The East is Black
1AC
Part 1- Framing
Anti-blackness is fundamental to and constructs civil society. Actions taken within the
current framing of society are doomed to be anti-black. The woman at Columbia narrates
the reality of blackness.
Wilderson 10, Frank B Wilderson III. “Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms”, Duke University
Press, 2010. p. 2
When I was a young student at
Columbia University in New York there was a Black woman who
used to stand outside the gate and yell at Whites, Latinos, and East and South Asian
students, staff, and faculty as they entered the university. She accused them of having
stolen her sofa and of selling her into slavery. She always winked at the Blacks, though we didn’t wink back.
Some of us thought her outbursts bigoted and out of step with the burgeoning ethos of multiculturalism and “rainbow coalitions.” But
others did not wink back because we were too fearful of the possibility that her isolation would become our isolation, and we had
come to Columbia for the precise, though largely assumed and unspoken, purpose of foreclosing on that peril. Besides, people said
she was crazy. Later, when I attended the University of California at Berkeley, I saw a Native American man sitting on the sidewalk
of Telegraph Avenue. On the ground in front of him was an upside-down hat and a sign informing pedestrians that here they could
settle the “Land Lease Accounts” that they had neglected to settle all of their lives. He, too, was “crazy. Leaving aside for the
the grammar of their
demands—and, by extension, the grammar of their suffering—was indeed an ethical
grammar. Perhaps it is the only ethical grammar available to modern politics and modernity
writ large, for it draws our attention not to how space and time are used and abused by
enfranchised and violently powerful interests, but to the violence that underwrites the
modern world’s capacity to think, act, and exist spatially and temporally. The violence
that robbed her of her body and him of his land provided the stage on which other violent and
consensual dramas could be enacted. Thus, they would have to be crazy, crazy enough to call not merely
the actions of the world but the world itself to account, and to account for them no less!
The woman at Columbia was not demanding to be a participant in an unethical network
of distribution: she was not demanding a place within capital, a piece of the pie (the demand
for her sofa notwithstanding). Rather, she was articulating a triangulation between two things. On the one hand was the
loss of her body, the very dereliction of her corporeal integrity, what Hortense Spillers charts as the transition from being a
being to becoming a “being for the captor,”1 the drama of value (the stage on which surplus value is extracted
from labor power through commodity production and sale). On the other was the corporeal integrity that, once
ripped from her body, fortified and extended the corporeal integrity of everyone else on
the street. She gave birth to the commodity and to the Human, yet she had neither
subjectivity nor a sofa to show for it. In her eyes, the world—not its myriad
moment their state of mind, it would seem that the structure, that is to say the rebar, or better still
discriminatory practices, but the world itself—was unethical. And yet, the world passes
by her without the slightest inclination to stop and disabuse her of her claim. Instead, it calls
her “crazy.” And to what does the world attribute the Native American man’s insanity? “He’s crazy if he thinks he’s getting any
money out of us”? Surely, that doesn’t make him crazy. Rather it is simply an indication that he does not have a big enough gun
And, the position of the slave is intimately related to the environmental degradation that
occurs in the name of the plantation’s economic growth.
Roane and Hosbey 19, J.T. Roane and Justin Hosbey, “Mapping Black Ecologies”, Current Research in Digital History,
vol. 2, August 23rd, 2019, https://doi.org/10.31835/crdh.2019.05
The histories and ongoing experiences of these communities require a robust vision for
environmental history, one that refuses to segregate toxic exposure and vulnerability to
climate change from the broader political, social, and economic history of Black life and
death. Variable exposure to phenomena associated with the defilement of the planet did
not emerge with smoke stacks and automobility but rather with the origins of the racial
capitalocene in the articulation of the plantation-industrial complex beginning in the colonization of
the Americas. Eighteenth-century planters like Landon Carter of Sabine Hall in the Northern
Neck of Virginia forced slaves to transfigure the interface of water and land constituting the socalled “golden age” of the Tidewater through the construction of dams, the herding of domesticated animals at
the expense of those indigenous to the region, and the displacement of forest
biodiversity through the planting of wheat and tobacco. As Carter’s diary illustrates, the effects of these
transformations as well as proximity to distant places facilitated through transit routes
along the growing Atlantic commerce set off various dislocations and epidemics that
were shaped by environmental transformation. Carter reported chronic small-pox epidemics, flies pestilent to
wheat “said to be sent into the Country by Mr. John Tucker of Barbadoes [sic],” rampant diarrheal diseases, and fits of ague or
malaria overtaking the enslaved as well as his biological family after heavy downpours, likely exacerbated by deforestation.
