the deferential approach is far more
demanding and in a far more unfair way: it asks the traumatized to shoulder burdens alone that we ought
to share collectively. When I think about my trauma, I don’t think about grand lessons. I think about the quiet nobility of
survival. The very fact that those chapters weren’t the final ones of my story is powerful enough writing all on its own. It is enough to
ask of those experiences that I am still here to remember them.
Deference epistemology asks us to be less than we are – and not even for our own benefit. As Nick
Estes explains in the context of Indigenous politics: “The cunning of trauma politics is that it turns actual
people and struggles, whether racial or Indigenous citizenship and belonging, into matters of injury. It defines
an entire people mostly on their trauma and not by their aspirations or sheer humanity”. This
performance is not for the benefit of Indigenous people, but “for white audiences or institutions of power”.
I also think about James Baldwin’s realization that the things that tormented him the most were “the very things that connected me
with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive”. That
I have survived abuse of various kinds, have
faced near-death from both accidental circumstance and violence (different as the particulars of these may
be from those around me) is not a card to play in gamified social interaction or a weapon to wield in
battles over prestige. It is not what gives me a special right to speak, to evaluate, or to decide
for a group. It is a concrete, experiential manifestation of the vulnerability that connects me to
most of the people on this Earth. It comes between me and other people not as a wall, but as a
bridge.
Too monolithic
There is no monolithic “Blackness” to “center.”
Kennedy, 2-4-21—Michael R. Klein Professor at Harvard Law School (Randall, “On the
Authority of Experience in Black Thought,” https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/on-theauthority-of-experience-in-black-thought/, dml)
A distinguished roster of black activist thinkers have adopted an optimistic perspective
regarding the possibility of attaining racial justice in America. Optimists include Mary McLeod Bethune, Walter White, A.
Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr, Ralph Ellison, John Lewis, and Barack Obama. An impressive cadre of black activist
thinkers believe, by contrast, that attaining racial justice in America is a virtual impossibility. Agreeing with Thomas
Jefferson and Alexis de Tocqueville, they contend that racial slavery fatally poisoned the possibility of racial harmony in America.
They contend that we shall not overcome. Pessimists include Henry McNeal Turner, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Derrick Bell, and
Randall Robinson.
Fervent debates about scores of subjects – indeed every imaginable subject — have roiled African
Americans ideologically: accommodation versus protest; interracial socialism versus black nationalism;
Gandhian non-violence versus “by any means necessary,” support for affirmative action versus detestation of
“lowered standards,“ “integration” versus “black power,” “respectability politics” versus “I don’t give a fuck”
authenticity politics. Black thinkers have even disagreed over the years about the preferred term by which they designate
“Blacks,” “blacks,” “African Americans,” “Negroes,” “colored people,” and “people of color.”
There are several implications to be drawn from recognizing the frequently underestimated
breadth, complexity, and variety of beliefs and perspectives found amongst African Americans. One is the
dubious utility of resorting to “experience” as an explanation for a given way of thinking. It is
frequently said, for example, that the egalitarianism manifested in the jurisprudence of Justice Thurgood Marshall is a
function of his experience as a black man oppressed by white supremacism. But what about other
black men also oppressed by white supremacism who responded very differently, such as Justice
Clarence Thomas, who is deeply antagonistic towards the social egalitarianism that Marshall embraced?
A wide variety of thought is discernible amongst people who have undergone a similar
experience because experience does not dictate thought. It is undoubtedly influential which is why one can
detect notable demographic patterns from which one can chart probabilities. It is probable that an African American will prefer the
Democratic as opposed to the Republican candidate for president. But that does not mean that the experience of a particular African
American will necessarily determine that person’s preferences. Experience
affects thinking in all sorts of subtle,
complex, mysterious, and surprising ways. But it does not determine thought. Hence, we ought to
be skeptical about claims regarding “the authority of experience” and efforts to make a
credential of experience. That a person has suffered impoverishment and marginalization is, alas, no
guarantee at all that that person will be attuned to those social vices or immune to them.
AT: Anti-Blackness Ks
at: ontology
Prosaic material incentives explain contemporary anti-blackness far better than ontological
claims that lack a genuine warrants- their theory reinforces the power of imagined racial
hierarchies and mystifies and can’t explain why it’s different from the Hindu Caste system
Harari 15 [Yuval Noah Harari, Israeli historian and a tenured professor in the Department of
History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specializing in World History, Doctorate in
Philosophy from Oxford University, and an acclaimed author whose first book, Sapiens, was an
international bestseller that received lavish praise by figures ranging from Barack Obama to Bill
Gates, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, tr. by Yuval Harari with help from John Purcell and
Haim Watzman, HarperCollins: Broadway, NY, 2015, p. 133-144]
UNDERSTANDING HUMAN HISTORY IN THE millennia following the Agricultural Revolution boils down to a single question:
how
did humans organise themselves in mass-cooperation networks, when they lacked the biological
instincts necessary to sustain such networks? The short answer is that humans created imagined orders
and devised scripts. These two inventions filled the gaps left by our biological inheritance.
However, the
appearance of these networks was, for many, a dubious blessing. The imagined
orders sustaining these networks were neither neutral nor fair. They divided people into makebelieve groups, arranged in a hierarchy. The upper levels enjoyed privileges and power, while
the lower ones suffered from discrimination and oppression. Hammurabi’s Code, for example,
established a pecking order of superiors, commoners and slaves. Superiors got all the good things in
life. Commoners got what was left. Slaves got a beating if they complained.
Despite its proclamation of the equality of all men, the
imagined order established by the Americans in 1776
also established a hierarchy. It created a hierarchy between men, who benefited from it, and women, whom it
left disempowered. It created a hierarchy between whites, who enjoyed liberty, and blacks and American Indians,
who were considered humans of a lesser type and therefore did not share in the equal rights of men. Many of those who signed the
Declaration of Independence were slaveholders. They did not release their slaves upon signing the Declaration, nor did they consider
themselves hypocrites. In their view, the rights of men had little to do with Negroes.
The American order also consecrated the hierarchy between rich and poor. Most Americans at that time had little problem with the
inequality caused by wealthy parents passing their money and businesses on to their children. In their view, equality meant simply
that the same laws applied to rich and poor. It had nothing to do with unemployment benefits, integrated education or health
insurance.
Liberty, too, carried very different connotations than it does today. In 1776, it did not mean that
the disempowered (certainly not blacks or Indians or, God forbid, women) could gain and exercise
power. It meant simply that the state could not, except in unusual circumstances, confiscate a citizen’s
private property or tell him what to do with it. The American order thereby upheld the hierarchy
of wealth, which some thought was mandated by God and others viewed as representing the immutable laws of nature. Nature,
it was claimed, rewarded merit with wealth while penalising indolence.
All the above-mentioned distinctions – between free persons and slaves, between whites and blacks, between rich and poor – are
rooted in fictions. (The hierarchy of men and women will be discussed later.) Yet it is an iron rule of history that every
imagined hierarchy disavows its fictional origins and claims to be natural and inevitable. For
instance, many people who have viewed the hierarchy of free persons and slaves as natural and
correct have argued that slavery is not a human invention. Hammurabi saw it as ordained by the gods.
Aristotle argued that slaves have a ‘slavish nature’ whereas free people have a ‘free nature’. Their status in society is merely a
reflection of their innate nature.
Ask white supremacists about the racial hierarchy, and you are in for a pseudoscientific lecture
concerning the biological differences between the races. You are likely to be told that there is something in
Caucasian blood or genes that makes whites naturally more intelligent, moral and hardworking. Ask a diehard capitalist
about the hierarchy of wealth, and you are likely to hear that it is the inevitable outcome of objective
differences in abilities. The rich have more money, in this view, because they are more capable and diligent. No one should
be bothered, then, if the wealthy get better health care, better education and better nutrition. The rich richly deserve every perk
they enjoy.
People with lighter skin colour are typically more in danger of sunburn than people with darker skin. Yet there was no biological logic
behind the division of South African beaches. Beaches reserved for people with lighter skin were not characterised by lower levels of
ultraviolet radiation.
Hindus who adhere to the caste system believe that cosmic forces have made one caste
superior to another. According to a famous Hindu creation myth, the gods fashioned the world out of the body of a primeval
being, the Purusa. The sun was created from the Purusa’s eye, the moon from the Purusa’s brain, the Brahmins (priests) from its
mouth, the Kshatriyas (warriors) from its arms, the Vaishyas (peasants and merchants) from its thighs, and the Shudras (servants)
from its legs. Accept this explanation and the sociopolitical differences between Brahmins and Shudras are as natural and eternal as
the differences between the sun and the moon.1 The ancient Chinese believed that when the goddess Nü Wa created humans from
earth, she kneaded aristocrats from fine yellow soil, whereas commoners were formed from brown mud.2
Yet, to the best of our understanding, these
hierarchies are all the product of human imagination.
Brahmins and Shudras were not really created by the gods from different body parts of a
primeval being. Instead, the distinction between the two castes was created by laws and norms
invented by humans in northern India about 3,000 years ago. Contrary to Aristotle, there is no known
biological difference between slaves and free people. Human laws and norms have turned some people into slaves and others into
masters. Between
blacks and whites there are some objective biological differences, such as skin colour and hair type, but
there is no evidence that the differences extend to intelligence or morality.
Most people claim that their social hierarchy is natural and just, while those of other societies
are based on false and ridiculous criteria. Modern Westerners are taught to scoff at the idea of racial hierarchy. They
are shocked by laws prohibiting blacks to live in white neighbourhoods, or to study in white schools, or to be treated in white
hospitals. But the hierarchy of rich and poor – which mandates that rich people live in separate and more luxurious neighbourhoods,
study in separate and more prestigious schools, and receive medical treatment in separate and better-equipped facilities – seems
perfectly sensible to many Americans and Europeans. Yet it’s a proven fact that most rich people are rich for the simple reason that
they were born into a rich family, while most poor people will remain poor throughout their lives simply because they were born
into a poor family.
Unfortunately, complex
human societies seem to require imagined hierarchies and unjust
discrimination. Of course not all hierarchies are morally identical, and some societies suffered
from more extreme types of discrimination than others, yet scholars know of no large society that has been
able to dispense with discrimination altogether. Time and again people have created order in their societies by classifying the
population into imagined categories, such as superiors, commoners and slaves; whites and blacks; patricians and plebeians;
Brahmins and Shudras; or rich and poor. These categories have regulated relations between millions of humans by making some
people legally, politically or socially superior to others.
Hierarchies serve an important function. They enable complete strangers to know how to treat one another without wasting the
time and energy needed to become personally acquainted. In George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, Henry Higgins doesn’t need to
establish an intimate acquaintance with Eliza Doolittle in order to understand how he should relate to her. Just hearing her talk tells
him that she is a member of the underclass with whom he can do as he wishes – for example, using her as a pawn in his bet to pass
off a jower girl as a duchess. A modern Eliza working at a jorist’s needs to know how much effort to put into selling roses and gladioli
to the dozens of people who enter the shop each day. She can’t make a detailed enquiry into the tastes and wallets of each
individual.
Instead, she uses social cues – the way the person is dressed, his or her age, and if she’s not politically correct his skin colour. That is
how she immediately distinguishes between the accounting-firm partner who’s likely to place a large order for expensive roses, and
a messenger boy who can only afford a bunch of daisies.
Of course, differences in natural abilities also play a role in the formation of social distinctions. But such diversities of aptitudes and
character are usually mediated through imagined hierarchies. This happens in two important ways. First and foremost, most abilities
have to be nurtured and developed. Even if somebody is born with a particular talent, that talent will usually remain latent if it is not
fostered, honed and exercised. Not all people get the same chance to cultivate and refine their abilities. Whether or not they have
such an opportunity will usually depend on their place within their society’s imagined hierarchy. Harry Potter is a good example.
Removed from his distinguished wizard family and brought up by ignorant muggles, he arrives at Hogwarts without any experience
in magic. It takes him seven books to gain a firm command of his powers and knowledge of his unique abilities.
Second, even if people belonging to different classes develop exactly the same abilities, they are
unlikely to enjoy equal success because they will have to play the game by different rules. If, in
British-ruled India, an Untouchable, a Brahmin, a Catholic Irishman and a Protestant Englishman had somehow developed exactly
the same business acumen, they still would not have had the same chance of becoming rich. The economic game was rigged by legal
restrictions and unoɽcial glass ceilings.
The Vicious Circle
All societies are based on imagined hierarchies, but not necessarily on the same hierarchies.
What accounts for the differences? Why did traditional Indian society classify people according
to caste, Ottoman society according to religion, and American society according to race? In most
cases the hierarchy originated as the result of a set of accidental historical circumstances and was
then perpetuated and refined over many generations as different groups developed vested interests in it.
For instance, many scholars surmise that the Hindu caste system took shape when Indo-Aryan people invaded the Indian
subcontinent about 3,000 years ago, subjugating the local population. The invaders established a stratified society, in which they –
of course – occupied the leading positions (priests and warriors), leaving the natives to live as servants and slaves. The invaders, who
were few in number, feared losing their privileged status and unique identity. To forestall this danger, they divided the population
into castes, each of which was required to pursue a specific occupation or perform a specific role in society. Each had different legal
status, privileges and duties. Mixing of castes – social interaction, marriage, even the sharing of meals – was prohibited. And the
distinctions were not just legal – they became an inherent part of religious mythology and practice.
The rulers argued that the caste system rejected an eternal cosmic reality rather than a chance historical development. Concepts of
purity and impurity were essential elements in Hindu religion, and they were harnessed to buttress the social pyramid. Pious Hindus
were taught that contact with members of a different caste could pollute not only them personally, but society as a whole, and
should therefore be abhorred. Such ideas are hardly unique to Hindus. Throughout history, and in almost all societies, concepts of
pollution and purity have played a leading role in enforcing social and political divisions and have been exploited by numerous ruling
classes to maintain their privileges. The fear of pollution is not a complete fabrication of priests and princes, however. It probably
has its roots in biological survival mechanisms that make humans feel an instinctive revulsion towards potential disease carriers,
such as sick persons and dead bodies. If you want to keep any human group isolated – women, Jews, Roma, gays, blacks – the best
way to do it is convince everyone that these people are a source of pollution.
The Hindu caste system and its attendant laws of purity became deeply embedded in Indian
culture. Long after the Indo-Aryan invasion was forgotten, Indians continued to believe in the
caste system and to abhor the pollution caused by caste mixing. Castes were not immune to change. In fact,
as time went by, large castes were divided into sub-castes. Eventually the original four castes turned into 3,000
different groupings called jati (literally ‘birth’). But this proliferation of castes did not change the
basic principle of the system, according to which every person is born into a particular rank, and
any infringement of its rules pollutes the person and society as a whole. A persons jati determines her profession, the food she can
eat, her place of residence and her eligible marriage partners. Usually a person can marry only within his or her caste, and the
resulting children inherit that status.
Whenever a new profession developed or a new group of people appeared on the scene, they
had to be recognised as a caste in order to receive a legitimate place within Hindu society. Groups
that failed to win recognition as a caste were, literally, outcasts – in this stratified society, they did not even occupy the lowest rung.
They became known as Untouchables. They had to live apart from all other people and scrape together a living in humiliating and
disgusting ways, such as sifting through garbage dumps for scrap material. Even members of the lowest caste avoided mingling with
them, eating with them, touching them and certainly marrying them. In
modern India, matters of marriage and
work are still heavily influenced by the caste system, despite all attempts by the democratic
government of India to break down such distinctions and convince Hindus that there is nothing
polluting in caste mixing.3
Purity in America
A similar vicious circle perpetuated the racial hierarchy in modern America. From the sixteenth
to the eighteenth century, the European conquerors imported millions of African slaves to work
the mines and plantations of America. They chose to import slaves from Africa rather than from
Europe or East Asia due to three circumstantial factors. Firstly, Africa was closer, so it was cheaper
to import slaves from Senegal than from Vietnam.
Secondly, in
Africa there already existed a well-developed slave trade (exporting slaves mainly to
the Middle East), whereas in Europe slavery was very rare. It was obviously far easier to buy
slaves in an existing market than to create a new one from scratch.
Thirdly, and most
importantly, American plantations in places such as Virginia, Haiti and Brazil were plagued by
malaria and yellow fever, which had originated in Africa. Africans had acquired over the
generations a partial genetic immunity to these diseases, whereas Europeans were totally
defenceless and died in droves.
It was consequently wiser for a plantation owner to invest his money in an African slave than in
a European slave or indentured labourer. Paradoxically, genetic superiority (in terms of immunity) translated
into social inferiority: precisely because Africans were fitter in tropical climates than Europeans,
they ended up as the slaves of European masters! Due to these circumstantial factors, the
burgeoning new societies of America were to be divided into a ruling caste of white Europeans
and a subjugated caste of black Africans.
But people don’t like to say that they keep slaves of a certain race or origin simply because it’s economically expedient. Like
the
Aryan conquerors of India, white Europeans in the Americas wanted to be seen not only as
economically successful but also as pious, just and objective. Religious and scientific myths were pressed
into service to justify this division. Theologians argued that Africans descend from Ham, son of Noah,
saddled by his father with a curse that his offspring would be slaves. Biologists argued that blacks are less
intelligent than whites and their moral sense less developed. Doctors alleged that blacks live in filth and
spread diseases – in other words, they are a source of pollution.
These myths struck a chord in American culture, and in Western culture generally. They
continued to exert their influence long after the conditions that created slavery had
disappeared. In the early nineteenth century imperial Britain outlawed slavery and stopped the Atlantic slave trade, and in the
decades that followed slavery was gradually outlawed throughout the American continent.
Notably, this was the first and only time in history that slaveholding societies voluntarily abolished slavery. But, even though the
slaves were freed, the racist myths that justified slavery persisted. Separation of
the races was maintained by
racist legislation and social custom.
The result was a self-reinforcing cycle of cause and effect, a vicious circle.
Consider, for example, the southern United States immediately after the Civil War. In 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment to the US
Constitution outlawed slavery and the Fourteenth Amendment mandated that citizenship and the equal protection of the law could
not be denied on the basis of race. However, two centuries of slavery meant that most black families were far poorer and far less
educated than most white families. A black person born in Alabama in 1865 thus had much less chance of getting a good education
and a well-paid job than did his white neighbours. His children, born in the 1880S and 1890s, started life with the same disadvantage
– they, too, were born to an uneducated, poor family.
But economic
disadvantage was not the whole story. Alabama was also home to many poor
whites who lacked the opportunities available to their better-off racial brothers and sisters. In
addition, the Industrial Revolution and the waves of immigration made the United States an extremely fluid society, where rags
could quickly turn into riches. If
money was all that mattered, the sharp divide between the races should
soon have blurred, not least through intermarriage.
But that did not happen. By 1865 whites,
as well as many blacks, took it to be a simple matter of fact that
blacks were less intelligent, more violent and sexually dissolute, lazier and less concerned about personal cleanliness than
whites. They were thus the agents of violence, theft, rape and disease – in other words, pollution. If a black Alabaman in 1895
miraculously managed to get a good education and then applied for a respectable job such as a bank teller, his odds of being
accepted were far worse than those of an equally qualified white candidate. The
stigma that labelled blacks as, by
nature, unreliable, lazy and less intelligent conspired against him.
You might think that people would gradually understand that these stigmas were myth rather than fact and that blacks would be
able, over time, to prove themselves just as competent, law-abiding and clean as whites. In fact, the opposite happened – these
prejudices became more and more entrenched as time went by. Since all the best jobs were
held by whites, it became easier to believe that blacks really are inferior. ‘Look,’ said the average
white citizen, ‘blacks have been free for generations, yet there are almost no black professors,
lawyers, doctors or even bank tellers. Isn’t that proof that blacks are simply less intelligent and
hard-working?’ Trapped in this vicious circle, blacks were not hired for whitecollar jobs because
they were deemed unintelligent, and the proof of their inferiority was the paucity of blacks in
white-collar jobs.
The vicious circle did not stop there. As
anti-black stigmas grew stronger, they were translated into a
system of ‘Jim Crow’ laws and norms that were meant to safeguard the racial order. Blacks
were forbidden to vote in elections, to study in white schools, to buy in white stores, to eat in
white restaurants, to sleep in white hotels. The justification for all of this was that blacks were foul, slothful and
vicious, so whites had to be protected from them. Whites did not want to sleep in the same hotel as blacks or to eat in the same
restaurant, for fear of diseases. They did not want their children learning in the same school as black children, for fear of brutality
and bad influences. They did not want blacks voting in elections, since blacks were ignorant and immoral. These fears were
substantiated by scientific studies that ‘proved’ that blacks were indeed less educated, that various diseases were more common
among them, and that their crime rate was far higher (the studies ignored the fact that these ‘facts’ resulted from discrimination
against blacks).
By the mid-twentieth century, segregation in the former Confederate states was probably worse
than in the late nineteenth century. Clennon King, a black student who applied to the University of Mississippi in 1958,
was forcefully committed to a mental asylum. The presiding judge ruled that a black person must surely be insane to think that he
could be admitted to the University of Mississippi.
The vicious circle: a chance historical situation is translated into a rigid social system.
Nothing was as revolting to American southerners (and many northerners) as sexual relations and marriage between black men and
white women. Sex between the races became the greatest taboo and any violation, or suspected violation, was viewed as deserving
immediate and summary punishment in the form of lynching. The Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist secret society, perpetrated
many such killings. They could have taught the Hindu Brahmins a thing or two about purity laws.
With time, the racism spread to more and more cultural arenas. American aesthetic culture was
built around white standards of beauty. The physical attributes of the white race – for example light skin, fair and
straight hair, a small upturned nose – came to be identified as beautiful. Typical black features – dark skin, dark and bushy hair, a
flattened nose – were deemed ugly. These preconceptions ingrained the imagined hierarchy at an even deeper level of human
consciousness.
Such vicious circles can go on for centuries and even millennia, perpetuating an imagined
hierarchy that sprang from a chance historical occurrence. Unjust discrimination often gets worse, not better,
with time. Money comes to money, and poverty to poverty. Education comes to education, and
ignorance to ignorance. Those once victimised by history are likely to be victimised yet again.
And those whom history has privileged are more likely to be privileged again.
Most sociopolitical
hierarchies lack a logical or biological basis – they are nothing but the
perpetuation of chance events supported by myths. That is one good reason to study history. If
the division into blacks and whites or Brahmins and Shudras was grounded in biological realities
– that is, if Brahmins really had better brains than Shudras – biology would be sufficient for understanding human society. Since the
biological distinctions between different groups of Homo sapiens are, in fact, negligible, biology can’t explain the intricacies of Indian
society or American racial dynamics. We
can only understand those phenomena by studying the events,
circumstances, and power relations that transformed figments of imagination into cruel – and
very real – social structures.
Progress is not only possible, it has consistently occurred since the dawn of the 20 th century prefer overwhelming statistical evidence
Pinker 18 (Stephen, professor of psychology at Harvard, “Enlightenment Now: The Case for
Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, EM) **Edited for potentially sensitive language
Humans are liable to treat entire categories of other humans as means to an end or nuisances to
be cast aside. Coalitions bound by race or creed seek to dominate rival coalitions. Men try to control the labor, freedom, and
sexuality of women.1 People translate their discomfort with sexual nonconformity into moralistic condemnation.2 We call
these phenomena racism, sexism, and homophobia, and they have been rampant, to varying
degrees, in most cultures throughout history. The disavowal of these evils is a large part of what we call civil rights
or equal rights. The historical expansion of these rights—the stories of Selma, Seneca Falls, and
Stonewall—is a stirring chapter in the story of human progress.3 The rights of racial minorities,
women, and gay people continue to advance, each recently emblazoned on a milestone. The year
2017 saw the completion of two terms in office by the first African American president, an achievement movingly captured by First
Lady Michelle Obama in a speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2016: “I wake up every morning in a house that was built
by slaves, and I watch my daughters, two beautiful, intelligent black young women, playing with their dogs on the White House
lawn.” Barack
Obama was succeeded by the first woman nominee of a major party in a
presidential election, less than a century after American women were even allowed to vote; she
won a solid plurality of the popular vote and would have been president were it not for
peculiarities of the Electoral College system and other quirks of that election year. In a parallel universe
very similar to this one until November 8, 2016, the world’s three most influential nations (the
United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany) are all led by women.4 And in 2015, just a dozen years after
it ruled that homosexual activity may not be criminalized, the Supreme Court guaranteed the
right of marriage to same-sex couples. But it’s in the nature of progress that it erases its tracks,
and its champions fixate on the remaining injustices and forget how far we have come. An axiom
of progressive opinion, especially in universities, is that we continue to live in a deeply racist,
sexist, and homophobic society—which would imply that progressivism is a waste of time,
having accomplished nothing after decades of struggle. Like other forms of progressophobia, the
denial of advances in rights has been abetted by sensational headlines. A string of highly
publicized killings by American police officers of unarmed African American suspects, some of
them caught on smartphone videos, has led to a sense that the country is suffering an epidemic
of racist attacks by police on black men. Media coverage of athletes who have assaulted their wives or girlfriends, and
of episodes of rape on college campuses, has suggested to many that we are undergoing a surge of violence against women. And
one of the most heinous crimes in American history took place in 2016 when Omar Mateen
opened fire at a gay nightclub in Orlando, killing forty-nine people and wounding another fiftythree. The belief in an absence of progress has been fortified by the recent history of the
universe we do live in, where Donald Trump rather than Hillary Clinton was the beneficiary of
the American electoral system in 2016. During his campaign, Trump uttered misogynistic, anti-Hispanic, and antiMuslim insults that were well outside the norms of American political discourse, and the rowdy followers he encouraged at his
rallies were even more offensive. Some
commentators worried that his victory represented a turning
point in the nation’s progress toward equality and rights, or that it uncovered the ugly truth that
we had never made progress in the first place. The goal of this chapter is to plumb the depths of
the current that carries equal rights along. Is it an illusion, a turbulent whirlpool atop a stagnant pond? Does it easily change
direction and flow backwards? Or does justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a mighty stream? I’ll end with a coda about
progress in the rights of the most easily victimized sector of humanity, children. By now you should be skeptical about reading
history from the headlines, and that applies to the recent assaults on equal rights. The data suggest that the number of police
shootings has decreased, not increased, in recent decades (even as the ones that do occur are captured on video), and three
independent analyses have found that a black suspect is no more likely than a white suspect to be killed by the police.6 (American
police shoot too many people, but it’s not primarily a racial issue.) A spate of news about rape cannot tell us whether there is now
more violence against women, a bad thing, or whether we now care more about violence against women, a good thing. And to this
day it is unclear whether the Orlando nightclub massacre was committed out of homophobia, sympathy for ISIS, or the drive for
posthumous notoriety that motivates most rampage shooters. Better first drafts of history can be gleaned from data on values and
from vital statistics. The
Pew Research Center has probed Americans’ opinions on race, gender, and
sexual orientation over the past quarter century, and has reported that these attitudes have
undergone a “fundamental shift” toward tolerance and respect of rights, with formerly
widespread prejudices sinking into oblivion.7 The shift is visible in figure 15-1, which plots reactions to three survey
statements that are representative of many others. Other surveys show the same shifts.8 Not only has the
American population become more liberal, but each generational cohort is more liberal than the
one born before it.9 As we will see, people tend to carry their values with them as they age, so the
Millennials (those born after 1980), who are even less prejudiced than the national average, tell us
which way the country is going.10 Of course one can wonder whether figure 15-1 displays a decline
in prejudice or simply a decline in the social acceptability of prejudice, with fewer people willing
to confess their disreputable attitudes to a pollster. The problem has long haunted social
scientists, but recently the economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has discovered an indicator of
attitudes that is the closest we’ve come to a digital truth serum.11 In the privacy of their keyboards and
screens, people query Google with every curiosity, anxiety, and guilty pleasure you can imagine, together
with many you can’t imagine. (Common searches include “How to make my penis bigger” and “My vagina smells like fish.”)
Google has amassed big data on the strings that people search for in different months and
regions (though not the identity of the searchers), together with tools for analyzing them. Stephens-Davidowitz discovered
that searches for the [n word] (mostly in pursuit of racist jokes) correlate with other indicators of racial
prejudice across regions, such as vote totals for Barack Obama in 2008 that were lower than
expected for a Democrat.12 He suggests that these searches can serve as an unobtrusive indicator of
private racism. Let’s use them to track recent trends in racism, and while we’re at it, private sexism and homophobia as well.
Well into my adolescence, jokes featuring dumb Poles, ditzy dames, and lisping, limp-wristed homosexuals were common in network
television and newspaper comics. Today they are taboo in mainstream media. But do bigoted jokes remain a private indulgence, or
have private attitudes changed so much that people feel offended, sullied, or bored by them? Figure 15-2 shows the results. The
curves suggest that Americans are not just more abashed about confessing to prejudice than
they used to be; they privately don’t find it as amusing.13 And contrary to the fear that the rise of Trump
reflects (or emboldens) prejudice, the curves continue their decline through his period of notoriety in 2015–2016 and inauguration
in early 2017. Stephens-Davidowitz
has pointed out to me that these curves probably underestimate
the decline in prejudice because of a shift in who’s Googling. When the records began in 2004, Googlers were
mostly young and urban. Older and rural people tend to be latecomers to technology, and if they are
the ones who are likelier to search for the offensive terms, that would inflate the proportion in
later years and conceal the extent of the decline in bigotry. Google doesn’t record the searchers’ ages or levels
of education, but it does record where the searches where the searches come from. In response to my query, Stephens-Davidowitz
confirmed that bigoted searches tended to come from regions with older and less-educated populations. Compared with the
country as a whole, retirement communities are seven times as likely to search for “[n word] jokes” and thirty times as likely to
search for “[f*g] jokes.” (“Google AdWords,” he told me apologetically, “doesn’t give data on ‘[b word] jokes.’”) StephensDavidowitz also
got his hands on a trove of search data from AOL, which, unlike Google, tracks the
searches made by individuals (though not, of course, their identities). These threads confirmed that racists
may be a dwindling breed: someone who searches for “[n word]” is likely to search for other topics that appeal to senior
citizens, such as “social security” and “Frank Sinatra.” The main exception was a sliver of teenagers who also searched for bestiality,
decapitation videos, and child pornography—anything you’re not supposed to search for. But aside from these transgressive youths
(and there have always been transgressive youths), private prejudice is declining
with time and declining with
youth, which means that we can expect it to decline still further as aging bigots cede the stage
to less prejudiced cohorts. Until they do, these older and less-educated people (mainly white men) may not respect the
benign taboos on racism, sexism, and homophobia that have become second nature to the mainstream, and may even dismiss them
as “political correctness.” Today they can find each other on the Internet and coalesce under a demagogue. As we will see in chapter
20, Trump’s
success, like that of right-wing populists in other Western countries, is better
understood as the mobilization of an aggrieved and shrinking demographic in a polarized
political landscape than as the sudden reversal of a century-long movement toward equal rights.
Progress in equal rights may be seen not just in political milestones and opinion bellwethers but
in data on people’s lives. Among African Americans, the poverty rate fell from 55 percent in
1960 to 27.6 percent in 2011.14 Life expectancy rose from 33 in 1900 (17.6 years below that of
whites) to 75.6 years in 2015 (less than 3 years below whites).15 African Americans who make it to 65 have longer lives
ahead of them than white Americans of the same age. The rate of illiteracy fell among African Americans from
45 percent in 1900 to effectively zero percent today.16 As we will see in the next chapter, the racial gap in
children’s readiness for school has been shrinking. As we will see in chapter 18, so has the racial gap in
happiness.17 Racist violence against African Americans, once a regular occurrence in night raids
and lynchings (three a week at the turn of the 20th century), plummeted in the 20th century, and has fallen
further since the FBI started amalgamating reports on hate crimes in 1996, as figure 15-1 shows. (Very few of
these crimes are homicides, in most years one or zero.)18 The slight uptick in 2015 (the most recent year available)
cannot be blamed on Trump, since it parallels the uptick in violent crime that year (see figure 12-2),
and hate crimes track rates of overall lawlessness more closely than they do remarks by politicians.19 Figure 15-3 shows that hate
crimes against Asian, Jewish, and white targets have declined as well. And despite claims that Islamophobia has become rampant in
America, hate crimes targeting Muslims have shown little change other than a one-time rise following 9/11 and upticks following
other Islamist terror attacks, such as the ones in Paris and San Bernardino in 2015.20 At the time of this writing, FBI data from 2016
are not available, so it’s
premature to accept the widespread claims of a Trumpist surge in hate crimes
that year. The claims come from advocacy organizations, whose funding depends on whipping
up fear, rather than disinterested recordkeepers; some of the incidents were ironic hoaxes, and
many were boorish outbursts rather than actual crimes.21
Protests that harness the state have been able to materially reduce police violence in
Ferguson
Liu 14 [Eric, “Time to turn protests into change,” CNN, December 4, 2014,
http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/03/opinion/liu-meaning-ferguson-protests]
More than a week after the grand jury's decision in Ferguson, protests continue
nationwide. On campuses, in
malls, on streets and in stadiums, Americans young and old are voicing their anger about the nonindictments in the deaths of Michael Brown and now Eric Garner in New York -- and about the rigged system that
makes such results all too common. This proliferation of protests is good. But it's not good enough. First,
let's reflect a bit on why it's good. Anytime Americans start seeing themselves as more than mere consumers or spectators -- rather,
as citizens and participants -- something healthy is happening. That's especially true when people are willing to flex their citizen
muscles during the start of peak shopping season. So seeing
protesters from Seattle to New York engage in civil
disobedience on Black Friday was heartening. Did all the walk-outs and "die-ins" inconvenience some
shoppers and deal-seekers? Sure. The post-Ferguson moment demands, at a bare minimum, that we all raise our sights beyond
one-day sale tags. But while the protests are promising and necessary, they are also insufficient. A deeper
phase of work is needed. And here all of America can learn from what's already been happening
in Missouri. The media has tended to focus on the most eye-catching conflict -- either daytime marches with famous activists, or
nighttime rioting after the grand jury decision. But off-camera, people on the ground in and around this community have been doing
something simple and difficult. They've been moving from protest to power. Faith
groups and grassroots organizers
like Communities Creating Opportunity and the Organization for Black Struggle have, since this
summer, been engaging people in Ferguson to organize and advocate for reforms, to register, to
vote, to understand the makeup and the methods of the city council and the state legislature. In
short, to do politics. This may seem unsatisfying to some, even irrelevant. The members of the
millennial generation who are driving so many of the protests today are idealistic and
networked -- but also exceedingly cynical about traditional politics and government. And young
African-Americans who are most often subjected to arbitrary abuses by the criminal justice system have the
most reason to be mistrustful of the larger political machinery that begat that system. But what
the grassroots organizers in Ferguson teach us is that there is no avoiding politics. Indeed, there is no
way to achieve any scaled and durable reform without stepping into the arena of government,
policy, politics, and elections. A change in city council representation can lead to a change in
how truly representative one's police force is. A well-coordinated campaign to let elected
officials know you are part of a collective with voice, clout, savvy, and votes can lead to a
change in attitude among those elected -- and then to changes in policy. What this requires is an
understanding of the institutions that govern how we govern ourselves. What it requires is
literacy in civic power. This is why the organization I run, Citizen University, is working with partners around the country to
teach people about the skills and systems of power. And it's why everyone, left or right -- and especially
those living on the front lines of racial disparity and violent inequity -- must learn how to read and to write power.
Wherever you live, ask yourself: Could I teach someone what the activists in Ferguson are teaching
people now? Could I teach them how my city makes policy, how politicians respond to public
pressure, how to navigate the rules of voting, how to make votes cancel out money? All around the
world, from Tahrir Square a few years ago to Hong Kong today, we see young people caught up in what
one journalist called "the euphoria of defiance." Alas, in most of those situations, we also see
what happens when protesters are unable to convert civil disobedience into civil self-rule. That
requires strategy. It requires organization. It requires patient instruction in citizenship. Fifty-nine years ago this
week, Rosa Parks made a heroic choice not to sit at the back of the bus. But what her story teaches us is this: Heroes are what
happens when a moment calls forth people well prepared by institutions. Parks did
not arrive randomly at that occasion
on that bus. She had been groomed by an ecosystem of civil rights groups like the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People, trained at places like the Highlander Folk School. She had understood
her choice -- her immovable defiance -- to be part of a larger story and a methodical strategy for the attainment of
power. This is what unsung but undaunted citizen organizers and educators are doing in Ferguson
today. They've moved past "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" gestures. They are getting hands-on about changing their
community. And so should we all. That's how we can make this a season of powerful
citizenship.
Racial bias is malleable and can be changed---empirical evidence proves
Dayna Bowen Matthew 15. Nonresident senior fellow in the Center for Health Policy. University
of Colorado School of Law, Colorado School of Public Health, and Center for Bioethics and
Humanities at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. “Just Medicine: A Cure for
Racial Inequality in American Health Care.” New York University Press. 2015.
Evidence that Implicit Biases Are Malleable¶ Scientists
have developed a body of empirical evidence that
implicit biases are malleable over the past quarter century. The empirical record is now well established
and offers strong evidence that implicit attitudes are neither inaccessible nor inescapable; they
are not impossible to control; they are not out of reach. In fact, implicit associations can be influenced both by
the individual who unconsciously holds these stereotypes and prejudices and by external factors. Researchers have reported and
reviewed numerous studies that put two important misconceptions about implicit biases to rest. First, the
evidence
demonstrates that unconscious implicit attitudes are responsive to the deliberate choices and
influences of an individual even though that person is not consciously experiencing the bias.
Second, implicit biases are not impervious to relatively short-term change even though they arise
from social knowledge that was acquired slowly, and over a lifetime. In fact, the evidence reveals that
learning can continue to take place and alter social group knowledge, after initial attitudes and
associations are formed. Take, for example, a person who developed bad driving habits over time and subconsciously incorporated
those habits into driving behavior for many years. If this person chooses to be mindful of improving his or her driving, either out of a
conscious decision to do so or in response to external influences, those bad habits can be altered. External authorities may
incentivize improvement through a media campaign, new rules of the road, prosecution for reckless driving, or a driver's education
class. Thus, malleability
describes an ongoing learning process in which people with old,
objectionable implicit biases learn to respond to newer, more appropriate attitudes and beliefs.
Put another way, longstanding and unconscious thinking can change.¶ This understanding of malleability is
called the “connectionist" model of implicit bias. Unlike the prior notion that implicit associations are static and
inaccessibly fixed, the empirical record reveals that stereotypes and prejudicial beliefs to which we
may adhere at any given time are “states” of thinking that form based on past experiences and
current inputs. Biases can be revised depending upon current informational inputs gathered and
weighed with each new encounter. This flexible view of stereotyping replaces an outdated rigid
one and allows for the evidence that individuals can constantly update the stored group
knowledge that produces implicit biases. The connectionist model ex. plains that a stereotype is merely a pattern of
activation that, at a given point in time, is jointly determined by current input (i.e., the context) and the weight of the new
information’s connection to existing and underlying beliefs. Psychologists now conclude that “stereotypes are quite elastic and thus
any individual could hold and even change an infinite number of representations of social category's members, when viewed across
time and place?Ӧ The
connectionist model contrasts with early theories of implicit bias, which
focused on their automaticity. ‘Automaticity' refers generally to the way that individuals make associations without any
awareness, without intentionality, and without responsibility for the influence the associations have in directing their conduct and
choices.“ Early researchers concluded that automaticity meant inevitability. For example, one researcher
said, “a crucial component of automatic pro~ ceases is their inescapability; they occur despite deliberate attempts to bypass or
ignore them.”7 This view is no longer correct. Over the past twenty years. researchers have collected a strong record to
contradict this notion that implicit attitudes change slowly, if at all, simply because they develop slowly over time. This idea has been
replaced by what Dr. Irene Blair has called “the now-bountiful evidence that automatic
attitudes and self-reported
attitudes-~are sensitive to personal, social, and situational pressures." Blair points out that “the
conclusion that automatic stereotypes and prejudice are not as inflexible as previously assumed
is strengthened by the number and variety of demonstrations. . . . The fact that the tests were conducted in
the service of many different goals, and by the similarity of findings across different measmres."9¶ The importance of understanding
that implicit biases are malleable cannot be overstated. First, malleability
means that interventions may be
strategically introduced to provide current inputs that alter implicit biases. Thus, we can expect
that implicit biases can be reduced. To say that biased attitudes may be “reduced” is to say that current informational
inputs can be adjusted so that the resulting stereotype patterns to longer conform to traditional, discriminatory, or inequitable
stereotypes, but instead lead individuals and institutions to more equitable judgments and more equitable conduct. Furthermore,
malleability also leans that the discriminatory impacts that result from implicit biases so maybe
reduced. The research that gave rise to the connectionist mode has provided important insights concerning the several methods
available to individuals and institutions wishing to ameliorate the discriminatory impact of decisions and conduct informed by imme
biases, stereotyping, and prejudice. Finally, by
demonstrating that even subconscious racial biases are
within reach and control, researchers have provided a sound basis for holding individuals and
institutions responsible for reducing implicit racial and ethnic biases and for reducing the
discriminatory harms caused by unconscious racism.
Antiblackness is socialized, not a libidinal and universal drive
Peter Hudis 15. Professor of Philosophy and the Humanities at Oakton Community College.
Frantz Fanon: Philosopher of the Barricades. University of Chicago Press. 33-7.
Fanon’s vantage point upon the world is his situated experience. He is trying to understand the inner psychic life of
racism, not provide an account of the structure of human existence as a whole. Racism is not, of
course, an integral part of the human psyche; it is a Social construct that has a psychic impact. Any
effort to comprehend social distress that accompanies racism by reference to some a priori structure—be
it the Oedipal Complex or the Collective Unconscious—is doomed to failure. [END PAGE 35]¶ Carl Jung
sought to deepen and go beyond Freud's approach by arguing that the subconscious is grounded in
a universal layer of the psyche—which he called “the collective unconscious.” This refers to
inherited patterns of thought that exist in all human minds, regardless of specific culture or
upbringing, and which manifest themselves in dreams, fairy tales, and myths. Jung referred to these universal patterns as
“archetypes.” It may seem, on a superficial reading, that Fanon is drawing from Jung, since he discusses how white people tend to
unconsciously assimilate views of blacks that are based on negative stereotypes. Even the most “progressive” white tends to think of
blacks a certain way (such as “emotional,” “physical,” or “aggressive”), even as they disavow any racist animus on their part.
However, Fanon
denies that such collective delusions are part of a psychic structure; they are not
permanent features of the mind. They are habits acquired from a series of social and cultural
impositions. While they constitute a kind a collective unconscious on the part of many white
people, they are not grounded in any universal “archetype.” The unconscious prejudices of whites do not
derive from genes or nature, nor do they derive from some form independent of culture or upbringing. Fanon contends that
Jung “confuses habit with instinct.”21¶ Fanon objects to Jung’s “collective unconscious” for the
same reason that he rejects the notion of a black ontology. His phenomenological approach
brackets out ontological claims on both a social and psychological level insofar as the
examination of race and racism is concerned. He writes, “Neither Freud nor Adler nor even the cosmic Jung took the
black man into consideration in the course of his research.”22¶ This does not mean that Fanon rejects their contributions tout court.
He does not deny the existence of the unconscious. He only denies that the inferiority complex of blacks operates on an unconscious
level. He does not reject the Oedipal Complex. He only denies that it explains (especially in the West Indies) the proclivity of the
black “slave” to mimic the values of the white “master.” And as seen from his positive remarks on Lacan's theory of the mirror stage,
he does not reject the idea of psychic structure. He only denies that it can substitute for an historical understanding of the origin of
[END PAGE 36] neuroses .23 Fanon adopts
a socio-genetic approach to a study of the psyche because
that is what is adequate for the object of his analysis.¶ For Fanon, it is the relationship between
the socio-economic and psychological that is of critical import. He makes it clear, insofar as the subject
matter of his study is concerned, that the socio-economic is first of all responsible for affective disorders:
“First, economic. Then, internalization or rather epidermalization of this inferiority.”24 Fanon never misses an
opportunity to remind us that racism owes its origin to specific economic relations of
domination- such as slavery, colonialism, and the effort to coopt sections of the working class into serving the needs of
capital. It is hard to mistake the Marxist influence here. It does not follow, however, that what comes first in the order of time has
conceptual or strategic priority. The inferiority complex is originally born from economic subjugation, but it takes on a life of its own
and expresses itself in terms that surpass the economic. Both sides of the problem-the socio-economic and psychological-must be
combatted in tandem: “The black man must wage the struggle on two levels; whereas historically these levels are mutually
dependent, any unilateral liberation is flawed, and the worst mistake would be to believe their mutual dependence automatic.”25¶
On these grounds he
argues that the problem of racism cannot be solved on a psychological level. It
is not an “individual” problem; it is a social one. But neither can it be solved on a social level that
ores the psychological. It is small wonder that although his name never appears in the book, Fanon was enamored of the work of
Wilhelm Reich. This important Freudian-Marxist would no doubt feel affinity with Fanon's
comment, “Genuine
disalienation will have been achieved only when things, in the most materialist sense, have
resumed their rightful place.”27
Libidinal economy is a hoax -- neurophysiological phobias and philias are malleable thru habit
forming -- cohesion around institutional change solves.
Cikara & Van Bavel ’15 [Mina and Jay; June 2nd; Assistant Professor of Psychology and Director
of the Intergroup Neuroscience Lab at Harvard University; Assistant Professor of Psychology and
Director of the Social Perception and Evaluation Laboratory at New York University; Scientific
American, “The Flexibility of Racial Bias: Research suggests that racism is not hard wired,
offering hope on one of America’s enduring problems,”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-flexibility-of-racial-bias/; GR]
It would be easy to see in all this powerful evidence that racism is a permanent fixture in America’s
social fabric and even, perhaps, an inevitable aspect of human nature. Indeed, the mere act of labeling others according to
their age, gender, or race is a reflexive habit of the human mind. Social categories, like race, impact our thinking quickly, often
outside of our awareness. Extensive research has found that these implicit racial biases—negative thoughts and feelings about
people from other races—are automatic, pervasive, and difficult to suppress. Neuroscientists
have also explored
racial prejudice by exposing people to images of faces while scanning their brains in fMRI machines. Early
studies found that when people viewed faces of another race, the amount of activity in the amygdala—a small brain structure
associated with experiencing emotions, including fear—was associated with individual differences on implicit measures of racial
bias. This work has led many to conclude that racial biases might be part of a primitive—and possibly hard-wired—neural fear
response to racial out-groups.
There is little question that categories such as race, gender, and age play a major role in shaping the biases and stereotypes that
people bring to bear in their judgments of others. However, research has shown that how people categorize themselves may be just
as fundamental to understanding prejudice as how they categorize others. When people categorize themselves as part of a group,
their self-concept shifts from the individual (“I”) to the collective level (“us”). People form groups rapidly and favor members of their
own group even when groups are formed on arbitrary grounds, such as the simple flip of a coin. These findings highlight the
remarkable ease with which humans form coalitions.
Recent research
confirms that coalition-based preferences trump race-based preferences. For
and Republicans favor the resumes of those affiliated with their political party
much more than they favor those who share their race. These coalition-based preferences remain powerful even in
example, both Democrats
the absence of the animosity present in electoral politics. Our research has shown that the simple act of placing people on a mixedrace team can diminish their automatic racial bias. In a series of experiments, White participants who were randomly placed on a
mixed-race team—the Tigers or Lions—showed little evidence of implicit racial bias. Merely
belonging to a mixed-race
team trigged positive automatic associations with all of the members of their own group, irrespective of race.