Enslaved, free, and later post-emancipation communities suffered the effects of these
transformations as malnourished laborers forced to transform the landscape by filling
swamps, rerouting and damming waterways, herding domesticated animals, and clearing forests.8
Ongoing exposure is the legacy of these sedimented histories that form a radical and
disturbing continuity in regional and local histories of the United States South and the wider African
Diaspora.9
Thus, the Role of the Ballot is to embrace the deconstruction of racialized structures of
civil society.
Understanding the anti-black nature of society is key to understanding how blackness is
implicated in the environment, the topic, the debate space, and our lives.
Wilderson 2, Frank B Wilderson III. “Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms”, Duke University
Press, 2010. p. 6
The difficulty of writing a book which seeks to uncover Red, Black, and White socially engaged feature films as aesthetic
today’s
intellectual protocols are not informed by Fanon’s insistence that “ontology—once it is
finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside—does not permit us to understand
the being of the black man.”6 In sharp contrast to the late 1960s and early 1970s, we now live in a political, academic,
accompaniments to grammars of suffering, predicated on the subject positions of the “Savage” and the Slave, is that
and cinematic milieu which stresses “diversity,” “unity,” “civic participation,” “hybridity,” “access,” and “contribution.” The radical
fringe of political discourse amounts to little more than a passionate dream of civic reform and social stability. The distance between
the protester and the police has narrowed considerably. The effect of this on the academy is that intellectual protocols tend to
privilege two of the three domains of subjectivity, namely preconscious interests (as evidenced in the work of social science around
“political unity,” “social attitudes,” “civic participation,” and “diversity,”) and unconscious identification (as evidenced in the
humanities’ postmodern regimes of “diversity,” “hybridity,” and “relative [rather than “master”] narratives”). Since the 1980s,
intellectual protocols aligned with structural positionality (except in the work of die-hard Marxists)
have been kicked to the curb. That is to say, it is hardly fashionable anymore to think the vagaries of power through
the generic positions within a structure of power relations—such as man/woman, worker/boss. Instead, the academy’s
ensembles of questions are fixated on specific and “unique” experiences of the myriad
identities that make up those structural positions. This would be fine if the work led us
back to a critique of the paradigm; but most of it does not. Again, the upshot of this is that
the intellectual protocols now in play, and the composite effect of cinematic and political discourse since the
1980s, tend to hide rather than make explicit the grammar of suffering which underwrites
the United States and its foundational antagonisms. This state of affairs exacerbates—or,
more precisely, mystifies and veils—the ontological death of the Slave and the “Savage”
because (as in the 1950s) the cinematic, political, and intellectual discourse of the
current milieu resists being sanctioned and authorized by the irreconcilable demands of
Indigenism and Blackness—academic enquiry is thus no more effective in pursuing a revolutionary critique than the
legislative antics of the loyal opposition. This is how left-leaning scholars help civil society recuperate
and maintain stability. But this stability is a state of emergency for Indians and Blacks.