Being a part of one of these seemingly trivial mixed-race groups produced similar effects on brain activity—the amygdala
responded to team membership rather than race. Taken together, these studies indicate that momentary
changes in group membership can override the influence of race on the way we see, think about, and feel toward people who are
different from ourselves.
Although these coalition-based distinctions might be the most basic building block of bias, they say little about the other factors that
cause group conflict. Why do some groups get ignored while others get attacked? Whenever we encounter a new person or group
we are motivated to answer two questions as quickly as possible: “is this person a friend or foe?” and “are they capable of enacting
their intentions toward me?” In other words, once we have determined that someone is a member of an out-group, we need to
determine what kind? The nature of the relations between groups—are we cooperative, competitive, or neither?—and their relative
status—do you have access to resources?—largely determine the course of intergroup interactions.
Groups that are seen as competitive with one’s interests, and capable of enacting their nasty intentions, are much more likely to be
targets of hostility than more benevolent (e.g., elderly) or powerless (e.g., homeless) groups. This is one reason why sports rivalries
have such psychological potency. For instance, fans of the Boston Red Sox are more likely to feel pleasure, and exhibit rewardrelated neural responses, at the misfortunes of the archrival New York Yankees than other baseball teams (and vice versa)—
especially in the midst of a tight playoff race. (How much fans take pleasure in the misfortunes of their rivals is also linked to how
likely they would be to harm fans from the other team.)
Just as a particular person’s group membership can be flexible, so too are the relations between groups. Groups that have previously
had cordial relations may become rivals (and vice versa). Indeed, psychological
and biological responses to outgroup members can change, depending on whether or not that out-group is perceived as threatening. For example, people
exhibit greater pleasure—they smile—in response to the misfortunes of stereotypically competitive groups (e.g., investment
bankers); however, this malicious pleasure is reduced when you provide participants with counter-stereotypic information (e.g.,
“investment bankers are working with small companies to help them weather the economic downturn). Competition between “us”
and “them” can even distort our judgments of distance, making threatening out-groups seem much closer than they really are.
These distorted perceptions can serve to amplify intergroup discrimination: the more different and distant “they” are, the easier it is
to disrespect and harm them.
Thus, not all out-groups are treated the same: some elicit indifference whereas others become targets of antipathy. Stereotypically
threatening groups are especially likely to be targeted with violence, but those stereotypes
can be tempered with
other information. If perceptions of intergroup relations can be changed, individuals may overcome hostility
toward perceived foes and become more responsive to one another’s grievances.
The flexible nature of both group membership and intergroup relations offers reason to be cautiously
optimistic about the potential for greater cooperation among groups in conflict (be they black versus white or citizens
versus police). One strategy is to bring multiple groups together around a common goal. For example, during the fiercely contested
2008 Democratic presidential primary process, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama supporters gave more money to strangers who
supported the same primary candidate (compared to the rival candidate). Two months later, after the Democratic National
Convention, the supporters of both candidates coalesced around the party nominee—Barack Obama—and this bias disappeared. In
fact, merely creating a sense of cohesion
between two competitive groups can increase empathy for the
suffering of our rivals. These sorts of strategies can help reduce aggression toward hostile out-groups, which is critical
for creating more opportunities for constructive dialogue addressing greater social injustices.
Of course, instilling a sense of common identity and cooperation is extremely difficult in entrenched intergroup conflicts, but when it
happens, the benefits are obvious. Consider how the community leaders in New York City and Ferguson responded differently to
protests against police brutality—in NYC political leaders expressed grief and concern over police brutality and moved quickly to
make policy changes in policing, whereas the leaders and police in Ferguson responded with high-tech military vehicles and riot
gear. In the first case, multiple groups came together with a common goal—to increase the safety of everyone in the community; in
the latter case, the actions of the police likely reinforced the “us” and “them” distinctions.
Tragically, these types of conflicts continue to roil the country. Understanding the psychology and neuroscience of social identity and
intergroup relations cannot undo the effects of systemic racism and discriminatory practices; however, it can offer insights into the
psychological processes responsible for escalating the tension between, for example, civilians and police officers.
Even in cases where it isn’t possible to create a common identity among groups in conflict, it may be possible to blur the boundaries
between groups. In one recent experiment, we sorted participants into groups—red versus blue team—competing for a cash prize.
Half of the participants were randomly assigned to see a picture of a segregated social network of all the players, in which red dots
clustered together, blue dots clustered together, and the two clusters were separated by white space. The other half of the
participants saw an integrated social network in which the red and blue dots were mixed together in one large cluster. Participants
who thought the two teams were interconnected with one another reported greater empathy for the out-group players compared
to those who had seen the segregated network. Thus, reminding people that individuals could be connected to one another despite
being from different groups may be another way to build trust and understanding among them.
A mere month before Freddie Gray died in police custody, President Obama addressed the nation on the 50th anniversary of Bloody
Sunday in Selma: “We do a disservice to the cause of justice by intimating that bias and discrimination are immutable, or that racial
division is inherent to America. To deny…progress -- our progress -- would be to rob us of our own agency; our responsibility to do
what we can to make America better."
The president was saying that we, as a society, have a responsibility to reduce prejudice and discrimination. These recent findings
from psychology and neuroscience indicate that we, as individuals, possess this capacity. Of course, this capacity is not sufficient to
usher in racial equality or peace. Even when the level of prejudice against particular out-groups decreases, it does not imply that the
level of institutional discrimination against these or other groups will necessarily improve. Ultimately, only
collective action
and institutional evolution can address systemic racism. The science is clear on one thing, though:
individual bias and discrimination are changeable. Race-based prejudice and discrimination, in particular, are
created and reinforced by many social factors, but they are not inevitable consequences of our
biology. Perhaps understanding how coalitional thinking impacts intergroup relations will make it easier for us to affect real social
change going forward.
ontology bad – exceptionalism
Their attempt to universalize an ontological category of blackness is American exceptionalism
― transcribing American experiences to the world is colonialist and delegitimizes African
epistemologies of resistance
Thomas 18 (Greg Thomas, Associate Professor of English at Tufts, Ph.D. in Rhetoric from the
University of California, Berkeley, M.A. in Philosophy from State University of New York,
Binghamton, B.A. in Philosophy from Randolph-Macon College, 2018. “Afro-Blue Notes: The
Death of Afro-pessimism (2.0)?”, Theory & Event, January 2018, Volume 21, Number 1, Available
Online at: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/685979/pdf Accessed 4-4-18)
The conceptual-geopolitical trappings of "1865" fundamentally define the discourse of "AfroPessimism and the Ends of Redemption," like assorted neo-pessimist texts: "The expanding field of Afro-pessimism theorises [sic]
the structural relation between Blackness and Humanity as an irreconcilable encounter, an antagonism. One cannot know Blackness
as distinct from slavery, for there is no Black temporality which is antecedent to the temporality of the Black slave."25 Critically,
Wole Soyinka details "pre-colonial" African languages of "black" self-identification from the Yoruba to the Ga to the Hausa peoples
on continent, for starters, in "The African World and the Ethnocultural Debate" (1989). But these details do not enter modern
Eurocentric discussions in the main, be they Marxist or anti-Marxist, etc.26 There is in Wilderson only the slaver's history of
slavery—one slaver's official "national" or state history and discourse. The "expanding field" of "Afro-pessimism" (2.0) further
expands anti-Black, anti-African conceptions of historical agency. There is nothing outside of, or before, or countering Wilderson's
"slavery" for the African enslaved. There is only Wilderson's "Blackness," which is curious. For what he casts as "Black" rather than
"black" is more accurately cast as "negro" (in this specifically English usage, moreover, with no memory of the Spanish or Portuguese
etymology) and not even "Negro," quiet as it's kept—since all of Africa is
flatly foreclosed by this acutely
paradoxical "Afro-pessimism." Both Africa and diasporas eclipsed, his "Blackness" and "Human
Life" turn out to be the blackness and humanism of white Americanism, specifically and
restrictively, an isolationist or exceptionalist Americanism despite the past and present
hegemony of white Western humanism and its "anti-Black racism" worldwide. What is the "Afro" in
"Afro-pessimism," therefore, when this Afro-pessimism (2.0) revivifies in disguise the "negro" concept of white settler-slave state
history and historiography? It ironically does so in the name of some "Blackness" itself or, rather, the "blackness" of whiteness, of
white postulation—not the Blackness of Blackness or the transvaluations of manifold Black liberation movements themselves, even
as it blithely misappropriates the ongoing if now naturalized cultural-political labor of that historic Blackness in the upper case. A
dominant Anglo-American discourse of slavery is all that there is and ever was now when it
comes to the Black and African, all anti-slavery discourses and counter-discourses of slavery as
well as Blackness somehow vanished. A glaring absence of Black radical and revolutionary
intellectual history should be expected from any expression of "Afro-pessimism." Indeed, could Afropessimism 2.0 take hold as another trend in mainstream academia except in the political void produced after the 1960s and '70s by
local as well as global counter-revolution and counter-insurgency? This
absence affects the shape and agenda of
the critical analysis of "anti-Black racism" in essential ways. Wilderson's critique of the "ruse of
analogy" in Red, White & Black becomes a refrain that naturalizes academic approaches to politics now
institutionalized with the continued reign of Western bourgeois liberalism. For older and enduring
Black radical perspectives, the existence of "anti-Black racism" among non-Black peoples,
organizations, and movements is neither a new nor shocking phenomenon. For many Black revolutionary
movement logics of the '60s and '70s, for instance, this did not preclude alliance (or the exhaustion of alliances
made) or lead to a doctrinaire rejection of "solidarity" work and its international (or "intercommunal")
possibilities.27 "Contradictions" were expected, so to speak, in theory and practice, which might be resolved
or not, depending on material interest, circumstance, etc. For them, this work was not about gauging identity, or
the perfection of a projected analogy, but mobilization for the political accomplishments of
revolution—a revolutionism that could or may not work toward the development of a new humanism
not white or racist or anti-Black after all. The
reach for potential solidarities was not construed as a gift or
an act of good-willed benevolence, wise or unwise given the risks. Even solidarity work with obviously
problematic, openly enemy forces could be a strategic or tactical mode of advancing Black collective
self-interests that might dispense with any alliance at any given moment in time without seeing the
relationship as a statement of some total identity or non-identity of condition and interests. The notion of solidarity has
nowadays been superficialized, remaining riveted on mere rhetorical proclamation and aesthetic or
representational identification in neo-colonial culture industries here and there. An older, praxical approach to
alliance, perhaps "analogy," and solidarity is not taken up by current analyses of identity conflicts that
prevail with the resurgence of a more academic political-intellectualism and a now much less
contested liberalism. This is imperial "multiculturalism" and its malcontents. As much as Afropessimism (2.0) may object to certain instances of liberalism, or [End Page 292] regulation white racist
liberalism at least, it assumes these Western epistemic frameworks of white academic liberalism all
the same, thereby ensconcing the colonialism and neo-colonialism it constantly and symptomatically
denegates in text after text. Black anti-colonialism / anti-colonialist Blackness The great anti-colonialist poet of Négritude, Aimé
Césaire wrote famously in his letter of resignation from the French Communist Party that he wanted Marxism and communism to be
placed in the service of Black peoples and not Black peoples in the service of Marxism or communism. He maintained in 1956: "it is
clear that our struggle—the struggle of colonial peoples against colonialism, the struggle of peoples of color against racism—is more
complex, or better yet, of a completely different nature than the fight of the French worker against French capitalism, and it cannot
in any way be considered a part, a fragment, of that struggle."28 As always, he was writing on behalf of Black people who were,
proverbially, the only people on the planet who have been excluded from the "human race" by the "modern" history of Western
racism and colonialism which obstructs "a true humanism—a humanism made to the measure of the world."29 What is this
Négritude if not Blackness, Black anti-colonialism, or anti-colonial Blackness? This tradition is not a tradition in Wilderson who
regularly critiques the analogical arrogance of Marxism, feminism, and an academic paradigm of
"post-colonialism" with less common reference to "queer" or "gay and lesbian" categories of
analysis as well—all in the name of pessimism. For him, none of these political frameworks with their privileged
identarian subjects can capture the condition of "Blackness" and "slavery" (or "the Black/Slave"). While that perspective
can allow for some insights—ones certainly seen before around the Black world and ones certainly avoided by so much
institutional scholarship—it leaves the general categorical grid of established Western political
epistemologies intact. The familiar academic terrain of "race, gender, class, and sexuality" frames the critique for
"Blackness" of "gender, class, and sexuality" in addition to "post-coloniality" or "post-colonialism." The most conventional US
academic categories of identity and analysis are still rendered in full as discrete, monolithic, and
monological categories and referents (e.g., workers, women, etc.), like the respective political ideologies based upon them in
the traditional ideological history of the white West (e.g., Marxism, feminism, etc.). There are "workers" and then there are
"women," generically, and then sometimes there are "gays" by whatever name, not to mention "natives" or the colonized in this
culturally specific epistemology of a specific culture of colonialism itself. The
upshot is quite conservative, even
anachronistically so. This critique is an internal if damning critique embodying and encouraging
pessimism largely from within the established order of knowledge that it analytically engages
and categorically replenishes and preserves. The grid politics of Wilderson's critique of "the ruse
of analogy" leaves all manner of "Blackness" in a wasteland. The routine categorical contrast with "Native
Americans" reduces all that and any colonial condition to a startlingly oversimplified matter of "land" (or "land restoration"); and it
occludes "Afro-Indian" history as well as "Red-Black" maroonage all across the Americas. The constant generic contrast with
"feminism" or "non-Black women" eclipses the more mammoth criticism of "gender" writ large in Diop and Amadiume's BlackAfrican studies of Europe or "Western Civilization" as a "racial patriarchy" of pessimism and "anti-Black" imperialism. The
contrast with Marxism and its "workers" never resurrects any issues of "class" or economics
from any other perspective to recognize or to resist, for example, the white invention of Black elites
as vital instruments of racism, anti-Blackness, and white-supremacism. There never appears a
trace of any critique of Black "social class' (or political class) elitism in "Afro-pessimism" (2.0), which is
a tell-tale sign of petty-bourgeois or "lumpen-bourgeois" articulations. Lastly, Wilderson's occasional categorical
contrast of "Blackness" with Palestinians or al-Nakba (which aligns in Arabic with the Swahili substitution for the term "Middle
Passage"—Maafa, the "Catastrophe") comprehends no Blackness in Palestine or among Palestinians. His Afro-pessimism can
envision no Afro-Palestinianism, unlike a great tradition of Pan-African discourses that also do not dislocate Palestine from an anticolonialist mapping of the African continent or the Afro-Asian landmass of a Pan-Africanist and "Bandung" imagination, one
powerfully shared by Malcolm X and Fayez A. Sayegh. For "Black Power" internationally, Kwame Ture would refer to Palestine as the
"tip of Africa" and uphold Fatima Bernawi, the iconic Black woman who's been named the "first Palestinian female political
prisoner," as the paragon of "Black and Palestinian Revolutions."30 She is likewise canonized by other Afro-Palestinian icons
themselves, such as Ali Jiddeh and Mahmoud Jiddeh of the African community of the Old City of Jerusalem, for example—or, say,
Ahmad and Jumaa Takrouri of Occupied Jericho—who are each among the greatest of all icons across Historic Palestine, a country
which has produced multiple Black Panther formations in Hebrew as well as Arabic in the 1970s and the 1980s. Again, Wilderson
tacitly "nationalizes" his category of "Blackness" although this is scarcely in the interests of Black people in or outside of the US
colonized mainland of Americanism; and so none of the above "Blackness" survives the critical grid of a very Anglo-American (and
white racist state-bound) critique of "analogy," regardless of the "Afro-pessimist" text at hand. Do not the vulgar colonial-nativist
politics of Incognegro's strangely overlooked comment on "West Indians" go full blown then in Red, White & Black and
elsewhere?31 There
is here a general critical erasure of the massive tradition of Black anticolonialism—or anti-colonial Black resistance to "anti-Blackness" and anti-Black colonialism, which transcends
nationalization. Wilderson's "Afro-pessimist" rejects the anti-colonialist paradigms of supposedly
"other" peoples, and yet in a manner that reinstates US or Western coloniality nonetheless—a white
colonialism that oppresses "the Black" inside and outside the United States's official geopolitical
limits. This position can thus make a virtue out of automatic and absolute anti-alliance postures with no further, actual political
action then required for Black people, "the Black critic," or any Black liberation struggle on this view. Such chauvinism
without political commitment or engagement beyond critique is logically consistent, for pessimism,
where mere resentment or ressentiment can masquerade as resistance or "pro-Black"
"radicalism." After all, Afro-pessimism (2.0) begins with a proud suspicion of Black liberation or Black
liberation movement, itself, no less than of its potentially "anti-racist" or "anti-Black" political
alliances. This provincial "American" pessimism reveals more affinities with Créolite in the Caribbean than Césaire's anticolonialist eruption of Pan-African Négritude, in reality, its narrowly and negatively delimited rhetoric of the "Blackness" of "the
Black" (as "Slave," of course) notwithstanding. As if this too is a virtue, pessimism
is not just suspicious of power but
possibility—while, upholding dystopia, it is casually dismissive of all historical actuality that does not
support a pessimist paradigm, orientation or sensibility. Analytically, moreover, there is somehow no white
colonialism for Blacks to fight in Africa or Black countries of Black people anywhere and no terrible landlessness that afflicts the
African diasporas of Blackness captive within white settler and/or imperial state formations, for Wilderson and Afro-pessimism (2.0).
ontology bad – coalitions
The only world they destroy is the one where things can ever improve
Haider, 18—founding editor of Viewpoint Magazine (Asad, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in
the Age of Trump pg 36-40, ebook, dml)
The assumption that only black-led organizations could organize around “their” issues, despite
the deep political divergences among these organizations—some of which represented the elite interests of a
black bourgeoisie and explicitly sought to suppress grassroots militancy—would come to have a deeply damaging
effect. Among intellectuals, the most reactionary separatist tendencies were granted the status of a
pseudo-philosophy with the ascendance of Frank Wilderson’s so-called Afro-pessimism. A fundamental
symptom of this trend was the proliferation of the term antiblackness in the place of racism. The latter, more quotidian term implies
an antiracist struggle that unites oppressed groups. The
“antiblackness” problematic radicalizes and
ontologizes a separatist, black-exceptionalist perspective, rejecting even the minimal gesture
toward coalitions implied by the term people of color. It claims, on the basis of dubious interpretations of
Gramsci and the historiography of slavery, that “blackness” is founded on “social death,” the loss of
identity and total domination imposed upon slaves at birth—despite the fact that the source of this
term, sociologist Orlando Patterson, used it to define all forms of slavery, including nonracialized
ones.7 It follows from Wilderson’s reasoning that the whole of “white” civil society is founded on this
absolute violence, the entire history of which is reduced to an effect of a purported white
enjoyment of black suffering—“as though the chief business of slavery,” in the inimitable words of
historian Barbara Fields, “were the production of white supremacy rather than the production of
cotton, sugar, rice and tobacco.”8 With ideologies of racial unity functioning as a clear block to
the development of mass antagonistic politics, it is no wonder that the seemingly extremist
languages of blackness and antiblackness seduced intellectuals into reconciliation with the
status quo. Of course, when Afro-pessimist discourse course occasionally did discuss the black political
class, its tone was one of severe criticism. But this criticism reproduced the political dynamics
that led to its rise in the first place: black leaders were castigated for their coalitionism, thus
reinforcing the ideology of racial unity that obscured their class positions; their reformist
program of bringing black people greater citizenship rights was rejected in language reminiscent
of earlier critiques of integration, obscuring the political incorporation of the black elite that
has been taking place since the end of segregation.9 The ideology of blackness in Wilderson’s Afropessimism functions as a disavowal of the real integration of black elites into “civil society,”
now hardly a “white” thing. When the lethal effects of white supremacy are exerted by a racially integrated ruling class,
blackness as an antipolitical void becomes a convenient subject position for the performance of
marginality. Separatist ideology prevents the construction of unity among the marginalized, the
kind of unity that could actually overcome their marginalization. In a 2014 radio interview, Wilderson
attacked the view that the experience of black people in Ferguson was in any way comparable to
that of Palestinians. Attributing this view to “right reactionary white civil society and so-called progressive colored civil
society,” he proclaimed: “That’s just bullshit. First, there’s no time period in which black policing and slave domination have
ever ended. Second, the Arabs and the Jews are as much a part of the black slave trade—the creation
of blackness as social death—as anyone else … Antiblackness is as important and necessary to the formation of Arab
psychic life as it is to the formation of Jewish psychic life.”10 Listening to Wilderson’s bewildering repetitions of
neoconservative Orientalist tropes, you wouldn’t know that activists in Ferguson had been in
close contact with Palestinians, who pointed out that the same tear-gas canisters were being
fired at them and shared street-fighting tactics learned from bitter experience. A solidarity statement
signed by a range of Palestinian activists and organizations declared: “With a Black Power fist in the air, we salute the people of
Ferguson and join in your demands for justice.” This solidarity was returned in January when a group of movement activists visited
Palestine. During the peak of the Black Lives Matter movement, Afro-pessimist language
spread rapidly on Twitter and
to describe police violence in terms of the suffering
imposed upon “black bodies” and to try to monopolize the very category of death. It was a
somewhat stupefying choice of words at a time when black people in Ferguson were constituting part of
a global struggle to refuse to accept suffering, to refuse to die. As Robin D. G. Kelley has pointed out,
reading black experience through trauma can easily slip into thinking of ourselves as victims and
objects rather than agents, subjected to centuries of gratuitous violence that have structured and
overdetermined our very being. In the argot of our day, “bodies”—vulnerable and threatening bodies—increasingly
stand in for actual people with names, experiences, dreams, and desires. But in fact, Kelley points out,
“what sustained enslaved African people was a memory of freedom, dreams of seizing it, and
conspiracies to enact it”—a heritage of resistance that is erased by the rhetoric of “black
bodies.” Furthermore, Kelley argues, if we argue that state violence is merely a manifestation of
antiblackness because that is what we see and feel, we are left with no theory of the state and
have no way of understanding racialized police violence in places such as Atlanta and Detroit, where
most cops are black, unless we turn to some metaphysical explanation.11 Here we get to the crux of the
problem. The “metaphysical explanation”—the classic mode of ideological superstition—obscures not only the
social relations of the state, but also the contradiction between mass insurgency and the rising
black elite that claimed to represent it. Wilderson claims that Afro-pessimism seeks to “destroy the
world” rather than build a better one, since the world is irredeemably founded on
“antiblackness.” In reality, Afro-pessimism has served as an ideological ballast for the emergent
bureaucracies in Ferguson and beyond, since the supposedly radical rhetoric of separatism and
the reformism of the elite leadership have converged to foreclose the possibilities of building a
mass movement. The “representatives” of the Black Lives Matter movement who got the most media play included the
Tumblr, encouraging a wide range of activists
executive director of Saint Louis Teach for America, an organization that has played a driving role in the privatization of education
and the assault on teachers’ unions. In fact, a group of these “representatives” enthusiastically met with the aggressively pro-charter
and pro-testing secretary of education Arne Duncan during his visit to Ferguson—white civil society or not. If
such tendencies
continue unchecked, the only world that will be destroyed is the one in which poor black
students can attend public school or expect to get a job with benefits.
at: empathy bad / various fiat k’s
It’s valuable to use political imagination based upon the principles of entangled and imperfect
empathy to construct more ethical relations, both for black and non-black people
Gruen 17 [Lori Gruen, William Griffin Professor of Philosophy, and Professor of Feminist, Gender
and Sexuality Studies and Science in Society, at Wesleyan University, “Expressing Entangled
Empathy: A Reply,” Hypatia, Vol. 32, No. 2, Spring 2017, p. 452-462]
The psychological literature is also replete with discussions of empathy as coupled with a
motivational state in order for helping action or pro-social behavior to occur.1 Generally, these
“psychological” motivational states fall into two mutually exclusive general categories: self-interested motivation and altruistic
motivation. If the self is understood as deeply relational, the distinction between these motivational states breaks down. And this is
the third sense of motivation I want to mention. Attuned moral
perception moves me to act on behalf of the
wellbeing of others who co-constitute my agency. Directing one's empathetic attention toward
others is also shaped largely by whether one is so motivated, so while entangled empathizing moves us to
action, we can alter our empathetic focus by acts of will. The process of being moved by entangled empathetic
attention and being moved to refine our empathy are part of the dynamic process of
developing our moral perception.
When one is made aware of a shortcoming in her responsiveness or a failure of her empathetic attention, when she is able, in other
words, to see that she is in a “bad” relationship, as I put it—by which I mean one of instrumentalization, exploitation, or violence, for
example—she cannot maintain that relationship and hold onto the belief that she is engaged in loving or caring attention. That sort
of attention is part of what it means to be a moral agent, I suggest, so one is at least going to be moved to change one's conception,
and I would hope, that will also lead to behavioral changes.
But there
is a deeper resonance to the question “why care?” that addresses a danger that has
been mentioned to me on a number of occasions and that all of my critics discuss. That is a worry
about the possibility of ever really, truly understanding and empathizing with another. In the book, I discuss a case worth repeating
briefly here. Two wealthy black parents who raised their children to be cautious in white society were devastated in the aftermath of
an incident in which their son, who was walking near the boarding school he attended in Connecticut, was called the “N” word. The
son became scared and angry, and felt vulnerable. This incident had a negative impact on his schoolwork and his confidence. When
the father, Mr. Graham, tried to get the attention of the administration at his son's school, he received little response. This led him
to realize that he was no better able to understand the perspective of the white people to whom he reported the incident than of
those who called his son the “N” word (Graham 2014).
In many ways Mr. Graham is right. White
people in a culture of anti-black racism cannot understand the
burden of racism. And if white people can't understand Black people, what hope is there to understand a chimpanzee in
entertainment, a dairy cow, or a lab rat? Perhaps entangled empathy is simply too optimistic to think any sort
of meaningful moral perception is possible.
Recently, I was asked by Frank Wilderson, whose work I much admire, why do I care? I got a better sense of the
force of his question after reading his paper “‘Raw Life’ and the Ruse of Empathy.”2 In it Wilderson interrogates “an optimism that
assumes relationality within and between all sentient beings.” His
analysis is that there are some beings who are
beyond relationality. “The explanatory powers of empathy and analysis are scandalized when confronted with the Black
position, a paradigmatic location synonymous with slavery” (Wilderson 2013, 184). Following on the definition of slavery provided
by Orlando Patterson as a permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons (Patterson 1988),
Wilderson sees Blackness as a form of social death, a state of being deprived of relationality. So “even
perceived moments of empathic identification with the Slave are ruses” (Wilderson 2013, 189), as one
cannot empathize with objects or beings that are not in the relation. Further, he argues that if empathy is meant to facilitate
and produce “civic relation and if anti-Blackness is the generative mechanism of this mode of production, then it becomes
understandable how and why” (201) empathy
is problematic.
There are two concerns here; the latter is not unlike the worry that Debes raises about epistemic injustice, although in a different
register. Debes says “dominant social groups trade on existing, ‘collectively’ shared—perhaps we should say, mainstream—forms of
social understanding to reach self- and interpersonal understanding. And disempowered groups are pressed to conform to these
normalized, mainstream social understandings” ($$). If
these normalized understandings require, as Wilderson says,
the social death of Black people, and these understandings are what entangled empathy is relying on, then it looks
like entangled empathy is in the service of anti-Blackness and should thus be rejected. Debes is right
insofar as this form of understanding is meant to be full understanding, and he is also onto something if the understanding required
for entangled empathy inescapably emerges from mainstream “narrative tropes.” But
I'm not sure why either needs
to be the case. Trying to fully understand is not the same as actually achieving full
understanding. Understanding among those on the margins happens all the time. Indeed, following the
insights of Black feminists, often those on the margins understand more than those at the center, as they have opportunities for
understanding both.
What I take us to be doing when we
are engaged in entangled empathetic moral attention is working through
complicated processes of understanding one another and other animals in situations of differential
social, political, and species-based power. Usually what we “get” is just a glimpse. We never really “know,”
but too many people use the idea that we can't really know as an excuse to opt out of working
at it. I take this to be a failure of both imagination and moral agency.
The second worry will be something I continue to work out, and that is a more robust description of relationality. On the relational
ontology I envisage, there
is no place beyond relations; anti-Blackness or speciesism, for example, are political
and ethical relations that view whites and humans as justified in regarding Blacks and animals as
fungible, disposable, and perhaps paradoxically, outside of relationality. But as I've suggested, the relations
we are in are not always, perhaps not even often, the sorts of things we choose. Some relations I am forced into,
some I seek to develop, some are unjust, some are harmful, some may even seek to forever deprive me of my subjectivity. And since
we are constituted in various ways by these relations, when some relations make it hard to see ourselves and others, entangled
empathy will seem almost impossible. But that
these relationships are part of us means that we can, indeed
must, work with them and try to change them for the better.
I think that
is something to care about.
hope good (wingate)
Hope is good for mental health
LaRicka R. Wingate et al., 2016. **Associate Professor and Director of Africana Studies, Oklahoma State University
(OSU). **David W. Hollingsworth, currently an Assistant Professor of psychology, Fairfield university; at the time of
this publication, graduate student in clinical psychology, OSU. **Raymond P. Tucker, graduate student in psychology,
OSU. **Victoria M. O’Keefe, currently assistant professor of health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health;
at the time of this publication, graduate student in psychology, OSU. “Hope as a Moderator of the Relationship
Between Interpersonal Predictors of Suicide and Suicidal Thinking in African Americans.” Journal of Black Psychology
42(2): 175-90. Emory Libraries.
Discussion The current study
investigated the relationships between hope, suicidal ideation, and the
interpersonal risk factors of suicidal desire (Joiner, 2005) in a sample of African American college
students. Consistent with previous literature, hope was negatively correlated to symptoms of
depression, thwarted belongingness, and perceived burdensomeness. Hope was not significantly
correlated to suicidal ideation in this sample. However, the agency subscale of hope was negatively
correlated to suicidal ideation. To expand on the simple associations between hope and suicidal ideation previously established in the
literature, the current study took a contextualist approach. More specifically, through the use of moderation
analyses this study sought to better understand the circumstances of the established
relationship between hope and suicidal ideation in an African American sample. It was hypothesized that
levels of hope would moderate the relationship between feelings of perceived burdensomeness
and thoughts of suicide. As hypothesized, the relationship between perceived burdensomeness and
suicidal ideation was moderated by hope. High levels of hope weakened the relationship
between perceived burdensomeness when statistically controlling for symptoms of depression.
In other words, at high levels of hope, the relationship between perceived burdensomeness and
suicidal ideation was no longer strong and positive as seen with low levels of hope. These results
suggest that those who are naturally more hopeful are buffered against deleterious effects (i.e.,
suicidal ideation) when experiencing feelings of perceived burdensomeness. Individuals who feel
comfortable setting goals and are motivated to achieve them may be better equipped to cope
with feelings of perceived burdensomeness. Those who are more hopeful but feel as though they are a burden on others may
be better equipped to cope with these feelings, as they may be able to naturally identify ways they can contribute to the well-being of others and are
motivated to achieve these goals. This,
in turn, may protect against thoughts of suicide when experiencing
feelings of perceived burdensomeness. Also consistent with hypotheses, high levels of hope weakened the
relationship between thwarted belongingness and suicidal ideation after controlling for
symptoms of depression. Simple slope analyses indicated that the relationship between
thwarted belongingness and suicidal ideation was strong and positive at low levels of hope but
unrelated at high levels of hope. This result suggests that even though extreme feelings of social
disconnection and unreciprocated caring are strongly associated with suicidal thinking, this
relationship may only exist in those who are low in hope. Individuals who naturally engage in
goal-directed thinking and are motivated to identify and use pathways to obtain their goals may
feel as though they are more equipped to find solutions to feeling disconnected from others. Thus,
when a hopeful individual feels thwarted in their belonging, they may be less likely to
experience the negative effects of this feeling because they are better able to work toward
connecting with others. Generally, the results of the current study indicate that African Americans
who exhibit higher levels of hope (i.e., engage in goal-directed thinking, can identify pathways to
achieve goals, and are naturally motivated to achieve their goals) may be buffered against
suicidal ideation even in the presence of prominent interpersonal predictors of suicidal desire
(i.e., thwarted belongingness and perceived burdensomeness). This investigation is timely, as the ITS has received
empirical support as a strong model of understanding suicide in the general population (i.e., Joiner et al., 2009), African Americans (Davidson et al.,
2010), American Indian/Alaska Natives (O’Keefe et al., 2013), elderly populations (Jahn & Cukrowicz, 2011), and veterans (Anestis, Bryan, Cornette, &
Joiner, 2009). Although
feelings of thwarted belongingness and perceived burdensomeness have
been linked to thoughts of suicide in African Americans in both the current investigation and
previous work (Davidson et al., 2010; Hollar, 2010; Lamis & Lester, 2012), the current study indicates that this
relationship may only detrimentally affect those African Americans who are less hopeful.
Specifically, for less hopeful participants, as their perceptions of being a burden and not
belonging increased, so did their thoughts of suicide.
More ev
Daniel B Lee 2012 -- A thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Art in the
Department of Psychology (“The Role Of Optimism And Religious Involvement In The
Relationship Between Race-Related Stress And Well-Being”
Https://Pdfs.Semanticscholar.Org/F353/5119dd12f21106b881b8ea23970ff4125ab9.Pdf) mbaalb
Although racial discrimination experiences are negatively associated with psychological wellbeing outcomes, studies have also reported considerable heterogeneity in well-being outcomes
(Miller & MacIntosh, 1999; Neblett, White, Ford, Philip, Nguyên, & Sellers, 2008). To explain this variation, researchers have examined
the role of “protective factors,” or variables that mitigate the harmful effect of exposure to
stress and adversity (Luthar & Zelazo, 2003). One such factor is optimism. Several studies suggest that
optimism may modulate the negative relationship between stress and well-being outcomes
(Peterson, 2000; Taylor, Larsen-Rife, Conger, Widaman, & Cutrona, 2010). More specifically, optimism has been found to protect the
psychological well-being of African Americans from race-related stress (Utsey, Giesbrecht, Hook, & Stanard, 2008).
Activism combats race-related stress
Caroline Reid 18, “Activism as a Source of Strength for Black College Students at Predominately
White Institutions,”
https://encompass.eku.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1588&context=honors_theses
Racism is deeply ingrained in American society, and white supremacy and the oppression of people of color has greatly contributed
to the establishment of the very institutions that continue to perpetuate its existence today. Racism manifests itself in a variety of
ways, and its most constant and daily appearance is in instances of microaggressions. These experiences contribute to feelings of
invisibility, frustration, and anger, an experience known as racism- related stress, which research has shown to severely and
negatively impact mental health. In order to combat the insidious effects of racism, Black Americans have utilized coping
mechanisms for generations. This
resiliency is astoundingly powerful, however, dealing with the
omnipresence of racism is a constant and significant internal labor. For Black college students at
predominately white institutions, microaggresions and systemic racism create a difficult
environment to navigate. Unique opportunities in activism manifest themselves as tools to
combat discrimination and racism-related stress. However, some argue that caution is needed in viewing activism
as panacea for improving the lives of people of color, particularly Black people. Indeed, some research has suggested that activism is
harmful to mental health, as it increases the intensity and frequency of experiences of perceived racism among some populations.
This thesis includes a meta-analysis that examines the findings on the effects of activism on
mental health. As a result of this analysis, a counter argument argues the potential of the
utilization of activism as a source of strength that may combat the harms of racism, supporting
the earlier claim that certain factors involved in activism may be protective in nature.
hope good (at: sullivan 17)
Their Sullivan evidence about battle fatigue is based on 3 sources –
One is a lifestyle magazine with no qualifications
Another one is a news article from the Boston Globe
We’ll insert this passage and footnotes ---
**don’t read
Sullivan 17 - Chair and Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She teaches and writes on
feminist philosophy, critical philosophy of race, American pragmatism, and continental philosophy (Shannon, “Setting Aside Hope: A
Pragmatist Approach to Racial Justice” page 238-239,
https://www.academia.edu/27794394/Setting_Aside_Hope_A_Pragmatist_Approach_to_Racial_Justice_2017_)
De facto white class privilege in the form of racial microaggressions contributes to people of
color's 'racial battle fatigue," which entails "the constant use' or redirection of energy for coping against mundane racism
which depletes psychological and physiological resources needed in other important, creative, rand productiveareas of 'life" (Smith, Hung, and Franklin 2012, 40). Racial battle fatigue has been 'linked empirically to
de- pression, tension, and generalized anxiety disorderin African Americans, and the stress
associated with all of these 'psychological problems also contributes to physiological weathering
that harms black health, contribut- ing to high rates of hypertension, cardiovascular-disease,
pre-term birth rates, and infant mortality to name a few (Smith, Hung and Franklin 2012, 37, 40; D.
Smith 2012). The effects of whige r4Cism literally get inside and help constitute they bodies of black people in harmful ways. They
wear down the body's various systems by creating a high allostatic load via stressors that accumulate over tinie. The
results are
health problems such as disproportionately high rates of pre-term birth, infant mprtality, cardio- vascular disease, diabetes,
and-accelerated physiological aging (Blitstein 2009). Racism also kills in Ways that are subtler but no less deadly
than the lyncher's noose or the neighbor's bullet (Drexler 2007), These effects, moreoverj can'be
transgenerational physiologically passed onto subsequent generations *through 'varioås epigenetic changes (Sullivan 2013).
Works Cited/Footnotes
The only STUDY is bad news for the K –
Income was the comparatively the biggest factor– proves it’s not ontological and class
outweighs
Smith et al 12 (William, Associate Professor in the Department of Education, Culture & Society and Associate
Professor, Ethnic Studies Program (African American Studies division). He serves as the Associate Dean for Diversity,
Access, & Equity in the College of Education and has a Presidential Appointment as the Special Assistant to the
President & Faculty Athletics Representative, Dr. Smith coined the term racial battle fatigue as a theoretical
framework to better understand how the biopsychosocial approach is a valuable method for examining the impact of
race-related stress to the biological, psychological, and social factors and their complex interactions in the health of
People of Color, Man Hung, Assistant Professor in the Department of Orthopaedics at the University of Utah. She is
also affiliated with the Huntsman Cancer Institute, the Center for Clinical & Translational Science, and the Division of
Epidemiology, Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Utah, & Jeremy D. Franklin, doctoral student in
the Department of Education, Culture & Society at the University of Utah, “Between Hope and Racial Battle Fatigue:
African American Men and Race-Related Stress,” Journal of Black Masculinity, Vol.2, No. 1)
*MESS = mundane extreme environmental stress
Results As Table 1 shows, the Moderate Hope group had a slightly higher proportion of younger people whereas the High Hope
group had slightly higher proportion of older people. Across all three levels of hope, at least a third of the participants had a high
school diploma. Among High, Moderate, and Low Hope individuals, about 50%, 43%, 33% had at least some college experience or
was a college graduate, respectively. While
categories of annual household income were distributed
rather evenly among the High and Moderate Hope groups, approximately half of the people in
Low Hope group had an annual household income of less $30,000. Over 40% in the High Hope group were
married. Approximately 34% and 32% of Moderate and Low Hope individuals, respectively, were married. Table 4 presents the
relationship among age, income, education, racial microaggressions, and societal problems. We found that age and educational level
significantly affected MEES. After controlling for age, annual
household income, educational level, and racial
microaggressions (b = 0.327, β = 0.258, p < 0.01) and societal problems (b = 1.199, β = 0.346, p < 0.01) still significantly
affected MEES in the High Hope group. Racial microaggressions accounted for 6.4% of the variation in
MEES, while societal problems accounted for 11.9%. However, when we looked at the group of African American
males with Moderate Hope, we found that societal problems was not significant. Only racial microaggressions (b = 0.382, β = 0.317,
p < 0.01) significantly predicted MEES in this group after controlling for demographic characteristics. The variations in MEES
accounted for by racial microaggressions were 9.8%, a nd the variations accounted for by societal problems were 3.4%. Among
African American males in the Low Hope group, the results indicated that none of the factors (i.e., ag e, annual household income,
educational level, racial microaggressions, and societal problems) have any significant influence in MEES. Racial microaggressions
and societal proble ms were no longer significant, and they only explained 3.4% and 0.5% of the variance in MEES, respectively.
Altogether, age, annual household income, educational level, racial microaggressions, and societ al problems accounted for 24.3% of
the total variation in MEES in the High Hope group, 27.7% in the Moderate Hope group, and 6.8% in the Low Hope group.
Concludes negative –hope resolves the problems of racial battle fatigue, optimism turns the k
Smith et al 12 (William, Associate Professor in the Department of Education, Culture & Society and Associate
Professor, Ethnic Studies Program (African American Studies division). He serves as the Associate Dean for Diversity,
Access, & Equity in the College of Education and has a Presidential Appointment as the Special Assistant to the
President & Faculty Athletics Representative, Dr. Smith coined the term racial battle fatigue as a theoretical
framework to better understand how the biopsychosocial approach is a valuable method for examining the impact of
race-related stress to the biological, psychological, and social factors and their complex interactions in the health of
People of Color, Man Hung, Assistant Professor in the Department of Orthopaedics at the University of Utah. She is
also affiliated with the Huntsman Cancer Institute, the Center for Clinical & Translational Science, and the Division of
Epidemiology, Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Utah, & Jeremy D. Franklin, doctoral student in
the Department of Education, Culture & Society at the University of Utah, “Between Hope and Racial Battle Fatigue:
African American Men and Race-Related Stress,” Journal of Black Masculinity, Vol.2, No. 1)
Hope appears to play a different role for the African American men in this study when compared to previous research. Race-
related socialization appears to influence how much hope is healthy or realistic (Bowman & Howard,
1985; Brown, 2008; Fischer & Shaw, 1999; Neblett, Philip, Cogburn, & Sellers, 2006). African American men with high to moderate
levels of hope had more stress associated with racial microaggressions and societal problems than did men who had low hope. Like
similar findings in the study by Danoff-Burg, Prelow, and Swenson (2004), we are encouraged from our findings that hope works
differently for African American men. Hope
appears to be correlated with a more realistic assessment of
the possibilities of experiences that African American men might face. Possessing a more
realistic understanding of the potential for racist discrimination offers these men additional
avenues for coping. Hope does not always have to be based in reality. Therefore, by having a more
accurate understanding of racial microaggressions and societal problems, these men learn to
avoid extremely harmful external control behaviors that can destroy typical or mainstream avenues for reaching
their goals. It should be clear that we are not suggesting that African American men with low or moderate
levels of hope are playing into a negative self-fulfilling prophecy or that they are not reaching their expected
goals. However, we are suggesting that low and moderate hope men are taking into account additional
realities that their high hope peers appear to overlook and therefore they are struggling with more
self-reported stressors. Under these circumstances, the opening quote from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is still
appropriate in the present lives of African American men. Moreover, in our study, to be an African American man is to
hope against hope that racial microaggressions, societal problems, and racial battle fatigue will
diminish in the near future. Thus, we agree with Stevenson (1997), African American men must possess
three important forms of racial socialization as forms of coping: proactive, protective, and adaptive. In our
study, it appears that adaptive racial socialization might be playing a significant role in reducing
stress among low hope African American men. Adaptive racial socialization is an orientation that
recognizes the racial microaggressions and racist discrimination that pervades, identifies it, and then keeps it
at bay long enough to develop room for creative counterstrategies (Stevenson, 1997). Consequently, high
hope African American men, who tend to be slightly more formally educated, older, hold full-time jobs, higher incomes, and who
married in greater numbers, are more at-risk from the relative safety that adaptive racial socialization provides. Maintaining or
developing adaptive racial socialization strategies can enhance African American men’s belief in a world that is obfuscated with
racists relations while promoting healthy self-development despite the obstacles they face (Stevenson, 1997).
at: agathangelou
Agathangelou reduces groups to stereotypes and reproduces imperial IR.
Christopher Murray 20, PhD candidate in the Department of International Relations at the
London School of Economics, “Imperial dialectics and epistemic mapping: From decolonisation
to anti-Eurocentric IR,” European Journal of International Relations 2020, Vol. 26(2) 419–442.
Then there are definitions of epistemic difference based on ‘lived experience’. Although an
improvement on territorial or raciological accounts, the ascription of cultural difference to a
generic lived experience or social subjectivity can also reduce groups of people to stereotypes
and monolithic value sets. This is evident in the work of some scholars who take Fanon
primarily as a source of ‘epistemic blackness’, without fully addressing his concerns about
racialisation and the geopolitical dimensions of decolonisation. For example, the philosopher
Lewis R. Gordon writes that ‘Fanon’s body. . . is a subtext of all his writings. ... Anxiety over
embodiment is a dimension of Western civilization against which Fanon was in constant battle.
The body, he laments, is a denied presence, and black people are a denied people’ (Gordon,
2015: 8). Even in as sophisticated an analysis of Fanon as Gordon’s, there is a danger of
essentialism through the association of black identity with a particular way of thinking. For
Fanon, black people were not so much universally ‘denied’ as relegated to certain roles within
a social hierarchy – the French empire most specifically. Blacks could be of higher or lower
status, but race was the basis for social relegation, which alienated the subject from a full,
dynamic humanity. For Fanon, every particular experience is an instantiation of the universal,
and his analysis of his own experience is a demand to be recognised as a fellow human with an
equal stake in humanity. Blackness is not a generalisable perspective from which we can derive
a non-Western knowledge, but a reminder to pay attention to the social and historical
specificity of relation.9
Embodiment arguments are usually the vehicle for Fanon’s presence in IR, and are often
accompanied with the claim that non-Westerners have profoundly different ways of practising
politics or being modern. For example, Vivienne Jabri (2014) invokes Fanon to theorise the
‘embodied presence’ of non-Western agency within international order. Anna Agathangelou
(2016) links different aspects of Fanon’s revolutionary dialectics to his conception of the
subjugated black body. She is particularly interested in how Fanon’s conception of racial
experience might present alternatives or ‘different’ ways of doing politics (Agathangelou, 2016:
111; cf. Sekyi-Otu, 2009). In a similar argument, John M. Hobson contrasts the ‘different
critique’ of ‘African-American Marxists’, including Du Bois, with ‘white Eurocentric institutional
thinkers’ like Leonard Woolf (Hobson, 2012: 17, n. 20). However, the difference is not as stark as
Hobson might hope. It is true that Woolf’s anti-racism was qualified by a belief in elite
institutional development, but so was Du Bois’s anti-imperialism.10 Areas of overlap are, thus,
obscured by the assumption that there are ‘black’ and ‘white’ ideas, which can be mapped onto
generic ‘black’ and ‘white’ social realities.
Aside from its dubious reliability, the problem with epistemic mapping is essentially the same
as the problem with the ethnicised counter claims of Du Bois or Senghor: it is too amenable to
the purposes of imperial ordering and elite representation. It creates and services the two
worlds of Said’s orientalist divide, rather than building an agenda based on analytical
approaches that constructively problematise the divide.