The ballot is key to affirming black scholarship. Accepting alternative methods of debate
is key to putting the performance of the black body on equal footing and deconstructing
antiblackness in the space
Polson 12
Dana Roe Polson, Baltimore city public and public charter schools high school teacher, “’Longing for Theory:’
Performance Debate in Action” Dissertain directed by Dr. Christine Mallinson, Assistant Professor, Language, Literacy, and Culture
pp. 247-248)CEFS
Coach and former debater Duane Hartman said that he often
heard the question, “why can’t Black people just do traditional debate?” and then folks would “list
off all the names of successful Black debaters” (Hartman, group interview I, p. 11). What does the performance of
the body look like in traditional debate? According to Mitchell, “The purpose of debate becomes unrelenting
Doing Performance; Performing the Body
pursuit of victory at a zero-sum game.... Debate practice involves debaters ‘spewing’ a highly technical, specialized discourse at
expert judges trained to understand enough of the speeches to render decisions” (Mitchell, 1998, p. 5). As we will see in this
chapter, there are a number of attributes connected to epistemology of traditional debate, as well as corresponding attributes that
signal performance debate’s agentic alternative. These attributes are signaled through performance of Black or white bodies, as
well. Mitchell, Wise, and others depict traditional debate as spewing, as mile-a-minute reading of evidence (which is not exclusive to
traditional debate, anymore), as part of a split between the technical, specialized, and policy-oriented traditional style on the one
hand and a performance debate style that calls for something different and new on the other. Ten years ago, Warner and Bruschke
called for control of debate to shift to newer, ‘non-traditional’ debaters: “If
offered access to the creative form of
debate, new participants can appropriate it and make their very debating a critique of the
domination in debate in ways that those sharing a majority worldview cannot imagine on
their own.... We can either discuss among ourselves [debate professionals] what
elements of debate style make it such a white-dominated activity, or we can listen to the
unique styles and expressions of new-found debaters and validate them with positive
feedback. We can use our ballots to affirm new styles of debate” (Warner & Bruschke, 2001, pp.
14–15). Duane Hartman, former debater and coach, described traditional policy debate as
not a normal performance of the Black body. He continued, “The body is always excluded
from intellectual thought. And it’s always the mind and any interpretation of what the
mind says about the body that is considered intellectual.” He pointed out the dichotomy
that is drawn between “Black being the body, white being the mind. If instinct and
experience are knowledge, but embodied, and if those are considered the province of
Black ways of knowing, as opposed to academic knowledge which is prioritized.... these
need to be equalized instead of dichotomized and hierarchical” (Hartman, group interview I, p. 11).
Here we see how the epistemology of performance debate is intimately linked to the stylistic
aspects, to the doing of debate, the performance of the body.
Part 2- Advocacy
Thus, the advocacy: The Niggas’ Republic of China ought to prioritize environmental
protection over economic growth.
We defend the topic as the Niggas Republic of China. Our interpretation of the topic is
that niggas are people, and our application of black understanding to the topic allows us
to conceptualize black relationality to China which is key to black engagement with the
nature of the topic and the debate space. We draw on the positive and negative histories
and relations between blackness and China in order to understand past violence and
theorize new futures.
Frazier 15, Robeson Taj Frazier in an interview with Keisha N Blain, “On Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination: An
Interview with Robeson Taj Frazier”, Black Perspectives, https://www.aaihs.org/on-cold-war-china-in-the-black-radical-imaginationan-interview-with-robeson-taj-frazier/
All bracketing is done by the article and not me.
Keisha N. Blain: Tell us more about the inspiration for your book title, The East Is Black. Where does the title come from and
how does it reflect the major argument and themes of the book?
Robeson Taj Frazier: The book title is a play on “The East Is Red,” an extravagant Chinese opera and song that for the latter half of
the 1960s was the unofficial national anthem of the People’s Republic of China. But the title signifies a number of things to me –
some that tie directly into the arguments put forth in the book, and others that are reflective of my intentions/objectives with the
one vein the title refers to: China’s outreach to different groups of African descent
during the Cold War; black radical travelers’ different efforts to communicate the significance of
China’s road to socialism to black American and Afro-diasporic audiences; how
blackness and race became a useful nodes to reframe Asian communism for black
Americans and to domesticate Chinese citizens with the power of the Chinese state and the ideas of China as leader of global
book. So in
anticapitalist and antiracist movement. In the other vein, the
title speaks to my own investment in increasing
black Americans’ awareness of China, and Chinese people’s understandings of black American life. Lastly,
there’s a mild Hip Hop connotation. I grew up in an era when some of my favorite American Hip Hop artists were
constantly referring to “the East” and utilizing aesthetics and imagery that signified
Asian influence and culture – Wu Tang Clan, Blahzay Blahzay, Jeru the Damaja, X Clan, Afu Ra. The irony is
that when several of them were referring to “The East” they were also bigging up their
neighborhood of East New York.
Blain: What are the factors and/or motivations that led you to write a book on the “relationship between Asian struggles against
imperialism and black American movements against social, racial, and economic injustice”?
expanding my own understanding of black intellectual history and
political culture, and the role travel and media played in different black intellectuals’
efforts to confront capitalism and racism while facing increased repression from the U.S.
state. Similarly, I have studied Mandarin, spent time traveling and living in China, and have had a longstanding interest in Chinese
Frazier: I was interested in
history and political culture. So the book is my effort to merge these two concerns and explore the intersections and differences that
exist between black diasporic and Chinese political history and culture. And I argue that these relations are not just historic but also
existent between contemporary movements that are being shaped in both contexts – in China the massive strikes and civil
disobedience by migrant workers and ethnic minorities, as well as the young people in Hong Kong who have been mobilizing in
mass against increasing government electoral manipulation and influence from the mainland; and in the U.S. the #BlackLivesMatter,
Occupy, and anti-mass incarceration movements that have been galvanizing publics and reshaping American consciousness.
Blain: Your book highlights the significant function of what you refer to as radical imagining. Tell us more about how you
conceptualize this term; and how you use it in the book.
Frazier: Many
people have theorized the imagination as a political practice—that is to say
the role the imagination plays in the both the creation of individual and collective
identities and moreover in the construction of collective formations like the community,
the society, the nation, and the nation-state. My use of radical imagining builds on this
thread, in particular off the ideas and arguments made by Robin D.G. Kelley, Cynthia Young, Gerald Horne, Shelley Streeby,
among others. Dr. Kelley writes, “The map to a new world is in the imagination….[It] transport[s] us
to another place, compel[s] us to relive horrors and, more importantly, enable[s] us to
imagine a new society.” It is the metaphors of possibility, travel and contradiction within
his statement that best tie into what I mean by radical imagining – the fertile
inventiveness and creativity, as well as limitations, errors, and ambivalences that encompassed and animated black
intellectuals’ political projects of solidarity, societal transformation, and radical democracy.
Understand and protect the environment as more than just biology, but as the social
conditions that involve and reinforce black death. Using black ecologies as an epistemic
starting point allows us to both understand the anti-black violence of the world while
also conceiving alternative realities.
Roane and Hosbey 2, J.T. Roane and Justin Hosbey, “Mapping Black Ecologies”, Current Research in Digital History, vol.
2, August 23rd, 2019, https://doi.org/10.31835/crdh.2019.05
We call for the widened yet elastic concept of “Black ecologies” as a way of mapping
ongoing susceptibility as a function of historical and ongoing relations. Like Black
geographies, the designation Black marks the outside within the ecologies of living—the
spaces that sustain and reproduce normative forms of biological and social existence.
As a naming of the outside and the bottom, Black ecologies are foremost sites of
ongoing injury, gratuitous harm, and premature death.10 The designation of these as
ecologies seeks to bring into focus the critical ways that forces above even the hand of
Man punctuate, underline, and exacerbate raw spatial inequality.11 Black ecologies are
spaces threatened directly by the rising seas and made toxic as the sites where the
byproducts of production and consumption can be dumped.12 At the same time, they
form the critical ecologies of the damned, sites wherein ordinary Black people articulate
alternative maps—dissonant and heterodox ecological grammars as well as vision for a
different order.
Our method is a key mode of engagement that allows circumvention of the violent and
colonialist practice of cartography. Our imaginative understanding of the actor inserts
blackness into the debate to disrupt exclusionary representations by questioning and
redefining what “places” and “spaces” are.
Roane and Hosbey 3, J.T. Roane and Justin Hosbey, “Mapping Black Ecologies”, Current Research in Digital History, vol.