Liberal root cause of war is an ahistoric myth – their “Empire” impact can’t explain why
Western intervention happened in Libya and Iraq but not in Yemen
Benno Gerhard Teschke 11, IR prof at the University of Sussex, “Fatal attraction: a critique of
Carl Schmitt's international political and legal theory”, International Theory (2011), 3 : pp 179227
For at the centre of the heterodox – partly post-structuralist, partly realist – neo-Schmittian analysis stands the conclusion of The Nomos: the thesis of a
structural and continuous relation between liberalism and violence (Mouffe 2005, 2007; Odysseos 2007). It suggests that, in sharp contrast to the
liberal-cosmopolitan programme of ‘perpetual peace’, the geographical expansion of liberal modernity was accompanied by the intensification and deformalization of war in the international construction of liberal-constitutional states of law and the production of liberal subjectivities as rights-bearing
individuals. Liberal
world-ordering proceeds via the conduit of wars for humanity, leading to Schmitt's ‘spaceless
straight line is drawn from WWI to the War on Terror to verify
Schmitt's long-term prognostic of the 20th century as the age of ‘neutralizations and depoliticizations’ (Schmitt 1993). But this attempt to read the history of 20th century international
relations in terms of a succession of confrontations between the carrier-nations of liberal
modernity and the criminalized foes at its outer margins seems unable to comprehend the
complexities and specificities of ‘liberal’ world-ordering, then and now. For in the cases of
Wilhelmine, Weimar and fascist Germany, the assumption that their conflicts with the Anglo-American liberal-capitalist
heartland were grounded in an antagonism between liberal modernity and a recalcitrant Germany outside
its geographical and conceptual lines runs counter to the historical evidence. For this reading presupposes
universalism’. In this perspective, a
that late-Wilhelmine Germany was not already substantially penetrated by capitalism and fully incorporated into the capitalist world economy, posing
the question of whether the causes of WWI lay in the capitalist dynamics of inter-imperial rivalry (Blackbourn and Eley 1984), or in processes of belated
and incomplete liberal-capitalist development, due to the survival of ‘re-feudalized’ elites in the German state classes and the marriage between ‘rye
and iron’ (Wehler 1997). It also assumes that the late-Weimar and early Nazi turn towards the construction of an autarchic German regionalism –
Mitteleuropa or Großraum – was not deeply influenced by the international ramifications of the 1929 Great Depression, but premised on a purely
political–existentialist assertion of German national identity. Against a reading of the early 20th century conflicts between ‘the liberal West’ and
Germany as ‘wars for humanity’ between an expanding liberal modernity and its political exterior, there is more evidence to suggest that these
confrontations were interstate conflicts within the crisis-ridden and nationally uneven capitalist
project of modernity. Similar objections and caveats to the binary opposition between the Western discourse of liberal humanity against
non-liberal foes apply to the more recent period. For how can this optic explain that the ‘liberal West’ coexisted
(and keeps coexisting) with a large number of pliant authoritarian client-regimes (Mubarak's Egypt, Suharto's
Indonesia, Pahlavi's Iran, Fahd's Saudi-Arabia, even Gaddafi's pre-intervention Libya, to name but a few), which were and are
actively managed and supported by the West as anti-liberal Schmittian states of emergency,
with concerns for liberal subjectivities and Human Rights secondary to the strategic interests of
political and geopolitical stability and economic access? Even in the more obvious cases of Afghanistan, Iraq, and, now,
Libya, the idea that Western intervention has to be conceived as an encounter between the liberal
project and a series of foes outside its sphere seems to rely on a denial of their antecedent
histories as geopolitically and socially contested state-building projects in pro-Western fashion, deeply codetermined by long histories of Western anti-liberal colonial and post-colonial legacies. If these states (or social forces within them) turn against their
imperial masters, the conventional policy expression is ‘blowback’. And
as the Schmittian analytical vocabulary does not
include a conception of human agency and social forces – only friend/enemy groupings and
collective political entities governed by executive decision – it also lacks the categories of
analysis to comprehend the social dynamics that drive the struggles around sovereign power
and the eventual overcoming, for example, of Tunisian and Egyptian states of emergency without
US-led wars for humanity. Similarly, it seems unlikely that the generic idea of liberal world-ordering
and the production of liberal subjectivities can actually explain why Western intervention seems
improbable in some cases (e.g. Bahrain, Qatar, Yemen or Syria) and more likely in others (e.g. Serbia,
Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya). Liberal world-ordering consists of differential strategies of building, coordinating, and drawing liberal and
anti-liberal states into the Western orbit, and overtly or covertly intervening and refashioning them once they step out of line. These are
conflicts within a world, which seem to push the term liberalism beyond its original meaning.
The generic Schmittian idea of a liberal ‘spaceless universalism’ sits uncomfortably with the
realities of maintaining an America-supervised ‘informal empire’, which has to manage a
persisting interstate system in diverse and case-specific ways. But it is this persistence of a worldwide system of
states, which encase national particularities, which renders challenges to American supremacy possible in the first place.
at: redaction alt
The alt forecloses meaningful political action
Shulman, 21—teaches political theory at The Gallatin School of New York University (George,
“Fred Moten’s Refusals and Consents: The Politics of Fugitivity,” Political Theory, Vol. 49(2),
272–313, dml) [inserted “when” for grammatical integrity—insertion denoted by brackets]
In turn, radical democrats may refuse his reduction of politics to sovereignty, but if
we then identify the properly
political as nonsovereign action, as nonrule or (fugitive) refusal to be governed, we remain captive
to this demonic picture of power and its idealized other. By affirming only the “power to” of
solidarity and action in concert, we risk disavowing power “over,” as participation in rule, as
explicit rule-making, and as “ruling out” antidemocratic interests and practices. Do we imagine
that generativity thrives only by refusing rule, and not also through forms of structure and even
imposition, as parents and teachers know? As Prospero, a personification of both sovereignty and theory, finally acknowledged
Caliban as the “dark thing” he must “own as mine,” the trope of fugitivity entails a disavowed remainder, the problem of
power and rule, which needs to be acknowledged. For freedom requires not only flight from rule,
but flight into it, as a problem that no one can escape, but that a democratic politics explicitly
acknowledges and undertakes to rework by participatory practices of contest.40
Using Moten’s own idiom, I would ask: “What
if” we do not dichotomize the informal assembly and praxis
of fugitive sociality, and politics-as-rule predicated on exclusion and regulation of difference?
“What if” a democratic theory must blur the social and political but also acknowledge
inescapable, fraught, yet potentially fruitful tensions—between tacit grammar and explicit acts of translation,
between informal form and organized forms of power, between fugitive aliveness as resistance to rule, and
organizing democratic power to make claims on how the world is ruled? “What if” we refuse (not reverse) the
abstract polarity between subjection to sovereign rule as such, or statelessness as refusal to be
governed as such, and “come down to earth” as Marx put it? We then find politicality not in rule or
nonrule, as such, but in the judgments and actions by which subalterns address who makes
decisions (and how) about which practices, values, and inequalities are being ruled out, or which
encouraged, in the communities they are building by socio-poetic insurgency? In difficult historical contexts they
rework and mediate tacit grammars, customary practices, and explicit forms of organized
power as they reconstitute democratic forms of rule-making.41
These what-ifs suggest a conversation between Moten and Sheldon Wolin. The parallels are striking. Wolin depicts a “system” so “immovable and interconnected as to be unreformable as a totality”; he calls
“pessimism” a “reasoned insight” and “suppressed revolutionary impulse”; and he endorses a “rejectionism” whereby citizens “withdraw and direct their energies and civic commitment to finding new life forms.”
Moreover, “instead of imitating most political theories,” which adopt “the state as the primary structure, and adapt the activity of citizens” to it, Wolin refuses “the state paradigm” and the “liberal-legal
corruption of the citizen.” He affirms how “common life resides in cooperation and reciprocity that human beings develop to survive, meet their needs, and explore their capacities and the remarkable world into
which they have been cast.” He thus rejects Arendt’s splitting of political and social, and her valorization of the “who,” and in Moten’s terms he instead values how “entanglement and virtuosity” are negotiated in
the “common life” of the ordinary. Both theorists thus defend “preservation” of customary ways of “taking care of beings and things,” as Wolin says, against neoliberal correction, progressive promises of
incorporation, and radical romances of emancipation.42
Moten’s two antagonisms—between the few who run things and things that run, and between informal form and formalization—echo Wolin’s critique of bureaucracy, of “institutionalized systems of power,” and
of “constitutional democracy”; and Moten’s refusals resonate with Wolin’s late claim that democracy names not a form of government but “fugitive” moments of insurgency. And though Wolin seems to mean
“fugitive” only in its temporal sense of transient or fleeting, he also depicts democracy as interdicted by idioms of governance, contained by constitutions and organized power, and pathologized by norms
stipulating the legal and proper. Like blackness— though Wolin never makes this association—his democracy is (called) criminal, transgressive, and chaotic; it is feared, hunted, and enclosed, though also
“wanted,” desired, and used for legitimation. Both theorists embrace such epithets while showing how insurgency bespeaks “jurisgenerative” energies, engendered by commonality and memory, that precede and
surround formal (state-centric) politics. Their fugitive protagonists—an undercommons or popular insurgency—claim a spatial and symbolic distance from a deranged modern regime, and in Wolin’s words
“replace the old citizenship” by “a fuller and wider notion of being, whose politicalness will be expressed not in one or two activities—voting or protesting—but in many.” Of course, this very “politicalness” is one
mark of deep differences.43
Though Wolin’s awareness of racial inequality appears in repeated associations of democratic moments and social movements with black insurgency, he does not grasp how “commonality” names not (only) a
resource against enclosure but the historical production of whiteness and settler colonialism. He laments the gap between formal citizenship and genuine participation, which effectively disempowers legally
enfranchised citizens, but never construes citizenship as a racial status, “standing” as white, constituted by a racial state of exception. His hard-pressed “citizens” draw on tacit (local, rooted) customs, but he does
not credit how their “commonality” reproduces popular power by racial terror. Moten thus brings to this idiom of commonality and democracy, as to Arendt’s “common sense” and “world,” a justified
presumption that such predicates of the political mean antiblackness. But acknowledging this truth is also the premise of thinking abolition and radical democracy together.44
For if Wolin’s commonality risks racial innocence, his idea of the
political remains essential because it highlights
the foreclosures in Moten’s sociality. First, Wolin depicts both tacit commonality and explicit insurgency as contingent and, in
that sense, as political. Whereas Moten depicts sociality underwritten by ontology, and reproduced as
antiblackness generates “common habitation and flight,” Wolin sees every (under)common undone by political economy and
individualism, not only by
incorporation into formal politics. Whereas Moten imagines the “absolute sufficiency” of
(re)generated and remade only by
practices that, though “emerging out of” sociality, politicize—acknowledge, (re)articulate, or
(re)organize—tacit customs and vernacular memories. Tacit commonality is at once discovered,
remade and regenerated only [when] people make explicit claims in “public declarations,” or
visibly exercise “collective power” to “promote or protect the well-being” of a “collectivity,”
sociality informally reproduced, Wolin argues that commonality itself is
including an undercommon.45
Second, Wolin also links and distinguishes sociality and politicality by depicting the experience and practice of sharing and exercising
power. For Wolin, local or customary “institutions and practices are sustained” only by our “capacity to share in power, to cooperate
in it.” “Power to,”
generated and shared by the ongoing practices of assembly and cooperation
that Moten calls planning, is thus the basis of all other goods. But, as “distilled” from the “relations and
circles we move within”—call this Moten’s sociality—this power, at once “symbolic, material, and
psychological,” “enables political beings to act together.” As the political dimension of sociality, “power”
can be extracted by states or undermined by individualism, and thus alienated, a loss that
devitalizes the solidarity—and thereby the generative capacity—of sociality. The recurring “loss of the
political,” as capacities to articulate the tacit and organize power, reveals the nature of the political as a distinctive “mode of
experience,” for “we are always losing it and having to recover it.” But
“renewal” is always possible, partly “as human
by “creating new patterns of commonality”
across differences, and partly by (re)making “modes of action” by which to “concert their
powers.” Though grounded in sociality, Wolin’s political thus opens an interval between the tacit and the explicit, in which
experience is metabolized and (re)articulated. In this interval people question the organization of power and
rules of justice, and they answer as they “reinvent forms and practices” that express “a
democratic conception of collective life.”46
beings rediscover the common being of human beings,” partly
For Moten, of course, “democratic” and collective” signal the alienated rule that abstracts from lived sociality to “designate” a
political to represent us, whereas black fugitives refuse to be governed or represented by others but also to translate themselves
into legible political terms. In contrast, Wolin offers a potentially fruitful, not only correctional or appropriative—we might say
agonistic—relation between the tacit and the explicit. In fact, practices
of “fugitive democracy” recurrently
emerge in and from black sociality, as the practices of Black Lives Matter activism most recently
demonstrate. For sure, practices of concealment and evasion, which defend black fugitivity from surveillance,
regulatory correction, and violence, and practices of public action that engage whites and the state, are
contradictory in crucial ways, as Juliet Hooker has argued. But as Rom Coles and Lia Haro argue, frontline
communities on the underground railroad also engaged repeatedly in “flagrantly public” action
in concert, both in literal self-defense of black autonomy in its fugitive illegality, and to contest
the rule(s) of police, the law, and the state; as recent protests suggest, they viewed formal political
institutions both as “integral to white supremacy so far,” but also “as potential instruments
toward emancipatory ends.”47
If Hooker sees temporal shifts between moments of “black fugitivity” and moments of “fugitive democracy” in the thought and
practice of Frederick Douglass, Coles/Haro depict an ongoing “oscillation” between inward-facing and outward-turning practices.
Likewise, Neil Roberts defends grand marronage for seeking a “sustainable rather than fleeting form of flight” by forging
autonomous spaces, and yet, because “freedom in our world lies
not in permanent evasion of Leviathan” but
in “taming” it, he proposes an idea of “sociogenic marronage” to reconstruct “an order in need of systemic repair.” Not
coincidentally, Wolin’s fugitive democracy, though “rejectionist” and antistatist in its major chords,
includes a social democratic minor key, which notes the limits of localism and the necessity of
seeking and using state power to address structural inequality and collective fate.48
Complex and generative tensions are lost, then, as Moten recovers
the freedom schools organized by Fannie
Lou Hamer but not her organizing for the right to vote, to exercise popular sovereignty locally,
especially around police and schools, but also to create a “Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party” that
entered national politics. Hamer (like the Black Panthers and Black Lives Matter) models how
black radicalism has lived in an interval between the tacit grammar and ongoing “planning” of black
fugitivity—as loopholes of retreat practiced and concealed in plain sight—and flagrant publicity as fugitive
democracy. Whereas for Moten, the historical failure or defeat of outward-facing public action proves the futility of fugitive
democracy, I would ask: “what if” we follow his own fugitive view that any being or act is both incomplete and excessive, to infer
that specific
historical experiments are not definitive failures, but unfinished in meaning,
examples we could retrieve and refashion now? If keeping open such possibility risks cruel
optimism, foreclosing it reifies the impasse he generatively transvalues in so many other ways.
Redaction fails
Bickerstaff 17 (Jovonne Bickerstaff is a Post-Doctoral Associate, “Of Wake Work and We Who
Would Build: Centralizing Blackness in Digital Work”, February 2017,
http://aadhum.umd.edu/2017/02/centralizing-blackness-digital-work/ ///ghs-sc)
, I am drawn to Christina Sharpe’s conception of “wake work.” Wake work does not
seek to amend Black suffering through the frames of juridical, philosophical, or historical
solutions. Wake work theorizes Black life in both the “wake” and the “hold” of the slave ship,
In my own research
requiring recognition “of the ways that we are constituted through and by vulnerability to overwhelming force, though not only known to ourselves and to each other by that
force.” This is critical Black study that does not seek to make room for the full scope of Black humanity to be recognized by the white consciousness. Rather, it works to “defend
the dead” through the cultivation of a ‘blackened consciousness’ that would inhabit the ways that we are both living and dying in the wake. In my own digital humanities work
centered in New Orleans, 11 years after the storm, this means staring unflinchingly at the political, economic, and intellectual assemblages that over-determine Black life/death,
while simultaneously understanding how insurgent Black social life can undermine these over-determinations. Is digital wake work possible? If so, what can it look like? That is
the question that I intend to work through as a researcher within the AADHum Initiative. If it is indeed true that, as Moya Z. Bailey says, “All the Digital Humanists Are White, All
the Nerds Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave,” then it’s time to say—in the words of Jonathan P. Jackson—“Gentlemen, we will be taking over from here.” In our work, how can
we discover and further develop digital lines of escape, made possible by the apertures that emerge at the collision of Black Studies and the digital humanities? We who would
build: Re-visioning resistance & theorizing beyond the gaze —Jovonne Bickerstaff, Ph.D. We have two hands: one is to battle, one is to build. We battle. We resist by calling out
threats to our dignity by name. We build. We actively protect our dignity by creating what works. Those two hands may be on one person, one organization may be set up to do
both. For others, they are the battling or the building kind. Either way, the battlers need the builders. The builders need the battlers. This is a discipline of resistance. —Brittany
Packnett, activist Outlining her concept of “Black studies in the wake,” Christina Sharpe emphasizes its call “to be at the intellectual work of a continued reckoning the longue of
Atlantic chattel slavery, with black fungibility, antiblackness… accounting for the narrative, historical, structural, and other positions black people are forced to occupy.” Drawing
on Alexander Weheliye, Kim Gallon, by contrast, characterizes Black Studies as “a mode of knowledge production” that “investigates processes of racialization with a particular
emphasis on the shifting configurations of black life.” Building on the Duboisian tradition of intellectual activism that advances scholarship while furthering social justice, both
I can
see how interrogating the racial project of whiteness that shapes black folks’ lives can be a way
of speaking truth to power for African Americanist scholars. Still, focusing so acutely on
unpacking racism and racialization as sole or primary path of resistance gives me pause. I
wonder if we’ve framed what Black Studies does—and more importantly can do—too narrowly.
Might our pre-occupation with black struggle, whether in the conditions of or resistance to
oppression, make us complicit in the diminishing the fullness of black humanity and what we
might explore in it? Can we imagine examining black experience without making America’s
racialization project the dominant idiom? Recently, activist Brittany Packnett developed a Twitter thread which began, “We have
two hands: one is to battle, one is to build.” Certainly, we African Americanists know how to battle. So much of our training as scholars
prepares us for it; we’re socialized to privilege the work of critique and deconstruction. Given how black folk have been conceptualized or written out of cannons, our
proclivity towards confrontational debate may be more pronounced. We feel the pulse of that
suggest that the real and vital work on black people necessarily speaks to race—that is, analyzing the consequences of and resistance to the project of racialization.
resistance when Gallon characterizes Black Studies as “the comparative study of the black
cultural and social experiences under white Eurocentric systems of power.” But… is that
enough? Is our conception of black scholarly resistance too narrow? Taking Packnett’s call for a multifaceted strategy of
resistance to heart, I must ask, when do we build? These questions are central to who I’ve become as a scholar. Surely, I do my share of confrontational resistance, interrogating
problematic paradigms, particularly when I teach. Still, as my research agenda solidifies,
I’m more compelled by that call to build. Centering
black experience has been my entry point for moving beyond critique to imagine new narratives and inquiry to engage in what I term theorizing beyond gaze—orienting my own
work and my hopes for the AADHum Initiative. “From my perspective there are only black people. When I say “people”, that’s what I mean… No African American writer had
ever done what I did… even the ones I admired… I have had reviews in the past that have accused me of not writing about white people… As though our lives have no meaning
and no depth without the white gaze. And I have spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one … I didn’t have to be consumed
by or concerned by the white gaze… The problem of being free to write the way you wish to without this other racialized gaze is a serious one for an African American writer”
[emphasis added]. —Toni Morrison Freedom for her, Nina Simone once quipped, was the absence of fear. As a scholar and writer, my vision of freedom is more akin to Toni
Morrison’s and begins with one radical tool: choice. I name, frame, and lay claim to different terrains: examining understudied populations (couples in enduring relationships),
raising novel questions (how emotional strategies for resilience impact intimacy), and situating my research in unorthodox literatures (sociology of emotions vs. “the black
family”). In every case, each she/he/they that I describe is, by default, black. Refusing to explicitly qualify race in work on black people can be jarring because having non-white
In addition to disturbing notions of black folks as the perpetual other,
theorizing beyond the gaze forces us to recognize how failing to fully account for positionality
undermines our theorizing. If we uphold confrontation as the primary or most effective tool of
resistance, I fear we risk neglecting how resistance requires and has always relied as much on
subversive tactics like theorizing beyond the gaze as on direct action. In the AADHUM initiative, I hope that helps us
experiences centered is so rare.
think through how can we begin to construct a “meaningful intellectual and activist challenge that circumvents the analyses of injustice that re-isolate the dispossessed, à la
McKittrick’s invocation of Gilmore. It’d be easy (and reductive) to see black Twitter simply as an offshoot of mainstream Twitter use. But what if we saw it instead as innovation
narrative, à la Steve Jobs and iPods and iPhones, whereby they’re responsible for optimizing technology use in ways that reveal its fullest potential? Or conversely, could we
invert the arrows of co-optation, which typically focuses on stolen African American products, to reveal how communities of color used Twitter and Vine towards subversive
Ultimately, how, when and why
we enter as African Americanists, seems to turn largely on who we are working for and what we
are working towards. The aim is not to abandon the battle, but simply to recognize that, while
necessary, it is insufficient.
ends of mobilizing social change (i.e. BLM), celebrating black joy in the mannequin challenge or viral memes on Vine?
at: curry 13 / anti-ethics
Anti-blackness doesn’t corrupt all ethics.
Naomi Zack 17. University of Oregon. 03/07/2017. Review of Stain Removal: Ethics and Race. Notre Dame
Philosophical Reviews, https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/stain-removal-ethics-and-race/.
Miller begins by claiming
that there cannot be an ethics of race because an ethics of anything
presupposes that its subject can be perceived or correctly described in some "factual" or value-neutral way,
because it is "outside" of ethics. But race is already evaluative (evaluated) throughout the modern period, beginning
systematically in philosophy with Kant's ordinal (ranked, with whites first) taxonomy of human races. Miller's insistence that race is already inexorably
evaluative is based on his emphasis of the importance of myths about the transfer of value through heredity and physical embodiment. Physical
embodiment is the object of perception, so that racial identities are what Bernard Williams has called "prejudicial objects." Miller claims that value-
laden myths about race have criminalized some human bodies in a tradition of "blessing and curses." By
contrast, and in opposition, Enlightenment ideas about moral responsibility made it possible for
individual autonomy in a single lifetime -- the individual creates her own fate through choices. Ethics is thereby born, but only
in opposition to the tradition of hereditary blessings and curses. And the ethical tradition of individual
responsibility requires the tradition against which it reacted, as well as those who remain
identified with the "blessing and curses" tradition, that is, racialized "others." Miller outlines these core
ideas in his Introduction. In chapter 1, he argues that ethical emphases on deeds neglect accompanying evaluations of the agent. Chapter 2 considers
how subjectivity could be "reconfigured" in terms of affiliative relations that transfer value, when awareness of what is determined could operate as a
"circuit breaker" on the forces determining value (pp. 77-8). Chapters 3 and 4 are an analysis of ancient Greek and early Christian thought about the
origination of value and ethical knowledge as part of the natural world. Here, Miller shows how value first emerged after action was deemed criminal, a
structure that is proto-typical for the historical emergence of race. Miller's Conclusion is not a "happy ending," because ethical inheritance still
dominates the subject seeking freedom and nothing, not even a reversal of existing racial power structures, can undo the past. Miller ends with a
passage by James Baldwin which expresses a tension between acceptance of cursed/criminalized inheritance in the first paragraph and a thirst for
vengeance in the second: The custodian of an inheritance, which is what blacks have had to be, in Western culture, must hand the inheritance down
the line. So, you, the custodian, recognize, finally that your life does not belong to you: nothing belongs to you. This will not sound like freedom to
Western ears, since the Western world pivots on the infantile, and, in action, criminal delusions of possession, and of property. . . . But the people of
the West will not understand this until everything which they now think they have has been taken away from them. In passing, one may observe how
remarkable it is that a people so quick and so proud to boast of what they have taken from others are unable to imagine that what they have taken
from others can also be taken from them. (p. 171) The controversy I predicted at the start of this review is unlikely to unite moral philosophers and
philosophers of race, because both traditional moral philosophers and progressive anti-racist philosophers will recognize a fundamental criticism of
their entire enterprise in this work. Enigmatic questions are raised for both groups of scholars: Is
race such a fundamental category
of human existence that it overrides basic assumptions about how we can develop our characters and regard others?
Can the historical contingency of race override the more important concerns and projects involving
character development and assessment? How does the importance of what we now take to be ethical
concerns and projects compare with the power of the value-imbued ontology of race? If race is
already embedded in racial ontology, why is it not possible to resolve that circularity through
careful analysis that recognizes this problem, without seeking to purify racial ontology as it is
commonly taken to be? Philosophers of race might already recognize the morally bad aspects of race throughout
history and advocate mourning and memorial, as well as resolve to resist the morally bad aspects of race
in their own discourse. In fact, most philosophers of race who seek to retain racial categories proceed exactly in that way. Similarly,
ethicists could take special care to cultivate awareness of how their moral prescriptions and systems
exclude or already criminalize nonwhites. Although, as noted, Miller claims that the enterprise of ethics is
impossible without nonwhite racial others who are already considered morally bad or not qualified to be
ethical subjects or objects, he has given little support for this sweeping assertion. Surely, the
abolitionist movement against slavery, white supporters of the U.S. civil rights movement, and international
humanitarian discourse disturb that generalization, if only as an empirical matter. Finally, although Miller
resists addressing race as racism, it
is difficult to understand how his analysis of race as a stain that cannot
be removed from ethics and his analysis of ethics as ineradicably white (or not nonwhite) does not
amount to deep analysis of anti-nonwhite racism. Miller's book is a short, dense, brilliant, and fascinating work that is very important for
its historical and phenomenological depth of analysis. Miller's analysis proceeds by unveiling or positing a horrible but compelling prophecy that to
remove ideas of nonwhite race as curse would also remove the need for ethics. The question is whether there would be interest in taking responsibility
if some individuals were no longer burdened by hereditary criminalization. The illogic of
this question, that A is motivated to
be ethical because B is not ethical, is alleviated if those "others" so burdened are recognized as
projections of the ethical self -- that is, criminalized B is a projection of ethical A. Still, removing
the need for ethics by removing what it is a rebellion against, namely the tradition of
determined badness or criminalization, does not necessarily preclude some people from
gratuitously choosing to be good. That already happens when ethics is purely secular and some
are kind.
at: pornotroping (leong)
Abandoning relational empathy as pornotroping fails
Raengo 17.
Alessandra. Associate Professor of Moving Image Studies, Georgia State University and coordinator of liquid
blackness, a research project on blackness and aesthetics. “Dreams are colder than Death and the Gathering of Black Sociality.”
Black Camera 8(2): 120-36. Emory Libraries.
Arthur Jafa's 2013 essay film Dreams are colder than Death begins as a lyrical meditation on the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream"
speech conducted through interviews with African-American intellectuals—the specialists, as Jafa calls them—such as Hortense Spillers, Fred Moten,
Saidiya Hartman, and Nicole Fleetwood; filmmaker Charles Burnett; ex–Black Panther and professor Kathleen Clever; musician Flying Lotus; and visual
artists Kara Walker and Wangechi Mutu, among others.1 Quickly, however, the film detours toward more fundamental and open-ended questions,
[End Page 120] such as "What is the concept of blackness? Where did it come from? And what does it mean for people of color living in America
today?"
Weaving together lyrical slow-motion images of black people—the uncommon folks—mostly in outdoor spaces hanging out, walking around, or talking
to one another, with images of dark waters or deep space, the film creates a tapestry within which the voices of some of the most powerful
contemporary black artists and thinkers engage in a meditation on the ontology of blackness and its relationship to life, death, and the concept of the
human in the context of the "afterlife of slavery."2
That the social existence of blackness has to be understood within the context of the "afterlife
of slavery" is the position held by scholars that identify with the conversation described as AfroPessimism,3 while the ascendance of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, founded by three queer
women—Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi—can be seen to vindicate the "AfroOptimist" position that affirms instead the primacy, vibrancy, and generative capacity of black
social life.4
To be sure, this opposition stands more strongly in the eyes of critics of Afro-Pessimism than those of its supporters, as Jared Sexton has recently
articulated in his article "Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word," where he describes Afro-Pessimism as an ars vita "because it emerges from within a
global catastrophe so total that the creation or production of a black poetry, a black art, a stylization of the black body, a black sense of place cannot
but be invented wholesale [. . .] without a future promising anything different or, rather, better."5 In what, to date, is the most explicit alignment of the
goals of Afro-Pessimism with those of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, the overarching question Afro-Pessimism, as an art vita, poses then becomes,
"How do we create a world where black lives matter, to everyone or, rather, to everyone else as well? What economies—political, libidinal, symbolic—
must be destroyed or negated, what others forged or affirmed?"6
The film addresses this issue through the words of Moten, who asks, "When
you say that black people are just an
effect of slavery you raise a question: can black people be loved? Not desired, not wanted, not acquired, not lusted after . . . can
blackness be loved?" By posing this question, especially in the current context within which the intimacy between blackness and death has
become increasingly obscenely clear, the film holds these apparent opposites in suspension.7
This essay reads Dreams as the aesthetic articulation of the fact of black love. The film's structure, I argue, effectively performs the very networks
of solidarity, grief, and grievance that are some of the goals of #BlackLivesMatter.8 In other words, my
reading finds in the film's edits—which I approach as passages, as I will explain below—the expression of its own balancing act between the
commemoration of a speech so closely associated with fantasies of equality and freedom, and the philosophical and artistic decision to
frame [End Page 121] it through the concept of death.9 In other words, the decision is to approach all this from the midst of an
ongoing genocide, a place where the dream has given way to the coldness of an endless deferral, to
the solitude of a corpse abandoned too long in the middle of the street.10
The film holds these two poles in balance while reflecting on their implications: on the one hand, the recognition, as Spillers puts it in the film, that
slavery is such a powerful and huge phenomenon that in some ways it is still present—a statement we hear over an image of dark waters—and, on the
other hand, the repeated association of blackness with images of galaxies and deep space, which, instead, affirm its life-giving force and cosmic reach.
Through its aesthetic "liquidity"—i.e., the way in which it enacts unobstructed and yet unprecedented "passages" between seemingly disparate and
incongruous concepts and situations, as well as the facility with which it travels across scale, from the molecular to the celestial—the film connects
experiences of personal grief to the expression of grievance, to reflections on the challenges blackness poses to the conception of the human subject
and her freedom. It performs, in other words, what Sexton describes as a series of conceptual moves "from the empirical to the structural or, more
precisely, from the experiential to the political ontological."11
One methodological premise of this essay is that the film's edits have to be regarded as types of passages, that is, as very similar, at least in spirit, to
those L.A. Rebellion filmmaker Larry Clark adopted in his film Passing Through (1977). For years, Jafa has been "obsessed" about this cult film that, by
many accounts, has successfully transposed the compositional principles of jazz improvisation into filmmaking and thus reached a powerful synergy
between free jazz and film form.12 In his work, Clark leverages the adventurous expansiveness of free jazz to connect, and therefore pass through, a
variety of seemingly incongruous or remote spaces, making adjacent, for example, sites of artistic improvisation and sites of systemic oppression,
spaces of addiction and spaces of healing, the US racial scene and Third World revolutionary struggles. These very passages, which Jafa has carefully
studied since his time at Howard University, which had purchased a print of the film through his mentor Haile Gerima, are precisely what joins so
essentially the aesthetics and politics of the film. They also stand as testimony that blackness
requires incredibly capacious
frameworks to gather and comprehend its audacious transitions.
Thus, methodologically speaking, this essay interprets the film's editing structure—beautifully executed by Dreams' producer and editor Kahlil Joseph—
and, in particular, the elements that the film posits as adjacent, as indices of the
network of love and care that
#BlackLivesMatter also seeks to establish as a way to counteract state-sanctioned antiblack
violence.
The balance that Dreams performs between the thinking of life and the thinking of death is also attained by the particular way in which the film [End
Page 122] dislodges some of the very conditions for black surveillance by having voices disjointed from bodies, faces made hardly legible because shot
against intense natural light sources and a pervasive use of slow motion that creates a sense of another space, an alternative—perhaps suspended—
dimension, and different sets of expectations and constraints, within which black bodies can move at their own chosen pace.13
This image/sound disjunction, whereby the interviewees' voices are strategically recorded independently from the image, establishes its own passages
connecting otherwise distant or disparate things, including the passage from the "particular universal" of the queer identities of #BlackLivesMatter's
founders to the capaciously collective ("All Black Lives Matter" is the claim on their website) and, by extension "all people," which is one of the main
guiding ideas of the #BlackLivesMatter movement.14 It is in this way, I will show, that the film claims for blackness an expansiveness and intelligence
that reaches across space and time and therefore can be seen to attain its own “fugitivity,” a line of escape, as Moten
describes it, an
optimistic thinking "on the run," rendered here, in Melissa Louidor's words, as a "mobilization of Black vitality, in
which biomechanic and metaphysical forces are deployed to activate effort; an effort that is integral to claiming survival."15
Dis-joining and Re-joining
The study of filmic movement and sound has been a central preoccupation for Jafa since his collaboration with Julie Dash in Daughters of the Dust
(1991). For years he researched ways to bring "intonation and inclination down to actual movement" and to manipulate motion in concordance with
black people's handshakes—that is, to find a different integrity and comfort or ease between black sound and black body, black image and black
motion.16 For this film, he decided to record the sound of the interviews separately from their images, which are consistently overexposed or shot at
oddly tilted and unusual angles, or in extreme close-up, so that the faces might be present but not necessarily legible, and legibility quickly becomes
irrelevant anyway (fig. 1).
There are two main reasons for this choice. First, the decision not to use direct sound in his practice came in part as a matter of production
circumstances. Early on, after his experience on the set of Charles Burnett's My Brother's Wedding (1983), shot on location in Watts, Jafa realized that if
he wanted to film in black neighborhoods, he would have to add sound in post-production: as he explained, black neighborhoods have all kinds of
environmental noises that cannot be put on hold. He adopted this practice because of his commitment to working on location, with nonprofessional
actors, to cast against (the industrial) grain, on the footsteps of neorealist filmmakers. [End Page 123]
At the same time, Jafa's decision about sound recording performs a powerful critique of the problem of forced coherence between black voice and
black body that has been a staple of the film industry since Hollywood's transition to sound.17 This is what he has attempted to reproduce by casting
from the streets: for example, the possibility to choose on the basis of people's natural movements and then pair them in postproduction with
someone whose voice has the right sound. This affords the possibility to combine various voices to produce transgender sounds, ultimately, as he
describes it, to take the same liberties with sound and voice that black musicians have historically taken with their music. In many ways, this is a
particularly "black move" in the sense that this disarticulation of image and sound performs a critique of the very properties of self-possession that
constitute "the existential issue for Black Americans."18
While, on the one hand, as Kahlil Joseph also confirmed, separate sound recording creates a different comfort zone where people can speak freely,
without being policed by the camera, it also affords a different rendering of aural style in the sense that ultimately the sound of what one says, as well
as the posture and movements that go with it, might have a deeper stylistic mark than the specific content of what is being said.19 Movement,
including the movement induced by editing, in other words, might attempt to translate a speaking style, or the sound design might strive to render the
texture of a stroll, and so on.
To push this strategic disconnection and reconnection between sound and image even further, at some point the interviewers—i.e., Jafa or Greg [End
Page 124] Tate—asked the interviewees what were the things they truly believed. Recorded independently from the image, the interviewees express
themselves rather freely. As a result, the film is punctuated with exceptionally powerful statements—" I know that . . . I know that"—one of which
opens the film. This knowledge, the film argues, is a combination of knowing, feeling, and believing; it is ultimately what Moten describes as a type of
knowing "under the rubric of faith," which he considers to be the theological component of Black Studies. Even more profoundly, this knowledge is the
expression of a "thinking [that is] irreducible in blackness," a statement that is overlaid to the image of a filament spectacularly detaching from the sun
(fig. 2).
Black Flesh
The film opens with a quasi-still and fairly flat image of a young man slowly turning his head right to left while also looking into the camera, as Spillers's
voice is heard making a commanding and unconditional assertion: "I know that." Her voice continues over the image of a backward movement: we see
young men somersaulting out of (instead of into) a swimming pool in slow motion, their bodies remaining temporarily suspended in midair: "We are
going to lose this gift of black culture unless we are careful," she elaborates, "this gift that is given to people who don't have a prayer." Her [End Page
125] voice screeches for emphasis around the word "prayer" and is cued to the frozen close-up of one of the young men in the pool who looks intensely
at the camera (fig. 3). [End Page 126]
Juxtaposed to two lynching images, Spillers's in Selma voice continues: "beat our skins off our bodies; kill and rape our mamas in front of us." As she
repeats for the last time that "we didn't have a prayer," the film's first "abstract" image appears, possibly the picture of a molecular structure, with
clearly visible filaments and small translucent masses; it is an image enigmatic enough that it suggests a dimension blackness possesses that does not
necessarily belong to the phenomenological world but rather expands unbound across scale (fig. 4).
Spillers continues over slow motion images of people walking down the street:
Now we are heads of international courts, President of the United States, we sit in the United States Supreme Court, Presidents of Universities, CEO of
American Express. . . . Some black person is it.
But the price of that is to lose this precious insight that connects you to something human and bigger than white folks—I don't give a fuck what color
the folk—something bigger than that.
We are losing that connection because we are buying this other shit.
"I know that. I know that," she concludes over increasingly hazy images of semi-opaque glass panes at dusk, as the camera is looking onto trees and
green outside (fig 5).
Here transparency is blocked in favor of an emphasis, not on the haptic properties of these images, but rather on their "intransitive" character—they
[End Page 127] don't convey any clear and readable relation to what she is saying, they don't lead anywhere else—so that they can also be "arresting"
and create a moment of philosophical suspension.
After a fade to black, one of the filmmakers explains in voice-over how Dreams began as an assessment of "the roles and ambitions of the Civil Rights
Movement in the United States," fifty years after Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech to gather "thoughts and conversations of an America that is rarely
heard." These words unfold over two images of deep space and a close-up of colorful light reflections on dark waters that show all the chroma of the
visible spectrum, as if slipping into blackness and back to color, from color into blackness. (fig. 6).
The voice-over continues:
"In the process the filmmakers discovered even a more fundamental set of questions: What is the concept of blackness? Where did it come from? And
what does it mean for people of color living in America today?" The last question is posed over the image of a black star-child that fades into the title,
Dreams are colder than Death, while the sound design bears an outer-space quality reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1969).
This transition embodies the connection with something bigger that Spillers described earlier. It is also steeped in Jafa's admiration for Stanley Kubrick's
film, which he saw when he was ten and which provided him with "a model for how powerful art could be."20 Despite being initially utterly puzzled by
2001, he eventually understood his fascination with the "glacial pageantry" of the film in part because a "nascent melancholy" emerged as he began to
recognize "categorical constraints" dictated by his blackness. Yet, he also registered the "transfixing" and "unprecedented blackness" of the inhabitants
of the Mississippi Delta region where he grew up, including their [End Page 128] "arresting beauty and dense corporeal being," which he ultimately
described as "the dark matter of black being."21 In this context, he read 2001's horror vacui as animated by a profound fear of "black being
contaminating white being, which, by the very nature of the self-imposed fragile ontological construction of white being, equals the annihilation of
white being."22
Yet, what happens when the dark matter of black being, rather than the atavistic whiteness of 2001, is placed at the center of the textual system?23
One way Jafa attempts this radical recalibration is through Spillers's influential notion of the flesh. She discusses how her sister was subjected to a
partial amputation and yet continued to feel an excruciating pain in her phantom leg, as if her pain remembered, so to speak, the part of the leg that
was no longer there. She calls this "flesh memory" in a manner that echoes Elizabeth Alexander's argument in her article "Can You Be Black and Look at
This?," that is, the idea that there is a bodily archive of practical memory that is reactivated at the moment of collective spectatorship of the black body
in pain.24 For Spillers, the flesh results from the "theft of the body" that occurs in the Middle Passage.25 It is also a way to describe, as Alexander
Weheliye has done, the ungendering inscription of domination onto the biopolitical dimension of the slave body as well as the slave's availability as raw
material.26
"We were available in the flesh to the slave master," her voice-over explains, "immediate; hands on," and these words are layered over a slowmotion
image of a woman crossing the street. "I can pluck your nappy head from wherever it is. Bang!," Spillers continues. The sound of her "Bang!" is cued to
the image of the same woman, who now turns in slow motion toward the camera with a puzzled and inquisitive look, as if reacting to Spillers's
mimicked slap (fig. 7). [End Page 129]
"How many kids you have here? Bang! Bang!" Spillers continues.
This layering establishes a call-and-response between the scholar's voice and the "uncommon people" it is laid over by moving through the "passage"
that this very layering produces and toward the
experience of the flesh as a source of empathy; it also
reinforces the very connection that Spillers worries might be lost.
Not only does the empathy of the flesh, as rendered here, vividly materialize the network of
solidarity, grief, and grievance that #BlackLivesMatter supports, but it locates it within a cosmic
context. As Spillers introduces the concept of empathy, the film transitions from a close shot of her face temporarily obscured by foliage as she is
walking under a tree, to a shot of the word "TERROR" carved on a black man's chest—a quite literal representation of Spiller's concept of the
"hieroglyphics of the flesh"—to an image of the Centaurus galaxy. The
flesh here is what binds people who slavery
deprived of their "body," and yet, this passage suggests, it is also, possibly, cosmic black matter.
The Dark Matter of Black Being
Key to Jafa's understanding of the "dark matter of black being" in 2001 is the fact that the monolith is a sentient black object, although its blackness, as
well as its perfectly smooth and polished modernist surface, might ultimately obscure this very sentience.27 In Christina Sharpe's words, black
sentience, just like black pain, is "anagrammatical blackness," an "index of violability," which also means, as Calvin Warren explains, that the
metaphysical violences directed at black lives "are indecipherable because they constitute a non-sense sign within the grammar of redress and
humanism." While unreadable to the outside, they are affectively felt, where affect provides "form for an experience anti-blackness places outside
ethics."28 Drawing on Hortense Spillers's field-defining essay "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," one of the issues both AfroPessimism and #BlackLivesMatter insist on is the need to find an appropriate grammar for black pain. If "suffering," as Sexton puts it, is a "simple
enough term for withstanding the ugliness of the world—and learning from it—[then] Afro-Pessimism is, among other things, an attempt to formulate
an account of such suffering, to establish the rules of its grammar."29
Black sentience and suffering are appropriate "black matter" for the type of knowledge and flesh memory on which Dreams insists. Saidiya Hartman,
for example, shares her relationship with premature death: how she knows too many people who died young, including all the guys she had crushes on
in her youth. Similarly, she knows her life could end at any [End Page 130] minute because of an act of gratuitous violence. The social existence of
blackness, she says, is one of "intimacy with death."30 Yet images of human suffering in the film are all historical rather than contemporary, and even
this latter statement happens in conjunction with an image of a mother and three girls absorbed in their own thoughts, walking in slow motion toward
the camera (fig. 8).
Horizontal passages such as this one register as assertions of the equal preciousness, and equal enigma, of all black lives. They establish affective links
and therefore enact what Sharpe might call "wake work" and which Warren would describe as "black care."
At the same time, and overall, they can be seen as a form of gathering in a way that stages also the "Thingness of blackness" in the Heideggerian sense
that Moten follows in his essay "The Case of Blackness." There, he claims for blackness that status of Thing, a "gathering as contested matter"—both
Sache, that is, gathering, and Ding, that is, the "matter under discussion"—a thingness that pours out of the object, and, like troubled air, escapes from
its vestibule. This "breath," he argues, this outflowing of "stolen life," describes the ontological vitality of blackness—its unbound and ungraspable
Thingness—as a constitutive and dangerous supplementarity, a "transplanted organ, always eliciting rejection."31
This type of gathering, as Sarah Cervenak similarly writes in her reading of Leonardo Drew's sculptures, "ceremoniously aestheticizes rejectable life,
making way for the im/proper regard of its unencroachable (always [End Page 131] unfigurable) value."32 Thus, in this gathering of the "dark matter of
black being" across scale—from the microscopic to the cosmic—as well as horizontally, Dreams too institutes the networks
of care that
transform #BlackLivesMatter from a concept to a movement, insofar as in their very gathering,
black lives acquire "the weightedness of being [which] comes through precisely through a kind of deregulated
togetherness."33
Indeed, structurally speaking, the film can be regarded as an archival "gathering" of still and moving images—both archival and contemporary images,
found and original, recognizable and unrecognizable—which
include footage of the interviewees as well as other
people who are not named, whose connection to the speaking voices is not known and cannot be
guessed.
The film features a number of still images that also appear on APEX_TNEG, a "proof of concept" piece, originally developed with Malik Sayeed, in which
still images quickly flash by in a variety of different orders and combinations. Jafa has modified this montage several times over the years, and it follows
rather closely Jafa's "collecting" practice and his sense that individual elements acquire a measure of additional density just by virtue of being gathered
together.34
A great part of the film's gathering occurs in the "bosom" of the cosmos itself. When Rich Blint asks, "How do you know that you are free without
captivity?" his question is posed over a stunning image of Saturn's moon Dione (fig. 9).35 [End Page 132]
The image of the NGC 3621 Galaxy shown while Nicole Fleetwood explains that "there is something unique about black expressive culture" also
underscores this dimension. We can say that anagrammatical blackness reappears here but this time as an index of potentiality, "blackness anew,
blackness as a/temporal, in and out of place and time putting pressure on meaning and that against which meaning is made."36 More specifically, this
Galaxy is believed to have a system of three black holes at its center, one of which is active and swallows matter while producing radiation.37
Fleetwood explains that she was raised with a working-class black female religious sensibility, and that, at the church where her grandmother was the
music director, it was music, and not the sermon, that would drive the service. Indeed, music acted as a mechanism capable of generating energy. Her
words are laid over images in part inspired by Hart Leroy Bibbs's Manifesto Optksorption, a 1977 collection of poems and long-exposure photographs of
jazz musicians as they are playing. The traces of the musicians' movements linger around their figures as squiggles of light that blur the figures'
contours, arguably one of the closest photographic counterparts to the "intensities" that traverse Francis Bacon's paintings, which Deleuze discussed to
illustrate the "logic of sensation" (fig. 10).38
Jafa knows Bibbs's work, and he too has been making similar images because he is equally invested in the energizing and expansive intensity of black
music. A similar jazz image comes back during Moten's discussion of blackness as a critique of ownership and of the proper. "We have been placed in a
position that requires us to break the law, to disobey," Moten explains, and [End Page 133] thus blackness displays an irreducible relation between law
making and law breaking, legality and criminality. Not contingently, but historically: during slavery, he elaborates, black gathering was illegal. Yet this
also means that blackness is involved in a jurisgenerative process whereby formal innovations are necessarily types of lawbreaking (while lawbreaking
might also always conduce to formal innovation). What Miles Davis and John Coltrane were doing, he elaborates, was to break the very rules that they
had established the night before, while their improvisatory acts performed a disruption of both property and propriety.
There are no imaginable circumstances within which #BlackLivesMatter could make a similar claim. In the discourses and practices in which it
intervenes, where "white safety equals black murder," criminality does not have a philosophical meaning, but it is rather the overarching framing within
which blackness is seen to operate, before and regardless of any actions actually taken.39 Yet, Moten and Harney insist, in an essay devoted to Michael
Brown, "If we refuse to show the image of a lonely body, of the outline of the space that body simultaneously took and left, we do so in order to
imagine jurisgenerative black social life walking down the middle of the street—for a minute, but only for a minute, unpoliced, another city gathers,
dancing."40
Mattering Blackness
Filling the frame in extreme close-up, and barely emerging into visibility, silhouette artist Kara Walker rubs her eyes.
"When I work . . . I find myself in this kind schism, in this kind of mercurial space, that is sort of non-gendered and non-raced," she says over some of
her most famous silhouette installations. "My skin keeps trying to stick itself back on. . . . I become aware of the skin and everything that comes with it.
. . . And then it comes detached, only slightly, not all the way." Now an extreme close-up of her lips occupies the left side of the frame. "I am getting
this image of retinal detachment. The skin is literally folding away and it's gory and grotesque and that's where I feel like when I am at home." Seen in
extreme close-up now, her eyelid occupies the right side of the frame (fig. 11).
"It is not a safe place to be," she continues, "but one where you can kind of look at the underside of race . . . what is being escaped from." She
proceeds: "What is this existential horror that one can feel about being kind of invisible . . . being kind of a heavy presence / a heavy non-presence?" It
is a question heard over an image of waves hitting a shore dotted with black rocks.
The space she describes is no longer purely cosmic but also mental and epistemological—a space for the skin to slightly detach and raciality [End Page
134] to be placed in suspension. This
is a space for the flesh to be not the product of dispossession but
rather the location of pure sentience, one that the film translates through a process of
mattering: from Walker's actual flesh, seen from an unnaturally close proximity, as if the camera aspired to eliminate any distance whatsoever
between itself and its profilmic subject, to "dark waters," and eventually to the extreme close-up of an older man slowly nodding his head. Here, too,
black gathering produces weight, density, and mass.
Black matter gathers, Dreams shows, but also remembers. Spillers narrates the loss of family members: her father and mother, her niece, her nephew,
and her last sibling. The details seem at first very specific to her contingent experience; yet she claims that in this process she discovered something she
didn't know: "dying is really real. It is really nonnegotiable." The particular universal of her loss traces the same network #BlackLivesMatter attempts to
travel by giving way to the capaciously collective, and beyond that, to the universal fact of dying. All lives end. Not just black lives.
It is at this point that, through Moten's words, the film poses its crucial question about loving blackness regardless of its relationship to the after-life of
slavery:
I know there
is such a thing as blackness—not an effect of horror—it survives horror and terror. It
can be loved, and it has to be loved; it should be defended; it should be nurtured. [End Page 135]
I know those things to be true.
I know those things.
As he explains the source and nature of his knowledge, he also affirms the constant thinking that is "irreducible in blackness." The image of the sun
mentioned at the beginning then transitions to a slow-motion close-up of Spillers laughing broadly (fig. 12), as if exhilarated, perhaps in passage toward
a suspended lightness that springs from the knowledge of black love.
If we win that black relationality is possible, it disproves pornotroping. They assume that the
relationship between non-Black and Black is SOLELY one of domination. This denies Black
agency and the history of resistance
Tamura A. LOMAX 11. Doctoral Student in Religion, Vanderbilt. Hortense Spillers served on
Lomax’s doctoral committee. “Changing the Letter: Theorizing Race and Gender in Pop Cultural
‘Media’ Through a Less Pornotropic Lens.” Dissertation. May.
http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-03282011101108/unrestricted/LomaxDissertatonFull.pdf.
However, it is important to note that while
black women and girls are impacted by superimposed pornotropic
ways of being seen, a distinction is to be drawn between identities as produced by others and
identities as appropriated and performed by black women and girls themselves. Therefore, although identities are
superimposed onto black women and girls’ bodies, they are always contested and appropriated. Despite contestation
and appropriation, culturally produced and maintained ideas about identities are also so hegemonicly determined that they appear normative and are
thus internalized. Although
the pornotropic gaze may be internalized, simultaneously operating may
also be their contestations, notwithstanding how difficult resistance to pornotropic gazing may
be, particularly as they are intermeshed with reality and as such, difficult to resist altogether.¶
Exploring the pornotropic gaze and its determinacy within contemporary black religion 12 and cultural media 13 is the major aim of this dissertation.
Womanist theologians and ethicists created a cross-pollinated theo-ethical trajectory that demarginalized and re-presented North American black
women as thinking and feeling moral agents with experiences worthy of academic inquiry. Pivotal to their discourse is demythologizing black
womanhood and its variety of cultural representations. However, a major proposition circulating throughout this dissertation is that, while womanist
theoethical discourse opens space for examining North American black women’s experiences and representations, what is needed to move that
discourse forward in African American Religion14 from its dependencies on restricted analyses of black women’s experiences, methodological
limitations and normative conceptual restrictions, is an examination of the manner in which the force of representational epistemes operate in black
religion and culture to over-determine contemporary black women and girls’ experiences within a pornotropic gaze. ¶ This dissertation argues that
religious and cultural media are socially organized technologies of power that reproduce, maintain, circulate, and exchange historical myths on black
womanhood, which black women and girls both resist and appropriate. 15 Notwithstanding how they may be resisted or appropriated, operative
historical myths need to be deconstructed and, in many cases, disoriented. This dissertation achieves this by “changing the letter.” “Changing the
letter,” which refers to the essay, “Changing the Letter: The Yokes, the Jokes of Discourse, or, Mrs. Stowe, Mr. Reed,” written by Spillers, frames both
my theory and strategy for reading (deconstruction) and writing (retheorizing). It holds that words
(“letters”) can be manipulated
(“changed”) in a variety of ways to tell a story that may be either liberative or oppressive
(“yoke”). Therefore, meanings are not fixed, 16 but are constantly influx, although sometimes
appearing stabilized.¶ This dissertation takes issue with the latter perception: the ways that cultural
meanings are stabilized over time and presented as “truth.” 17 Pornotropia 18 thrives off of
controlling ideas that are stabilized and taken for granted. The phrase, “taken for granted,”
highlights what Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann refer to as un-reflected inclinations toward certain actions
developed in the ‘natural attitude’, which presume inter-subjective realities of the life-world to
be similarly experienced or imagined, for example, the idea that there was a world prior to our
existence, made up of subjects, objects and nature, the former of which (human subjects) are endowed with consciousnesses that interpret
meanings amongst themselves in horizontal and cognitive ways. However, “reality,” the conditions that we encounter,
is mediated through interpretation, which gives rise to certain kinds of conduct (over others),
given our stock of previous experiences, either our own or inherited. Previous experiences frame
our “stocks of knowledge” and motivate our attitudes and actions toward certain ends, given
the anticipation of what is believed to be both conventional and probable. 19¶ The “taken for
granted” within the ‘natural attitude’ neglects critical queries that might take up how
relationships between the subject and representation might be situated, or, as interpreters, how
we may be positioned towards either (or both), given attitudes. This kind of thinking leads to
reductive practices such as reading one’s identity in light of the appearance of a (projected)
profile such as the taken for granted “black-female-aswhore” stereotype, as opposed to her
complex subjectivity. The latter enables a variety of readings, thus “lessening” pornotropia,
which depends on the rigidity of a closed script.¶ This dissertation highlights a struggle for truth that is
inextricably linked to lived experiences, that is, social-cultural-historical-political conditions. One aim of
this dissertation is to confuse previous readings of “black womanhood” by blasting the habits of language, linguistic and representational, its internal
signals, inferred ideologies, encodings, and operation. These strategies enable the mass-reproduction and continued circulation and closure of the
script of black womanhood. Circulating
myths of black womanhood need to be taken up. However, they also
need to be taken up differently than they have been previously in African American religion, culture, and womanist theoethical
scholarship. This dissertation explores their deployment in religion and culture and the critiques thereof. Both deployment and criticisms produce
layers of meanings that are reproduced and circulated. I will examine the strategies by which myths of black womanhood travel, getting realigned and
re-appropriated from generation to generation.¶ These
moves “loosen the yoke” and decrease the jolts of
“America’s Grammar Book” on race and gender. The following chapters emphasize loosening the yoke, while the overall aim
of this dissertation is significantly inspired by the reality of the jolt. “The jolt” refers to the ongoing threat of symbolic and material violence caused by
day-to-day representational terror, which is mass-produced in and transmitted through media that “projects”20 and inform certain opinions and
attitudes regarding ‘normativity’ and ‘difference’.
Presenting a strategy to solve suffering isn’t voyeurism.
Craps ’12 [Steph; 2012; Professor of English at Ghent University, Director of Centre for
Literature and Trauma; Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds, Palgrave, “Conclusion,”
p. 126-127; GR]
Cogent though these various critiques are in their own terms, it seems to me that they unduly homogenize and simplify different forms of interest in
and inquiry into trauma. While it is true, of course, that trauma research does not in and of itself lead to political transformation, I would argue that a
trauma theory revised along the lines I have suggested is not destined to serve as the handmaiden of the status
quo or a mere academic alibi for the indulgence of voyeuristic inclinations. On the contrary, it can help
identify and understand situations of exploitation and abuse, and act as an incentive for the
kind of sustained and systemic critique of societal conditions called for by Berlant and Brown. In
fact, the expanded model of trauma I have proposed, based on the work of Laura Brown, Frantz Fanon, and
others, bears a close resemblance to the model of suffering that Berlant puts forward as an alternative to the (traditional) trauma
model, which she finds inadequate: "a model of suffering, whose etymological articulation of pain and
patience draws its subject less as an effect of an act of violence and more as an effect of a
general atmosphere of it, peppered by acts, to be sure, but not contained by the presumption that trauma carries, that it is an
effect of a single scene of violence or toxic taxonomy" (338). Berlant's observation that "the pain and suffering of subordinated subjects in everyday life
is an ordinary and ongoing thing that is underdescribed by the (traumatic) identity form and its circulation in the state and the law" (344) is perfectly in
line with the argument I have presented in this book.
That trauma research can act as a catalyst for astute political analysis and meaningful activism
would seem to be borne out by the [END PAGE 126] development in Fanon's writing, from Black Skin, White Masks, which describes the psychological
impact of racial and colonial oppression, to the overtly political The Wretched of the Earth, which confronts the source of the mental strife he saw in
the clinic.3 Since Douglas Crimp's plea for "[m]ilitancy, of course, then, but mourning too: mourning and militancy" (18) in relation to the AIDS
movement back in 1989, several scholars have argued that an interest in issues of trauma,
loss, and mourning is in fact
compatible with a commitment to radical activism. A desire to make visible the creative and
political-rather than pathological and negative-aspects of an attachment to loss is the thread that binds
together the essays gathered in David Eng and David Kazanjian's volume Loss: The Politics of Mourning (2003), which seeks to "extend[] recent
scholarship in trauma studies by insisting that ruptures of experience, witnessing, history, and truth are, indeed, a starting point for political activism
and transformation" (10). Eng and Kazanjian see their collection as moving "from trauma to prophecy, and from epistemological structures of
unknowability to the politics of mourning" (10). As one of the contributors, Ann Cvetkovich, puts it, trauma
can be "the provocation
to create alternative lifeworld’s" ("Legacies of Trauma" 453).
Recognition of suffering serves as a necessary first step towards the amelioration of that
suffering. In Judith Butler's words, "The recognition of shared precariousness introduces strong normative
commitments of equality and invites a more robust universalizing of rights that seeks to address
basic human needs for food, shelter, and other conditions for persisting and flourishing" (28-29). Without wishing to overstate its likely
impact, I believe that rethinking trauma studies from a postcolonial perspective and providing nuanced readings of a wide variety of narratives of
trauma and witnessing from around the world can help us understand that shared precariousness. By fostering attunement to previously unheard
suffering and putting into global circulation memories of a broad range of traumatic histories, an inclusive and culturally sensitive trauma theory can
assist in raising
awareness of injustice both past and present and opening up the possibility of a more just
global future-and, in so doing, remain faithful to the ethical foundations of the field.5
at: alt solves IR
The alt can’t solve states going to war AND makes alleviating “concrete human woes”
irrelevant.
Isacoff ’15 [Jonathan; 2015; Associate Professor of Political Science and the Chair of
Environmental Studies at Gonzaga University; Why IR Needs Deweyan Pragmatism,
“Perspectives on Political Science,” p. 26-33; GR]
I mean that what IR is or is not is not nearly as important as what it achieves. So the question should not be
whether IR is scientific, but rather, how scientific does it need to be to get the job done? To this, there are many answers, but I
suggest a line of reasoning: the scientific method in the most general sense is useful in helping to explain how and why, all else
equal, causal processes work. Put differently, if
we want to know how and why some states go to war and
would be more useful—in the sense of getting logically coherent, empirically
verifiable answers—to analyze historical cases systematically than it would be to consult with a shaman or
others do not, it
use a crystal ball to obtain an answer. This is not say that there is not an important role for textual interpretation in the process of
studying war and other international phenomena. Indeed, I elsewhere argue that interpretation of historical texts is crucial to
making valid claims about wars.47 But the main point here is that interpretation is a means toward an end, namely, the process of
coping with the world via human experience. Toward that end, interpretation is necessary and useful, but it is not the end itself.
A second point is that there is clearly a pragmatic and justifiable need for certain types of quantitative methods, namely, statistics,
though not necessarily formal models, in some segments of IR. Taking a simple example for illustrative purposes, if one wished to
study the effect of speed limits on motor vehicle fatalities, the use of aggregate data statistically analyzed would be far superior to
standing on the corner waiting for an accident to observe or reading several diary accounts of individual accidents. The key point
here, however, is not that statistical methods are inherently better, or more “rigorous” than any other type of method. Rather, the
use of statistically analyzed data to find answers to problems of highway fatalities creates knowledge
that if properly applied, would alleviate “concrete human woes,” which is to say it would help to save
lives. That is pragmatic political science.
48 What Is a Problem?
Many political scientists believe in the idea of having a “problem orientation” for the field. For example, Atul Kohli asserts that there
is a strong consensus among leading experts “that comparative politics is very much a problem-driven field of study.” “What
motivates the best comparative politics research are puzzles of real-world significance,” writes Kohli, in “The Role of Theory in
Comparative Politics: A Symposium.”49 Similarly, Ian Shapiro, responding to the question of what would be a better alternative than
RCT asks the question: “What is the phenomenon to be explained?… The formulation of alternative explanations, in other words,
should be a problem-driven activity.”50 This is clearly consistent with Deweyan pragmatism; in fact, it is inherently pragmatist. “A
Deweyan pragmatic approach to political inquiry,” writes Maurice Meilleur, “would transform political science from a discipline,
based on a set of methods, into a profession, based on a set of problems.”51 But what, more specifically, is a “problem orientation?”
First, it is clear that Kohli and his colleagues mean an empirically driven problem orientation. That is, the study of politics
should be driven by empirical, not theoretical, or methodological problems. Careful not to push this
point too far, a Deweyan pragmatist would suggest that theorization is an important activity, but it must not lose its link to problems
of human experience, which is to say empirical problems. However, Kohli and others advocating an empirically driven problem
orientation have little to say about how to identify and value problems. After all, there is a limitless supply of political problems only
a fraction of which can be studied.
In response, I would argue that some problems are more significant to the detection and response to human suffering and thus
more deserving of study, than others. This is itself a tricky ethical problem, for who is to say what is or is not a “real problem?” One
reader of this manuscript suggested that “What is really going on here, when one scratches the analytical surface, is not that IR
theorists aren't discussing problems; it's that they are discussing problems that the author does not feel are worthy of attention. But
why should we accept that the author's “problems” are more important or privileged? Why does the author get to decide what a
“real” problem is?” This is a good question but it is a misreading of the argument. Nowhere does Dewey or this author imply that
any individual could or should decide or dictate which problems matter and which do not. To the contrary, the question of “who
decides” is a public deliberation problem, a subject Dewey addressed exhaustively in his classic The Public and Its Problems.52
According to Dewey, problems are the direct outcome of a public's determination of its common good. A full analysis of how this
works, or in some cases, fails to work in practice is beyond the scope of this article. But it is important to note that there is no
argument here for the privileging of one private individual's notion of what constitutions “real problem” versus that of another. That
is for the public to decide.
Human Woe and Issues That Matter
The final point to be made about reconstruction stems directly from the previous discussion: some problems matter more than
others with regard to the alleviation of concrete human suffering. Which issues matter the most in our world? Ultimately, per
Dewey's political philosophy touched on above, that is for the public to decide. Assuming that there ever could be a “common
good,” we can hypothesize that people
might choose to focus on issues that affect them daily, issues such as
climate change, poverty, health care, education, racism, and sexism, as well as war and peace, all issues
that are of grave importance to humanity. IR, especially in its American form, with its disproportionate emphasis on
global security and great power war, has given scant attention to too many other issues, and when attention is given to the “lesser”
topics, they are relegated to sub-sub-specializations within the discipline, “Gender and IR,” for instance. More problematic from
the standpoint of pragmatism, the
approach-driven wing of the discipline is more concerned with which
paradigm has scored more points in the epic contest for paradigmatic supremacy than with the
matter of how the world could or should respond to climate change or why hundreds of million of children lack basic
nutrition and medical care. The interpretivist/linguistic wing, in contrast, is more concerned with how texts are interpreted in
graduate seminars than with the fact that children in inner cities cannot even read a text at all.
53 Many IR scholars are still fighting over whether and to what extent “unit-level variables” should be taken into consideration in
understanding international politics (and if so, whether one might still rightly be accepted in the club of realism).54 Others are
trying to demonstrate that IR constructivism is really “liberalism in disguise.”55 This is not a stab at “why
realism is (yet again) wrong.” It is a critique of the self-definitionally obsessed, paradigm-driven culture of
academic IR. I would not go so far as to claim that there are no scholars who study everyday politics; many clearly do.56 Rather, the
problem is that that the incentive structure to contribute to the “big debates” of the discipline, namely, those at the
paradigmatic level, is a project that drifts ever afar from the problems of “concrete human woe”
that affect the other millions of people who happen not to have graduate degrees in IR.
at: death k (omalade etc)
Biological life is better than death – even if society is rigged against minorities, fighting to
protect the global commons is the only option
Alice Walker 82 [Alice Walker, “Only Justice Can Stop a Curse”, Anti-Nuke Rally speech at Grace
Cathedral, San Francisco CA, won Pulitzer Prize and lots of other white awards for the Color
Purple, other books by her which are also incredible are less known but still great, March 16,
1982]
Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches
in it. In any case, Earth is my home—though for centuries white people have tried to convince me I
have no right to exist, except in the dirtiest, darkest corners of the globe.¶ ¶ So let me tell you: I intend
to protect my home. Praying—not a curse—only the hope that my courage will not fail my love. But
if by some miracle, and all our struggle, the earth is spared, only justice to every living thing (and
everything alive) will save humankind.¶ ¶ And we are not saved yet.¶ ¶ Only justice can stop a
curse.
AT: Anti-Blackness Ks (Rememory Aff)
2AC -- RC -- Essentializing
Root cause debates are bad---they rely on exceptionalism from violence and reduces other
literature to liberalism---causes scapegoating of indigenous/black communities because
“they’re succumbing to the state” and movement failure through lack of solidarity and
intercommunal violence
Leroy 16 (Justin Leroy, Ph.D., Assistant Professor at UC Davis, 2016, “Black History in Occupied
Territory: On the Entanglements of Slavery and Settler Colonialism,”
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/633276; accessed 8/16/2021) ng
Roberts's analysis was not without flaws. He did not consider the limits of British emancipation, either in terms of expectations for
continued black labor productivity or how it legitimized the British imperial project writ large. Yet Roberts was among the first to
articulate the idea that black freedom cannot be premised upon indigenous death and displacement. Inspired by Roberts, I begin
with the claim that slavery
and settler colonialism share deep and overlapping histories. What insights
might emerge from thinking of settler colonialism as a logic of indigenous erasure that has sustained its
coherence partly through the language of anti-blackness? Or from considering anti-blackness as
dependent upon militarized discourses of security with roots in settler colonialism? Conversely, what
intellectual pathways are foreclosed when slavery and settler colonialism vie for primacy as the violence
most foundational to the modern social order? Recent work in black studies, on the one hand,
and indigenous and settler colonialism studies, on the other, has made claims to
exceptionalism that leave the two fields at an impasse. After surveying this work, I argue that twentiethcentury colonial projects have relied upon both anti-blackness and a logic of settlement. Social
movements have been able to express radical forms of solidarity by suspending claims to
exceptionalism so pervasive in scholarly analysis. I conclude with a brief sketch of contemporary blackPalestinian solidarity activism, paying particular attention to how the anti-blackness at work in the Israeli settler project makes
blackness resonate in Palestine and occupation resonate among black Americans. Frameworks of Exceptionalism Indigenous and
black critical theory are extraordinarily robust fields. They have challenged the notion that the United States could live up to its
universalist foundations (“liberty and justice for all”) if only it could address the structuring exclusions of race, gender, sexuality, and
class. Rather than framing such exclusions as the unfortunate effect of lingering prejudices that could be remedied by inclusion
within the fabric of the nation-state, indigenous and black theory frame settler colonialism and racial slavery, respectively, as the
very conditions of possibility for the United States. The violence of these processes is enduring and ongoing, and the hinge of
inclusion/exclusion both misnames that violence and narrows any sense of possibility for how it can be redressed. These fields have
emerged in isolation from one another. Each
has supplanted facile notions of racial exclusion, but in doing
so has proposed alternatives—colonialism and slavery—premised upon exclusive claim to
accounting for the violence of modernity.2 These claims are internally coherent and broadly
useful, but are incompatible. Either colonialism or slavery must be subordinated to the other,
forcing them into aporetic tension. Each field reduces the other to a variation on the theme of
liberal multiculturalism in order to maintain the integrity of its own exceptionalist claims. Yet
these theories cannot fully account for the historical messiness of black and indigenous
encounters with one another and with the US state. What might emerge if scholars
suspended—even momentarily—such claims in order to consider the impasse of settlement
and slavery using historical methods? Recent work in black studies has argued for a
reconceptualized notion of black racialization in which blackness emerges at the edge of
humanity—that is, the category “black” is defined against the category “human.” In such
formulations, black/non-black is the primary division of the modern social, epistemological, and
ontological order, exemplified by Atlantic slavery and its legacies. Although this group of scholars has
disagreed about whether slavery's transformation of human life into a commodity was radically generative or a shattering
obliteration of the self, they are united by the idea that our ways of knowing the modern world and imagining alternatives to it
require centering the violence of enslavement.3 While
this work is incredibly helpful for understanding the
epochal impact of slavery, it relegates forms of racialization and colonialism that do not selfsubordinate to slavery to the realm of anti-blackness or liberal multiculturalism. Such framing has
led Tiffany King to claim that black studies is “inarticulate in the face of settler colonialism.” 4 Put
another way, the field of black studies has not fully reckoned with the historical intimacy between
colonialism and slavery. In his seminal work Empire As a Way of Life, William Appleman Williams asserted that the imperial
life of the United States “is predicated upon a charming but ruthless faith in infinite progress fueled by infinite growth.” 5 The liberty
so central to the founding mythology of the United States was defined by its limitlessness —not in terms of whom it applied to, as in
the fantasies of liberalism, but in terms of its spatial expansion. To be free was to face no limits to growth. Tepid versions of black
studies have made the assumption that the struggle for justice is an inclusionary one, defined by access to rights and liberties
guaranteed by the language of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. This type of black studies has not reconciled
with the fact that freedom has never been purely abstract; it is always enacted over and against the ongoing history of colonialism.
Thus Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri can claim, “between the presidencies of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, the open
space of the frontier became the conceptual terrain of republican democracy.” 6 Such scholarship has refused to grapple with what
it means to diagnose oppression and demand its redress from within a settler state. Even the more robust formation of black
studies concerned with the exceptionalism of slavery has not reckoned with the relationship
between this drive to growth and the expansion of human chattel.7 It has not reckoned with
how black racialization occurred in tandem with settler ideology and not merely adjacent to it. To
be clear, this problem is not one of black studies ignoring the presence of indigenous people, but of how the field theorizes
black racialization in a way that precludes a serious engagement with indigenous
dispossession. If blackness is exclusion from the category of the human or access to a knowable
self, the loss of sovereignty can only be framed as a lesser loss with a subordinate grammar. For
example, Jared Sexton has argued that slavery “precedes and prepares the way for colonialism,” and describes colonialism as “the
issue or heir of slavery, its outgrowth or edifice or monument.” 8 While this may be a generative theoretical claim that lends
conceptual coherence to Sexton’s insightful
framing of slavery and antiblackness, it is simply not
historically accurate.
Their exceptionalist reading of sovereignty misidentifies the sovereign possibility of the Native
– from the settler/master perspective the Native is void and there is no possibility of humanity
– turns all Sexton args and is a solvency deficit to the alt.
Robinson, 2020 (Rowland – member of the Menominee Nation (Ka͞eyes-Mamāceqtawak) and
PhD Candidate in Sociology @ the University of Waterloo, “An Autoethnographic Account of the
Imaginarium of Late Capitalist/Colonialist Storytelling”, dissertation, shae)
7.1 Being-outside-Settler-Time In his text Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, Wilderson
provides us with
an ontological taxonomy of life under settler colonialism of human-Savage-Slave57. Within his necessarily
arboreal theorization the white/settler/master occupies the space of the ‘human’, alongside all other non-Native and
non-Black people of colour, while the Black Slave is the abjected non-human. Between these two positions is
the Native Savage, which for Wilderson occupies a liminal position of half-humanness (2010). The
reasoning for the half-human positionality of the Native Savage for Wilderson is found within his
understanding of the grammars of Native life: genocide and the loss of sovereignty. Within his
theorization of the structure of U.S. antagonisms, the former is unable to be made legible within the rhetorical world of the
human cum settler, and rather finds articulation with the grammars of Black suffering: accumulation and fungibility. However, so Wilderson
theorizes, the latter, which is the loss of sovereignty, is able to be reincorporated and made legible
within the human’s register of structural re-adjustment (2010). Wilderson notes: On the semantic field on which the
new protocols are possible, Indigenism can indeed become partially legible through a programmatics of structural adjustment (as fits our globalized
era). In other words, for the Indians’ subject position to be legible, their positive registers of lost or threatened cultural identity must be foregrounded,
when in point of fact the antagonistic register of dispossession that Indians “possess” is a position in relation to a socius structured by genocide. … [T]he
Indigenous position is one for which genocide is a constitutive element, not merely an historical event, without which Indians would not, paradoxically,
“exist” (2010:9-10). He continues this line of thinking elsewhere, writing: whereas the genocidal modality of the “Savage” grammar of suffering
articulates itself quite well within the two modalities of the Slave’s grammar of suffering, accumulation and fungibility, Native American film, political
texts, and ontological meditations fail to recognize, much less pursue this articulation. The small corpus of socially engaged films directed by Native
Americans privilege the ensemble of questions animated by the imaginary of sovereign loss (2010:28). As powerful and insightful as Wilderson’s
ontological mapping of white/settler/master and Black life may be, there
are certain theoretical miscues within his analysis which
cause him to misallocate the Native Savage as liminal to human life, as not-quite-human, rather than fully outside of it. Indeed, in later work, Wilderson
completely abjures this formulation under the influence of Jared Sexton’s work in “The Vel of Slavery” (2016)58, and places the formerly liminal Native
Savage fully inside of the category of the Man qua the human (2011). Focusing on his earlier and more textually substantial work however, for Juárez—
who’s own work repositions Wilderson’s grammar of Redness from genocide and sovereignty to clearing and civilization—this is because
Wilderson: compartmentalizes the Red ontological position of clearing into genocide and (the
loss of) sovereignty, ultimately failing to recognize the nature of Red life as the condition of
being cleared a priori to existence, what Wilderson articulates as the shift from clearing as a verb to clearing as a noun at the
moment of the “discovery” [emphasis mine] (2014). This essential element of recognition for Juárez is the entry point of the Native as out-of-settlertime. In drawing this development out of the settler order of things, we turn to the Marshall Trilogy of decisions at the U.S. supreme court in the earlyto-mid-19th century, seminal decisions in the juridical reckoning of the Native within the northern bloc. Johnson v. McIntosh, Cherokee Nation v.
Georgia, and Worcester v. Georgia were three of the single most important decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court with regards to Native Law and
Indigenous rights, setting forth the legal terrain upon which much the proceeding governance of settler colonialism would be built. For example, the
Court’s unanimous decision in 1823 in the Johnson case, despite no actual representation for Indigenous peoples, re-inscribed into the law of the new,
secular american republic the older, christian european “doctrine of discovery”, which decidedly relegated Indigenous peoples to secondary status on
the question of their possession of their own land, which was transferred into the realm of being squabbles over territory by competing european and
settler actors. Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, and Worcester v. Georgia continued this legal colonialism, refining the process over the period of these two
subsequent Supreme Court cases (Williams 2005). Lumbee critical legal scholar Robert A. Williams, Jr. says of their foundational role in the settler order
of things that: the Marshall Model of Indian Rights plays much the same kind of inaugural and paradoxical organizing role in the Supreme Co urt’s Indian
law as Bhabha’s wondrous “English book” plays in the cultural writings of English colonialism (2005:50). In particular, these three court decisions have
had a profound and lasting implication for any understanding of Native sovereignty and the loss thereof. In this regard, Juárez notes, “The Marshall
rulings ontologically determine Redness from the moment the Settler meets the Savage (2014). The temporal dimension of the Marshal rulings is
likewise noted by Wolfe, who states: Native
sovereignty existed out of (or at least, prior to) colonial time, which is to
say, it did not exist at all—or rather, it only existed in order to be diminished. Paradoxically, therefore,
Native sovereignty was a creation of discovery. Propositionally, it was an imperative generated by Marshall’s commitment to
diminution, which required an undiminished prior state that could be diminished from (2012:10-11). Finally, Mark Rifkin describes the cognition of
Native sovereignty in light of the Marshall Decisions as a “peculiar status.” In particular, he says of the place of Native
sovereignty within
the juridical worlding of the settler that it is “less as a way of designating a specific set of powers
than as a negative presence, as what Native peoples categorically lack” (2017b:297). The notion of
Native sovereignty is a void, a nullity, a simulacrum par excellence; it does not hide some
genuine truth, some deeper reality, that Natives are, or were, in fact, sovereign self-subjects and
that this status was lost within the cognition of the white/settler/master. As Baudrillard himself notes, in a
simulated reference to the new testament, “The simulacrum is never what hides the truth—it is truth that hides the fact that there is none” (1994:1).
This is, as Juárez articulates, the essence of “being cleared a priori to existence” (2014). On the ontological implications of this, and of the resultant
construction of the Native within the symbolic order of the settler, he notes: For
the concept that the United States had
eminent domain over the land to gain coherence it must presume, in the a priori, that the terra
nullius of the Americas always was. Here, Native Americans emerge barred from sovereignty at
the ontological level, and thus can only be regarded as non-human occupants. This a priori clearing
becomes the necessary grounding for the Marshall ruling to make sense because the clearing of land must be scaled to the level of a hemisphere in
order for colonial land-grabbing to even begin to play out within the Americas. … as
world is concerned, the
far as the Settler is concerned, as far as the
Red Indian never had sovereignty, never had any claim to the land at all (2014). The above discussions of
the Marshall Rulings in the United States also reveal an additional problem with Wilderson’s theorization of the Native as a kind of liminal half-human
or not-quite-human. This is that while he sees the loss of sovereignty for the Native as a point of articulation with the grammars of suffering of the
human, what he fundamentally misses is that where the same linguistic taxons may be used to seemingly describe a notion of Native sovereignty that is
superficially similar to the sovereignty of the white/settler/master, it is, in fact, something of a categorically, and fundamentally different, and inferior,
kind. While not in my reading a direct critique of Wilderson, Wolfe makes this distinction clear, noting: In keeping with the doctrine of discovery, the
Marshall judgments presuppose, and can only consistently be read as presupposing, a fundamental asymmetry between Indians’ right of occupancy
and the property rights that white settlers could obtain once Native title had been extinguished. Under certain conditions, Natives’ immemorial
occupation of their land entitled them to a right of soil or usufruct, which was understood as hunting and gathering rather than as agriculture. This right
was inalienable. It could not be sold to private individual or corporation but, under the principle of pre-emption, could only be surrendered to the
crown. Once Native title had been surrendered to the crown and extinguished, however, the crown could transfer to settlers an entitlement (fee
simple) that was greater than the right of occupancy that the Natives had surrendered. Thus the process yielded more than land for settlers. It also
yielded sovereign subjecthood: they became the sort of people who could own rather than merely occupy. The asymmetry between occupancy and
title reflected a thoroughgoing discrepancy whereby Indian and white were categories of a different order (2012:10). Thus,
the trap for
which Wilderson falls in his discussion of (the loss of) Native sovereignty as one of the two modalities of Red
suffering, and as a point of articulation with the alienation and exploitation of the white/settler/master, is one of language. As he
claims in Red, White & Black: At every sale—the soul, the body, the group, the land, and the universe—they [the settler and the Indian] can both
practice cartography, and although at every scale their maps are radically incompatible, their respective “mapness” is never in
question.
This capacity for cartographic coherence is the thing itself, that which secures subjectivity for both the Settler and the
‘Savage’ and articulates them to one another in a network of connections, transfers and displacements’ (2010:181). Wilderson’s predicament is made
clearer in his more recent essay “Afro-Pessimism and the End of Redemption,” in which he creates a juxtaposition between Simon Ortiz’s poem “Sand
Creek” (2000) alongside his own, “Law Abiding” (2013). Through his reading of Ortiz’s poetic work he claims: [T]he relational status of both the Indian
victims and the White oppressors is established—a reciprocal dynamic is acknowledged (between degraded humanity, Indians, and exalted humanity,
White settlers). This reciprocal dynamic is based on the fact that even though one group is massacring the other, both exist within the same paradigm
of recognition and incorporation. Their relation is based on a mutual recognition of sovereignty. At every scale of abstraction, body, family, community,
cosmology, physical terrain, Native American sovereignty is recognized and incorporated into the consciousness of both Indians and settlers who
destroyed them. The poem’s coherence is sustained by structural capacity for reciprocity between the genociders and the genocided (2016).
Speculatively: Wilderson’s trap of language here and elsewhere is perhaps as a result of the insufficiencies in, and inherent ideological and affective
working of, settler juridical and philosophical linguistic taxonomies59. In essence he
mistakes the outward linguistic
conceptual coverings of these two concepts of supposed sovereignty for their actual ontological
content; two things which in fact could not be more distinct—thus allowing for his argument that Natives and the white/settler/master share a
mutual cognition of the sovereignty of the other, united in a joint paradigm of “recognition and incorporation.” As Wolfe notes, however, “The same
words meant different things when applied to either” (2012:10). Tracing a similar path Joanne Barker likewise notes that: There is no fixed meaning for
what sovereignty is—what it means by definition, what it implies in public debate, or how it has been conceptualized in international, national, or
indigenous law. Sovereignty—and its related histories, perspectives, and identities—is embedded within the specific social relations in which it is
invoked and given meaning. … The challenge, then, to understand how and for whom sovereignty matters is to understand the historical circumstances
under which it is given meaning. There is nothing inherent about its significance (2005:21). We can follow the old structural linguistics of Saussure
(2013) through Baudrillard (2019; 2006; 1994) and Derrida (2016) that any
sign within a given assemblage gains its
meaningful content in their relationships to other signs and other concepts; through what it is
not. Native sovereignty is not, and never has been the same thing as the sovereignty of the
white/settler/master. This is born out explicitly within the juridical judgements of the Marshall Trilogy and the legal rendition of prior
Native possession as mere usufruct, rather than the fulsomeness of free-holding private property—true sovereignty—something which, via a
technology of settler governance that appears more as a form of the alchemy, it could be transformed into and granted forthwith to genuine human
(ethnoclass (bourgeois) Man) subjects through of the sovereign power of the Crown or the Republic. Wilderson is hardly alone in this movement,
however, which seeks, as Wolfe notes, “to minimize Indian difference and assimilate it to Whiteness” (2016a:8), or more specifically, to assimilate it to
Man in its overrepresentation as the human, and thus make it inimical to all other forms of life and decolonial, abolitionist and liberation struggles. For
Wilderson’s close fellow traveller Jared Sexton this is most explicit (2016), as it is in the work of Migration and Transnationalism scholar Nandita Sharma
(2008-09; 2015). Thus, for them, as Melanie K. Yazzie and Nick Estes describe, moves towards a critique of settler colonialism as a distinct modality of
domination and towards a decolonial Nativeness are, “in their recent assaults on Native sovereignty and nationhood, racist to the point of treachery
against all oppressed people” (2016:20). What is certainly the case here is that, as critical as their thought may be with regards to the struggles of
racialized and colonized peoples, all three of these theorists, within the bodies of their work, effectively re-inscribe and recapitulate a settler-colonial
order of things. As Wolfe puts it, speaking specifically of Sharma, but easily applicable to all, colonial resonances pervade their work (2013b:266). Quite
on the contrary to this kind of world-building, counterpoised as they are to white supremacy, rather than form a point of legibility and articulation
between the human and the Savage, as Wilderson argues (2010), Native sovereignty and the sovereignty of the white/settler/master ultimately occupy
fundamentally different and incommensurable registers, on planes of linguistics, the political and the ontological. This in and of itself upsets much of
Wilderson’s theorization that sovereignty its loss places the Native in the liminal state of half-humanness—or his later moves to simply fully assimilate
the Native into the human—without necessary recourse to Juárez’s shift of the grammars of Native suffering from genocide and (the loss of)
sovereignty to clearing and civilization, though I do prefer his general outline for the depth it pursues. In short, the void and the fulsome are neither
coeval nor coterminous and can never be. And this is the ultimate trap that Wilderson and similar theorists face when they find themselves confronted
by the personage and the position of the Native Savage and mistake superficial linguistic outer-trappings for the inner ontological and political content
of the sign. As Juárez eloquently, if painfully, states: The pain and anger over a loss without name is the formation of the social group, it transforms all
narratives into narratives of surviving, every act of “culture” by Native Americans becomes a survival strategy in which the dualism between the
Wilderson’s concern
with the irreconcilable “worlds” of the Settler and the Savage is far too reductionist in the
intricacy of the violence inflicted against Red bodies. It is not that there is a Savage world that
overwhelming violence of being a Being of nothingness and the deathly comfort of alcoholism and drug use is put off.
stands in irreconcilable opposition to the world of the Settler, but rather that Red life (as far as it can
be called life) is a survival strategy that no longer possesses the potential for world creation. … He ignores
that the violence Red bodies face extends far beyond the reservation into time and space because it is a violence that silenced languages, burned
books, obliterated people, erased history, and shattered families (2014). In this project of worlding, of world creation by the white/settler/master as
Man as its overrepresentation as the human, there can be no reckoning, no casting of a decolonial face into the future anterior, where there is present
something that we might recognize as a genuine Native sovereignty so long as the world of the settler persists. Any
futurity which
preserves settler colonialism with its civil society, governmental, ontological, and symbolic
orders is one that by its very constitution voids any notion of Native self-determination, not only
from the present but from the past and the future as well, as anything other than pure
simulacra. Returning to the results of the Marshall Decisions60, what they mean for any ontology of Nativeness are profound. On the question of
temporality, they must be taken as key to my understanding, because they not only evacuate any possibility of Native sovereignty from the spatial
coordinates of the northern bloc of settler colonialism, but indeed from all possible coordinates of temporal cartography as well. Native
sovereignty is not just a sovereignty that was lost, in that it is no longer part of the present-now but is, in fact, a
sovereignty that never was. While the Native—or, more correctly, the myriad of diverse Indigenous nations
that would come to be confined within the legal category of the Native through the governance techniques of settler coloniality—may have
been self-governing and self-determining prior to the arrival on these shores of the european, within the worlding of
the euro-american/euro-canadian settler the Native qua the Native is not, and never has been, sovereign. The
extent to which we can even begin to discuss Native sovereignty and the Native as containing a cogent meaning under the rubrics of settler
governmentality, we
must first recognize that they have been, and always have been, determined by
and through the prerogative of the settler. There is no possibility of structural re-adjustment;
only a relationship of aporia and antagonism. This brings into sharp relief Byrd’s two-headed questioning of “do Indians live
the ordinary life in the contemporary now?” and “are Indians part of the present tense?” (2011:37). In short, for me, the answer is a resounding no. For
Byrd herself, in her reading of Alexis de Tocqueville and the removal of the Choctaw from their traditional homelands in the southeastern United
States, she notes that “Even in the present of their removal, the Choctaws are always already past perfect: they had left, they had stepped, they had
been promised” (2011:37). Beyond questions of pure legality, as in the questions of sovereignty in the Marshall Trilogy, these issues of temporal
abjection for the Native are significant. Mark Rifkin in his work Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination asks,
“What does it mean to be recognized as existing in time?” before going on to note that: The representation of Native peoples as either having
disappeared or being remnants on the verge of vanishing constitutes one of the principal means of effacing Indigenous sovereignties. Such a portrayal
of Indigenous temporal stasis or absence erases extant forms of occupancy, governance, and opposition to settler encroachments. Moreover, it
generates a prism through which any evidence of such survival will be interpreted as either vestigial (and thus on the way to imminent extinction) or
hopelessly contaminated (as having lost—or quickly losing—the qualities understood as defining something, someone, or some space as properly
“Indian” in the first place) (2017a:5). In
the worlding of the white/settler/master, the Native is always, and
has always been, “was” and “were,” never “is” and “are.” Certainly, if we take this line of logic through its terminal point, not only
is the Native was/were and not is/are, the Native can indeed never truly be, so long as the world of the settler
continues to be. This is precisely why Byrd, building upon Judith Butler’s articulation of when life is grievable (2016), asks whether the Native is
able to cast a life into the tense of the future anterior “in which Indians will have been decolonized” (2011:38). The Native is a being-out-of-time if ever
there was one.61
2AC -- RC -- Defense
but their theory can’t explain the aff---indigeneity is the mirror opposite of blackness,
historically a site to be exterminated rather than to be continually reproduced---theorizing
settler colonialism in conjunction with antiblackness is specifically key to understanding white
settlerism
Day 2015 [Iyko, Associate Professor of English and Chair of the Critical Social Thought program at Mount Holyoke, “Being or
Nothingness: Indigeneity, Antiblackness, and Settler Colonial Critique,” Critical Ethnic Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2]
According to Sexton, no other oppression is reducible to antiblackness, but the relative totality of antiblackness is the
privileged perspective from which to understand racial formation more broadly. But unlike the way feminist and queer critical
theory interrogate heteropatriarchy from a subjectless standpoint, Sexton’s entire point seems to rest on the very specificity and
singularity—rather than subjectlessness—of black critical theory’s capacity to understand race. The privilege of this embodied
viewpoint similarly relies on rigidly binaristic conceptions of land and bodily integrity. He writes, “If the indigenous relation to land
precedes and exceeds any regime of property, then the slave’s inhabitation of the earth precedes and exceeds any prior relation to
land—landlessness. And selflessness is the correlate. No ground for identity, no ground to stand (on).”57 In other words, the
slave’s nonrelation to her body precedes and exceeds any other body’s relation to land.
However, the settler colonial designation of the United States and Canada as terra nullius—as
legally empty lands—denies the very corporeality of Indigenous populations to inhabit land, much
less have any rights to it. Alongside genocidal elimination, the erasure of Indigenous corporeal
existence is inseparable from the ground it doesn’t stand on, or is removed from. For the same
reason that the economic reductionism of orthodox Marxism has been discredited, such an
argument that frames racial slavery as a base for a colonial superstructure similarly fails to take
into account the dialectics of settler colonial capitalism. The political economy of settler
colonial capitalism is more appropriately figured as an ecology of power relations than a linear
chain of events. Relinquishing any conceptual privilege that might be attributed to Indigeneity, alternatively, Coulthard offers
a useful anti-exceptionalist stance: “the colonial relation should not be understood as a primary locus of
‘base’ from which these other forms of oppression flow, but rather as the inherited background
field within which market, racist, patriarchal, and state relations converge.”58 From this view,
race and colonialism form the matrix of the settler colonial racial state. Putting colonial land and
enslaved labor at the center of a dialectical analysis, we can see that blackness is neither reducible to Indigenous land nor
Indigeneity to enslaved labor. Indigenous peoples and slaves are not reducible to each other because settler colonialism abides by a
dual logic that is originally driven to eliminate Native peoples from land and mix the land with enslaved black labor. If land is the
basis of settler colonialists’ relationship to Indigenous peoples, it is labor that frames that relationship with enslaved peoples. We
can draw on Patrick Wolfe’s important points about the heterogeneous racial effects of such a settler formation based on
Indigenous land and enslaved labor. To summarize those points, the
racial content of Indigenous peoples is the
mirror opposite of blackness. From the beginning, an eliminatory project was driven to reduce
Native populations through genocidal wars and later through statistical elimination through
blood quantum and assimilationist policies. For slaves, an opposite logic of exclusion was driven
to increase, not eliminate, the population of slaves. One logic does not cause the other; rather,
they work together to serve a unitary end in increasing white settler property in the form of
land and an enslaved labor force. As a result, in the postemancipation, postfrontier era, the
racial content of Indigenous peoples is entirely dissolvable and eradicable. Alternatively, the
racial content of blackness remains absolute and essential, and maintains an infinite capacity to
contaminate. As Wolfe states, “the respective racializations . . . were diametrically opposed, in a
manner that reflected and preserved the foundational distinction between land and labor. For
whereas race for black people became an indelible trait that would survive any amount of
admixture, race for Indians became an inherently descending quantity that was terminally
susceptible to dilution.”59 One consequence is that the phrase “separate but equal” can take two meanings: as either an
injurious legal relic or a sovereign politics of the future.60 Given this stark distinction in racial ontologies, any
critical theory that views race and colonialism as a causal rather than dialectical relation is
incapable of exposing these inextricable logics of settler colonialism.
2AC -- AT: Ontology
Anti-blackness is not an ontological antagonism---conflict is inevitable in politics, but does not
have to be demarcated around whiteness and blackness
Peter Hudson 13, Political Studies Department, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg ,
South Africa, has been on the editorial board of the Africa Perspective: The South African
Journal of Sociology and Theoria: A Journal of Political and Social Theory and Transformation,
and is a member of the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism, The state and the
colonial unconscious, Social Dynamics: A journal of African studies, 2013
There always has to exist an outside, which is also inside, to
the extent it is designated as the impossibility from which the possibility of the existence of the
subject derives its rule (Badiou 2009, 220). But although the excluded place which isn’t excluded insofar
as it is necessary for the very possibility of inclusion and identity may be universal (may be considered
“ontological”), its content (what fills it) – as well as the mode of this filling and its reproduction – are
contingent. In other words, the meaning of the signifier of exclusion is not determined once and for all: the place of
the place of exclusion, of death is itself over-determined, i.e. the very framework for deciding
the other and the same, exclusion and inclusion, is nowhere engraved in ontological stone but
is political and never terminally settled. Put differently, the “curvature of intersubjective space” (Critchley
2007, 61) and thus, the specific modes of the “othering” of “otherness” are nowhere decided in advance (as a certain
ontological fatalism might have it) (see Wilderson 2008). The social does not have to be divided
into white and black, and the meaning of these signifiers is never necessary – because they are
signifiers. To be sure, colonialism institutes an ontological division, in that whites exist in a way barred to blacks – who are not.