2, August 23rd, 2019, https://doi.org/10.31835/crdh.2019.05
Our ongoing project integrates audio, images, and digital mapping in its analysis, in order to depict
the ways that Southern Black communities mobilize against the historical and contemporary
struggles of the racial capitalocene—Françoise Vergès’ critical interrogation of the so-called Anthropocene. Vergès
mobilizes Cedric Robinson’s concept of racial capitalism and its attendant challenge to the conceptions of capitalism that ignore its
originary dependence on racialization to challenge
this nascent discourse of the Anthropocene,
which in broad strokes paints the mounting ecological crisis in terms of generic,
undifferentiated humanity.5 While recognizing the ways that geospatial analysis and digital
tools augment and enhance historical interpretation, our ongoing project also reckons with
the inherent violence of cartography as a practice. Sylvia Wynter explains how Western cartography
developed as a set of technologies and spatial tactics in order to facilitate Western imperialism and its exploitative, genocidal
Projecting and transforming a multilayered 3D place onto a 2D digital map
necessitates the literal and figurative flattening of that location, producing a colonial,
“bird’s eye view” of a landscape. This project deals with this contradiction by georeferencing oral history interviews,
projects.6
census demographic maps, and land deeds onto all 2D maps, deepening their historical contexts and infusing the voices of the
people who lived in these communities. In Black Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature,
Judith Madera argues that “place”
is a social construction that is both discursive and affective.
Further, she asserts that “counter-cartographies,” or “people’s geographies,” are key
ways that Black people have defined spaces for themselves and de-stabilized dominant
and exclusionary representations7. Our ongoing project on Black ecologies intervenes from this
perspective, incorporating audio, images, and digital mapping in order to create “deep maps” that garner
a robust appreciation for both Black ecological vulnerability and possibility from the
vantage of these same communities. Often prevented from participating in the
production of state recognized cartographic and ecological knowledge due to the
political economy of knowledge production in an anti-Black world, this wide-ranging set
of sources shows the capaciousness of Black culture, thought, and social life for
producing trenchant analyses and critiques of the continuities in the devastation and the
possibilities shaping Black living. We argue that these Black counter-cartographies are spatial tactics of resistance.
These “people’s geographies” refuse statist claims of irredeemable low income and working-class Black Southern communities that
can acceptably be allowed to face the brunt of ecological vulnerability in the United States.
Part 3- Solvency
Our troubling of traditional debate’s anti-black norms enables meaningful discussion and
analysis which is necessary to analyze structures of anti-blackness in the debate space
and the real world. Louisville provesReid-Brinkley 19, Shanara Reid-Brinkley, “Voice Dipped in Black: The Louisville Project and the Birth of Black Radical
Argument in College Policy Debate” Online Publication Date, June 2019. p. 2
Louisville battled a resistant majority white academic community for years. For example, note
the following comment from the former director of the Mercer debate team (one of Louisville’s major competitors), Joseph Zompetti:
“I still feel strongly that arguing these things in debate rounds does more harm than good. I think you’re correct to say that the
community won’t change voluntarily. I do think that discussions and structural changes from the AFA [American Forensics
Association] or the NDT committee [National Debate Tournament] or CEDA [Cross Examination Debate Association] can help”
the considerable controversy, Louisville’s debate team would break
through racialized barriers and become one of the most competitively (p. 216) successful
debate teams in the country. During their winning 2003–2004 season, the team transformed into what became
(Zompetti 2004b). Despite
commonly referred to as the Louisville Project. The development of an acclaimed Louisville Method of Debate would have significant
reverberations through both the college and high school debate communities more than fifteen years later. Troubling
the
assumption of neutrality, Louisville’s performance and argumentation highlight the
hypocrisy of traditional debate performance, its relationship to anti-Blackness, and the
normative performance of whiteness as the marker of achievement. The Louisville team
delves into the neoliberal ordering of American democracy, making visible the hypocrisy
of white liberalism and its attendant antagonism—subtle and overt—toward Blackness.