But this ontological relation is really on the side of the ontic – that is, of all contingently constructed
identities, rather than the ontology of the social which refers to the ultimate unfixity, the
indeterminacy or lack of the social. In this sense, then, the white man doesn’t exist, the black man doesn’t exist (Fanon 1968, 165); and neither does
the colonial symbolic itself, including its most intimate structuring relations – division is constitutive of the social, not the colonial
division. “Whiteness” may well be very deeply sediment in modernity itself, but respect for the “ontological difference”
(see Heidegger 1962, 26; Watts 2011, 279) shows up its ontological status as ontic. It may be so deeply sedimented that it becomes
difficult even to identify the very possibility of the separation of whiteness from the very possibility of
order, but from this it does not follow that the “void” of “black being” functions as the ultimate
substance, the transcendental signified on which all possible forms of sociality are said to rest. What
gets lost here, then, is the specificity of colonialism, of its constitutive axis, its “ontological” differential. A crucial feature
of the colonial symbolic is that the real is not screened off by the imaginary in the way it is under capitalism. At the place of the colonised, the symbolic and the
imaginary give way because non-identity (the real of the social) is immediately inscribed in the “lived
experience” (vécu) of the colonised subject. The colonised is “traversing the fantasy” (Zizek 2006a, 40–60) all the time; the void of the verb “to be”
is the very content of his interpellation. The colonised is, in other words, the subject of anxiety for whom the symbolic and
the imaginary never work, who is left stranded by his very interpellation.4 “Fixed” into “non-fixity,” he is eternally
suspended between “element” and “moment”5 – he is where the colonial symbolic falters in the
production of meaning and is thus the point of entry of the real into the texture itself of
colonialism. Be this as it may, whiteness and blackness are (sustained by) determinate and contingent
practices of signification; the “structuring relation” of colonialism thus itself comprises a knot of
significations which, no matter how tight, can always be undone. Anti-colonial – i.e., anti-“white” –
modes of struggle are not (just) “psychic” 6 but involve the “reactivation” (or “de-sedimentation”)7 of colonial
Thus the self-same/other distinction is necessary for the possibility of identity itself.
objectivity itself. No matter how sedimented (or global), colonial objectivity is not ontologically immune to antagonism. Differentiality, as Zizek insists (see Zizek
2012, chapter 11, 771 n48), immanently entails antagonism in that differentiality both makes possible the existence of any identity whatsoever and at the same time – because
it is the presence of one object in another – undermines any identity ever being (fully) itself. Each element in a differential relation is the condition of possibility and the
condition of impossibility of each other. It is this dimension of antagonism that the Master Signifier covers over transforming its outside (Other) into an element of itself,
symbolisation produces an ineradicable excess over itself, something it
can’t totalise or make sense of, where its production of meaning falters. This is its internal limit point, its real:9 an errant “object” that
has no place of its own, isn’t recognised in the categories of the system but is produced by it –
its “part of no part” or “object small a.”10 Correlative to this object “a” is the subject “stricto sensu” – i.e., as the empty subject of the signifier
without an identity that pins it down.11 That is the subject of antagonism in confrontation with the real of the
social, as distinct from “subject” position based on a determinate identity.
reducing it to a condition of its possibility.8 All
Claims of blackness as structural are essentializing and unduly skeptical – prefer black
optimism to escape cycles of oppression – net benefit to the permutation.
Moten, ’08. Fred Moten's field is black studies, where he works at the intersection of
performance, poetry and critical theory. He is a Helen L. Bevington Professor of Modern Poetry
at Duke University. “Black Op.” PMLA, Vol. 123, No. 5, Special Topic: Comparative Racialization
(Oct., 2008), pp. 1743- 1747 http://www.jstor.org/stable/25501981 – clawan
What is often overlooked in blackness is bound up with what has often been over- seen. Certain
experiences of being tracked, managed, cornered in seemingly open space are inextricably bound to an aesthetically and politically dangerous
supplementarity, an internal exteriority waiting to get out, as if the prodigal's return were to leaving itself .
Black studies’ concern with
what it is to own one`s dispossession, to mine what is held in having been possessed, makes it
more possible to embrace the underprivilege of being sentenced to the gift of constant escape.
The strain of black studies that strains against this interplay of itinerancy and identity - whether in the
interest of putting down roots or dis- claiming them - could be said, also, to constitute a departure, though it may
well be into a stasis more severe than the one such work imagines (itself to be leaving). In
contradistinction to such skepticism, one might plan, like Curtis Mayfield, to stay a believer and therefore to avow
what might be called a kind of metacritical optimism. Such optimism, black optimism, is bound
up with what it is to claim blackness and the appositional, run- away, phonoptic black operationsexpressive of an autopoetic organization in which flight and inhabitation modify each other-that
have been thrust upon it. The burden of this paradoxically aleatory goal is our historicity,
animating the reality of escape in and the possibility of escape from. What if the study of comparative
racialization begins to extend and deepen its critical and imaginative relation to the terms abolition and reconstruction in a genuine, fundamental,
fantastic, radical collective rethinking of them that will take into account their historical ground while also propelling them with the greatest possible
centrifugal force into other, outer, space? Then, even though these terms index a specific history in the United States, their continued relevance and
resonance will be international as well as intranational insofar as the ongoing aggressive constitution of the modern nation-state as a carceral entity
extends histories of forced migration and stolen labor and insofar as the imperial suppression of movements that would excavate new aesthetic,
political, and economic dispositions--as well, of course, as those movements themselves- is a global phenomenon. Abolition and reconstruction might
then be seen as ongoing projects animating the study of comparative racialization as well as black studies, two fields that will be seen as each other’s
inner- most ends, two helds that will be understood as constituted through the claim they make on-their thinking of and in-blackness. Finally, one
might plan to continue to believe that there is such a thing as black- ness and that blackness has
an essence given in striated, ensemblic, authentic experience (however much a certain natural bend is amplified by the
force of every kind of event, however productive such constant inconstancy of shape and form must be of new understandings of essence and
experience). It is obvious (particularly after the recent lessons of Lindon Barrett, Herman Bennett, Daphne Brooks, Nahum Chandler, Denise Ferreira da
Silva, Brent Edwards, Saidiya Hartman, Sharon Holland, and Achilles Mbembe, among others) that blackness
has always emerged as
nothing other than the richest possible combination of dispersion and permeability in and as the
mass improvisation and protection of the very idea of the human. Thus, concern over the
supposedly stultifying force of authenticity exerted by supposedly restrictive and narrow
conceptions of blackness, or worry over the supposed intranational dominance of blackness broadly and unrigorously conceived (in ways
that presuppose its strict biological limitation within an unlimited minoritarian field), or anxiety over the putatively intradiasporic hegemony of a
certain mode of blackness (which presumes national as well as biological determinations that are continually over- and underdetermined) indexes
some other trouble, which we would do well to investigate. Such investigation is best
accompanied by vigilant remembrance of and commitment to the fact that blackness is present
(as E. P. Thompson said of the English working class) at its own making and that all the people who are called black
are given in and to that presence, which exceeds them (in an irrevocable, antenational combination of terror and enjoyment,
longing and rejection, that Hartman, in particular, illuminates). Ultimately, the paraontological force that is transmitted in
the long chain of life and death performances that are the concern of black studies is horribly
misunderstood if it is understood as exclusive. Everyone whom blackness claims, which is to say
everyone, can claim blackness. That claim is neither the first nor the last anticipatory reorientation but is, rather, an irreducible
element of the differentially repeating plane that intersects and animates the comparativist sphere. In this regard, black studies might best be
described as a location habitually lost and found within a moving tendency where one looks back and forth and wonders how utopia came to be
submerged in the interstices and on the outskirts of the fierce and urgent now. The temporal paradox of optimism-that it is, on the one hand, a
necessarily futurial attitude while being, on the other hand, in its proper Leibnizian formulation, an assertion of the necessity, rightness, and
timelessness of the always already existing-resonates in the slim gap between analytic immersion and deictic reserve. This bitter earth is
the best
of all possible worlds, a fact that necessitates the renewed, reconstructed, realization of
imaginative intensities that move through the opposition of voluntary secrecy and forced
exposure in order to understand how the underground operates out in, and as, the open. What's the
relation between the limit and the open? Between blackness and the limit? Between a specific and materially redoubled finitude called blackness and
the open? The new critical discourse on the relation between blackness and death has begun to approach these questions. That discourse reveals that
optimism doesn’t require-indeed, it cannot persist within-the repression of that relation; rather, it always
lives (which is to say, escapes) in the faithful, postfatal assertion of a right to refuse, in the prenatal
instantiation of a collective negative tendency to differ, and in the resistance to the regulative powers
that resistance, differing, and refusal call into being. The general insistence that we don't mind leaving here is inseparable
from the fact that it's all right. Black optimism persists in thinking that we have what we need, that we can get there from here, that there’s nothing
wrong with us or even, in this regard, with here, even as it also bears an obsession with why it is that difference calls the same, that resistance calls
regulative power, into existence, thereby se- curing the simultaneously vicious and vacant enmity that characterizes here and now, forming and
deforming us. However
much trouble stays in mind and, therefore, in the light of a certain interest that the ones who are without
there is cause for optimism as long as there is a need for
interests have in making as much trouble as possible ,
optimism. Cause and need converge in the bent school or marginal church in which we gather together to be in the name of being otherwise.
2AC -- Perm
perm do the aff and non-mutually exclusive parts of the alt---a joint analysis of settler
colonialism and antiblackness can allow us to conceptualize new ways to challenge settler
colonialism and antiblackness---only through this simultaneous vision can we create
possibilities for collaboration that prevents exceptionalism and intercommunal violence
King 13 (TIFFANY JEANNETTE KING, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR Women's Gender and Sexuality
Studies, 2013, dissertation, “IN THE CLEARING: BLACK FEMALE BODIES, SPACE AND SETTLER
COLONIAL LANDSCAPES,”
https://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/14525/King_umd_0117E_14499.pdf?sequen
ce=1; accessed 8/16/2021) ng
In this chapter, I explore the possibility of decolonizing sight. Decolonizing
sight requires that we understand
what directs our sight. It also means that we interrogate a social world ordered by conquest.
What kinds of inner eyes direct the way that we view bodies and space in settler societies?6
How have the ways that we have been taught to survive, self actualize and know ourselves in
settler societies shaped the ways that we look, see and know? In this chapter, I focus on the visual orders and optic
regimes of settler colonialism as sites of knowledge creation and power that skew our vision. In
this chapter, we will be developing new ways of looking at old landscapes. I draw upon the
creative work of Julie Dash and Catherine McKinley, and the scholarly writing of Sylvia Wynter,
Jennifer Morgan, Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Frank Wilderson and Oyeronke Oyewumi
in order to challenge the visual and cognitive regimes of the settler colonial order. These cultural
producers and theorists help us apprehend, conceptualize, and develop inner eyes that help us
visualize the ways that Blackness and slavery shape the settler colonial landscape. They help us
bring the plantation and the body of the slave back into settler colonialism’s analytic frames.
These new units of analysis and conceptual tools can help change our inner eyes so that we
can see how settler colonialism and slavery structure one another. They make simultaneous
vision possible.7 Simultaneous vision is difficult to obtain. It requires that we retrain our thought, inner eyes
and eyes to adjust their focus in order to attend to the ephemeral and moving traces of power
that at times recede or disappear into the background or a realm of the seemingly invisible
depending on the landscape. The power of settler colonialism’s and slavery’s spatial and ontological
formations does not appear on the landscape with equal intensity, in the same hue, or equally
positioned on the landscape. At times the productive and repressive power that makes the
slave will be the foreground color and the power of settler colonialism will provide a bit of
texture. The texture in the background is just as crucial as the foreground color. My reorganization of these units of analysis is
what is new. Scholars of slavery and settler colonialism have inherited analytic units like the plantation, the homestead/settlement,
the Master, the Settler, the Slave which often work to sequester Native Studies, Black Studies, settler colonial studies and
scholarship on slavery. I
want to reframe some of the key analytics from each of these fields of study
by looking at them simultaneously. However, what happens when we think about the plantation
as a result of settler colonial spatial patterns? What is possible when we ask, how is Native
subjectivity and space obliterated by the plantation? What is possible when ask, how is the
slave master also a settler? Reframing allows us to view key units of analysis in new ways and
think about them as co-constituting one another.
Slavery and anti-blackness are inadequate to understand and must be theorized in
conjunction with settler colonialism as structuring modernity and constituting blackness
King 13
[2013, Tiffany Jeannette King, “IN THE CLEARING: BLACK FEMALE BODIES, SPACE AND SETTLER
COLONIAL LANDSCAPES”, PhD Dissertation]
We must consider that Settler
colonialism shapes and constitutes Black life, specifically slavery and its
afterlife in America. While slavery and anti-Black racism should be active and robust analytic
frames that guide Black Studies and help us understand Black subjectivity in the Western Hemisphere, settler colonialism also
structures Black life. The genocide of Native peoples, the perpetual making of Settler space and
Settler subjectivity—as unfettered self actualization—do not immediately stop existing as forms of power
when they run into Black bodies. The way that settler colonial power looks and manifests itself
just changes; it does not stop. Settler colonialism, as a subjectless discourse, is a form of productive power
that touches all that live in the US and Settler colonial nations.30 Though it touches and shapes everyone’s life it
does so in very different ways. For the purposes of my own research I am arguing that settler colonialism’s normalizing power
enacts genocide against Native peoples (disappears Native people) but it also shapes and structures
antiBlack racism. The ontological positions that were created by slavery, specifically the Slave are still
alive and well however, settler colonial power intersects with, works through and structures the
repressive and productive power that makes the Black captive fungible and socially dead.
Throughout, In the Clearing poses the question, in what ways does settler colonial power help structure slavery and anti-Black racism? This project
ultimately argues that slavery
and anti-Black racism are not adequate to fully understand the material
and discursive processes that create Blackness in all of its embodied genres in North America.
Slavery and anti-Black racism are also not the only repressive powers that make the Black body
abject, fungible and situated at the outer limits of being-ness. Both slavery and settler
colonialism structure modernity and need to be fully conceptualized as forms of power that
help constitute Blackness. Conceptualizing the ways that settler colonialism and slavery coconstitute one another is an essential component of this dissertation.
Blackness is fundamentally a question of land relations – black fungibility is a result
of forced removal
King 13 [Tiffany Jeannette, Doctor of Philosophy, “IN THE CLEARING: BLACK FEMALE
BODIES, SPACE AND SETTLER COLONIAL LANDSCAPES”, PhD Dissertation, 2013,
http://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/14525/King_umd_0117E_14499.pdf;jses
sionid=7DA8E0EAD56156407235132AB4145B8E?sequence=1]
Redefining Settlement: Settlement within the disciplines of colonial history, US history, Native Studies and the emerging field of settler colonial studies is often defined through the space and time of
contact. The first moments of European contact with the lands of the New World and the Native people of the hemisphere give us our spatial and temporal frame for the origins of settlement.10 Dash’s
reorganization of the Eliza Lucas Pinckney archive allows us to reorganize the spatial and temporal frames of settlement. For Dash, settlement is reorganized along similar coordinates as Sylvia Wynter’s
frame for conquest. In her novel, Dash takes us back to West Africa to give us some context and explains how the cultivation of indigo that would become a part of the process of settling the land in the
British colonies is a protracted process that in fact starts before arrival on these shores. In the novel, Dash takes us to West Africa and introduces us to Ayodele (Elizabeth Peazant) when she is a twelve
year old girl. Twelfth year come, Ayodele in the indigo fields with mama, learning all she able bout growing indigo and making it into paste to be sent to de market. It was a long an difficult process, but
she patient, an after her first successful batch, they call her ‘My Indigo Girl’ as her mother did.11 The expertise that Ayodele gains as a child makes her valuable to Arab and European slave traders.12
Eventually Ayodele is then sold to the “Pinchney”13 family and is forced to tame the soil and plant in order to cultivate indigo in Charleston on the Wappoo plantation. Nobody know how, but some way
the mistress found out that Ayodele knew how to grow indigo. Maybe she see this piece of cloth that Ayodele bring with her colored with indigo. So mistress gave her some seedlings an a small piece of
land to work. The mistress told the Boss Man that Ayodele was only to work that bit of land. Oooh, he not like that one bit, but her would not hear nothing else. Well, Ayodele did all right, an the mistress
very pleased. All the white men, the master, that planter from Jamaica they brought in, the Boss Man, they fit to be tied. They spent a lot of money bringing that man over here, and he sposed to be the
Settling the land by cultivating indigo required Black bodies from Africa.
While Native genocide and the theft of Native land is at the core of settlement, the transport
expert, an he was white. Ayodele was just a girl and she was black.14
of Black bodies and the knowledge that those bodies have is also a part of settlement. The
spatial process of settlement includes the theft and use of Black bodies from across the
Atlantic. Settlement straddles the Atlantic Ocean and exceeds the White-Settler/Native conflict. This is not an appeal to expand the category of the settler, as I have argued before Black
slaves and descendants of slaves are not settlers. However, the processes which make Black
bodies fungible flesh, a form of terra nullius, and embed their bodies in the land as settledslaves needs to be theorized as modalities of settlement. Settlement needs to be retheorized along the contours of the bodies that it
renders materially and socially dead. Scholarship from Marxist geographies, cultural landscape studies, anthropology and the emerging field of settler colonial studies is useful for helping us think about
Native studies and Black
studies enable a discussion of how the production of Settler and Master or Settler-Master
subjectivity comes about due to its parasitic relationship to Native death and Black
fungibility/accumulation (social death). When we think about the Settler-Master as parasitic we can also
begin to think about their process of settlement as one that also requires the making of
ontological categories occupied by the dead. The process of settlement allows the SettlerMaster to become a human with spatial coordinates because the Native dies and the Black
becomes a non-being (a settled-slave).15 Settlement is more than transforming the land. It is more than the teleological process of weary white people making a home and
Native people naturally disappearing over time. Settlement is an assemblage of technologies and processes of makings and unmakings. Its processes require the making
and unmaking of bodies, subject positions, space, place and claims to various forms of
autonomy, self actualization and transcendence. In Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, Lorenzo Veracini, a founding scholar of the
space, however, it does not help us think about the ways that the process of settlement also materializes Blackness as an ontological position.
emerging field of settler colonial studies describes the process of settlement as a process that enables the “unfettered mobility” of the settler.16 While abject others within settler colonial nations are
“principally characterized by restrained mobility” the settler experiences the capacity for “unfettered mobility.” This description of the kind of state of existence that settlement allows the settler is
instructive. While Veracini’s description moves us closer to a discussion of states of being, I want to reframe Veracini’s description and introduce a few more elements to the equation.
Settlement as an intricate, dynamic and contradictory relationship to Native bodies, Black
bodies and the land/nature. Settlement structures the Settler’s relationship to the Native, the Black and nature as a relation of negation. Settlement also
creates complex ontological positions that are constituted by both states of stasis and flux.
What I mean by this is that some bodies (Native and Black) are relegated to a permanent position of flux. Native
bodies are always slipping into death, Black bodies are always sliding into states of
fungibility and accumulation. The flux and instability of the Black and the Native enable the
Settler to experience a self actualizing state of both libratory stability and transcendent
autonomy. The ontological positions of the Native (slipping into death) and the Black (sliding into fungibility and accumulation) are positions of fixed-flux. As Wilderson argues these
positions do not occupy the universal liberal orienting and humanizing frames of time and space. They are fixed and rooted in a place of elimination and expanding use for the settler’s unending pursuit of
By settling, or gaining an exclusive claim to time and space, the Settler is able to simultaneously become a
stable, coherent and autonomous human subject who occupies space while they also
experience hyper mobility, transcendence and self directed transformation. The Settler moves back and forth at
will between states of rootedness and mobility, stability and postmodern (self determined) constructedness. The Settlers’ unfettered movement
between these contradictory spaces and states is predicated on the “fixed-flux” of Native
and Black bodies. Fixed-flux is the underside of the Settler’s unfettered mobility and self actualization. It is always being susceptible
to having the world flipped upside down at the whim of another (the Settler). Settlement
functions like a violent form of deconstruction. Settlement as a gratuitously violent project
that kills the Native and accumulates the Black also reorganizes discourse. The relationship
that exists between the signifier and signified for concepts like autochthony and indigeneity
and words like clearing under conditions of settlement become shifting ground beneath our
feet.17 The prior meanings held by the terms and words autochthonous, indigenous and clearing are destabilized and then completely evacuated due to the material and discursive muscle of
settlement. At the site of the clearing, Settlers are able to become autochthonous and indigenous at the same time. Frank Wilderson helps us think about the
kind of discursive and material violence that occurs within what he calls the
“Settler/Master/Human’s grammatical structure.”18 Within this grammatical structure, Wilderson argues that there is a disavowal of the
self actualization.
violence of genocide in the way the settler narrates the formation of the US. On one level, the disavowal occurs through the settler’s preferred part of speech. Clearing is only spoken of as a noun in the
Wilderson draws our attention to its
use: “Clearing, in the Settler/Savage” relation, has two grammatical structures, one a noun
and the other as a verb. But the Western only recognizes clearing as a noun. But prior to the
Settler/Master/Human’s grammatical structure. Clearing is never used as a verb in the human’s grammatical structure.
clearing’s fragile infancy, that is before its cinematic legacy as a newborn place name, it labored not across the
land as a noun but as a verb on the body of the “Savage,” speaking civil
society’s essential status as an effect for genocide.”19 This discursive displacement represents an actual displacement. As
the Settler/Master/Human renders the clearing a static place, void of settler violence and absent of indigenous bodies and relations to the land, the Settler also indigenizes themselves to this abstract
space. The Settler is allowed to merge with the land as they root themselves. They become autochthonous people that “sprang up from the land.”20 Settlers are now the group of humans that establish a
right/righteous relationship with the land. Settlers proclaim themselves the new indigenous population. The original indigenous peoples are stripped of their indigeneity and rendered dead. Within the
process of settlement, the indigenous people become embedded in or are literally buried as the dead within the land. The Settler then assumes a new autochthonous identity and emerges from the earth
anew. Even when the Settler indigenizes or roots themselves into the land; they do not become stuck there like Native peoples. In her book, Black Body: Women, Colonialism and Space, Radhika
Mohanram spends time explaining how enlightenment notions of the Indigene and European binary operate.21 The body conceived as incarcerated by nature is partially achieved by the discursive
construction of the native as a “person who is born and thus belongs to a certain place,” and is in fact over determined by that place.22 The European on the other hand can be of a place but is not
incarcerated by it like the Native. Their settler “indigeneity” offers them “unfettered mobility” as well as unfettered self actualization. Native people do not acquire this through their indigenous status.
Upon encountering the settler (who becomes indigenous) the Native experiences their indigeneity as non-existence and death. The clearing also shapes Blackness as it carves out the settlementplantation. The clearing in its verb form certainly labored across the bodies of Native people. However, the clearing also worked on and transformed the bodies of Blacks. The Black body is turned into the
Settled-slave. Nana and Elizabeth Peazant are Settled-slaves whose bodies evince the way that the process of settling “cleared” Blacks of all spatial coordinates that could make them human during this
process of making the settlement/plantation. Blacks become mere ‘states of flux,” and the atomic potential for space. At the site of the clearing, both a spatial and ontological production, Black bodies are
the raw material and precursor to space. While Black bodies are geographic and necessary to the production of space they are not geographic subjects that humanly inhabit space at the site of the
clearing.23 As geographic—dark—matter and material under settlement they make space possible but cannot occupy it. Existing in a continual state of liminality and change Black femaleness is a place
making unit but not in place. Place is where humanness resides. According to Tim Cresswell, place and its links to humanness, morality and identity are a part of a humanistic project.24 For the humanist
undertaking geography, “ontological priority was given to the human immersion in place rather than the abstractions of geometric space.”25 The humanist concept of place is accompanied by the
baggage of morality, identity, authenticity and exclusion.26 Within modern thought systems, there is a tendency to locate people with certain identities in certain places. There is also a tendency within
this metaphysical framework to imagine “mobile people in wholly negative ways.”27 Bodies on the move or sentient beings in a state of “fixed-flux” who slip into death like the Native or slide and
transform as fungible flesh have no place and are considered suspect within this worldview. McKittrick argues that Black subjects, specifically Black women are geographic subjects. Wilderson on the
other hand argues throughout Red, White and Black that Blacks have no spatial coordinates or place for that matter. I however, hold these two thinkers understandings of Black peoples relationship to
space in tension. I argue that Blacks are crucial to the production of Settler space, however can not occupy it on the Settler’s terms. Cresswell argues that since antiquity, western philosophy has
enshrined space as universal and abstract. People, bodies and the particular aspects of mere place did not belong there. That is until the 1970s when “humanistic geographers” attempted to repeople
space and focus on the “geographical nature of being in the world.” 97 Through humanist articulations and re-theorizations of place, the universal and abstract notion of space becomes humanized and
exclusionary admitting only a select group of people. Making a place is also about making a home.28 Place (and space) as home was functioning within imperialist endeavors of the enlightenment far
before human geographers of the 1970s named it as such. As a geographer, Tuan has focused a great deal of attention on the extent to which people have attempted to “create order and homeliness out of
the apparent chaos of raw nature.”29 In fact “the concept of place is central to our understanding of how people turn nature into culture by making it their home.”30 What happens when this humanist
endeavor of turning nature/chaos into culture/order/home meets up with the imperialist endeavor? Sylvia Wynter argues that both the Native and the Black are considered states of non-Reason and
chaos within Enlightenment humanism. Under imperialism, both the bodies and the lands of Native and Black people were states of chaos that needed to be ordered. While Tuan’s configuration of place
and the transformation of raw nature into a home for humankind does not have the violent and exclusionary form of the human in mind, my reconfiguration of the place of settlement does. The
landscapes of settlement, when they appear to the eye as a tranquil pasture with a log cabin or people sun bathing on a beach conceal the violent processes hidden in the clearing. One way of revealing
what is hidden is through rethinking what a landscape is and how it functions. Richard Schein presents an interpretation of landscape as a process. 98 In fact, Schein argues that landscape is always in the
“process of becoming.”31 Another aspect of Schein’s theorization of the landscape that is productive is that he construes the landscapes as having material and epistemological value. The epistemology of
the landscape disciplines those who come into contact with it. The disciplinary element of landscape is embedded in the fact that the material aspect of the landscape is seen, and presents itself as linear
and objective.32 The landscape is in fact not self evident but duplicitous.33 Likewise settlement as a process and what it achieves even in its materiality (clearing, settlement-plantation) is not selfevident but multivalent and at times counter intuitive. What is hidden is that settlement is not just the making of a physical location for the Settler; rather, what is concealed is the simultaneous process of
the Settler rooting in order to launch. Settlement is the subjugation and sinking/fixing of others into a state of flux (death, fungibility) in order for the Settler to transcend into a state of humanness. As the
ultimate self actualizing human, the Settler can actually overcome the particularity of place (body, gender, race, abject sexuality) and launch into universal and abstract space (humanness). To be human
in Frank Wilderson’s terms is to have “cartographic capacity.”34 “Spatial and temporal capacity is so immanent on the field of Whiteness that the effects and permutations of its ensemble of questions and
the kinds of White bodies that can mobilize this universe of combinations are seemingly infinite as well.”35 To be a 99 Savage or to be Black is to exist in the realm of no time and space.36 An apt visual
for what happens when the Settler (noun) settles (verb) both people and land is one of a propelling long jumper. A long jumper is a subject who plants in order to launch oneself into space. This process
of disciplining bodies, land and the viewers’ eye is hard to always perceive. One of the ways that landscapes come into view and also obscure themselves is through the representational work of archives.
Archives often stand as material records, locations, buildings, people, narratives and discourses where we are often told that truth can be found. Schein’s description of a cultural landscape as “discourse
materialized” opens up the possibility of reading the archive, specifically Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s archive as a discourse that “touch[es] ground.”37 I would like to unsettle and disrupt the ways that the
Eliza Lucas Pinckney archive creates a landscape of settlement that veils the ways that place/non-place and human/non-human ontologies are being created at her Wappoo, Waccamaw and Garden Hill
settlement plantations. I also want to expose the way that she is made to function outside of the category of the Settler/Master. Many historians can remark on the rather pristine and harmonious
depictions of her as a slave master. Few remark on the fact that she had great stakes in and supported the death of the Cherokee in the Indian Wars. And there are almost no analyses of the ways that both
her Master and Settler status constituted one another and required the negation of both the
Native and the Black in order to make her a human.
AT: Black Disability
Case
1NC --- Presumption
Alt can’t change society’s worldview and only marginalizes material
experiences
Vehmas & Watson 13 (Simo Vehmas & Nick Watson, “Moral wrongs, disadvantages, and
disability: a critique of critical disability studies”, p. 648-649)
Further, deconstructing
differences will not in and of itself produce respect and equality between
all people with various characteristics. Neither will it result in a social order free from a sense of
difference. It is simply unrealistic to assume that a society could exist were people would not
see some other people as different, and their lives or characteristics as representing a deviation from some norm
considered important regarding good human life. This is because some of the individual characteristics that define
disabled people are, sometimes with good reason, undesirable, even in a utopia where all differences
would have been queered. Disability is not the same as many other group identities and we need to
explore both morally and socially disability and difference rather than simply use difference as a concept through which to critique
the disability identity. There
are no rational reasons to consider homosexuality or gender undesirable
characteristics whatever the social context, but there are many impairments that can reasonably be seen as
undesirable (Shakespeare 2006). Motor neuron disease, depression or spinal cord injury are the kinds of
conditions that we would prefer not to have, and this is not merely because of the cultural
representations attached to them but because these conditions are the kinds of predicaments
that cause suffering irrespective of one’s cultural environment. In acknowledging that
impairments can include an undesirable dimension does not imply devaluing people with
impairments nor their positive group identity (Shakespeare and Watson 2010). As long as people are genuinely free
to decide for themselves and feel about themselves however they wish to feel, we are pretty close to relational justice, free from
hierarchical evils. Imposing
on people ableist or disablist assumptions is certainly wrong, but so
would be the denial of the personal experiences of fearing the loss of one’s physical and mental capacities, or the
fear of dying (Carel 2008). To explain the psychological anguish related to conditions such as motor
neurone disease or depression merely in terms of internalized oppression and ableism would be
insensitive, disrespectful and simply nonsensical.
1NC --- Cyborg Bad
Cyborg theorizing is rooted in ableist and Anti-Black logics that ensure it’s
failure.
Knadler 19 - ( Stephen Knadler; Stephen Knadler is an associate professor of English at
Spelman College, where he teaches US literature and cultural studies. He has been published in
American Literature, American Literary History, American Quarterly, Minnesota Review, and
Modern Fiction Studies.; Originally published: August 6, 2019; “Vitality politics : health, debility,
and the limits of black emancipation”; http://link.umsl.edu/portal/Vitality-politics--healthdebility-and-the/n6SXiAQq3achttp://library.lol/main/D8D265377A8F7623EB4F5A75223D22AB)
Dōgen
What I
am also unwilling to take with the theory of assemblage is the freighted territory of the cyborg: the
feminist materialist theory of becoming developed by Donna Haraway that combines human,
animal, and machine as a radical political enterprise that ushers in the future both theoretically
and practically. I have found it useful as a thought exercise that complicates the relationship of the body to itself and to others
and deals with our very real reliance on machines and kinship with animals. Since the cyborg opens up the conversation about
futurity—which usually elides madness and Blackness—it also becomes a useful space to consider who we are becoming.60
Certainly, to think through our kinship with machines is apropos for discussions of disability given the medicalization of certain
bodies, and remains so given my emphasis on speculative fiction. But the
cyborg is an incomplete, politically
fraught, and ethically suspicious answer to a series of questions about raced and disabled
futurity. Material reality must reckon with what others have pointed out are the lived experiences of the
Black and disabled body, what amount to (in this project, at least) the gaps and folds within Black speculative fiction. Read
in alignment with Tobin Siebers’s theory of complex embodiment and Alison Kafer’s questioning of spatial, cultural, and temporal
logics, the emphasis
on the cyborg and the desire to supersede the body has an antagonistic
relationship with concerns at the heart of disability studies: pain, fiscal access, and the validity of
embodied experience, to name a few.61 What happens when one does not desire cyborgian
intervention as cure? What of those for whom material cyborgian realities are more painful than
useful or pleasurable? As much as cyborgian futures promise a radical set of possibilities for
considering disability, we ought to be wary of them because they are also reliant on a set of
middleclass (or rich) realities. I have elsewhere pointed out the way the cyborg’s promise of radical potential
hinges on an original white Western subject.62 Leaning on Donna Haraway’s original definition, João Costa
Vargas and Joy A. James understand the Black cyborg as a postbellum construction that requires
Black degradation: “A Black cyborg: a modified, improved human whose increased ethical, spiritual, and physical capabilities
generate unusual strength, omniscience, and boundless love.”63 They invoke Haraway’s understanding of the
cyborg as both real and fictive to pinpoint how the Black cyborg relies on a set of interracial
dynamics that extend from a history steeped in anti-Blackness. The Black cyborg is required to
participate in its own self abnegation since it is built on top of the foundations of American
democratic and imperial projects reliant on phobic understandings of Blackness. The Black cyborg,
then, in Vargas and James’s formulation, echoes that of the disabled cyborg: neither can escape
the desire for normalcy that erases Blackness and madness both. Alison Kafer reads in the gaps of Haraway’s
work and its intellectual genealogy to reinsert the oft-overlooked contributions of women of color—among them Octavia E. Butler
and Chela Sandoval—to the definition of the cyborg. She pinpoints that the cyborg
as transgressive figure has limited
potential precisely because of how it has been developed and mobilized in ways that erase women of
color and reify the virgule between disabled and able-bodied. Though the cyborg asks for blasphemous
interpretation—a promise and proposition Kafer, Vargas, and James readily champion—as part of its political transgression, I
question how much the cyborg can map a future of any kind when it relies on a past and path of erasure. What the
cyborg
ushers in—that I’d prefer to leave aside for this discussion—is an assemblage yoked to anti-Blackness and
ableism, a method of becoming that requires theoretical overcoming since the theories rely on but refuse
disabled and Black embodiment.
The Aff is an ableist cyborg hoax
Ellcessor 16 (Elizabeth Ellcessor is an associate professor of media studies at the University of
Virginia, “Cyborg hoaxes: Disability, deception, and critical studies of digital media”,
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1461444816642754, 4/19/16, Buck)
Cyborg hoaxes, deceptive forms of identity presentation that articulate gender, disability, and
technology, have been persistent but unremarked upon elements of online culture. By
identifying, contextualizing, and deconstructing them, this article has highlighted the persistence
of an ideology of ability in online culture and in cyberculture and Internet studies. An ideology of
ability is at work in the pitiable presentation of a digital sweet innocent and in the excuses
offered by cancer. Identifying these themes reveals that online cultures remain closely
connected to larger ideologies and norms. Far from offering a “liberation technology” (Coombs,
1991), online spaces may reproduce and amplify the prejudices and normative assumptions of
a broader cultural context. These deceptive assemblages deploy disability strategically for an
able-bodied audience, taking advantage of existing hierarchies. Yet, they may also challenge
the very ideologies upon which they depend. For instance, the prominence of romance and
sexuality in these hoaxes counters very real tendencies to desexualize people with disabilities.
Such contradictions, and the blurring of identity and technology, are indicative of the “cyborg”
component of these hoaxes. While I retained this language in order to highlight the possibility
of such provocations, it is in the experiences of people with disabilities using online media that a
richer form of cyborg can be found. These experiences reflect a variety of possible linkages of
gender and sexuality, disability, and technology. In these formations, people with disabilities can
be understood “as cyborgs not because of [their] bodies (e.g. our use of prosthetics, ventilators,
or attendants), but because of [their] political practices” (Kafer, 2013: 120). In claiming
disability identity and engaging in community formation, by reconfiguring default settings of
computer hardware and software, and by speaking back to dominant narratives of disability
and gender, these individuals and communities are producing disability technocultures that
are seditious and, too often, invisible. Disability is a necessary and theoretically rich addition to
the forms of identity, community, and material technology that have dominated critical and
cultural studies of digital media. Present since the earliest cyberculture work, but rendered
invisible or metaphorical, disability offers important critical resources for the nuanced and
complex study of the digital networked media that increasingly permeate daily life. Not a
metaphor, and not invisible, but ever-present and meaningful, disability offers a lens through
which to examine theoretical assumptions and exclusions and with which to critically
interrogate normative forms of digital media and the ideological structures that maintain and
challenge them.
1NC --- Liberalism
Even if political liberalism currently excludes the disabled, discussing questions
of implementation can revise it
Badano 13 (Gabriele – PhD candidate at the Centre for Philosophy, Justice and Health at
University College London – “Political liberalism and the justice claims of the disabled: a
reconciliation,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, April 2013,
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/tHKkbrxhGYIWAxTcJrAW/full#.UxyV-PldX-4)
I argue that any proposal abandoning
the language of political justice would not seem to do enough for
those individuals with disabilities who fall outside the basic idea of persons as depicted by Rawls. In fact, the intuitions
supporting the idea that concepts like rights and opportunities are indispensable are very strong.11
Let us go back to the examples of individuals falling outside Rawls’s idea of persons because their disabilities prevent them from
being a net benefit to social cooperation. They
are individuals who need multiple carers to work, or whose disabilities
prevent them from providing a benefit to social cooperation that is large enough. To put the point more
sharply, it is worth noticing that the disabilities in question are compatible with being in full possession of one’s logical and moral
powers. Now, should
we accept that those individuals ought to be given no rights or
opportunities? An affirmative answer would strike us as implausible, and for a good reason. In a liberal society, having
one’s rights, opportunities and basic distributive entitlements acknowledged is one and the same as
being recognized as an equal. And what is missing from Rawls’s political liberalism is precisely the idea that falling below a
threshold of full cooperation should not be enough to prevent the disabled from being regarded as persons on an equal footing with
anyone else. In sum, Rawls’s
political liberalism is not amenable to any extension that, keeping the basic
ideas of society and persons intact, is able to include a concern with the status of individuals with
disabilities. In addition, the proposal that the interests of the disabled are not for public reason to protect is not satisfactory.
Consequently, a substantial revision is the only way to reconcile political liberalism with our intuitions
concerning what is due to the disabled. 5. Revising political liberalism I: beyond Hartley’s contractualism The aim of this
section and the next is to propose a substantial revision of Rawls’s theory that accommodates the justice claims of the disabled while
upholding the project of political liberalism. A
question that needs to be answered at this point is: why should
we uphold the project of political liberalism, rather than endorsing a different model that more
neatly fits with our intuitions concerning what is due to the disabled? First, the general project of political
liberalism is compelling. Rawls’s political liberalism aims to identify a common ground of political ideas that can work as the
basis on which the most important political decisions should be made. This project is of the greatest importance
because, if successful, it creates legitimacy by building institutions on the basis of concepts that are
acceptable to each reasonable individual. Moreover, it promotes stability in societies that are characterized by deep
pluralism. Second, despite Rawls’s failure to take the interests of the disabled into consideration,
political liberalism is well suited to support the justice claims of individuals with disabilities.
This is because the idea that the disabled are citizens who deserve our respect is part of the common
culture of our societies. In other words, there is an overlapping consensus on the idea that rights, opportunities and distributive
shares must be granted to individuals who are not fully cooperating members of society, including those who fall below full moral
powers. It is widely believed that those
with physical disabilities should have the same rights as their
fellow citizens, live in a social environment that does not excessively limit their opportunities and
receive benefits that help meet their special needs. Besides, although the state or third parties are given exceptional
rights to interfere with the autonomy of individuals with severe cognitive disabilities, it is widely recognized that the
mentally disabled are citizens whose basic interests must be protected by the law.12 In the public
space, any proposal that individuals who are not fully cooperating members of society should have their basic interests neglected
would be widely received with outrage. Such proposal would be said to fit a fascist society, not a decent one. Among other legal
documents, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN General Assembly, A/61/611) can be taken
as the epitome of this widespread attitude. Adopted in 2006, the Convention requires that all individuals with disabilities should
share in the enjoyment of equal fundamental rights.
1NC --- State Good
The bidirectionality of this topic allows for state action for info sharing which
resolves the securitization of collective trauma that caused the War on drugs,
terror, and poverty
Jonathon P. Whooley 21 [San Francisco State University, International Relations, Ontological
(In)visibility and Cyber Conflict: The Problem of Sight and Vision in Establishing Threat, Global, Local,
Political 2021, Vol. 46(2) 47–51,
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/03043754211024583?journalCode=alta, -ekh-]
International Relations (IR) is
a field of vision. Elements traditional to IR like nuclear deterrence, armed conflict,
terrorism, or great power balancing, all require states to interpret the behavior and posture of other actors
to define the menu of options that are available to them. Ontological security theorists in general agree with
this position, arguing that feelings and interpretations of their security are required for states to
understand their position in relation to others in the international system. Thus, a state’s identity is defined as
much by its relationship and feeling of threat toward and among other states. But what happens if the linchpin of
defining a state’s security is covert, what if the mechanisms by which a state understands its
security standing is accomplished not in the light, but rather in the shadows, around computer
networks, non-state actors, disinformation campaigns, hacking, and at least for democratic
states like the US through electoral manipulation?
At a recent conference panel with intelligent scholars of various stripe I was asked ‘when was the last cyber attack?’ They noted the
presence of Stuxnet (a US-Israeli produced computer virus targeting the Iranian nuclear refining infrastructure at the Natanz plant)
but hinted in confusion that there had not been much since. And my colleague was not alone, polling on the threat of cyber-attack
routinely finds that these actions among the lowest of concerns for most Americans,1 The problem inherent in the disconnect
between the assumptions of my informed colleagues and the reality of the cyber landscape is vision and sight. Cyberthreats
often fall in between and within the context of our blindspots, hackers and non-state actors
use the fact that much of what they do, be it malware or ransomware toward a hospital,
misinformation or disinformation online, or direct attacks on networks or individuals, all too often
are relegated to page A7 instead of the front page and largely away from public vision. However, if say, a
series of bombs were exploded paralyzing the financial sector of a major American city the
focus would immediately be apprehended and the eyeballs of many Americans would be glued
to said attack.
This approach is both normative and theoretical in that it is directed at a central question: why
do people misconstrue or
fail to take seriously cyber threats? We argue that for democracies to thrive with well-informed voters
making decisions in their elections and transmit their policy preferences to their elected leaders. But this requires the
referential Self to effectively understand and develop their own identities relative to the
national or effective assessments of threat must be possible. Placing OST in the conversation helps us to
organize how publics conceive of their security and organize it into preferential voting behaviors. This folds in notions of threat and
visibility, as well as the presumption that to properly ascertain how threatening an action may be is entirely relative to the
perception that the problem is something tractable enough to apprehend, and cognizable enough to properly fold into an existing
structuration of concern. Voters in an overwhelming information environment may fail to properly aggregate potential threats to
their governments or persons, but this does not mean those threats do not exists. It only means we (as the public) may fail to
properly tabulate and understand how those threats relate to our lived experience.
Ontological security theory as a set of practical and empirical assumptions about state and
individual behavior is an important tool for heuristically constructing how preferences are
sorted in an atmosphere of threat and contestation. Huysmans’s (1998) study is particularly important for this
work because it situates how states come to view internal/external others as threats to the self/identity both in terms of space and
vision. Because, as Huysmans argues, OST is founded upon relational security practices and the ability to perceive which are and are
not manifest security threats is hotly in contention and is driven “by ‘securitizing’ the unknown into an identifiable threat” (Steele,
2017). The unknown in this case can be typified, though not flippantly, by the “half a billion cyber security breaches in first semester
of 2014” (Oltramari et al., 2014) or the “16,555 vulnerabilities between January 1, 2018, and December 31, 2018” (Syed, 2020). This
picture of the cyber horizon is made even more chaotic when one recognizes that “65% of the victims of intrusion and information
theft in the private sector are notified by third parties and that the detection process usually takes up to 13 months” (quoted in
Syed, 2020).
To effectively evaluate threat in the realm of cyber security means being able to effectively adjudicate how and where threats occur. For Huysmans
(1998) in the practical realm of OST, this means identifying the other or securitizing the problematic party. For those in the cyber security community
(computer scientists, data systems managers, and cyber security analysts) this means creating a common language to describe threats and to properly
allocate culpability. They describe the problem as “cognizance” or the ability to create a “reliable perception of the elements of the environment
and…the explicit representation of their semantics” (Syed, 2020, p. 54). The promotion of a shared conceptualization of chaotic and often covert threat
attempts to, “shape that chaos into a framework of meaningful chunks of knowledge, turning the operational disarray into a systematic model” that
gives practitioners and theorists purchase on dealing with cyber threats. To understand cyber is to adapt or adopt a common language to create a
landscape of cyberthreats. Thus, the realm of threat is not hard to understand as even those closest to the problem are aware that lacking a basic
knowledge of common elements has created chaos. How then are normal people meant to understand the cyber realm as a position of threat?
In this regard Kinvall’s work is helpful because it organizes the terminology
and language of threat around a
common source of loss. For example, the election hacking and disinformation around the 2020 election. Kinvall employed
the use of ‘chosen traumas’ from (Volkan 1998) which are folded into broader group identities.
Defined from here as the “collective memory of a calamity that once befell a group’s ancestors”
(Volkan 1998). Securitizing the Self, here it seems’ requires a collective trauma, which in the realm
of terrorism is easily understood. The terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, as well as the
tragedy of Flight 93, on September 11, 2001 for example provided a necessary site for collective trauma
and the torture (Steele, 2017) and then the Global War on Terror emerged as a result (Updegraff et al., 2008).
The role of this trauma in creating the permission structure for conflict and bloodletting is
manifest in the recent history of American Foreign Policy (Resende and Budryte, 2013). This, as opposed to say
election hacking, or the sheer volume of cyber threats and conflicts as noted above, defies the mind to create
known or unknown enemies precisely because vision is deterred and the necessary creation
around anxiety is upended. Political life and the establishment of norms and routines around
threat is dynamic and shifting, even as the human drive for certainty remains (Onuf, 1998). Societies are
driven by a sense that a coherent picture of personal security is possible and preferable even if the notion of how that world outside
is created is problematic and fractured. As researchers we desire things as well, including, a “coherent Self” (Steele, 2017) but
paradoxically these may be those that are most capable and likely to commit acts of violence (Steele, 2017). Again, though, this
requires a construction of the Self relative to a manifest threat and a creation of a sphere of safety around a perceived possible
security or insecurity. Krahmann argues that just such a security sphere exists in the marketing of cyber-security to European Union
(EU) communities. The promotion by the state of anxieties around threat first appears in notion of terrorism and migration in the
EU. But migrates, one might feel, inevitably, to the realm of cyber security. Krahmann argues that while “Fear can be addressed by
eliminating a threat, anxiety cannot” (2018: 358).
This is precisely the problem: anxiety without vision is lost on voters and policymakers not directly focused on the issue
of cybersecurity. Because the cyber realm is largely opaque to the outside world and because individuals, corporations, public
utilities, hospitals, or governments who suffer from cyber attacks often hide these attacks out of shame, embarrassment, or for
security concerns no trauma is effectively transmitted and thus no concerted popular response is generated. This piece is
not
opining for another global war on terror, nor is it seeking some sight of popular trauma to serve
as a benchmark for the dangers of cyber warfare, what it is fundamentally concerned about is the dramatic uptick
in cyberattacks (the Russian attack on the Ukrainian2 and Georgian3 power grids, the ongoing Solar Winds hacks4 , the Russian theft
of State Department emails5 , or the constant barrage of Chinese attempts to obtain intellectual property6 ) and the failure of the
public to cognize that there are no redlines in cyber.
Other than the ICANN framework7 which is at this point not codified into international law or recognized by the UN, there are no
established rules of the road, proportionate responses in terms of Just War Theory, or mitigative efforts short of backroom
diplomacy. What
a just response to an attack on a power grid or to the targeting of nuclear
enrichment is often made on the fly among a close network of parties in the know, without the
overview of policy makers or voters. This is a highly combustible situation, and it is made all the
more dangerous by the potential for miscalculations, made broadly out of the view of the voting
public, to result in magnified or outsized results.
2NC --- State Good
State action can be good for people with disabilities – ADA proves
Mckeever 20 (Amy Mckeever, JULY 30, 2020, "How the Americans with Disabilities Act
transformed a country," History,
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/americans-disabilities-act-transformedunited-states ) //RB
More than 2,000 disability rights advocates gathered on the South Lawn of the White House in
Washington, D.C., on a hot summer day. It was July 26, 1990, and they’d come together to
witness one of the most momentous civil rights victories in decades: President George H.W.
Bush signing the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) into law.
During the signing ceremony—days after the Fourth of July—Bush
admitted that the United States hadn’t always lived
up to its founding principles of freedom and equality. “[T]ragically, for too many Americans, the
blessings of liberty have been limited or even denied,” he said. “Today’s legislation brings us
closer to that day when no Americans will ever again be deprived of their basic guarantee of life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
The ADA not only provided comprehensive civil rights protections for people with disabilities
for the first time in the nation’s history, but it also marked a sea change in the nation’s
attitudes toward disability rights. Here’s how the landmark statute came to be, and how it
transformed the country.
The disability rights movement gains steam
Throughout history, people with disabilities were feared and ridiculed for their perceived defects and pushed to the margins of
society. By the 1960s, that discrimination had been codified. People with disabilities were excluded from public schools, involuntarily
sterilized, sent to live in state-run institutions, and even denied the right to vote. Some U.S. municipalities even had so-called “ugly
laws” prohibiting people with “unsightly or disgusting” deformities in public places. It was a world designed not to include people
with disabilities. Government buildings and private businesses alike lacked ramps and elevators, while public transportation rarely
provided accommodations for people with mobility or visual impairments. Having a disability was considered a medical problem to
be solved rather than an identity to be protected under non-discrimination laws. But things began to change in the 1970s. Inspired
by the civil rights movement of the 1960s, disability rights advocates became more vocal in their demands that their rights ought to
be guaranteed as well. Disability had also become more noticeable as wars in Vietnam and Korea returned thousands of soldiers
with lasting injuries. In 1973, advocates won the passage of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which prohibited programs
receiving federal funding from discriminating against people with disabilities. It was the first piece of legislation to use the term
“discrimination” to describe the limitations that these Americans face.
For the law to go into effect, the government would have to issue regulations defining who
qualifies as a person with a disability and what constitutes discrimination in the disability
context. The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare put off issuing those regulations for four years as they wrestled over the terms.
Impatient with the delay—and worried it meant the regulations would be weakened—advocates organized protests around the country. In April
1977 they launched a sit-in at a federal building in San Francisco that would last for 28 days—
the longest peaceful occupation of a federal building in U.S. history—and result in victory.
The need for a comprehensive civil rights law
With Section 504, the American public began to understand that making accommodations for
people with disabilities was a civil right rather than a welfare benefit. It also galvanized a growing disability
rights movement that won several other important victories in the 1970s and 1980s—including legislation that guaranteed a free
public education to children with impairments and prohibited housing discrimination on the basis of disabilities. Yet discrimination
persisted. In 1979, the Supreme Court ruled that the nursing school at Southeastern Community College in Whiteville, North
Carolina, was not required by Section 504 to accommodate a hearing-impaired applicant. In other circumstances, regulations were
simply not well enforced. For example, transit authorities were left to decide for themselves how accessible they needed to be. (A
skull discovered in Spain suggests that early humans cared for disabled children.) In the mid-1980s, advocates came to the
conclusion that the critical next step was to push for comprehensive civil rights legislation for people with disabilities. The National
Council on Disability commissioned a report on the need for such a law, while its vice chair Justin Dart—who would later become
known as the “Godfather of the ADA”—embarked on a national tour to discuss disability policy with local officials and gather stories
of the discrimination people with disabilities faced. These advocacy efforts made an impression on both sides of the political aisle.
Disability rights had become a bipartisan issue thanks to years of changing public perceptions. In 1988, Senators Lowell Weicker, a
Republican from Connecticut, and Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa, introduced the Americans with Disabilities Act. After years of
revisions, amendments, and negotiations, the bill was passed, and on that July day Bush—who had made civil rights legislation for
people with disabilities a campaign promise in 1988—signed it into law with Dart by his side.
Why the ADA matters
The Americans with Disabilities Act was a sweeping piece of legislation that banned
discrimination on the basis of disability in employment, public accommodations, public services,
transportation, and telecommunication. It finally afforded people with disabilities the same
protections that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had provided on the basis of race, color, religion,
sex, and national origin.
"It is the world’s first declaration of equality for people with disabilities," Dart wrote after the
ADA was passed. "It will proclaim to America and to the world that people with disabilities are
fully human; that paternalistic, discriminatory, segregationist attitudes are no longer acceptable;
and that henceforth people with disabilities must be accorded the same personal respect and
the same social and economic opportunities as other people."
The ADA launched the process of building a more accessible world by ensuring that buildings,
schools, and public spaces were equipped with ramps, elevators, and curb cuts. It made travel
easier by requiring operators to make accommodations, such as offering wheelchair lifts, airport
shuttle service, and rental cars with hand controls. It also led to the rise of interpreters and
closed captioning in public communications. (These five coastal areas have made accessibility a
priority.)
After a tragic accident ended her dance career, Kitty Lunn taught herself how to dance again in her wheelchair. Today, Lunn
empowers her students to "dance in the body you have" in this film by Qingzi Fan. The Short Film Showcase spotlights exceptional
short videos create...Read More
Crucially, this legislation has also become a model for lawmakers and activists around the world
seeking to end discrimination against people with disabilities in their countries. Since 2000,
more than 180 countries have passed legislation inspired by the ADA. The law is limited, however. The ADA has
been criticized for failing to increase employment among people with disabilities—only 19 percent are in the workforce today compared with 66
percent of those without disabilities. People with disabilities are still disenfranchised. Accommodations at polling places across the nation are
inadequate; in 2016, a government report found that 60 percent of the polling places it examined had one or more potential impediments, such as
ramps that were dangerously steep or paths in poor condition. Meanwhile, 39 states and Washington, D.C., have incompetence laws that allow judges
to strip the vote from people they deem incapable of participating in the democratic process, such as people with mental impairments. Stigma and
discrimination persist throughout society too. The ADA may not be perfect, but as Dart wrote in 1990, it “is only the beginning. It is not a solution.
Rather, it is an essential foundation on which solutions will be constructed.”
1NC --- Progress
The aff’s theory is contingent on institutions and their engagement with
language in debate can’t achive any success. Only political engagement can
solve.
Brock 22 – Brian Brock holds a personal Chair in Moral and Practical Theology. He joined the
University of Aberdeen in 2004, following postdoctoral studies at the Friedrich Alexander
University Erlangen-Nurnberg and a doctorate in Christian ethics at King's College London. (Brian
Brock, “On the limits of justice as eradicating ‘isms’”, Taylor and Francis Online, 23 Feb 2022,
Vol. 22, Issue: 1, pgs. 75-85, https://doi.org/10.1080/1474225X.2022.2038017) || PZ
**Edited for language**
Are all biases equal? What is more idolatrous than ableism? Just as racism
is a set of cultural attitudes and
sociopolitical structures that privilege the dominant race over ethnic minorities, and just as sexism is a
similar set of cultural presuppositions and sociopolitical structures that perpetuate male domination over women, so ableism
names the discriminatory attitudes, negative stereotypes, and sociopolitical and economic structures and
institutions that together function to exclude people with disabilities from full participation in society.
Ableism thus identifies the normate bigotry, evaluative chauvinism, and structural injustice that people with disabilities have to
endure at the hands of the dominant (read: nondisabled) culture.1 With this articulation of the injustices suffered by people with
disabilities, the Pentecostal disability theologian Amos Yong channels the zeitgeist, a widely shared sensibility about how equality is
to be achieved. The contemporary version of this Enlightenment quest
to achieve justice – understood as universal
equality – takes the form of a hunt to root out all pernicious -isms: not only racism, ableism, evaluative chauvinism
but also patriarchalism, heterosexism and gender essentialism. Put in the terms of this special issue, it is almost universally
assumed in the modern democratic liberal space that when we (late-modern westerners) ask whether disability is a ‘driving force for
change,’ we understand change as a process progressive of eliminating injustices. This paper probes the limits and blind spots of
moral change so defined in order to raise one theological note of caution. Understanding moral change in progressivist terms carries
a momentum – psychological and linguistically embedded – that that can carry the moral drive for justice into a superficial and so
problematic policing
of language that can become unmoored from the more concrete work of
investigating the mechanics of specific forms of lived justice. It is important to ask whether it is possible that wellmeaning quests for justice can take forms that are idolatrous because they in fact excuse people from making real
and costly concrete ventures to serve lived, actual justice. When Yong highlights ableism as idolatrous, he rightly
draws attention to an important set of injustices, and in a way that makes common cause with people of all faiths and none who find
ableism morally repugnant. The question I want to ask is whether saying something is idolatry (a theological description) is wholly
equivalent to saying that it is a pernicious ‘ism’ (a linguistic and moral description). This distinction matters because one fights
idolatry primarily by confession and repentance, whereas the common liberal
understanding is that one fights bias
and prejudice by education and institutional reform. Yong holds these two sorts of response together by
marrying idolatry and ableism, but it may be that the list of aspects of ableism that he lists (‘discriminatory attitudes, negative
stereotypes, and sociopolitical and economic structures and institutions’) are very differently understood if taken to be signs of
worship of a false power rather than as institutional
structures and mental attitudes which make life harder for
some people than others. There may well be forms of being educated about discrimination which exacerbate the spiritual pride
that assumes people do not really need to change. If so, it is important to ask what is lost if we simply equate the very different
descriptive registers of idolatry and discrimination. These questions matter if the
final aim of justice is effective
social change. It is dangerous to assume that linguistic change alone can do this, a claim Yong would
certainly reject. No one should doubt that we often find our way to real injustices by querying the behaviour of people who speak
disparagingly of others, in this case, those with disabilities. Yet it is crucial not to lose the
question of how successful or
unsuccessful the work of rooting out discriminatory linguistic expressions has been in achieving
changes to unjust practices on the ground. There are very practical differences in what it takes to combat
‘discriminatory attitudes and negative stereotypes’ in contrast to changing ‘sociopolitical and economic structures and institutions.’
If we call both sorts of work ‘combatting ableism’ we are lumping together very different sorts of activity, from the crafting of policy,
to the analysis of cultural tropes to the revising of formulaic public speech to the investigation of people’s own identity structures.
Distinguishing idolatry and discrimination Distinguishing between idolatry and discrimination matters because real
change
demands self-examination and repentance. It also demands personal investment in a very different sort of work,
sociological research, policy formulation, legal clarification, engagement in the political process,
forging alliances between different power blocks, and so on. It will always be tempting to reduce
one’s investment in fighting injustice to the easiest of all these activities, the policing of language. What is
dangerous about this narrowing of the quest for change to linguistic policing alone is that it can push some
forms of injustice underground and so entrench them. It is fair to call the drift into linguistic policing
alone intellectually lazy because it foregoes the hard and necessarily constant work of asking what is actually
happening on the ground, what is the real injustice people are suffering right now, and what we
might concretely do about it if we are serious about bringing about a genuinely more just society? The modern liberal quest
to root out -isms can sometimes proceed in ways that make it difficult to see if these investigative questions are being seriously
asked. Language policing undermines its own moral authority if this more concrete and fine-grained analysis is not obviously being
pursued. For example, since the police killing of George Floyd in 2020 there has been an exponential rise in interest in rooting out
racial bias among American white liberals. Yet despite this increase in intellectual comprehension of the implications of white
privilege, those who think of themselves as white might still buy houses in places where they know racism gives them an unfair
economic advantage, not challenge racism among family members and find reasons to resist sharing schools. Given the structural
inequalities involved in racism and the personal costs of remaking these infrastructural barriers, crafting a ‘woke’ online profile and
voting for progressive causes may seem like a reasonable and low-cost way of being an ally of victims of racial injustice while in fact
being one of the more stable ways that racism is perpetuated.2 As early as 1965 Martin Luther King himself had highlighted this
dynamic in the American populace. The ‘silence of friends’ he pointed out, is a longstanding feature of American racism, and is held
in place as the majority of enlightened liberals denounce racism elsewhere but explain it away in their own back yards, where
admitting it would demand costly change. As he put it in 1967: ‘most whites in America, including many of goodwill, proceed from
the premise that equality is a loose expression for improvement. White America is not even psychologically organized to close the
gap – essentially, it seeks only to make it less painful and less obvious but in most respects retain it.’3 Stated philosophically: the
danger of calling a concrete injustice, against disabled people, for instance, an ‘ism’ – in this case, ableism, is to insinuate that the
basic motor of justice is our work of classifying new sets of language and thought as pernicious -isms. The illusion is that moral
change in society is essentially driven by the reclassification of specific acts from being morally neutral, to being morally problematic.
Once something has been labelled a problematic -ism it is then subsumed within a general class of illiberal -isms that those who
want to achieve a just society must now fight to eradicate or defend themselves from accusations of being morally suspect. But as
the case of racism makes clear, this linguistic reclassification can blind us to our own culpability if we are not able to name concrete
ways in which we are participants in ableism. Those who have become content to denounce unjust -isms can often be spotted by the
ease with which they compare and implicitly equate injustices. People
who have developed the habit of verbally
denouncing unjust -isms often find it hard to explain the details of concrete injustices. There is a
symmetry between the equation of injustices and the superficiality of one’s emotional and intellectual engagement with them. For
instance: are the indubitable injustices associated with the labels racism and ableism in fact morally or phenomenologically
equivalent? There are a wide range of questions that would need to be asked here to even begin to answer the question of what it
would mean to stamp out these two -isms. Is the racism of one society equivalent to that of all others? In a society that had chattel
slavery in living memory, should we prioritise the fight to eradicate racism, or should we acknowledge that disabled people have
been disparaged and mocked for most of human history, and so deserve to receive priority in formulating our campaigns for justice
and our calls for better social policies? Should we even ask whether some injustices are more severe than others? If we cannot ask
this question, how will we focus our efforts in fighting injustice? I am not taking a position on any of these questions, but raise them
in order to highlight how the classing of all injustices under labels that appear to set injustices in a single conceptual cluster may
produce false equivalences that make it difficult to investigate and admit morally important differences between disparaging
language and actually enacted injustices.
1NC --- Reform
Abstract critique keeps us from forefronting political reform
Ruckelshaus 17 (Jay, Rhodes Scholar and graduate student in political theory at the
University of Oxford, and the founder and president of Ramp Less Traveled, a nonprofit
organization that helps students with spinal cord injuries pursue higher education, "The NonPolitics of Disability”, 1/18/17, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/opinion/denouncingtrump-wont-help-disability-rights.html)
Disability rights enjoy a seemingly ironclad moral consensus, an ostensible unanimity that is striking given
America’s entrenched polarization and the antagonism surrounding other identity movements. Many are wary of L.G.B.T. rights or
the Black Lives Matter movement, but it seems beyond the pale — almost cruel — to oppose disability rights. Nobody wants to be
anti-disability. Initially, this harmony would seem helpful. Free
from partisan discord, advancements for the
be easier to achieve, borne aloft by the wings of certain
progress. Why, then, do rampant unemployment and educational disparities endure, and why does
success remain the exception? I think part of the reason is the insulation of our pro-disabled political
consensus. Its logic is rooted not in any deep belief in the equal worth of citizens with disabilities, but rather in a general
aversion to disability. This is related to the charity impulse that has always surrounded disability — and has
constrained liberation efforts by assuming that inequities are unfortunate but natural realities to be
mitigated through compassion, rather than politically structured injustices. There is also a
profound lack of disabled people in the public sphere, meaning any substantive discussion that does
occur is extremely rare. I suspect many people I talk to about disability maintain an implicit hope that, if they nod as
vigorously as possible, the issue will simply go away. In this way, support for disability rights is similar to the act of expressing
perfunctory thanks to military veterans. It temporarily absolves us of the responsibility to address the heart of
the matter. Moreover, the apparent moral consensus may be mostly superficial. In trying to enact accessibility, disability
approximately 57 million Americans with disabilities should
advocates encounter increasing resistance as the effort and costs involved in proposals come closer to being realized. (Consider the
neighborhood store that decides it’s just too costly to install a ramp, or the community lecture that excludes deaf attendees by
refusing to hire a sign-language interpreter.) Instead of facilitating change, false unity actually restrains change. It stifles the more
substantive conversations true progress requires. And our inability to speak honestly — and contentiously — about disability shows
how the politics of disability is in this sense non-political. We are the worse for it. In
addition to greater participation in
the public sphere, true progress for citizens with disabilities will require a willingness to confront
the issues head-on, even when — especially when — citizens disagree on competing solutions. We must politicize
disability — not in the cable-news, grandstanding kind of way, but in the term’s more formal sense. The work of the Belgian
political theorist Chantal Mouffe can help illuminate what’s at stake. Mouffe begins with the premise that human relations are
inherently antagonistic: Political change always requires controversial transfers in power or prestige, and it is an illusion to imagine
politics without confrontation. Per this “agonistic” conception of democracy, a healthy political order is one that prefers vigorous,
good-faith argumentation to complacent consensus. Until we publicly recognize real disagreements surrounding disability and
accessibility, Mouffe would insist, we are doomed to a vacuous, empty debate that is neither political nor productive. Recall the
Kovaleski incident. I’m not suggesting that the abhorrence of Mr. Trump’s actions is open to legitimate questioning. But in
their
forcefully reassuring comments and messages, my friends prevented any serious discussion of
disability at the level where reasonable disagreement does exist. Where will the money come
from to fund disability employment schemes? How do we even define “disability”? Despite — and, I
would argue, partly because of — the broad condemnation of Mr. Trump for his insensitivity, there was no
substantive public discussion of such issues. You may be thinking, haven’t we had enough politics lately? Maybe it’s
a blessing that disability isn’t as political as it might be; it avoids the drama and messiness that now seem to define our common life.
Avoiding politics might be possible if disability were an exclusively private affair. But it is
fundamentally a public
concern, affecting everyone directly or indirectly and revealing our obligations to one another as members of a democratic
society. Issues of accessibility can be fully addressed only through public institutions and collective
effort. For the disability community, there is no answer but politics. But politics need not be
repulsive. That’s the beauty of Mouffe’s agonism: By legitimating clashing arguments and welcoming them
into the political fold, unproductive antagonism becomes constructive, and compromises emerge.
2NC --- Reform
Disability must be politicized---this is the only way to secure collective rights--the retreat from politics reifies ableist tropes of charity politics and naively tries
to wish problems away
Ruckelshaus 17, (Jay Ruckelshaus is a Rhodes Scholar and graduate student in political theory
at the University of Oxford, and the founder and president of Ramp Less Traveled, a nonprofit
organization that helps students with spinal cord injuries pursue higher education, The NonPolitics of Disability, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/opinion/denouncing-trump-wonthelp-disability-rights.html)
Disability rights enjoy a seemingly ironclad moral consensus, an ostensible unanimity that is striking given
America’s entrenched polarization and the antagonism surrounding other identity movements. Many are wary of L.G.B.T. rights or
the Black Lives Matter movement, but it seems beyond the pale — almost cruel — to oppose disability rights. Nobody wants to be
anti-disability. Initially, this harmony would seem helpful. Free from partisan discord, advancements for the
approximately 57 million Americans with disabilities should be easier to achieve, borne aloft by the wings of certain progress.
Why, then, do rampant unemployment and educational disparities endure, and why does success
remain the exception? I think part of the reason is the insulation of our pro-disabled political consensus.
Its logic is rooted not in any deep belief in the equal worth of citizens with disabilities, but rather in
a general aversion to disability. This is related to the charity impulse that has always surrounded
disability — and has constrained liberation efforts by assuming that inequities are unfortunate
but natural realities to be mitigated through compassion, rather than politically structured
injustices. There is also a profound lack of disabled people in the public sphere, meaning any
substantive discussion that does occur is extremely rare. I suspect many people I talk to about disability
maintain an implicit hope that, if they nod as vigorously as possible, the issue will simply go
away. In this way, support for disability rights is similar to the act of expressing perfunctory thanks
to military veterans. It temporarily absolves us of the responsibility to address the heart of the
matter. Moreover, the apparent moral consensus may be mostly superficial. In trying to enact
accessibility, disability advocates encounter increasing resistance as the effort and costs involved in
proposals come closer to being realized. (Consider the neighborhood store that decides it’s just too costly to install a
ramp, or the community lecture that excludes deaf attendees by refusing to hire a sign-language interpreter.) Instead of
facilitating change, false unity actually restrains change. It stifles the more substantive
conversations true progress requires. And our inability to speak honestly — and contentiously —
about disability shows how the politics of disability is in this sense non-political. We are the
worse for it. In addition to greater participation in the public sphere, true progress for citizens with disabilities
will require a willingness to confront the issues head-on, even when — especially when — citizens disagree on
competing solutions. We must politicize disability — not in the cable-news, grandstanding kind of way, but in the term’s
more formal sense. The work of the Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe can help illuminate what’s at stake. Mouffe begins with
the premise that human
relations are inherently antagonistic: Political change always requires
controversial transfers in power or prestige, and it is an illusion to imagine politics without
confrontation. Per this “agonistic” conception of democracy, a healthy political order is one that prefers vigorous, good-faith
argumentation to complacent consensus. Until we publicly recognize real disagreements surrounding
disability and accessibility, Mouffe would insist, we are doomed to a vacuous, empty debate that is
neither political nor productive. Recall the Kovaleski incident. I’m not suggesting that the abhorrence of Mr. Trump’s
actions is open to legitimate questioning. But in their forcefully reassuring comments and messages, my friends prevented any
serious discussion of disability at the level where reasonable disagreement does exist. Where will the money come from to fund
disability employment schemes? How do we even define “disability”? Despite — and, I would argue, partly because of — the broad
condemnation of Mr. Trump for his insensitivity, there was no substantive public discussion of such issues. You may be thinking,
haven’t we had enough politics lately? Maybe it’s a blessing that disability isn’t as political as it might be; it avoids the drama and
messiness that now seem to define our common life. Avoiding politics might be possible if disability were an exclusively private
affair. But it is
fundamentally a public concern, affecting everyone directly or indirectly and
revealing our obligations to one another as members of a democratic society. Issues of
accessibility can be fully addressed only through public institutions and collective effort. For the
disability community, there is no answer but politics.
2NC --- A2: Mollow
The aff cannot solve – violence against the disabled is inevitable and attempting
to reconcile creates more violence
Mollow, 15 [Anna Mollow, University of California, Berkeley; Ph.D. in English, Tufts University;
B.A. in English & French, Minor in Women’s Studies, has written countless books in disability
studies, Spring 2015, Berkeley, “The Disability Drive” -ekh- + jmk]
Afterword: Done with the Drive?
Four years into writing about the disability drive, and three days before this dissertation is due, I have a thought: maybe
it’s
time to be done with the drive. That thought, of course, contradicts everything I have written
in this thesis: one does not get done with the drive, check it off a to-do list, and go on to do
other things. The disability drive is unmasterable; it is a force that cannot be overcome. Much
as one might want to be done with the drive, the drive, it seems, is never done undoing us. Worse
(or perhaps better), although we may say that we want the disability drive to stop its self-rupturings, the very notion of
“wanting” is fundamentally destabilized by the drive, a compulsion that pushes us beyond
pleasure and beyond desire, forcing us to wonder exactly what those concepts mean. The drive
goes, does, and undoes. Recall the words of Jacques Alain Miller: “The drive…always has its keys in hand.” This line stays
with me; whenever I drop something (for example, my keys), it repeats in my mind.
Always with its keys in hand, the drive pushes this project to go further. Among the most pressing questions now driving my inquiry are Jewish ones. In
the previous chapter, I critiqued the ways in which Freud‟s developmental model of sexuality, reliant upon the theory that ontogeny recapitulates
phylogeny, reinforces racialized social hierarchies. Yet we can’t label Freud as racist—or even dub him a “dead white European man”—and leave it at
that. For in the context of the early twentieth century, Freud was not exactly European, and he was not exactly white. In the preface to the Hebrew
translation of Totem and Taboo, Freud‟s anthropological analysis of people to whom he refers as “savages,” Freud distances himself from his
Jewishness (noting his ignorance of “the language of holy writ” and his estrangement from “the religion of his fathers”) but nevertheless emphasizes
that he “has yet never repudiated his people” (4, xxxi). Avowing that he “feels that he is in his essential nature a Jew,” Freud writes that he “has no
desire to alter that nature” (xxxi). What is this essential nature? Freud cannot express the essence of Jewishness “clearly in words; but some day, no
doubt, it will become accessible to the scientific mind” (xxxi).
Freud made these remarks in December of 1930, an era in which so-called scientific minds were attempting to pin down, and to
eradicate, whatever that essence of being a Jew might be. Before the end of that decade, the Nazi invasion of Austria forced Freud
to flee Vienna; he spent the final year of his life in London. Although Freud could not have known about the genocide to come, the
threat of anti-Semitic violence forms a crucial part of the historical context in which he developed his concept of the death drive. “A
Jew awaiting a pogrom”: that haunting line in Civilization and Its Discontents, a text published in 1933, is offered by Freud as an
example of the impossibility of imagining what it is like to endure extreme suffering (62). The image is quickly left behind (“It seems
to me unprofitable to pursue this aspect of the problem any further,” Freud writes), but it invokes questions that keep coming. Most
saliently: why? “The Disability Drive” has perhaps taken us in the direction of this impossible question. My project’s central claim is
that repressing the drive leads to violence. Hostility
toward disabled people, women, fat people, racialized
others, poor and working-class people, and queers has been the focus of my analysis. My future
work will take these inquiries further, asking about the drive’s relation to systemic racial violence.
In doing so, I will ask: when
the drive, as repressed, keeps returning, what does this do? As we saw in Chapter 1,
Freud raised this question at the beginning of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Why, he wondered, did traumatized soldiers
repeatedly return to the scenes of violence that had made them ill? Building on Freud’s theorization of the drive as an
aspect of the psyche that may help the organism sustain trauma, I will ask whether theorizing the disability
drive as a way of living through, or with, trauma might lead to deeper understandings of lived experiences of, and social reactions to,
mental and physical disabilities that are brought on by trauma.
What connections exist between trauma and tragedy? In Chapter 2, I argued that disability
scholars might productively
reclaim the trope of “the tragedy of disability.” This phrase, I suggested, calls up not only the
colloquial signification of tragedy (as devastating loss or pointless suffering) but also the term‟s generic
denotation. Further exploring the relation between the disability drive and the genre of tragedy will open up questions about
the status of literature in cultural analyses of the disability drive. I have performed literary readings in this dissertation because the
drive, an unrepresentable force, can come to us only by means of the figural. For this reason, literary
texts provide particularly rich sources for theorizing the complexities and the obliquities of the drive. But at the same time, I have
sought to destabilize binaries between literary and nonliterary texts. By highlighting Freud‟s linguistic choices in his medical case
history Dora; by analyzing Charles Dickens‟s and Lee Edelman‟s respective portrayals of the character of Tiny Tim as both literary
and political productions; and by juxtaposing Freud‟s model of sexual development, Jane Austen‟s depictions of fatness and eating,
and contemporary US American culture‟s citations of the figure of the compulsive eater, I have drawn attention to the ways in which
the literary and the ideological structure, and are structured by, each other. In doing so, my intention
has not been to use the political to master the literary, or to employ the literary to exert control over the political; instead, I have
hoped to provoke and sustain potentially jarring confrontations between the two.
Such confrontations can produce experiences of epistemological disablement, rendering readers of cultural texts uncertain as to
what counts as literature, what counts as politics, and to what extent such divides can be upheld. As we discussed in Chapter 1,
epistemological disablement can be an effect of coming into contact with the disability drive. Stimulating uncertainties and doubts,
the disability drive may disable us all; yet this ubiquitous psychic disablement also specifically evokes particular aspects of many
disabled people‟s lived experiences. Disabled
people live ongoing contradictions between our embodied
realities and the structure of overcoming narratives, stories that are presented to us not as
fictions but as normative prescriptions. We feel the effects of the drive when we suffer the
breakages and breakdowns that occur when bodymind and overcoming narrative (the weight loss
diet, the getting better with exercise and meditation, or even the claiming of a proud disability consciousness) clash and contradict—
and when, for worse or for better, some parts of our selves like these crashes. In Chapter 2, I said that sometimes, despite our
selves, we do like the disability toward which we are driven. But
when it comes to the drive, perhaps it does not
matter much whether we do, or don‟t, think that we like it. Either way, the drive is not done
undoing us.
It undoes us through pity, we saw in Chapter 3. That
affect that self-respecting crips are supposed to shun, I
argued, could instead be conceived as a feeling that we might wish to solicit. If pity is regarded
as a feminizing emotion, and if the abjection of pity has been effected through the culture‟s use
of Tiny Tim as a trope not only for disability‟s pitiability but also, obliquely, for the clitoris as sign for an intrinsic
feminine disability, then perhaps we should reconsider the impetus to take Tiny Tim out of the cultural text. We could take our
analysis of pity further by asking whether primary pity—which I defined as a concept that lies on the threshold between, on the one
hand, the complete erasure of the concepts of “self” and “other” that characterizes primary narcissism and, on the other hand, the
solidification of the self in which secondary narcissism is grounded—could be conceived as a quintessentially queercrip concept. My
concept of primary pity is construable as “queer” because its unsettling of the categories of self and other poses a threat to identity
formations. At the same time, the concept is readable as “crip” because, insofar as it maintains an attachment to the construction of
the self, it is indebted to the disability rights movement‟s claiming of “crip” as a politically subversive identity. My queer cripping (or
crip queering) of primary pity will thus draw on the interventions in queer theory and disability studies that I made in Chapter 1: it
will depart from queer theory‟s strategy of claiming postidentitarianism as a transcendent solution to the disabling effects of
claiming, and being claimed by, culturally minoritized identities; and it will simultaneously challenge disability studies‟ positing of
proud, nonsuffering crip identities as foundational to political activism.
Questions about activism press us further, too. In using the lenses of psychoanalysis and
literary theory to delineate aspects of the cultural politics of disability, I have not laid out a
guideline or program for resisting ableist social structures. I have sought instead to show how developing an
understanding of the disability drive—and, in particular, attending to the violences that result from individuals‟ and cultures‟
misrecognitions of the drive—may facilitate transformations in how we conceive of our subjectivities. Such transformations, deeply
indebted to the feminist maxim that the personal is political, are not individual solutions akin to the overcoming narrative. Rather,
by changing how we understand our “insides,” we may contribute to changing the ways that, “outside,” on the level of the social, we
relate to each other. As we saw in Chapter 4, something
as seemingly personal as an individual‟s
“relationship to food” can raise vexing questions that, when we deny that within ourselves that
drives these questions, become the basis of damaging social structures of fatphobia, racism,
classism, misogyny, and anti-queer prejudice.
If the drive won’t stop doing us, is it possible that we can allow it to do us differently? In the last
paragraph of this dissertation, on the day that it is due, I feel as if I should leave you with a message to take home: perhaps a
user‟s guide to the drive, a method for learning to love this thing that won‟t leave us. If I were
a queer antisocial theorist, I might propose that we shout out, loud and proud, something like
this: “We‟re here! We‟re queer! We are the drive! And you‟ll never get used to us!” But such a
call, we saw in Chapter 1, performs a fantasy of overcoming the drive by identifying with it (if you can‟t
beat it, join it); and
the drive is not a force that can be overcome. Were I to
articulate my own version of a saying evoking the feeling of the drive, it would go more like this: “Come on; we‟re late; let‟s go—oh
no, where are my keys!?” To be clear, I am the last person who should offer advice about handling the loss of one‟s keys. I know
the recommendations—stay calm; breathe; retrace your steps—but rarely do I heed them. For
me, it‟s closer to: Panic! Berate self! Look for someone to blame! I have no guide for getting
over this set of reactions, but I do want to say this: “The Disability Drive” has been an invitation to think
collectively about the ways that, when we feel we cannot bear the psychic or social equivalents of losing our keys (keys potentially
serving as metaphors for other objects, the loss of which might be more devastating), the impetus to blame someone else can
harden into a fixed idea, a truth that one refuses to relinquish. We have analyzed multiple examples of this process: fat people
stigmatized as “compulsive eaters,” feminists caricatured as anti-sex identitarians, and chronically ill people dismissed as
“hysterical.” If
this dissertation has a moral, it is this: the intolerable feeling that arises when we
lose keys, control, or other objects that we think we need in order to believe in our selves,
originates not from outside us but from within. This is the drive: it always has its keys in hand.
We are not done with the drive.
Afropess
1NC --- Link
Their attempt to refuse ableism within the structures of civil society is only the
upending of a conflict that mystifies the fundamental antagonism that
structures civil society and the world writ large: The non-being of blackness –
Anti-blackness provides coherence to the “human” subject.
Kim 13,[ Hyo K. Kim, an assistant professor of English at Medgar Evers College, City University
of New York, where he teaches Asian American literature and literary theory. He is currently
involved in two research projects; one editing a collection of critical essays on Theresa Cha’s
Dictee; another is a book-length study exploring the connections between minor affects and the
aesthetics of minority literatures in the United States, Published in Penumbra: An
Interdisciplinary Journal of Critical and Creative Inquiry, http://unionpenumbra.org/article/theruse-of-analogy-blackness-in-asian-american-and-disability-studies/, JMH]
For instance, what at first glance seems merely naïve―that is the
observation that in the U.S. “[b]eing disabled is just
like being black”―actually does index how disability cannot be synonymous with Whiteness.
For what is suggested through the forced parity between the construction of blackness and disability is that the disabled body or mind cannot properly
embody Whiteness in toto. And that is what Anna Stubblefield demonstrates in “‘Beyond the Pale’: Tainted Whiteness, Cognitive Disability and Eugenic
Sterilization,” which iterates how disabled white persons have historically been categorized as embodying a tainted form of whiteness. She convincingly
argues that beginning from the 1800s in the U.S. those who were considered feebleminded, a form of cognitive disability, lost the full privileges
attendant with white citizenship. As she writes, “… to grasp feeblemindedness fully as a signifier of tainted whiteness, it is important to understand that
the state-sponsored, involuntary sterilization of tainted whites meant that they had, in effect, lost the full protection that whiteness conferred in a
white supremacist society” (178; emphasis added). Not only did the so-called feebleminded whites come to embody a compromised form of whiteness
but also the “ … white men [and women] labeled as criminal, sexually deviate, homosexual, … or insane … ” (Stubblefield 178). What Stubblefield
emphasizes is that disability
as a social construct cannot easily be detached from its imbricated
positioning within a network of material forces that include not only race but sexuality, class,
and gender. Her study foregrounds the need for Disability studies to attend to racialization as not a
tangential focus but central to its overall theoretical and political project. Interestingly Stubblefield’s study
of how disability can dispossess whites of their “full personhood” under U.S. law seemingly lends support to what “Dismodernism” authorizes, which is
the idea that the suffering of blacks can be made equivalent to not only what disabled whites
come to embody but also to all those other Others represented under the category of “people
of color.” In short, disability has the potential to democratize civil society by recalling how all
citizens are common in their humanity―that is, equally exposed to disability. Yet, if we read between
the lines of Stubblefield’s summary of how “feebleminded whites” can become “tainted,” the singularity of “blackness’s grammar of suffering”
emerges. For what
distinguishes “blackness grammar of suffering” is how it does not operate
according to the assumptive logic of capability. In other words, to approach “blackness’s
grammar of suffering,” Wilderson insists that one must be able to imagine “an ethicality … so
terrifying that, as a space to be inhabited and terror to be embraced” (41), it resists language.
It is a “grammar of suffering” based not upon the logic of a “lost” capacity but that of a
deontologized property, the Slave that is not “exploited and alienated” but rather
“accumulated and fungible.” The effect of this singular grammar on Asian American and
Disability studies is significant, but the impact of Wilderson’s critique on the “scholarly and
aesthetic production” of the “Black theorist” is radical by comparison. As he writes: This [“blackness’s
grammar suffering”] makes the labor of disavowal in Black scholarly and aesthetic production doubly burdensome, for it is triggered by a dread of both
being ‘discovered,’ and of discovering oneself, as ontological incapacity. Thus, through borrowed institutionality―the feigned capacity to be essentially
exploited and alienated (rather than accumulated and fungible) in the first ontological instance (in other words, a fantasy to be just like everyone else,
which is a fantasy to be)―the work of Black film theory [and by extension Black studies] operates through a myriad of compensatory gestures in which
the Black theorists assumes subjective capacity to be universal and thus ‘finds’ it everywhere. (42) Placed within the frame of “blackness’s grammar of
suffering,” I want to examine the consequences of Davis’s attempt to render disability cosmopolitan. While the move has the virtual effect of equalizing
all bodies around human capacity to suffer―such an ethical cum political strategy requires the disavowal of how concepts such as “human” and “civil
society” in the U.S. have structurally depended on the production of social death, i.e. the Black (and the Red). As it should be obvious by now, what is
therefore unthinkable in Davis’s attempt to make civil society cohere around the universality
of human suffering is the contingent nature of the term human itself. This in fact is what Bells intuits but
cannot name in his influential essay entitled “Introducing White Disability Studies: A Modest Proposal.” Bell’s hesitation is partly attributable to how
pain or suffering is both social (that is communicable, sharable by all humans in equal measure) and incommunicable within Disability studies. That is,
Disability studies’ uneven attention to the incommunicability of suffering is seemingly capable
of accommodating the unrepresentability that is constituent of “blackness’s grammar of
suffering.” As Siebers insists, “[i]ndividuality derived from the incommunicability of pain easily enforces a myth of hyperindividuality, a sense that
each individual is locked in solitary confinement where suffering is the only object of contemplation. People with disabilities are already too politically
isolated for this myth to be attractive” (176). Yet in an attempt to intervene in the poststructuralist tendency to idealize “physical pain” as site of either
transcendent power or pleasure, Siebers also adds, “… [p]hysical pain is [at once] highly individualistic, unpredictable, and raw as reality. Pain is not a
resource of political change. It is not a well of delight for the individual” (178). What is directly pertinent to the present essay is how the universal figure
of the “individual”- human marks the critical horizon of Disability theory. Or, to put a finer point to it via Widerson’s reading of Frantz Fanon’s Black
Skin, White Mask, “… the Negro … ‘is comparison,’ nothing more and certainly nothing less, for what is less than comparison? … [And as such] ‘No one
knows yet who [the Negro] is, but he knows that fear will fill the world when the world finds out’” (42). We find in the most sophisticated Asian
Americanist deployment of poststructuralist strategies of reading―such as the one advanced in the influential work by Kandice Chuh―a similar call to
abandon politics based on social identity.6 While I am in agreement with both Davis’s and Chuh’s overarching critique of uniform identity, I find
troubling their wholesale critique of all identity formation as a priori essentialist. For such framing of social identity as necessarily restrictive can only
lead to the return of the repressed in our present era of colorblindness―the ideal of abstract citizenship. As she writes: “ ‘Asian
American’ …
connotes the violence, exclusion, dislocation, and disenfranchisement that has attended the codification of certain
bodies as variously, Oriental, yellow, sometimes brown, inscrutable, devious, always alien. It speaks to the active denial of personhood to the
individuals inhabiting those bodies” (Chuh 27). In this, Chuh―along with Davis and Siebers―unwittingly announces the
displacement and the erasure of “blackness’s grammar of suffering,” as their strategies of reading the
presence or absence of justice within U.S. civil society is predicated upon exploitation and alienation of the a priori human subject. Nevertheless, by
embodying the self―Disability studies helps to shift (though only slightly) critical theory toward an alternative ethicality that does not programmatically
endorse the idea and ideals of abstract citizenship. For contrary to the liberal model of the political subject that achieves “hyperindividuality” through
social and material detachment, the alternative model of subjectivity that is afforded through the disabled body is a self that is always already in the
process of negotiating complex relations to the materiality of the social. Thus, the embodied model of subjectivity helps to re-imagine “personhood” as
relation itself, leading not to the reification or essentialization of self, this relational model of subjectivity demands that any identity whatsoever be
thought not as autonomous substance but rather as a site, comprising of unfinished, mobile, heterogeneously constituted relations across an embodied
hermeneutic horizon. It bears mentioning here that it is this interconnected and radically open vision of “personhood” as relation that is foreclosed in
the liberal model of abstract citizenship. For in the liberal model of the self, the ideal is to attain singular indeterminacy through the negation of such
social relations, without which no self can hope to attain intelligibility. As Alcoff’s important work suggests: Social identities … are more properly
understood as sites from which we perceive, act, and engage with others. These sites are not simply locations or positions, but also hermeneutic
horizons comprised of experiences, basic beliefs, and communal values […] . We are not boxed in by them, constrained, restricted, or held
captive―unless … it makes sense to say that we are boxed in by the fact that we have bodies . … (287) Interestingly it
is by attending to
how the self is embodied and embedded in social reality that clarifies the radical singularity of
the Black’s structural non-relationality, which in turn helps to bring into focus not only what
Wilderson calls the “structural antagonisms” that contour U.S. civil society but also
unexplored ethico-political limits and possibilities of sub-fields such as Disability and Asian
American studies. For according to Wilderson’s Red, White & Black what gives internal coherence to such terms as “human” and “civil
society” in the U.S. is the disavowal of the structural (historical) relation blacks have with what is essentially non-human, a form of social death known
as slavery. As he summarizes: During the emergence of new ontological relations in the modern world, from the late Middle Ages through the 1500s,
many different kinds of people experienced slavery. … But African, or more precisely Blackness,
refers to an individual who is
by definition always already void of relationality. Thus modernity marks the emergence of a
new ontology because it is an era in which an entire race appears, people who, a priori, that is
prior to the contingency of the ‘transgressive act’ (such as losing a war or being convicted of a crime), stand as
socially dead in relation to the rest of the world. (17-8) Wilderson’s intervention therefore hinges on isolating and
exposing this dual operation by which civil society makes sense of itself to itself―the simultaneous disavowal of and parasitic dependency on the Black.
In other words, the
desire to make blackness an analogue of disability amounts to denying the
structural relevancy of slavery to the formation of U.S. civil society. Wilderson’s reading of
Fanon helps to articulate the radical singularity of “blackness’s grammar of suffering,” as it
emphasizes how “… the gratuitous violence of the Black’s first ontological instance, the
Middle Passage, ‘wiped out [his or her] metaphysics … his [or her] customs and sources on
which they are based.’ Jews went into Auschwitz and came out as Jews. Africans went into the
ships and came out as Blacks” (38). What Wilderson calls the “blackness’s grammar of
suffering,” consequently, has no analogue in either the assumptive figure of the “individual”
that subtends Disability studies and those other Others within U.S. civil society that have
become included within the frame known as “people of color.” In this, “blackness’s grammar
of suffering” gestures toward what is unnamable, a form of suffering that is in excess of any
ethical language which is based upon the universal figure of the human. This is how Wilderson
radically undermines the desire to transpose “blackness’s grammar of suffering” into the
ethico-political language upon which civil society’s depends to make suffering (physical,
psychic or otherwise) intelligible. As he writes: The ruse of analogy erroneously locates Blacks in the world―a place where they
have not been since the dawn of Blackness. This attempt to position the Black in the world by way of analogy is not only a mystification, and often
erasure, of Blackness’s grammar of suffering (accumulation and fungibility or the status of being non-Human) but simultaneously also a provision for
civil society, promising an enabling modality for Human ethical dilemmas. It is a mystification and an erasure because … their grammars of suffering are
irreconcilable. (37) Such is the logic that animates Bell’s critique of Disability studies but it does not, cannot obtain the force of Wilderson’s intervention
because Bell cannot or dare not disarticulate the Black from the world. Nevertheless both Wilderson and Bell help foreground the important fact that
even suffering obtains a “grammar,” that is, has a way of indexing―whether positively in the form of identification or negatively through dis- or even
through non-identification, the presence or absence of a world. What Bell’s and especially Wilderson’s critique bring into sharp relief is that antiblackness is part and parcel of the episteme that gives internal coherence to U.S. civil society. To approach “blackness’s grammar suffering” is therefore
to contemplate, albeit always indirectly, not the paradigm of disability which is always already predicated on agency but a radical non-capacity.
Wilderson’s illumination of how the “antagonism”
that obtains around blackness is structural to the
formation of U.S. civil society has the effect of clarifying the positioning of sub-fields such as
Disability and Asian American studies, especially when their protocols aim toward establishing
some form of political justice based upon “exploitation and alienation,” which is at odds with
“blackness’s grammar of suffering.” As previously mentioned, Wilderson draws a sharp
distinction between “conflict” and “antagonism.” And this is key, as it is only when antiblackness is positioned as an “antagonism” that the residual and structural effects of the Slave
(the non-human) can be allowed to erupt into the living present of U.S. civil society. As such, though
by comparison far more optimistic than Wilderson’s study, Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2010) gives powerful evidence to Wilderson’s theory of the
“structural antagonisms” that contour U.S. civil society. This is how a critical theory based upon advancing a colorblind world or an ethicality based
upon the universal human effectively silences the suffering of the Black. As Alexander argues: Far from being a worthy goal … colorblindness has proved
catastrophic for African Americans. It is not an overstatement to say that the systematic mass incarceration of people of color in the United States
would not have been possible in the post-civil rights era if the nation had not fallen under the spell of a callous colorblindness. … Saying that one does
not care about race is offered as an exculpatory virtue, when in fact it can be a form of cruelty. … Our blindness also prevents us from seeing the racial
and structural divisions that persist in society: the segregated, unequal schools, the segregated, jobless ghettos, and the segregated public discourse―a
public conversation that excludes the current pariah of caste [the incarcerated black males in U.S. civil society]. (228) In this, Wilderson’s Red, White, &
Black and Alexander’s The New Jim Crow bring into sharp focus why the framing
of blackness within U.S. civil society
cannot do without the ruse of analogy which effectively puts under erasure a “… violence
which turns a body into flesh, ripped apart literally and imaginatively, destroy[ing] the
possibility of ontology because it positions the Black in an infinite and indeterminately
horrifying and open vulnerability, an object made available (which is to say fungible) for any subject” (Wilderson,
38). Put otherwise, this “violence” which is in excess of that ideologically saturated term called
Humanity demands the infinitely difficult yet necessary encountering with what gives U.S. civil
society the simulacrum of ethical and political decency.
2NC --- Root Cause
The white body becomes the center of disability, creating a savage degeneracy
at the heart of disabled blackness
Tommy Curry 17 [JOURNAL of SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY, Vol. 48 No. 3, Fall 2017, 321–343., “This Nigger’s
Broken: Hyper-Masculinity, the Buck, and the Role of Physical Disability in White Anxiety Toward the Black
Male Body,” African American scholar, author and professor of philosophy. As of 2019, he holds a
Personal Chair in Africana philosophy and Black male studies at the University of Edinburgh. In 2018, he
won an American Book Award for The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood,
-ekh-]
On September 23, 2015, Mr. Jeremy
McDole was executed by Wilmington, Delaware police officers. Mr.
McDole was allegedly a threat to himself and suicidal. The police were responding to a “911 call reporting that
[Mr. McDole] had shot himself.”1 The 911 caller can be heard yelling: “A man just shot himself in the
AutoZone parking lot ... he’s fallen out of a wheelchair.”2 Mr. McDole was reported to the
police as a victim, not a criminal. He was described as a disabled man with injury. A man who
was suicidal; in need of help. His need, his victimhood, was not seen. He was not recognized by
the police as a vulnerable person. He was seen as a Black man; a threat—a body marked for
death by the danger he posed to others. This stereotype applied to his body, despite him being
confined to a wheelchair. Like the deaths of hundreds of other Black males in America, his execution was recorded and
subsequently released to the American public for summary judgment—just or unjust killing of a Black man. Unlike the hundreds of
Black men killed every year in America, however, Mr. McDole was paralyzed
from the waist down from an
injury he sustained after being shot at the age of 18. What threat did this disabled Black man
pose to anyone? Was he armed? Did he have a gun? These are the questions that define Black
male death in this country, and despite Mr. McDole’s disability, they now define him. Why is it so
easy to frame the lives of Black men and boys by one act, that same moment all the public sees where it is almost willed in unison
that these Black males are in fact yearning for death? What was it about him being Black-male-disabled that resists consideration—
did not diffuse the presumed danger—and convey that he was not a threat?
Like many academic fields, disability
studies has been confronted with its raced, classed, and
gendered assumptions about the body which lies at the center of conceptualizations of
disability. Over a decade ago, Phil Smith argued in “Whiteness, Normal Theory, and Disability Studies,” that “whiteness is a
normative, dominating, unexamined power that underlies the rationality of Eurocentric culture
and thought. It serves to push to the margins not only those defined as not-white, but also
those defined as not-Able.”3 Similarly, Chris Bell’s “Introducing White Disability Studies: A Modest Proposal,” argues that
disability studies functions to commodify Blackness as synonymous with disability. Reflecting on the Queer disability conference held
in 2002, he writes many disabled non-whites “could not understand the overarching mentality of many of the attendees, perhaps
best expressed by a remark made in a breakout session: ‘Being disabled is just like being black, so society should stop hating us and
give us our rights.’ ”4 Bell clarifies in a footnote that disability
studies normalizes disability such that the
white disabled body is the conceptual/anthropological origin of disabledness. Far from excluding
people of color, “White Disability Studies treats people of color as if they were white people; as if
there are no critical exigencies involved in being people of color that might necessitate these
individuals understanding and negotiating disability in a different way from their white
counterparts.”5
The white body, being the ideal type, is then the basis of distortion or disfiguration which defines
the disabled other. The racial designation of whiteness exceeds the borders of what is often
meant by identity; who identifies or can be identified as a white person. In actuality, whiteness
speaks to something more fundamental in the West that has come to define what it is to be
human or nonhuman. To be non-white is to be abnormal—evolutionarily behind—in the
phylogenetic order of human development. Those who are raced have historically been
constructed as the degenerate/inferior/nonhuman opposite to the rational prototype of the
human/superior/(Western) (abled) human.6 An outgrowth of nineteenth-century eugenics, “degeneration
became a compelling racial metaphor such that the colonized races were assumed to be
intrinsically degenerate, and as a result could never be improved.”7 Degeneracy suggested
biological weakness and disease, often translating “into an attribution of diminished cognitive
and rational capacities of nonwhite populations.”8
In the West, these
colonial accounts of abnormality became dichotomizing anthropological
designations separating those who are human from those who are not human. Those bodies whose
origin are thought to share a phylogenic distance from European man have been thought to be the embodiment of pathology,
degeneracy, and racial inferiority. As a kind of abnormality, disability
was considered to be unnatural and
detestable, while normality became synonymous with that which was natural and a means “of
establishing the universal, unquestionable good and right.”9 The moral constitution of the self, the interior
character one possesses, became associated with the physical and mental formation of the body. Oye`ronke Oyewumı argues that
under Western epistemology, “The body
is given a logic all its own. It is believed that just by looking at it
one can tell a person’s beliefs and social position or lack thereof.”10 Because “the body is the
bedrock on which social order is founded, the
body is always in view and on
view,”11 so the somatological becomes intuitive; that which is obvious when gazed upon. In the West, sight analyzes
the body, and becomes the instrument used to identify biological deficiency which is thought to
indicate degeneracy and inferiority. In this circuitous epistemology, the deformity of the body is
a reflection upon the supposed distortion of the mind, just as the distortion of the mind
suggests the savage degeneracy of the body.145
In “Pathology to Power: Rethinking Race, Poverty and Disability,” Pamela Block, Fabricio Balcazar, and Christopher Keys explain that,
even in the twenty-first century, “the
concept of disability, when applied as a medical or psychological
diagnosis, can subsume the culturally, socially, and historically derived identity of an individual
beneath a label of pathology.”12 Despite the supposedly progressive social conscience of the American public, and the
seemingly infinite theoretical nuances in identity theory, there is an anthropological, and dare I say, ontological
problem, which continues to re-emerge as the basis of engaging those bodies perceived as
disabled. This risk of being reduced to the perception and anxieties of others is only amplified
by the vulnerabilities racial groups have in mainstream society. Whereas “white individuals
with disabilities can recognize that their disability is the main reason why they are
discriminated against, segregated, and oppressed, [disabled minority groups] have a harder
time separating or consolidating their multiple identities.”13 Non-whites experience
“segregation and discrimination independent of their disability. If we also consider the fact
that poverty is a major source of marginalization and that most individuals of color with
disabilities are poor, then the experience of disability is only one more factor in an already
oppressed existence.”14
But what of Black males? Despite over a decade of work identifying the whiteness and bourgeois assumptions in disability theory,
there has not been any attempt to create specific theories of Black male disability which engages the vulnerabilities his body has to
death, hyper-sexualization, and super-humanism in America. Even Nirmala Erevelles’s work, which does an excellent job articulating
the link between colonial concepts of inferiority, be they racial or cultural, misses the opportunity to fully articulate the
vulnerabilities racialized maleness has within her transnational feminist disability studies perspective.15 This is not to suggest
Erevelles does not engage the disabled Black male body. The concern she conveys for her husband Robert who was suffering with a
grade IV brain tumor is a startling reminder of how the Black male body is perceived as a danger regardless of its actual physical
state. As a Black male, I understand her relief when she tells the reader how lucky they both felt that most of Robert’s seizures
occurred in the privacy of their own home.16 I know her fear, the repetitive terror she experienced imagining her husband being
shot or killed because the public did not know how to react to a Black male body seizing. Erevelles is correct: “The
Black male
body ... is a source of terror in white patriarchal society, and when transformed during a grand
mal seizure—with rolled back eyes, harsh grunting sounds, mouth drooling bloody foam, and
the occasional loss of control of bodily function with its associated putrid smell—could become
an even more terrifying spectacle as a result of the now lethal triple combination of race,
gender, and disability.”17 But what conditions the maleness of this Black disabled body? What is
the role Black man plays in Erevelles’s knowledge that “to be perceived as a dangerous black
man in the wrong place at the wrong time ... could result in death,”18 and the public’s fear that
even a disabled Black man is Black and male enough to pose a threat?
There is an asserted claim in gender theory holding that maleness need not have a separate
theoretical account as an attribute of the racial body, as it represents privilege, domination, and
hegemony in its relation to femaleness.19 For many, acknowledging the horror the Black male body conveys is
enough, but the lack of an explanatory account as to why the Black male body is peculiarly
dehumanized within patriarchal racial logics leaves the multiple levels of vulnerability Black
males experience unexplored and untheorized. While it is obvious to many that Black males are seen as
dangerous, it is often unacknowledged that Black men and boys have a long history of being victims of rape,
sexual violence, and cannibalism.20 Black maleness is easily acknowledged as being the cause of
white aggression and violence, but these ignored violence(s), which exist in the sexual register,
are thought to be of no consequence to how Black men and boys are perceived, desired, and
feared.21 This essay attempts to remedy this deficit in theory how the Black male body generally, and the disabled Black male
body more specifically, is engaged as a phobia-inspiring entity. Because the Black male body is confined to the realm of terror—a
living corporeal horror—I argue the recognition of physical or mental disability by white onlookers is subsumed by white fear. In
other words, disability in the Black male is unrecognizable by whites because of a very real racial anxiety.
Capitalism
2NC --- Cap Links
Only our critical analysis of capital at the level of labor functions can explain
lived, material realities of disabled bodies as the surplus population.
De Cabral 22 – Vinicius Neves de Cabral holds a PhD in Education from the State University of
Londrina and currently works as a lecturer in the Department of Pedagogy at the State
University of Parana in Brazil. He is a researcher associated with the Centre for Critical Studies
and Research in Education and Social Inequality, and member of the Editorial Board of the The
Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies and of the Journal of Class and Culture. His main
research interests lie in the fields of education, culture, literature, and film, drawing on Marxist
methodologies. Recently published articles: (1) The Portrait of Exclusion in Brazilian Universities:
the limits of inclusion, (2) Roma: images of dictatorial regimes and Human Rights abuse in Latin
America, and (3) Capitalism, Class and Meritocracy: A Cross-National Study Between the UK and
Brazil. (Vinícius Neves de Cabral, “A Marxist Approach to Disability: Notes on Marx’s Relative
Surplus Population”, State University of Paraná (UNESPAR), Brazil and State University of
Londrina, pgs. 41-51, June 2022, http://www.jceps.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/20-22.pdf ) || PZ
Capitalism, Disability, and the relative surplus population I would like to start by establishing the grounds on which I shall build my
reflections. My first and final argument is that disability
in capitalism is a social product of the
contradictions produced by the clash between forces of exploitation and forces of labour. It is
rather important to clarify, perhaps to the despair of postmodern perspectives (Eagleton 1998; 2016; Harvey 1990), that I shall focus
my considerations on what
we could call a materialist universalising view of the body and the mind,
a body and mind that are expected by capitalism, the labour body/mind. The body/mind that
is able to work and to sell its labour force in the market, so that it may extract surplus value
from this abled-to-work body/mind. The contrast of the abled labour body/mind is the
disabled body/mind, which is a term “used to classify persons deemed less exploitable or not
exploitable by the owning class who control the means of production in a capitalist economy”
(Russel 2019, p. 42). Those “deemed less exploitable or not exploitable”, deviant from the ideal labour body/mind, may
be considered part of what Karl Marx calls a Stagnant Surplus Population (Figure 1), or the third category of the
Relative Surplus Population (floating, latent, and stagnant) or Industrial Reserve Army (Marx 1990) – discussed in chapter 25 “The
General Law of Capitalist Accumulation” of the first volume of the Capital. Although a famous quotation amongst Marxists is
commonly used to summarise the author’s arguments3 , I would like to linger a little longer on his discussion of the Relative Surplus
Population in order to establish a theoretical connection
between a stagnant surplus population and the
materiality of the lives of people labelled disabled in the capitalist society of the 21st century. Marx
(1990, p. 794) argues that The relative surplus population exists in all kinds of forms. Every worker belongs to it during the time
when he is only partially employed or wholly employed. Leaving aside the large-scale and periodically recovering forms that the
changing phases of the industrial cycle impress on it, so that it sometimes appears acute, in times of crisis, and sometimes chronic, in
times when business is slack, we can identify three forms which it always possesses: the floating, the latent, and the stagnant. David
Harvey (2010, p. 145) clarifies that the
surplus population is what “permits capitalists to super-exploit
their workers without regard for their health or wellbeing”. Marx understands that there is a relation
between the growth and accumulation of capital and the demand for a labour force, as capital expands so does the need for more
workers - “[a]ccumulation of capital is therefore multiplication of the proletariat” (Marx 1990, p. 764). However, if the number of
workers employed increases, so does the price of labour - an increase on wages - which means “a reduction in the unpaid labour the
worker has to supply” (Marx 1990, p. 770). Despite its apparent simplicity, this movement is nevertheless more complex than it
appears to be4 , but it can be summarised as follows: it is capitalistic accumulation itself that constantly produces, and produces in
the direct ratio of its own energy and extent, a relativity redundant population of labourers, i.e., a population of greater extent than
suffices for the average needs of the self-expansion of capital, and therefore a surplus-population. (Marx 1990, p. 782, my
highlights). For starters, we should not forget that the sole aim of the capitalist is to produce profit5 . Capitalists are ruled by what
Harvey calls “the coercive laws of competition” (2010, p. 146), in Marx’s words: “a coercive force external to him” (1990, p. 381).
When wages rise, they become an obstacle between capitalists and the maximum amount of profit that can be extracted. More
elements will then come into place, among others, the intensification of the exploitation of the work force and the use of technology
to increase productivity and profitability (Harvey 2010; 2011; Marx 1990). One example that may be useful to illustrate such an
abstract relation is that of bank workers in Brazil in the last 30 years. In the 1990s, bank employees in Brazil created influential
labour unions to exert pressure on banks, therefore demanding higher quality jobs - higher salaries, less working hours, more job
places, amongst others. When going on strikes, until the early 2000s, those unions would still have some influence in the decisionmaking process in the organisation of banks. In 2020, the widespread use of the new technology, which allows users to solve most of
their needs using their smartphones, has caused demands for higher productivity, wage drops, more working hours, and an increase
in unemployment in the sector - industrial reserve army. While strikes of the sector in the 1990s were catastrophic (crowds of
employees on the streets, freezing of banks, very little or no money available, the support of the population), a strike in 2020
gathers a few dozen with signs in the streets that are usually ignored by most passerby, looking down at their smartphones. Leading
us then to an important hallmark of capitalist labour exploitation practices: The Industrial Reserve Army as a regulator of the
tensions between the exploiters and the exploited. As capital multiplies and grows, it also tends to follow two internal movements,
namely concentration and centralisation. Respectively, the augmentation of capital and control of this capital in the hands of fewer
people. At the other pole, it also produces what Marx called in the previous quote “a relatively redundant working population”, that
is, the surplus population (Marx 1990, p. 782). This surplus population forms an army of workers who may at times be absorbed or
rejected by the capital, according to the capital’s own needs (variation in the number of workers in a certain area), requirements
(level of education, expertise, and/or experience), rules (wages/salaries, working hours, holidays, health insurance). In other words,
“the working population therefore produces both the accumulation of capital and the means by which it is itself made relatively
superfluous; and it does this to an extent to which is always increasing” (Marx 1990, p. 783). In the case of Brazilian bank clerks, the
introduction of new technological machinery, as Marx calls it, allowed banks to dispose of thousands of employees and change the
rules of the game, it developed new needs and new requirements. The first category of the relative surplus population characterises
workers that are “sometimes repelled, sometimes attracted again in greater masses” by the job markets (Marx 1990, p. 794). A
modern example may be the situation of engineering workers in Brazil - when the economy is growing, they are the first ones to be
absorbed and to get higher salaries and better conditions of work. However, as the economy slows, they are repelled by the
companies, made redundant, and will be unemployed again. The latent category represents those with potential to be part of the
capitalist labour force but are in agricultural areas still struggling to survive with their own practices against massive capitalist
companies; it is the representation of the death of a rural lifestyle. As cities and companies grow, they swallow small family farms
and ranches, leaving those families with no other option but to sell their properties to the big companies, move to the cities, and sell
their labour force. It is a situation portrayed in literature by Theodore Dreiser in The Lost Phoebe (1918) and by Graciliano Ramos in
Vidas Secas (1938), and more recently in the American sitcom The Ranch (2016-2020), and vastly discussed in the works of Raymond
Williams. The last category, the stagnant, is formed by those who must subject themselves to the lowest conditions of work, to the
most irregular forms of employment, and to “a maximum of working time and a minimum of wages” (Marx 1990, p. 796) - a
sediment of the working class that lives in the poorest conditions of life. Now that we have reached the stagnant category, we
should remember that when Marx is discussing the three forms of relative surplus population, he is categorising workers, in other
words, those who are forced to sell their workforce because they do not own any means of production – der Arbeitsmensch. They
are those who are able to sell their workforce; those who are at their full capacity in body and mind to create surplus value at the
lowest cost, with the lowest adaptation possible, as it is remarked by Marx (1990) and by Engels (1987). In contrast, when
dealing with disability, we are considering those who have been labelled by capitalist practices, symbols, and
meanings as disabled, unproductive, and as a burden to the rest of the working class. A burden to
the rest of the working class because “what becomes of the operative…, in case he cannot work, is no concern
of the employer” (Engels 1987, p. 543). Engels here sheds light on an important element of our discussion: the class
condition is a fundamental aspect of analysis when we are discussing disability. Marx (1990, p.797,
my highlights) enumerates three categories of those who dwell in pauperism – the lowest sediment of the relative surplus
population’, (1) those who are able to work but who are not working; (2) orphans and pauper children; and, finally, (3) ‘the
demoralized (sic), the ragged, and those unable to work, chiefly people who succumb to their incapacity for adaptation, an
incapacity which results from the division of labour… Note that here he is dealing with the incapacity of adaptation. And he goes on
to identify these workers as those “who have lived beyond the worker’s average lifespan; and the victims of industry… the
mutilated, the sick…” (1990, p. 797, my highlights). Marx
approaches both the issues of ageism and ableism in the same
category to indicate that those who are deemed useless by capitalist practices and excluded
from the labour market will dwell in pauperism. To clarify, pauperism is The hospital of the active labour-army
and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army. Its production is included in that of the relative surplus population, its necessity
is implied by their necessity; along with the surplus population, pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the
capitalist development of wealth. It forms part of the faux frais of capitalist production: but capital usually knows how to transfer
these from its own shoulders to those of the working-class and the petty bourgeoisie. (Marx 1990, p. 797). It seems to be implied
that he differentiates the surplus population and pauperism. They are both conditioned to the ontological structure of the capitalist
system and its ongoing wealth-making process. When Marx brings them together, he binds them, stating that one will be
responsible for the other (the dead weight of the industrial reserve army), he is providing arguments against the traditional
categorisation of disability as a personal and individual problem. Once again, disability
is approached as a social, cultural,
historical, and class-related issue. In a recent study, Santos (2020) scrutinised data on the living conditions of the Brazilian
population comparing and contrasting the categories of race, gender, and disability with class condition. The author identifies how
these elements come together to derail people’s access to a flourishing life in a racist, sexist/ patriarchal ableism, neoliberal Brazilian
society. According to her, 30,06% of the population with a disability live with within the range of 0-1 minimum wage (R$ 1,100 reais)
– in Brazil this means deprivation from a wide variety of essential goods and services, i.e., living in pauperism or close to pauperism.
From another geographical perspective, in the United States, according to Erevelles (2011, p. 56), “[…] “one out of every four
disabled people lives below the poverty line, and more than 75 percent have an individual income of less than $20,000.” In the
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx discusses the existence (Dasein) of the Arbeitsmensch in the labour-capital
relationship. He points out that “[p]olitical
economy… does not recognise the unoccupied worker, den
he happens to be outside [the] labourrelationship” (1988, p. 86), that is, it does
not recognise their Dasein, their existence. According to Marx, “they are figures (Gestalten)…, specters(sic) (Gespenster)
Arbeitsmenschen, in so far as
outside the domain of political economy” (1988, p. 86). Those deemed less exploitable or not exploitable are ghosts to a system that
values profit over anything else. As I pointed out, when we consider the
“class-disability” relationship in the
working class, we are dealing with the sphere of pauperism – those on the lowest, poorest, most
degrading conditions of life. These are either those who refuse to follow the system of discipline imposed by the
capital or those who deviate from the ideal labour body/mind. Harvey (2010, p.149) points out that: there is the
problem of what to do with people who don't conform and are therefore dubbed odd or even deviant. And this is Foucault's as well
as Marx's point: they are called mad or antisocial and incarcerated in insane asylums or prisons; or as Marx notes, they get put in the
stocks, mocked and punished. To
be a "normal" person, therefore, is to accept a certain kind of
spatiotemporal discipline convenient to a capitalist mode of production. What Marx
demonstrates is that this isn't normal at all - it's a social construct that arose during this historical
period in this particular way and for these particular reasons. According to Harvey, to be normal is to conform.
Those who deviate will be labelled as abnormal, irrelevant, will be deemed useless, and set aside. So,
normality does exist for capitalism – and it is very specific. On the one hand, it does not mean that we should simply
accept it as a universal truth. On the other hand, we should not deny normality either but address it and question it. Theoretical
and methodological perspectives that aim to refuse the existence of these antagonistic forces
– normality and abnormality – in capitalist practices, symbols, and meanings, in an attempt to promote
equality and the so-called inclusion, contribute to the ontological reproduction of the system that
created the antagonism in the first place. Labelled as irrelevant and disposable to the political and
economic structure, disabled people may be allocated in the Stagnant category of the Relative Surplus Population. In
fact, even when they are absorbed by the system in times of need or when the system is forced to absorb them by affirmative action
policies, those in the stagnant category “can be rendered superfluous at the slightest downturn of the
business cycle” (Russel 2019, p. 76). Barnes (1992, p. 55) defines disability as “a diverse system of social constraints imposed on
people with impairments by a highly discriminatory society — to be a disabled person means to be discriminated against”. A social
approach to disability, therefore, does not deny the impairment, but understands that there is a socio-historical difference between
impairment, disability, and disabled: the impairment is biological, the disability is social, and disabled is the end result of disabling a
person with an impairment6 . Vygotsky (1993, p. 36) argues that “[i]n the final analysis, what decides the fate of a personality is not
the defect [impairment in today’s terminology] itself, but its social consequences”. And it is this socio-psychological realisation that
may or may not be a disabling one. In their development, disabled children will only require processes that will stimulate them in
other ways rather than those traditionally applied at home, school, and any other social situation. As deviants of the patterns of
normality, however, disabled people are many times completely or partially deprived of social participation. Deviant bodies and
minds are expected to either follow the stabilised rules of society or not be part of it at all. Let us take a scene in Jack Nicholson’s
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest as an example. His character, Randle P. McMurphy, is in the swimming pool of a total institution
for those considered mentally ill and/or intellectually disabled and tells one of guards that within six days he is going to leave the
institution. To his surprise, according to the guard, he will only leave the institution when allowed to, when the doctors and nurses
consider that he is able to adjust to social order. Randle is only pretending to have a disability to dodge prison, but to many of his
companions it means never leaving the institution, because according
to the rules, requirements, and needs of the capital
they have already been deemed deviant and disposable or, as Harvey put it, they are “incarcerated in insane
asylums or prisons […] they get put in the stocks, mocked and punished” (2010, p. 149).
2NC --- Root Cause
The political economy is the best analytic to explain forms of ableist violence
that lead to material impacts that disabled populations must face. Only
understanding “competence” as indebted to the structures of productivity and
labor relations can reshape WHAT society values.
De Cabral 22 – Vinicius Neves de Cabral holds a PhD in Education from the State University of
Londrina (UEL) and currently works as a lecturer in the Department of Pedagogy at the State
University of Parana (UNESPAR) in Brazil. He is a researcher associated with the Centre for
Critical Studies and Research in Education and Social Inequality (UEL), and member of the
Editorial Board of the The Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies (JCEPS) and of the Journal
of Class and Culture. His main research interests lie in the fields of education, culture, literature,
and film, drawing on Marxist methodologies. Recently published articles: (1) The Portrait of
Exclusion in Brazilian Universities: the limits of inclusion, (2) Roma: images of dictatorial regimes
and Human Rights abuse in Latin America, and (3) Capitalism, Class and Meritocracy: A CrossNational Study Between the UK and Brazil. (Vinícius Neves de Cabral, “A Marxist Approach to
Disability: Notes on Marx’s Relative Surplus Population”, State University of Paraná (UNESPAR),
Brazil and State University of Londrina, pgs. 51-65, June 2022, http://www.jceps.com/wpcontent/uploads/2022/06/20-2-2.pdf ) || PZ
Disability and the Ideology of Competence As stated, I am not going to analyse the
disabling phenomena beyond the
part of the complex system of ontological maintenance
of the capital (Mészáros 2011). One way (not the only way) to do that is to approach, from a materialist
perspective, the ideological discourse of competence. It unveils not only what is expected from the
working class but also what is to be discarded. Competence is a concept that is in dialectical relation with
the concepts of class, exploitation, and individual. Social class, one’s position in the economic and political
structure of capitalism, will have a direct impact on the limits imposed on and possibilities opened up to
individuals. That is, humans make their history, but they are determined by sociohistorical forces beyond their control (Marx &
Engels 1968). Therefore, a materialist reading of disability may largely contribute to deepen and expand the
scientific knowledge around the disabling phenomena. Social class, albeit a commonly forgotten category in
the analyses of disability, is an essential aspect of it. There are complex divergencies between facing an impairment in the
sphere of capitalism, but rather to understand them as
higher classes, in the middle-classes, or in the lower-classes7 (See Erevelles 2011; Cabral 2021; Russel 2019; Santos 2020). Wright
(1998) argues that exploitation is a grounding concept when it comes to class analysis because it creates a
fissure
between the higher classes (the owners of the capital, land, and means of production), who exploit, and the rest
who are exploited. The development of capitalist relations, however, engendered new classes, a class that originates from
the social and technical divisions of labour (Wayne 2020; Wright 1998). The middle-classes are constituted by those in the working
class who perform jobs that require more complex skills in contrast to those who are working in manual jobs - and thus
tendentiously share contrasting interests with them. These are also called in sociological works primary and secondary sector jobs,
which respectively represent “those with high wages, high skill levels, good working conditions, job security, and ample
opportunities for promotion” in contrast to “low wages, low skill levels, poor working conditions, little job security, and few if any
possibilities for advancement.” (Barnes 1992b, p. 57). Wayne (2020, p. 5) keenly highlights that The social division of labour is linked
to class formation because across the various branches of productive activity designed to meet variable social needs, the same social
types in control of those branches have more in common with each other than they do with their immediate workers, who have the
least control, least power and lowest remuneration in the production process. The maintenance
of class structure and
the inducement of competition and individualism in the working-classes is a fundamental trait to the
ontological continuation of capitalism. The social division of labour focuses on the formation of an un-critical,
individualist, and indebted working-middle class with no sense of unity or class consciousness (Marx & Engels 2008; Mészáros 2008;
2011). The spread of meritocratic values amongst the professional and managerial strata of the working-class gives them a
glamorous look and the false impression that they are closer to the top than to the bottom, that they share more with those in
power than with those in classes below them (Wayne & Cabral 2021). The relevance of the discussion of class lies in the fact that
when we talk about inclusion without questioning capitalism, we are usually referring to the right to enter the labour force and be
exploited. Disability
in the working-class demands the absence of one of the non-disabled members of
the family from the labour market to provide care for the disabled member. This care may also be relegated to a
philanthropic special institution - in the latter, allowing all working members of the families to be absorbed by the capital (Russel
2019). It may be argued, however, that the concepts and definitions of what it means “to be able to work” are variable (Stone 1984).
Indeed they are, but those are regulated by the State and by the capitalists themselves, and they vary not only influenced directly by
pressures of society, but by the demands of the capital (Russel 2019). In other words, it means to say that their jobs and the
place they occupy are both part of a regulatory system of the capital, as Russel (2019) argues, and a special
kind of charity - in either case their workforce is easily disposable. If we consider here Robert Young’s (2009) analyses
of Marx’s concept of use of value, we may indicate that: in the Capital’s commodity structure when
those deemed disabled are exchanged, they are exchanged for less. Erevelles (2011, p. 252) argues that
“[…] “becoming disabled is also a historical event where disability also has a use value that is
deployed simultaneously with race to justify the creation of the enslaved un-gendered body. ” and that the
“[…] actual act of impairment that is used both to create and at the same time to justify this construction.” Proof of that have also
been the recent changes in the Brazilian legislation regarding the regulations for the mandatory employment of disabled people.
Advancements in laws and legal regulations are indeed an important part of the struggles of the working class, but they “are
‘solutions’ which promote conflict between groups of disadvantaged workers, rather than making it a right of every citizen to have a
living-wage job and health care” (Russel 2019, p. 77). They are part of what Mészáros (2008; 2011) regards as corrections in the
structure of the capital. They play a fundamental role in the ontological conservation of capital when softening the tensions between
the owners of the capital and the working class. Barnes (1992) advocated in favour of anti-discrimination legislation as a solution to
improve the participation of disabled workers in the labour market, as we all should. No one would deny that even within the limits
of the capital one should always fight against discrimination, prejudice, and deprivation of access to better living conditions.
Notwithstanding, the market finds its ways to ‘dodge’ the legislation. When it comes to disabled workers that usually happens
through what Samuels (2014) calls biocertification. Biocertification
is the process companies and industries use to certify that
of
biocertification processes individuals are reduced to their biological characteristics and are erased as
social subjects, “[b]iocertification materializes the modern belief that only science can reliably determine the truths of identity
a new employee will follow their not-so-secret internal rules, using medical reports, exams, and tests. By means
and generally claims to offer a simple, verifiable, and concrete solution to questions of identity” (Samuels 2014, p. 122). The
structure of capital and its relations of material and cultural production, distribution, and exchange convey ideological models of
individuals, social relations, and patterns of social behaviour that must be assimilated to guarantee the right to actively participate in
everyday life, from the most trivial activities to the most complex forms of social participation. These representations will revolve
around the notions of gender, race, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and, in the case of the working classes, labour skills. They carry
labels of non-deviant and deviant. The
archetype of an ideal individual is linked to the project of society: Hence,
the oppression that disabled people face is rooted in the economic and social structures of
capitalism. And this oppression is structured by racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, and disablism,
which is endemic to all capitalist societies and cannot be explained away as a universal
cognitive process. (Oliver 1990, p. 165). Oliver is arguing that the foundations of prejudice are in fact part of
the ideological structure of capitalism. It a structure founded on an ideological and hegemonic set of “ideas, values,
belief systems, habits and practices that defend and legitimise the interests of groups at the expense of other groups in relationships
of inequality” (Wayne 2020, p. 136, author’s highlights). Hence, it is important here to clarify my understanding of five concepts that
are usually present
in discussions of inequality, prejudice, and disability: oppression, segregation,
exploitation, and inclusion/exclusion. It is my understanding that, from a materialist perspective, they are
all class-related issues. Oppression derives from the idea that due to one or more deviant characteristics one is deprived
from access to some or all material, cultural, and social conditions that would allow them to carry on a fulfilling life or, as Wright
(2019) calls it, a flourishing life. Oppression represents an image of someone being crushed, smashed, held (socially) against their
own will and despite their own efforts to change. Oppression
is a product of ideologies embedded in the social
structure of capitalism and it is related to inequality. Segregation revolves around marginalisation. The social process in which
those who are unable to follow one or more social expectations are centrifuged, sent to the borders of society. They are not
welcomed to participate in everyday life. Segregation comes as an alternative to the idea of social exclusion, as we shall see below.
Exploitation, in turn, is the essential concept that sustains capital every day. The act of extracting surplus value out of those who
own nothing else but their labour power (Marx 2012). Stripped of all properties and material conditions, workers have no way to
sustain life other than by selling their labour power to those who own those material conditions. Modern capitalism, however, has
become even more complex than it used to be when Marx’s wrote Das Kapital (Wright 2019). In order to guarantee its own survival,
the structure of class conditions was reshaped based on the social and technical divisions of labour. Different class interests will
clash between those who own the capital, those in positions that require higher qualification and more sophisticated skills (the
modern middle-classes), and the ones performing jobs that are socially characterised as lower jobs (Wayne 2020). A material
approach to these concepts understands that the condition of class will determine - imposing starting points, limits, and ends, as
Williams (1988) and Wright (2019) define it - their extensions and impacts on an individual’s life. It means to say that one may be
segregated but not so much oppressed. So, the extent of the processes of oppression, segregation, and exploitation is classdetermined. Going back to Wayne’s definition of ideology, he understands that: there is capitalism
itself which has a built-in
to decontextualise social phenomena, individualise social phenomena and de-historicise
social phenomena. We may also add that capitalism prematurely or falsely universalises capitalist culture
and value systems (e.g., the only way to live) (Wayne 2020, p. 137). Therefore, there is a paramount
comprehension of capitalist practices when it comes to the analysis of the disabling phenomena. When we
cultural tendency
look at Marx’s exposition of the sphere of pauperism, we were in fact targeting how this process of decontextualisation,
individualisation, and de-historicisation affect those who are considered unable to adapt. Historically and traditionally, capitalist
ideologies have treated disability as a personal, individual tragedy, which is brought out of
context and history, in an attempt to exempt society from any obligations it might have. Against this, Russel (2019, p.
51) argues that: Our institutions (particularly medical and social welfare institutions) have historically held
disablement to be an individual problem, not the result of economic or social forces. They have equated
disability with physiological, anatomical, or mental “defects” and hegemonically held these conditions responsible for the disabled
person’s lack of full participation in the economic life of our society. This approach presumed a biological inferiority of disabled
persons. Their deviation from social models of adaptation to everyday life and productivity in the cycle of the capital, established by
social standards of normality, promotes processes of social marginalisation, from institutionalising policies of discrimination to
deprivation of social participation (Barnes 2012; Bueno 2001; Ferreira 1994; Vygotski 2004). It is in and from everyday life that the
concepts, values, and norms that represent, regulate and organise a concrete social formation are executed (Heller 2016). Daily life
is the expression of the real life of the subjects that are part of it, it is the immediate unity of action and thought and expression of
concepts, values and norms formed from the hegemonic ideology conveyed and foisted upon individuals (Chauí 2016; Heller 2016).
Everyday life is ordinary thinking, common sense, and the expression of uncritical thinking. It is the embodiment of men's life, and it
is from it that they express their truth, build their beliefs, and guide their lives (Heller 2016). Everyday thought, the common sense,
is based on experience in the complex ideological network that maintains the socio-metabolic functioning of capital and aims at the
“orientation towards stability and relatively quiet social reproduction” (Mészáros 2004, p. 486- 487). The process of stigmatisation in
the case of disabled people permeates the complex social construction of everyday life. The distancing of adaptation to the
patterns of normality established in everyday life crystallises the stigma and removes from the person with
an impairment the condition of ‘human’ and projects it socially as the ‘non-human’ – as Marx’s pointed out a
spectre to political economy. The representation of the stigma occurs by a reduction of the subject to only one of its
characteristics - usually that which is downgraded or socially overvalued (Goffman 1963). The possible overcoming of these
conditions, or even the performance of more basic daily actions, can raise the stigmatised subject to the condition of superhuman,
keeping them still in a non-human status. A stigmatised person may, however, reformulate the rules when they reach a position a
social prestige. They are taken to the level of representation of their group and will be considered the example of selfdetermination, meritocracy, and success (Goffman 1963; McNamee & Miller 2009; Wayne & Cabral 2021). Leonard Kriegel (1987)
scrutinised the images of representation of disabled characters reproduced in literature and narrowed them down to four
categories, namely: Demonic cripple, Charity cripple, Realistic cripple, and Survivor Cripple. I will not discuss all of these categories,
but the last one may be useful here to illustrate my previous arguments. The Survivor Cripple “[…] is the man who endures and, in
his endurance, discovers survival as a cause in itself […]. His endurance is attractive, both to himself and to the audience, for it is
constructed around his understanding of the limitations it has imposed on him.” (KRIEGEL, 1987, p. 38). The survivor cripple is the
counterpart of the disabled person as pitiable and pathetic, as an object of pity, it is the representation of meritocratic values - the
one who fights against all odds and thrives. The bridge between class conditions and the idea of a (disabled) survivor relies
on capitalist meritocracy that seems to be reproduced in the image of the survivor, both in the lower and in the
middle classes. The image of the disabled person has been used as a motivational strategy, to trigger feelings of
determination, and has been associated with struggle and the power to overcome difficulties, usually followed by the question
“What is your excuse?”. This may be perceived in the real-life based cinematic representations of disability, as they may imprint
more credibility and cause a greater effect on the audiences. The Survivor Cripple makes the impairment a tragedy and overcoming
it the objective or the solution to the problem. The use of disability in motivational campaigns and films projects the disabled person
as an object of ridicule and as their own worst and only enemy – “if they wanted, they could.” – and cement meritocratic values – “if
they did, what’s your excuse?”. As examples, I could mention the biographical films based on the lives of Christy Brown (Sheridan
2008), Gabriela Brimmer (Mandoki 1987), and Stephen Hawking (Marsh 2014). The decades after 1990 have been marked by various
events and political and social reviews on the role and place of disabled people in society (Jannuzzi 2004). However, the system of
justification and ideological reproduction of stereotypes in the categorisation of the socially conceived human body, the labour body
and mind, as perfect permeates concrete social relationships in everyday life and triggers processes of stigmatisation of the deviants
(Samuels 2014; Stone 1984). Stigma is thus very much in constant relation with the ideologies that are working through culture – as I
have demonstrated with some examples in the previous paragraph. Competence, structured by bourgeois ideological pillars,
conveyed by the media, and absorbed by the cultural industry, sells signs and images of youth, health and happiness (Chauí 2016). It
is a powerful method of manipulation that “inoculate[s] individuals with the bourgeois appetite for personal success” (Freire 1970,
p. 147). The social process of constructing the discourse of the competent produces its dialectical counterpart, the incompetent. The
social and ideological role of the competent, valued by the social power of science, as an unquestionable source of knowledge,
underlies and justifies the domination and economic exploitation of one class, considered superior in material and cultural capital,
over the other, expropriated from the whole (Chauí 2016; Samuels 2014). The analysis of perfection,
based on a
neoliberal ideology, established mainly after the 1980s (Harvey 2011), subjugates disability in the working class
mainly to spaces of pauperism, marginalisation and segregation and is marked by the sociopolitical order and the
power of science. The ideological projection of the perfection of productivity, sociability, independence,
meritocracy characterises in the opposite pole the lack and the insufficiency, emphasising the defect and erasing
individuals beyond their disability and making the construction of their social relations unfeasible (Barnes 2012; Heller 2016;
Soldatic & Meekosha 2012a; 2012b; Vygotski 1993). The naturalising element of capital is propagated and foisted upon individuals
that reproduce the social structure through complex ideological systems of conservation, keeping individuals locked in the
relationships of everyday life. Everyday life is, therefore, the life of every social subject, without being able to be totally out of it or
completely trapped by it. It is in everyday life that the dominant metabolic ideological processes are emptied and reified as absolute
and natural truths (Heller 2016; Mészáros 2004; 2016). Mészáros (2005, p. 401) argues that the dominant ideology of capitalism is
“[…] sustained by the practical evidence of the established material structures within which people have to reproduce the material
and cultural conditions of their existence and ‘feel at home as a fish in water’”. Most of the population is conditioned by the
ideological standards set by the ruling class. Its ideological structure is: a logical, systematic, and coherent set of representations
(ideas and values) and norms or rules (of conduct) that indicate and prescribe to the members of a society what they should think
and how they should think about it, what they should value and how they should value it, what they should feel and how they
should feel it, what they should do and how they should do it. (Chauí 2016, p. 53). The dominating force of ideology lies in
pacification, naturalisation of the hegemonic social organisation and unity of interests, although they are conflicting (Mészáros 2008;
Wayne 2020; Zizek 2012). Ideology, in its hegemonic sense, structures life lived and represents “a sense of reality for most people in
the society, a sense of absolute because experienced reality beyond which it is very difficult for most members of the society to
move, in most areas of their lives” (Williams 1980, p. 38). It is in the everyday life that the ideological patterns of normality are
executed. Heller (2016, p. 37) indicates that [t]he maturation of man means, in any society, that the individual acquires all the
essential skills for the daily life of the society (social layer) in question. It is an adult who is able to live his daily life for himself.
Ideological patterns of normality are socially and historically established attributes and characteristics that are reproduced as natural
and ordinary and that categorise subjects as normal and abnormal deviant. They establish the norms that define what it means to be
a socially desired human (Amaral 1995; Everlles 2011; Heller 2011). Stigma disqualifies the individual due to a singular characteristic
that deviates from the ideological norms and standards imposed and determines the limits of their social participation. Lastly, I
would like to go back to inclusion. Inclusion
is part of the ideological process of self-correctness and selfpreservation of the bourgeois society. It is an attempt to lessen the weight of structural injustices, inequalities,
segregations/exclusions that are part of the ontological foundations of the capital. Marx’s thought elucidates how contradictory the
concept is: when analysing the production of relative surplus-value, that within the capitalist system all methods for raising the
social productivity of labour are put into effect at the cost of the individual worker; that all means for the development of
production undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become means of domination and exploitation of the producers. (Marx 1990,
p. 799). Some lines below, he famously concludes that: Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time
accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalization and moral degradation at the opposite pole, i.e., on
the side of the class that produces its own product as capital. (Marx 1990, p. 799). Inclusion, therefore, is the movement of opening
opportunities to share material and cultural capital with (some of) those who were deprived from access to them. It does so without
questioning or challenging the very essence of the society that created deprivation in the first place. Inclusion and exclusion are part
of the same dialects. One is the dialectical inversion of the other. The need to include only exists because of a society that engenders
exclusion. Thus, as I suggested, exclusion might not be a real thing, in immediate cultural and material access perhaps it does, but
not as part of the structure of the system itself, i.e., the individual is not excluded from the system, they are a product of it. Inclusion
and exclusion were uncritically adopted by all postmodern studies of identity, and inclusion became a motto to be fought for - as
Wayne suggested (2020, p. 39), “change without real change”. In other words, these changes are constrained within the limits of
capitalism and do not represent a threat to the structure of the system. Notwithstanding its core contradictions, it is something we
shall all fight for. If within the limits and contradictions of the capital this is the only possibility - or the closest possibility - some
individuals will have to access a flourishing life - meaning access to education, health, cultural expressions, housing, food - then until
the whole system changes, perhaps it is what one should fight for. In the case of disabled people, it applies even to the access or
opportunity of access to be exploited – as cruel as this may sound; that is what the “inclusion for disabled people” is in fact fighting
for. In that sense, “[b]asic
changes must be made in the economic, social, and political structure in order to
advance economic solutions that reach beyond capitalism’s instability. The reserve army, itself, must be made a
disposable concept” (Russel 2019, p. 77). Despite the limitations of what Wayne calls (following Gramsci) passive revolution – “the
paradox of massive change within the social relations of capitalism: change without real change” (Wayne 2020 p. 39, author's
highlights) -, these seem to represent a possibility to improve
the lives of those who are now in need, not only focusing on
disabled people, but also on other forms of discrimination as well. My favourite and paramount argument in that regard is
that Every reasonable and reasoned action proposed in an attempt to accelerate the social and political inclusion of the poor in the
process of economic development in order to bring equality to social development is historically welcomed. As much within the
scope of the State and its public policies as within civil society. It would be equally wicked to deny the diversity of the aspirations and
intervention actions in the problematic reality. (Martins 2012, p. 1). Nonetheless, we should not be satisfied with them, for they do
not interrupt the flow and the logics of the capital.
Capitalism’s drive for productivity forms the basis for Modern ableism by
bracketing out those deemed as “un-productive”. Only resolving capitalism
makes it possible to fracture and resolve existing ableist structures.
Shi 20- ( Abbigale ; Abbigale Shi is an author for The Daily free press and has written multiple
articles on bioethics and sociological relations; "Mind Your Business: Ableism Is Rooted In
Capitalism – The Daily Free Press". Dailyfreepress.Com, 2020,
https://dailyfreepress.com/2020/11/19/mind-your-business-ableism-is-rooted-in-capitalism/.
Accessed 5 Dec 2021.) SV
Capitalism prioritizes productivity: your value and worth lie in how much you can produce for
profit. The idea of constantly striving toward production is interwoven at the individual level, as
evidenced by the urge to ask kids what job they want when they grow up — as if we dream about
labor — and at the societal level, where a price tag is put on everything we do. This productivitydriven mindset permeates everything in a capitalist society. I grew up idolizing certain jobs: doctors, lawyers
and scientists. But, my admiration wasn’t based on how these professions helped people. It was mostly because I was taught to
prioritize their salary, recognition and prestige. In turn, people who didn’t choose a traditional corporate job were knocked to the
bottom and unfairly branded as lazy, useless and undeserving of respect. I’m still working to dismantle this mindset that has become
ingrained in me, but I’ve realized it’s even more important to do so when capitalism
is integral to modern day
ableism. So, what does capitalism have to do with ableism? Ableism is a product of capitalism. Simply put, the system
isn’t made for people who are different. This includes people who have different ambitions,
prioritize happiness or family over work, or have a different scope of ability. The ableist-capitalist
relationship means that even if not explicitly, society makes it unnecessarily difficult for disabled people to find work. Non-manual
labor jobs often tack on extraneous physical requirements that are inherently discriminatory, despite claiming to hire regardless of
disability. Especially in academia, when jobs listings require “walking, talking and hearing,” for example, it sends a very clear
message. When a disabled person secures a job, the employer might have to shift the functions of their role, or spend small sums of
money to comply with requirements set by the Americans with Disabilities Act. So, the net profit exploited from a disabled worker
may be less than that from an able-bodied worker. To compensate, many businesses use a loophole in the Fair Labor Standards Act to
justify paying disabled workers subminimum wage. It’s worse than it sounds — disabled workers often earn pennies, or even gift
cards, and are labeled as “substandard” because their disability can affect productivity. Before 2014, disabled people who received
benefits such as Medicaid payments or Social Security Disability Insurance were disqualified if they had assets totaling more than
$2,000 or if their monthly earnings exceeded $700. The job hunt is very discouraging when you know you’re going to face these
obstacles and could eventually be forced to forfeit your benefits. If you were to lose your job, you would have to reapply for these
programs, which often have waitlists a mile long. The Achieving a Better Life Experience Act was passed in December of 2014,
allowing disabled individuals to open savings accounts for certain disability costs such as education, housing, transportation, health
and basic living expenses. But the limitations of the ABLE Act still put disabled people at a disadvantage — the annual gift tax
exclusion, which was $15,000 in 2020, is the limit for account contributions, and individuals must be diagnosed with a disability
before turning 26 to be eligible. As if that’s not enough, the ableist-capitalist treatment extends beyond the workplace into daily life.
Social Security rules create penalties for disabled people who want to get married. Sure, they’re legally allowed to marry. But if they
do so, they’re faced with the possibility of losing their health insurance, earning a lower monthly income or losing their benefits
altogether. Why do people have to choose between basic necessities and love? Able-bodied, heterosexual people can joke about
getting married for the “tax benefits” while disabled people are forced to forfeit their right to marry so they can survive. By
only
rewarding those who are able-bodied, capitalism feeds into ableism. It produces and then
exacerbates inequalities between the “normal bodies” and those who are disabled. It seems
obvious a system that relies on the exploitation of individuals would in turn enable the devaluing
of disabled people because they may require more accommodations and aren’t as easily exploited.
During the pandemic, it’s also become obvious that accessibility is possible. Remote work is possible. But until a global pandemic
struck, our capitalist society has not considered it a possibility — even for disabled people who could greatly benefit from these
accommodations. It certainly makes one thing very clear: capitalism deems disabled people unworthy of the time and effort it takes to
dismantle the barriers it is responsible for. If we able-bodied people want to be allies for those who are disabled, we need to take on an
anti-capitalistic lens. You can’t separate the two. If
you want to fight ableism, you must be able to recognize
that it is, and has been for a long time, rooted in capitalism.
2NC --- Alt solves
Crip theorizations are currently organized around material change to cut back
against capitalism.
Hamraie and Fritsch 19 – Aimi Hamraie (they/them) is Associate Professor of Medicine, Health, & Society and
American Studies at Vanderbilt University, and director of the Critical Design Lab. Trained as a feminist scholar, Hamraie’s
interdisciplinary research spans critical disability studies, science and technology studies, critical design and urbanism, critical race
theory, and the environmental humanities. They are author of Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of
Disability (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) and host of the Contra* podcast on disability and design. With Kelly Fritsch, Mara
Mills, and David Serlin, Hamraie co-edited a special issue of Catalyst: feminism theory technoscience on “Crip Technoscience.”
Hamraie’s research is funded by the Social Science Research Council, the Smithsonian Institution, the Mellon Foundation, the
Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Arts, and the National Humanities Alliance; Prior to joining the Department of
Sociology and Anthropology, Kelly Fritsch earned her Ph.D. in Social and Political Thought at York University (2015) and was a
Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Women & Gender Studies Institute and Technoscience Research Unit, University of Toronto
(2015-2018). Her research broadly mobilizes crip, queer, and feminist theory to engage disability, health, technology, risk,
accessibility, and social justice. Fritsch is also cross-appointed to the Pauline Jewett Institute of Women’s and Gender Studies and
the Institute of Political Economy. , [“Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience”, Crip Technoscience Manifesto, Volume 5 Section
1, 7-8, SGH]
Crip technoscience centers the work of disabled people as knowers and makers. Crip technoscience
privileges disabled people as designers and world-builders, as knowing what will work best and developing the skills, capacities, and
relationships to make something from our knowledge. Unlike typical approaches to disability that objectify disabled people and
situate expertise in medical professionals and non-disabled designers or engineers, crip technoscience posits that disabled people
are active participants in the design of everyday life. Not only do disabled people make access in our everyday lives in ways that do
not get recognized as design, but the lived experience of disability, and the shared experience of disability community creates
specific expertise and knowledge that informs technoscientific practices.
We call for greater acknowledgement of the lived experiences and material design practices of
disabled people in the work of technoscientific intervention. There is a widespread perception that access
technologies are made for us by non-disabled experts, but there is little recognition of our own practices of remaking the material
world. Yet the field of disability scholarship grew out of activism against rehabilitative models of medical expertise and intervention
(UPIAS, 1976), crafting a materialist politics with anti-capitalism at its center (Oliver, 1990; Russell, 1998), and continues to struggle
against “compulsory ablebodiedness” (McRuer, 2006). Crip knowing-making forms the basis of political slogans such as Nothing
About Us Without Us (Charlton, 2000), framing
disabled people not just as design experts but also as
epistemic activists whose politicized ways of knowing the material world also situate us to
produce the material conditions that allow disability to thrive, in addition to remaking how
disability is known and experienced. Without glorifying do-it-yourself design practices, crip technoscience recognizes
that disabled peoples’ world-dismantling and world-building labors stem from situated experiences of “misfitting” in the world
(Garland-Thomson, 2011). Crips are not merely formed or acted on by the world—we are engaged agents of remaking.
2NC --- Perm Fails
Aff fails – doesn’t account for neoliberal exploitation and categorization is key
to activism
Vehmas & Watson 13 (Simo Vehmas & Nick Watson, “Moral wrongs, disadvantages, and
disability: a critique of critical disability studies”, p. 646-648)
Critical disability studies and justice
The influence of CDS and its challenge to the assumption that disability is a uniform condition have enabled the emergence of new
ideas on disability. In particular, this has enabled the development of a theory that can take account of not only impairment effects
but also can include class, ethnicity, sexual orientation or cultural identities. It has also argued for the re-emergence of a new
political identity, one where a solidarity that was previously built on a common single identity is replaced by one that incorporates
multiple voices including representatives from across the range of constituencies. The politics that it seeks to develop will be the
ending of the single interest group identity of the disability movement to be replaced by single-issue groups campaigning for
different social issues. To paraphrase Lister (1998, 74), if
disability and impairment are simply to be
‘deconstructed into a kaleidoscope of shifting identities’ and ableist discourses, there will be no
disabled people left to either fight for the right to be, or to be a citizen. If the principles of CDS are
evaluated critically in the light of disadvantage, its analytical and political value becomes questionable. Its relativism and its
suggestions that impairments are ethically and politically merely neutral differences are false. Impairments often
have
very tangible effects on people’s well-being, many of which cannot be explained away by
deconstruction (for example, Shakespeare 2006; Thomas 1999). Recognizing impairment effects is necessary
in order to secure proper treatment and social arrangements that enhance disabled people’s
well-being and social participation. CDS runs the risk of dismissing not only the personal experiences of
living with impairment, but also the significance of the differences between socially created
disadvantages. These disadvantages that often result from oppressive social arrangements, are very
much real and take place in different ways for different disadvantaged groups. Disabled people typically experience
disadvantage in relation to the market and capitalism, and they have to a large extent been
excluded from employment and from equal social participation, respect and wealth (Wolff and De-Shalit
2007, 26). On top of these materialist disadvantages, disabled people are stigmatized as deviant and undesirable, and also
subordinated to various oppressive hierarchical relations. For
disabled people to achieve participatory parity,
they require more than recognition; they need material help, targeted resource enhancement,
and personal enhancement (Wolff and De-Shalit 2007). Disability is rooted in the economic structures
of society and demands redistribution of goods and wealth. In contrast to some other oppressed groups,
disabled people require more than the removal of barriers if they are to achieve social justice. This extra help might be small – for
example, allowing a student with dyslexia extra time in an examination – through to complex interventions such as facilitated
communication, a job support worker or 24-hour personal assistance. Whatever the size, it is an extra cost both to employers and to
the state. These are real needs and represent real differences. Without an acceptance of these differences it is hard to see how we
could move forward. Whilst these ‘real differences’ can be presented as the result of dominant ableist discourses where disabled
people’s needs are regarded as extra cost, this does not solve the problem. The
problems disabled people face
require more than ideological change, and ideological change is of little use if it does not result
in material change. CDS fails to account for the economic basis of disability and offers only the
tools of deconstruction and the abolishment of cultural hierarchies to eradicate economic
injustice. This, as Fraser (2000) has argued, would be possible in a society where there were no relatively
autonomous markets and the distribution of goods were regulated through cultural values. In such
a society, oppression based on identity would translate perfectly into economic injustice and maldistribution. This is far from
the current reality where ‘marketization has pervaded all societies to some degree, at least partially
decoupling economic mechanisms of distribution from cultural patterns of value and prestige’ (Fraser 2000, 111). Markets are not
controlled by nor are they subsidiary to culture; ‘as a result they generate economic inequalities that are not mere expressions of
identity hierarchies’ (Fraser 2000, 111–112). The disadvantage related to disability is to a great extent a matter of economic
injustice, and before
this injustice can be corrected we have to be able to identify those individuals
and social groups that have been disadvantaged by social arrangements. Whilst this does create
and foster categories and binaries between groups of people, it also requires some sort of
categories to start with; namely, the various categories of disadvantage. Both the social and physical
mechanisms that produce human diversity are real, and they produce tangible differences that cannot be challenged, let alone
abolished, merely by pointing out the wanton nature of difference, and deconstructing the meanings attached to disability. Changing
the social conditions that disadvantage and disable some people demands that the diverse, sometimes dualistic, reality of social
advantage and disadvantage between different groups of people is recognized. This is exactly why group identities based on, for
example, impairment, gender, or sexuality have been invaluable tools in the resistance against discrimination and oppression – in
the fight against socially produced disadvantage. Confident, positive
disability identity has enabled many
disabled people to actively challenge the status quo that disadvantages them and to claim rights
and power and participation in dominant institutions. Being different from the so-called normal majority is no
longer considered to conflict with a good life, equality and respect. Quite the opposite, positive realization of one’s
difference has been liberating and empowering to many disabled people (Shakespeare 2006; Morris
1991). For a radical and active disability movement to emerge and for disabled people to take action on their own account, they
have to see themselves as an unfairly marginalized or disadvantaged constituency and a minority group (Shakespeare and Watson
2001). The category
disabled/ non-disabled is a good abstraction that can enable the
development of communities of resistance, and without it is hard to see how these could develop. CDS is premised
on the idea that difference acts as a precursor to the normalizing of behaviour and a requirement to treat people differently and,
importantly, less favourably. There is, however, no evidence to suggest that the categories that are applied to disabled people create
an unnecessary divide between disabled and nondisabled people. You could equally make the point that without
these
categories we would not know what it is we have to do, what actions we have to take or what
services we have to put in place to include disabled people. Indeed, for many disabled people the
disadvantages they are subjected to arise not as the result of domination but through neglect
and the denial of services and through society failing to take responsibility for those in need. As
Wolff (2009, 114) points out: ‘anti-discrimination policy needs to identify a group to be protected.’ In other words, it is
impossible to fight the oppression of a group of people that does not exist. Recognition of impairment is
also crucial regarding legislation and policy that aim to protect disabled people against discrimination. The point of antidiscrimination legislation is to protect people from discrimination on the basis of their physical
and mental properties, not on their opportunity to achieve equal participation and respect. Thus,
‘the parallel to race and gender is not disability but impairment’ (Wolff 2009, 135).
Ballot K
1NC---Ballot K
Radical care work is impossible within the paradigm of competition. Their call
for the ballot individualizes and neoliberalizes care relationships, turning the
case.
Laurence Simard-Gagnon 16, Department of Geography, Queen’s University, “Everyone is
fed, bathed, asleep, and I have made it through another day: Problematizing accommodation,
resilience, and care in the neoliberal academy,” April 2016,
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cag.12274
Following the principle of competition, if some are to succeed it is necessary that some fail.
Neoliberalism entails letting die, smothering even, the casualties of marketization. It entails
individualization of life circumstances, including needs and, importantly, struggles and failures
that occur when needs come in the way of an individual’s capacity to compete. Neoliberalism
entails exhaustion.
As I am making the final revisions on this paper, I have been experiencing partial deafness for
over a year, related to an untreated inner ear infection which will now result in permanent
hearing loss. I did not attend to it sooner—it was not urgent, and time and energy are so scarce.
They have been made even more so this year as my son has not been attending school full-time:
some weeks he won’t go for more than two or three half days. The recent neoliberal cuts to
public services in the province of Québec—where I reside—have translated into losses here and
there, from removal of school transportation services to cuts in hours of specialized education,
effectively reducing the amount of time an autistic child can spend at school. It is now late at
night, and I write these lines on an old and very slow netbook as my computer broke down:
when I bought it I had very limited financial resources, so I got a cheap model with no
guarantee. I could have had it fixed sooner, instead I was striving to pass my PhD comprehensive
examination these last months. There is nothing extraordinary in these circumstances, no one
trait that could be neatly identified and removed, no one issue that could be adjusted or fixed,
so that I could at last perform as a competitive and unencumbered individual.
The liberal normative prescription of atomic independence, combined with the neoliberal
imperative of competition, have debilitating [massive] implications for mental health,
particularly for those who are, like me, struggling to meet their needs and those of the ones
they care for. Their overlapping actions individualize and decontextualize not only our needs
and the circumstances in which needs arise, but also our personal failures to meet both these
needs and the demands of individuated functionality.
Academia, care, and resilience
One of the ways in which liberal and neoliberal versions of independence and needs are most
debilitating is through the idea of resilience. Resilience is often used as a term to celebrate the
ongoing efforts of those who continue to perform despite difficulties and struggles related to
their particular circumstances (see Jackson et al. 2007). When thinking in terms of care, the idea
of resilience is problematic because, as Cindy Katz points out, social reproduction, almost by
definition, must be accomplished (Katz 2001). No matter how difficult our circumstances or how
bare our resources get, we, and the persons we care for, need to eat, sleep, be clothed,
warmed, and loved, at least at a minimal level, in order to go on. Thus people will go to great
lengths (of resilience) to perform care. Resilience, therefore, cannot be taken as an indicator
that people are thriving despite the obstacles they encounter, despite the inhumane and unjust
expectations they face, particularly in this moment of increasingly harsh neoliberalism (Diprose
2015). Resilience is in fact incredibly stressful. Beyond the financial and logistical stress
associated with both pursuing an academic path and caring for others, being resilient implies
sustaining the ever underlying stress of feeling that one is never adequately filling their own
needs and those of their dependents.
In this context, resilience implies a projection into the future perfect (see Povinelli 2011 for a
discussion on tenses in late liberal capitalist economies). It is the idea that there will be a future
moment when the unsustainability of (poor) caring practices will abate. “When this article is
written, this presentation done, this chapter completed—these hardships that I am inflicting on
myself and the ones I care for will be over, and it will all have been worth it.” Except that this
moment never comes. Within an increasingly competitive academic context, demands are ever
emerging and there is no final moment of grace. As I am writing these lines, everyone in my
house is finally fed, bathed, asleep, and I have made it through another day. It is an exhausting
victory, yet nothing has been achieved that will not have to be recommenced tomorrow. I have
made it through another day, yet the days of ‘another day’ are endless.
As problematic as it is, however, there are not many alternatives to being resilient, to reconcile
as well as we can the ever emerging needs of existence and caring with the expectations for
independent and competitive accomplishments, while waiting for an ever elusive future perfect.
Resilience is indeed fuelled by the fear of breaking down, or, of falling behind.
Centering our vision of productive contributions as engagements of atomic and individuated
individuals fosters a logic of “if you can’t take the heat, you had better get out of the kitchen.” In
that context, asking for help is complicated or hindered by the apprehension that responses,
even from compassionate and concerned peers and superiors, will be grounded in that logic: “It
might be better for you to stop or take a break at this point,” or “Maybe later when your
circumstances are better…”. This, however, is not going to happen; these circumstances will not
get better, because once again they are not a punctual and discrete appendage of a self—or a
cohort—that can be circumscribed or cut out. They are embedded in one’s very subjectivity,
relationships, and existence.
Meanwhile the ways we care for one another within the context of academia are grounded in
the dominant logic of independence and resilience. Our paths as academics are tightly woven in
an institution fuelled by individualism and its correlate ideal of independence, and the ways in
which we care for one another most often fail to radically challenge this, and to acknowledge
the infinity and relationality of our needs. Caring others—people who care about struggling
individuals, about inequalities in general—will attempt to facilitate academic paths, but often
their actions are limited to more or less punctual accommodations, such as being a sympathetic
listener, providing tissues in which to cry, and granting extensions. This entails, for the person
receiving this type of support, the stress of navigating academic life through often last minute
actions of generosity that are entirely dependent on the good will of others, and of knowing that
this path of navigation is unsustainable. In my case it also entails a dissonant feeling of gratitude
for this generosity and trust—it somehow entails being in the position where I am genuinely
grateful for being allowed to continue maintaining my own existence and that of those who
depend on me.
Punctual acts of generosity and trust are also costly for those who bestow them. Unsurprisingly
in a liberal institution, and particularly in these neoliberal times, the burden of it rests on
individuals. In addition to the logistical complications that supporting struggling individuals can
entail, there is also the anxiety and dangers of venturing out of the current academic logic of
individualism and competition. Watching struggling individuals struggle, and attempting to care
for them, generates strain—I have seen it in the faces of compassionate peers and professors, I
have felt it in my face when confronted by the needs of struggling peers. There again, future
perfect is often our false and cold comfort: “I know it’s hard, but just get this thing done, give a
good hard push this time around, and then it’ll be done”.
Caring, however, is necessary as a way to escape the debilitating effects of liberal and neoliberal
paradigms of individualism and competition in the academy. On every university campus
there are officially designated places of care. Although necessary, these services tend to
respond to punctual and neatly delineated needs—such as discrete episodes of illness or mental
distress. But the type of caring that truly facilitates my existence is one that does not seek out
the independent and functional person within the grounded, slow, and encumbered mess that I
am. Places of care are indeed those places that resist this sort of surgical violence.
In my institution one such place is found at a centre offering services for students who are older
women and/or women with children. There, one can find a free meal, a bed to rest on,
companionship, or silence. The centre is open everyday, to anyone, as the needs it addresses
are understood to be universal, rather than punctual traits or shortcomings of a subjectivity that
is dysfunctional in one (or a few) specific ways. Where needs are not failures, one does not have
to identify as such. And so every moment spent in this place of care preserves for a little while
longer the possibilities of my sustained presence in the academia—the possibilities of an
alternative social project (see Povinelli 2011).
Although it may seem unsatisfactory and insufficient, maintaining possibilities in the face of
exhaustion is critical—it is the basis of everything, including change (Katz 2001; Povinelli 2011).
The type of caring that sustains my continued existence as an academic implies inserting a logic
of relationality, responsibility, and inter-dependency within a structure grounded on
individualism and independence—it implies inserting a transgressive current within an
institution which doesn’t have the eyes to recognize it. Caring, then, is very much like Certeau’s
perruque (Certeau 1991): a wig made from scrap material by a factory worker, who
opportunistically appropriates glimpses of company resources to create something unseen and
unforeseen by the power in place—to serve a subversive purpose. Like making a wig, caring
within the academy is a creative diversion—of time, of attention, of affection, of academic
positions designed to foster individual achievements and competition. It is a wink of recognition
to other meanings within a totalizing space. It is an act of resistance.
The 1AC’s value stands on its own---responding to it with judgement and the
ballot is a hollow validation that draws them into the oppressive gaze of the
academy---vote Negative to decline affirmation.
Dr. Kendall R. Phillips 99, Professor of Communication at Central Missouri State University,
PhD in Speech Communication from Pennsylvania State University, MA in Speech
Communication from Central Missouri State University, BS in Psychology and Sociology from
Southwest Baptist University, “Rhetoric, Resistance, and Criticism: A Response to Sloop and
Ono”, Philosophy & Rhetoric, Volume 32, Number 1, p. 96-101
My concern with this movement centers around an issue that Sloop and Ono seem to take as a given,
namely, the role of the critic. On one hand, calling for the systematic investigation of existing marginalized discourses is a
natural extension both of critical rhetoric (see McKerrow 1989, 1991) and of the general ideological turn in criticism (see Wander
1983). On the other hand, the
ease of transition from criticism in the service of resistance to criticism of
resistance may obscure the need to address some fundamental issues regarding the general
function of rhetorical criticism in an uncertain and contentious world. Beyond licensing the critic to
engage in political struggle, Sloop and Ono advocate the pursuit of covert resistant discourses.
Such a move not only
stretches our understanding of rhetoric and criticism, but also alters
significantly the relationship between critic and out- law. Critical interrogation of dominant
discursive practices in the service of political/cultural reform is supplanted in favor of
positioning covert out- law communities as objects of investigation. Invited to seek out
subversive discourses, the critic is positioned as the active agent of change and the out-law
discourse becomes merely instrumental. Rather than academic criticism acting in service of
everyday acts of resistance, everyday acts of resistance are put into the service of academic
criticism.
Rhetorical resistance
That we are "caught within conflicting logics of justice that are culturally struggled over" (Sloop and Ono 1997, 50) and that rhetoric
is employed in these struggles seems an uncontroversial statement. Despite the theoretical miasma surrounding judgment, Sloop
and Ono accurately note, the material process of rendering judgments (and of disputing the logics of litigation) continues in the
world of actually practiced discourse. In the materially contested world, rhetoric is utilized both by those seeking to secure the
grounds of dominant judgment and by those seeking to undermine or supplant dominant cultural logics with some out-law notion of
justice.
The distinction between these two cultural groups, "in-law" and out- law, however, deserves some consideration prior to any
discussion of the role of the critic as implied in the out-law discourse project. The discourse of the dominant or those within the
bounds of superordinate logics of litigation is reminiscent of Michel De Certeau's (1984) strategic discourse. For De Certeau,
strategies are utilized by those who have authority by virtue of their proper position. Strategies exploit the institutionally guaranteed
background consensus by which power relations (and litigations) are maintained and advanced. In contrast, tactics are utilized by
those having no proper place of authority within the discursive economy who must seek opportunities whereby the discourse of the
dominant might be undermined and contested. To extend Sloop and Ono's definition, out-law discourses are those that can (and, by
their analysis, do) take advantage of situations (e.g., race riots) to disrupt the regularity of dominant cultural groups.
The ongoing struggle between strategically instituted cultural dominants and the "out-law always lurk[ing] in the distance" (66) is
acknowledged, even celebrated, by Sloop and Ono. What their acknowledgment fails to provide, however, is a clear need for critical
intervention. Indeed, quite the reverse is presented: It is the critic (particularly the left-leaning critic) who needs out-law discourse.
While the struggles over justice, equality, and freedom have gone on, the left-leaning critics are those who have theoretically
excluded themselves from the disputes. The study of out-law dis- courses, then, provides a means to reinvigorate the intellectual
and re-institute (academic) leftist thinking into popular political struggles (53-54). Thus, Sloop and Ono's project incorporates three
types of rhetoric: the rhetoric of the in-law, presumably the traditional object of critical attention; the rhetoric of the out-law, the
study of which may transform our understanding of judgment as well as reinvigorate leftist democratic critiques; and the rhetoric of
the critics who, having lost their political po- tency, can exploit the discourse of the out-law to promote ideological struggles. It is to
this critical rhetoric that I now turn.
Resistance criticism
Sloop and Ono (1997) clearly state the relationship they envision between the rhetorical critic and out-law discourse: "Ultimately,
we will argue that the role of critical rhetoricians is to produce 'materialist conceptions of judgment,' using out-law judgments to
disrupt dominant logics of judgment" (54; emphasis added). Here the critic seeks out vernacular discourse (60), focuses on the
methods and values embodied in these communities (62), listens to and evaluates the out-law community (62-63), and chooses
appropriate discourses for the purpose of disrupting dominant practices (63). Essentially, it is the critic who seeks out marginalized
discourses and returns them to the center for the purpose of provoking dominant cultural groups (63).
Despite acknowledging the efficacy of out-law discourses, Sloop and Ono assume that the critiques generated and presented by the
out-law community have only minimal effect. The irony, and indeed arrogance, of this assumption is evident when they claim:
"There are cases, however, when, without the prompting of academic critics, out-law discourses serve local purposes at times and at
others resonate within dominant discourses, disrupting sedimented ways of thinking, transforming dominant forms of judgment"
(60; emphasis added). Sloop and Ono seem to suggest that such locally generated critiques are the exception, whereas the political
efficacy of the academic critic is the rule. This seems an odd claim, given that the justification for their out-law discourse project is
the lack of politically viable academic critique and the perceived potency of out-law conceptions of judgment. Their
suggestion
that out-law communities are in need of the academic critic contradicts not only the already
disruptive nature of existing out-law discourses (the grounds for using out-law discourse), but also the impotence
of contemporary critical discourse (the warrant for studying out-law discourse).
By this I do not mean that the critiques and theories generated by academically instituted intellectuals have not been incorporated
into subversive discourses. Just as out-law discourses inevitably mount critiques of dominant logics, so, too, the perspectives on
rhetoric and criticism generated by academics are used in resistance movements. Feminist critiques of patriarchy, queer theories of
homophobia, postcolonial interrogations of race have found their way into the service of resistant groups. The key distinction I wish
to make is that the existence of criticism (academic or self-generated) in resistance does not necessitate Sloop and Ono's move to a
criticism of resistance.
What Sloop and
Ono fail to offer is an adequate argument for "taking public speaking out of the
streets and studying it in the classroom, for treating it less as an expression of protest" (Wander
1983, 3) and more as an object for analysis and reproduction within the political economy of
the academy. Philip Wander made a similar charge against Herbert Wicheln's early critical project, and this concern should
remain at the forefront of any discussion aimed at expanding the scope and function of criticism. Sloop and Ono offer
numerous directives for the critic without addressing whether the critic should be
examining out-law discourses in the first place. While it is too early to suggest any definitive answer to the
question of criticism of resistance, some preliminary arguments as to why critics should not pursue out-law discourses can be
offered:
(1) Hidden out-law discourses may have good reasons to stay hidden. Sloop and Ono specifically instruct
us that "the logic of the out-law must constantly be searched for, brought forth" (66) and used to disrupt dominant practices. But
are we to believe that all out-law discourses are prepared to mount such a challenge to the dominant cultural logic? Or,
indeed, that the members of out-law communities are prepared to be brought into the arena of
public surveillance in the service of reconstituting logics of litigation? It seems highly unlikely that all divergent cultural
groups have developed equally, or that all members of these groups share Sloop and Ono's "imperial impulse" (51) to promote their
conceptions and practices of justice.
(2) Academic critical discourse is not transparent. Here I allude to the overall problem of translation (see Foucault 1994; Lyotard
1988; Lyotard and Thebaud 1985; Zabus 1995) as an extension of the previous concern. Critical discourse cannot become the
medium of commensurability for divergent language games. Are we to believe that the "use" of out-law dis- course by critics to
disrupt dominant practices can fail to do violence to these diverse/divergent logics? Are out-law discourses merely tools to be
exploited and discarded in the pursuit of returning leftist academic dis- course to the center?
(3) Perhaps the academic translation of out-law discourse could be true to the internal logic of the out-law community. And,
perhaps the re-presentation of out-law logic within the academic community will bestow a
degree of legitimacy on the out-law community. Nonetheless, the effect of legitimizing out-law
discourse is unknown and potentially destructive. In an effort to siphon the political energy of
out-law discourse into academic practice, we may ultimately destroy the dissatisfaction that
serves as a cathexis for these out-law discourses. It seems possible that academic recognition might
take the place of struggle for material opportunities (see Fraser 1997). But, will academic legitimation
create any material changes in the conditions of out-law communities? I mean to suggest, not that it is
better to allow the out-law community to suffer for its cause, but rather that incorporating the struggle into an (admittedly)
impotent academic critique does not offer a prima facie alternative.
(4) Criticism of resistance denies the practical and theoretical importance of opportunity. Returning to De Certeau's notion of
tactics, the crucial element of these discursive moves is their use of opportunity to disrupt the proper authority of the dominant. The
kairos of intervention provides the key to undermining "in-law" discourses. But when is the "right moment in time" for the academic
reproduction of out-law discourse? Mapping the points of resistance (ala Foucault and Biesecker) entails interrogating "in-law"
discourses for their incongruities and contradictions, not turning the academic gaze upon those communities waiting for an
opportunity. Out-laws do not lurk in the forefront (66), hoping to be exposed by academic critics; they wait for the right moment for
their disruption. Rhetoricians can provide rhetorical instructions for seeking opportunities and for exploiting these opportunities
(literally making the culturally weaker argument the stronger), but this does not justify interrogating (intervening in) the cultural
logics of the marginalized.
The concerns raised here are not designed to dismiss Sloop and Ono's provocative essay. The divergent critical logic they outline
deserves careful consideration within the critical community, and it is my hope that the concerns I raise may help to further
problematize the relationship between
resistance and rhetorical criticism.
Rhetorical criticism
As I have suggested, my purpose is to use the provocative nature of Sloop and Ono's project to extend disputes regarding the ends
of rhetorical criticism. Diverging perspectives on the ends of criticism have been categorized by Barbara Warnick (1992) as falling
along four general lines: artist, analyst, audience, and advocate. Leah Ceccarelli (1997) discerns similar categories around the
aesthetic, epistemic, and political ends of rhetorical criticism.
The out-law discourse project presents clear ties to the notion of critic as advocate. For
Sloop and Ono, the critic is an
interested party, discerning (and at times disputing) the underlying values and forces contained within
a discourse. Additionally, however, the out-law discourse critic is an analyst focusing on the
hidden, aberrant texts of the out-law and "rendering] an incoherent or esoteric text comprehensible"
(Warnick 1992, 233). Now, I am not suggesting that a critic must serve only one function or that the roles of advocate and analyst
are mutually exclusive; rather, these
entanglings of power (political ends) and knowledge (epistemic ends) are
inevitable. My concern is that we not neglect the complexity of these entanglements. Turning covert out-law
discourses into objects of our analyses runs the risk of subjecting them both to the gaze of the
dominant and to the power relations of the academy. As the works of Michel Foucault (especially 1979, 1980)
aptly illustrate, practices presented as extending such noble goals as emancipation and humanity may endow institutions of
confinement and objectification. Any justification for studying out-law dis- course because doing so may extend our political
usefulness in the pursuit of emancipatory goals must not obscure the already existing power relations authorizing such studies. Our
attempts to extend our domains of knowledge and expertise (authority) must not be pursued unreflexively.
2NC---Care Turn
C---The radical care ethic of the 1ac gets weaponized against black and brown
folks—history is on our side—prefer methods which break down structural
inequality
Hobart & Kneese, 20
Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and Tamara Kneese, Radical Care Survival Strategies
for Uncertain Times, Social Text 142 • Vol. 38, No. 1 • March 2020
Finally, because
care can be mobilized as a way to privilege some groups at the expense of
others, the “radical” aspect of care can bleed into right-wing and white supremacist politics as
much as it upholds leftist utopian visions. In describing her current book project on machine learning and segregation,
Discriminating Data: Neighborhoods, Individuals, Proxies, media theorist Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues that social networking platforms rely on a logic
of homophily: birds of a feather flock together, so you will want to date, love, and be neighborly with those who are just like you, who share your
fundamental values and interests.33 The
problem with care attached to fellow feeling or sympathy is that all
too often it means that care is reserved for those deemed worthy. As Cotten Seiler’s article in this issue
underscores, radical care is also potentially dangerous: affective feelings of compassion and empathy
toward poor whites during the Great Depression, for instance, could be used as justification
for caring for fellow whites over others, despite the state-backed care offered by the New Deal. What happens
when images of suffering or violence fail to inspire warm feelings and subsequent charitable
action? Care is unevenly distributed and cannot be disentangled from structural racism and
inequality. In addition to the kind of commercialized co-optation of neoliberal self-care we describe above, political leaders also
take advantage of stereotypes about caregiving to extract unpaid labor from citizens. Care is a
collective capacity to build an alternative to colonialism and capitalism, but those in power can also instrumentalize empathy
and care to their own ends. For example, Andrea Muehlebach has shown how the post-Fordist Italian state valorizes and
manipulates compassion in order to absolve itself of responsibility to its most marginalized
citizens.34 In the context of the United States, the American health care and childcare systems are kept afloat by a vast
corpus of unpaid or devalued domestic work performed by poor immigrant women and kin
members.35 Domestic workers are some of the most exploited workers, not just in the United States but
globally; in Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and Bangladesh they are often poor migrant women and are without labor
unions or other protections, often subjected to sexual assault and other forms of violence.36 To be
clear, the problems that radical care seeks to remedy are not just a product of neoliberal policy or the election of Donald Trump and other authoritarian
leaders. Older histories of settler colonialism and centuries of exploitation inform the inequalities entangled with care today. As Leanne Betasamosake
Simpson and Dionne Brand put it, “The
monster has arrived, and the monster was always here.”3
Environmental Justice CP
1NC --- Solvency
Creating intersectional movements and policy is the only way to address ableist
and discriminatory policy
Jampel, 18 (Catherine Jampel), “Intersections of disability justice, racial justice and
environmental justice.” Environmental Sociology. https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10058562.
Accessed 7-22-2021. ALS
Philosopher Anna Carastathis (2013) recuperates one of Crenshaw’s early metaphors in order to illustrate this point. Crenshaw’s
(1989) metaphor of a basement with a trap door illustrates how single-axis
or limited-axis movements may fail
people facing multiple systems of oppression. By system of oppression, I mean historical and
institutionalized patterns that disadvantage a particular group of people based on their social
identity. Systems of oppression include racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism and so forth. In the ‘basement’
metaphor, ‘all people who are disadvantaged on the basis of race, sex, class, sexual preference,
age, and/or physical ability’ occupy a basement with ‘those on the bottom being disadvantaged
by the full array of factors, up to the very top, where the heads of those disadvantaged by a
singular factor brush up against the ceiling’ (Crenshaw 1989, 151). In Crenshaw’s initial work on intersectionality,
which examined why Black women facing discrimination did not have legal recourse, White women and Black men could say they
would be out of the basement ‘but for’ the ceiling. However, Black women faced two ‘but fors’ – racism and sexism – and became
legally invisible. Truly
intersectional work aims to address all of the systems of oppression that might
leave someone in the metaphorical basement. The ‘Applications: bringing intersectionality and
disability justice to EJ work’ section of this paper will include examples of how EJ work can avoid
perpetuating ableism, the system that oppresses people with nonnormative bodies and minds.
Understandings ableism in environmental justice is a precursor to policy action
Jampel, 18 (Catherine Jampel), “Intersections of disability justice, racial justice and
environmental justice.” Environmental Sociology. https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10058562.
Accessed 7-22-2021. ALS
Analytical strategy for explanation: deepening
understanding of EJ issues by critically attending to disability
Attention to multiple systems of oppression and axes of social difference also enhances the capacity for
explaining a phenomenon, in this case environmental injustice. Here, I turn to three ways in which
thinking about ableism and disablement can enrich explanations of environmental injustice.
Differential exposure and vulnerability – the traffic crash Exposure. People with disabilities are specifically exposed to
and vulnerable to environmental injustice as a result of ableism. Just as people occupying marginalized race and class
positions are geographically segregated, so are people with disabilities more likely than those without to be
geographically segregated, unemployed or underemployed, and poor (Russell 1998; Hemingway and Priestley 2006). This makes people
with disabilities more likely to live in areas with disproportionate burden of environmental bads, such as near current or legacy factory sites. Moreover,
those most likely to be subject to and bear the greatest burdens of environmental injustice often occupy multiple marginalized social locations. Scholars
have demonstrated this with respect to disability, gender and race in the case of Hurricane Katrina. Hurricane
Katrina, established in the
academic literature as an issue of EJ (Sze 2006), climate justice (Schlosberg and Collins 2014) and racial justice (Elliott and Pais 2006), illustrates
how disability status contributed to the lived experiences of people in New Orleans, and why Hurricane Katrina also
presented issues of disability justice (Finger 2005; NCD 2005). Public health researchers found that those, who did not evacuate
‘lacked public transportation, misjudged the storm, were limited by their own or a family member’s physical disability, and were more likely to be
lifetime New Orleans residents’ (Brodie et al. 2006, 1407). Among those who were evacuated, 27,000 people moved from the Superdome in New
Orleans to the Astrodome in Houston, Texas. Some of the arrivals had lost their mobility devices and, until donated wheelchairs arrived, had difficultly
accessing the restrooms in the large arena, while other arrivals who see and hear with different strategies than typically seeing and hearing people had
to adapt to the new environment until accessibility was addressed after several days (Bloodworth et al. 2007). Lack of access to disability-aware spaces
and underestimation of disability-specific supplies meant that evacuees were further harmed even after leaving the hurricane area. Evacuation
exacerbated previous chronic health conditions as well given the extent to which lowincome people relied on public hospitals decimated by the storm
(Brodie et al. 2006). A
disability justice framework understands that it is not people with disabilities
who are ‘unprepared’ but rather ableism that has contributed to a larger system that has failed
them and their families (Fenney Salkeld 2016; Kim 2016, 198–212). Likewise, Hurricane Katrina created conditions for further disablement.
For example, demographer Narayan Sastry and economist Jesse Gregory (2013) explicitly focus on disability as an ‘effect’ of Hurricane Katrina – making
disability the dependent variable and accounting for age, race and sex as independent variables. Their analysis of data from the American Community
Survey revealed that the increase in disability in New Orleans was disproportionately concentrated among young and middle-aged Black women, with
the young faring the worst. Sastry and Gregory draw on the extant literature to review the potential factors contributing to multiple marginalization –
young black women were caught at the intersection of race, gender and age in such a way that
adverse outcomes compounded. As Black people, they were more likely to live in dwellings and
communities that suffered the most damage, leading to loss of property and neighborhood ties.
As women, they were more likely to be left with children after households broke up, and the
difficulties children in their care faced post-hurricane may have been sources of stress and
consequent mental health effects. As young people, new mental and physical impairments were more 6 C. JAMPEL Downloaded by
[66.189.72.133] at 06:07 11 January 2018 disabling, the researchers speculated, because of their effects on ability to work, having younger children not
as easily able to help with daily tasks such as shopping, and more limited access to financial resources. In their explanation, the researchers imply a
contextual model of disablement as a result of historical processes.
Environmental impacts are uniquely magnified against disabled bodies – only a
critical intersectional lens towards political processes can identify vulnerability
Jampel, 18 (Catherine Jampel), “Intersections of disability justice, racial justice and
environmental justice.” Environmental Sociology. https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10058562.
Accessed 7-22-2021. ALS
Vulnerability. People whose
bodies diverge from the ‘normal’ or ‘standard’ may face greater
exposure to environmental injustice than other people. For some people, their bodily differences may also make them
especially vulnerable to the effects of certain environmentally unjust conditions. For example, people who are
immunosuppressed or have biological variations such as ‘slow acetylation’ bear a greater burden when
exposed to air pollution, pesticides, industrial chemicals and a host of other toxic trespasses, a phrase Sandra
Steingraber (2010, 279) uses to describe involuntary human exposure to a pollutant. As she explains, people who are slow
acetylators have low levels of the enzymes that detoxify aromatic amines, a class of organic compounds used in pesticides and
strongly associated with bladder cancer (2010, 268). Slow(er)
acetylation becomes a disability when high level of
variation compounded with racialized,
classed and gendered exposures to toxics demonstrates how disability status ends up being
created and then exacerbated through a political– economic context. As mainstream discourses shape an
aromatic amine exposure is part of society and culture. Biological
understanding through which the most ‘vulnerable populations’ are ‘expected’ to be further impaired or harmed (Fjord 2007), a
critical and intersectional EJ lens can direct attention toward the political processes that lead to
unnecessary occupational and everyday exposures to compounds such as the aromatic amines used in dyes,
pesticides and plastics.
Framework
2NC --- Fairness
Disability justice can only be achieved through attempts to promote fairness
through policy engagement. Only policy can engage the algorithms of AI and
correct ableist notions behind AI.
Tilmes 22 – Nicholas Tilmes is in the field of bioethics and researches the intersection of
philosophy, psychology, and biology at Cornell University. He is passionate about applying
philosophical insights to concrete ethical dilemmas posed by emerging technologies, such as
genetic engineering and functional brain imaging, and the relationship between official medical
knowledge and the lived experiences of patients. (Nicholas Tilmes, “Disability, fairness, and
algorithmic bias in AI recruitment”, Ethics of Information Technology, Springer Link, Article No.
21, 19 April 2022, https://doi-org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/10.1007/s10676-022-09633-2 ) || PZ
Disability justice Rather
than attempting to promote fairness solely through technical adjustments to
should take up a disability justice approach. This
view acknowledges that factors such as error rates and accuracy are necessary but insufficient to
understand, identify, and address algorithmic bias. Disability justice serves as a framework for
reasoning about how ableist structures and norms subtly configure and restrict the ostensibly
objective aspects of AI design. A deeper analysis of disability and capacity not only draws attention to the valueladen nature of design processes but illuminates how data analytics and machine learning help to define and
redefine those concepts. Instead, a disability justice approach suggests drawing a wider circle of
considerations relevant to AI ethics; centering analysis of assumptions and values in design;
closing gaps between stakeholders; and pursuing policies that empower further activism. Disability
justice calls into question fair-ML’s dogged quest for objectivity and failure to confront broader socio-political
norms, demanding that data scientists attend to the subjective choices intrinsic to algorithm
design. This shifts from a sole focus on technical aspects of design—such as input–output relations and training data—and
expands the problem space to include the social responses and outcomes that algorithms generate. While data scientists
need not abandon technical considerations, these decisions must follow from an analysis of the
normative choices that go into, e.g., generating classifications, formulating problems, labelling data, and selecting proxy
variables. That is, designers should take a broader socio-technical perspective, which considers
systems as not merely technological but enmeshed with embodied, organizational, social, and
political factors (Simon et al., 2020; van der Bijl-Brouwer & Malcom, 2020). By considering how these dynamics
interact and affect AI design together instead of assessing them in isolation, data scientists can better
conceptualize, identify, and respond to biased algorithms. For instance, by reflecting on values woven into
training data and input–output relations, data scientists
targets like ‘fit,’ one can parse out legitimate indicators of employability, such as word choice, from ones steeped in ableist norms
and unrelated to performance, such as speech patterns and tone. Widening
the circle of factors considered relevant
to ethical AI design beyond data and input–output relations not only alters design processes but also renders thinkable
a wider range of alternatives. Looking beyond the optimization of technical fairness criteria intervenes in
solutionism and reveals a variety of other mechanisms for combatting bias and promoting social
transformation. Notably, this gives us the tools to situate algorithms in a socio-technical context and raise the question of
whether algorithms are appropriate instruments to measure and shape certain domains in the first place. For instance, given
concerns about algorithms’ ability to capture shifting, contextual aspects of disability, what amount of discretion should they have
over disabled people’s hiring outcomes, if any? While simply omitting groups from algorithmic models would exacerbate inequality,
there may be reason to be much more skeptical of their inferences. Already, protests
by Google employees about
collaboration with the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security on Projects JEDI and
MAVEN (Wakabayashi & Shane, 2018) and pledges
by computer science students to refuse work at
Palantir in light of its cooperation with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Birnbaum, 2019)
point to the ways in which data scientists can affect change beyond the algorithm itself. As such,
disability justice indicates that we ought to expand the scope of AI ethics and situate
algorithms in their socio-technical context. Moreover, a disability justice approach suggests that
data scientists should critically analyze the ways in which disability is defined, measured, and
labelled. Given that most data about disability are medical, inferences from them typically are limited to the medical model,
reducing disability to a biological dysfunction. Yet, by drawing on disability scholarship, we can uncover the
ways in which these categories shift and trace their roots to ableist assumptions. For instance, consider
proposals to increase the amount and quality of disability data by drawing from people’s electronic health records. While wellintentioned, these efforts would further entrench the medical model of disability, leave little room for self-identification, and
underrepresent disabled people who lack access to health care. Making explicit the ways in which algorithms model disability
creates space to imagine it differently through methods like value-sensitive design (Friedman & Hendry, 2019; Simon et al., 2020).
Such an approach melds conceptual, empirical, and technical elements, e.g., assessing models of disability in terms of their
assumptions, impact on data gathering, relationship to outcomes, and so on. In so doing, data scientists could better attend to the
ways that different models influence people’s claims about their disabilities and how those claims are mediated by intersecting
hierarchies of class, race, and gender. By investigating
how different definitions and measures of disability
shape who ‘counts’ as disabled, data scientists can intervene in these ongoing omissions. This
requires altering how disabilities are operationalized so they are defined not solely as medical
diagnoses but also in terms of how people navigate institutions, norms, and each other. While
fair-ML idealizes abstraction so that data can be applied across contexts, (in)capacities emerge from a multitude of contextual
factors like competing values and built environments. Instead, a disability justice framework suggests that an
algorithm’s
accuracy does not always trade off with its ability to accommodate contingency because many
disabilities are intrinsically situational and resist quantification. Implementing this approach might involve,
e.g., assigning more weight to contextual factors, assessing how aspects of a given disability shift over time, and designing scales
that are sensitive to social values and attitudes. For example, some researchers have demonstrated that disability data can be
disaggregated to more easily study the variables that cooccur with certain disabilities or contexts (Brown & Broido, 2020; Peña et al.,
2018). Others have called for analyzing how people’s capacities expand and contract in relation to built accessibility, office culture,
and the type of labor at hand (Bennett et al., 2020). This suggests that data scientists could model disability differently by altering
processes of data collection, label generation, and proxy selection so as not to abstract away its context. In addition, disability justice
demands more fundamental shifts in access, communication, and ownership across the AI design pipeline. Indeed, the biases that
hiring algorithms exhibit are inseparable from developers’ sole focus on employer values and widening asymmetries between firms
and applicants. Although applicants’ ability to secure jobs is shaped by these AI, they cannot examine or offer input on them easily, if
at all. Expanding
opportunities for these engagements and removing barriers to access is
essential to designing more equitable algorithms. Already, initiatives like Access Computing offer accessible
training in computer science (Trewin et al., 2019) and groups like (Dis)Ability in AI provide support to disabled people at conferences
about AI (Whittaker et al., 2019). Despite efforts to increase disability representation at design forums and in training datasets, the
mere presence of disability is not enough to transform existing institutions and restore trust.
That is, vendors must design with disabled people, not merely for them. As the scope of design expands, data
scientists ought to draw insights from other disciplines, including disability studies and socio-technical design, and team up with a
wider range of stakeholders. This process cannot simply tack on these perspectives but must integrate and consult with them
throughout the design pipeline. By collaborating with a diverse array of disciplines and voices, data scientists could better identify
stakeholders in AI hiring, explore their values and needs, study how AI might implicate them, and involve them in design processes.
This bears similarities to a participatory design perspective, in which workers are empowered by directly influencing the design of
technologies they will take up (Korsgaard et al., 2016). Using a variety of techniques—from prototyping and mock-ups to futureoriented workshops and scenarios—stakeholders reflect on the situation, imagine innovative solutions, and transform those
speculative approaches into realistic, concrete alternatives. This might involve, to give an example, asking stakeholders to evaluate
whether automated interviews that assess affect and gestures align with their values, what they communicate about disabled
applicants, and how they might be navigated. In parallel, insights from disability studies suggest granting disabled people’s
perspectives significant weight in debates about, e.g., generating labels and selecting proxies for disability status. For instance,
developers might look to data platform co-ops operated by people with rare disabilities, in which they oversee the use of their data
and share profits (Scholz, 2016; Treviranus, 2018), to inform their own decisions about responsible data use. By working alongside
these other disciplines and voices from the start of the design process, data scientists could help bridge gaps in knowledge, foster a
common conceptual language, and develop new research methods. Beyond
expanding the scope of AI ethics
concerns, redefining design values, and changing stakeholder dynamics, a disability justice approach suggests
pursuing policy measures that can empower data activism. While legislation often lags behind
advances in computing, existing regulatory uncertainty allows AI vendors to selectively
endorse transparency and fairness criteria in ways that preserve existing arrangements.
Greater transparency could help promote the conditions necessary for activists and data
scientists alike to study, uncover, and contest algorithmic bias. Despite the explanatory difficulties
associated with the black box, policies ought to be introduced mandating that AI developers regularly
audit and disclose the purview, inputs and outputs, and limitations of their algorithms. For example, some have
suggested requiring employers to make public the automated inferences they make about applicants (Hoffman, 2019a) and tasking
them with retaining detailed records of their bias mitigation procedures (Hoffman, 2019b). Developing
legislation to
establish minimum standards for data transparency and disclosure of bias mitigation
measures—even for opaque machine learning AI—is necessary to identify and make claims
against discriminatory algorithms. In addition to setting baselines for transparent design and implementation,
recognizing how ableist structures can affect people’s identification with and disclosure of
disability status highlights the importance of more robust privacy regulations. Existing protections
are ill-equipped to grapple with the ethical risks posed by automated hiring tools or predictions of disability status. The ADA (1990)
only shields those who are disabled, treated as disabled, or were disabled, while GINA (2008) and HIPAA (OCR, 2021) protect health
data while it is being stored, transferred, and analyzed by certain classes of covered entities. However, since these laws neither
cover AI vendors and data brokers nor explicitly forbid discrimination based on inferred risk factors for disabilities, AI can circumvent
them (Givens & Morris, 2020). Similarly, while the ADA prohibits discrimination in places of public accommodation, it does not
explicitly include algorithms, social media platforms, and so on (Rothstein, 2020). Expanding existing privacy protections would help
make disability disclosure less precarious and, in so doing, assist efforts to gather more representative datasets.