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Notes
This file contains a variety of different arguments related to racism; some are fully developed, others are
the start of something good; some are anti-whiteness Ks, others are responses to those Ks. Notes on
each argument are below.
Our goals for this file as a group for this were to:
A – Investigate and cut the best of the new literature emerging from folks who were outraged by the
George Zimmerman verdict, which occurred the day before we began our research.
B – Research new literature that previous debaters hadn’t researched, particularly from books and other
hard to find peer-reviewed literature that we’re lucky enough to access at UM.
--BR
The arguments included are:
Whiteness K: Very similar to the common K of whiteness, but with a different set of authors and
literature. There’s a few relevant narratives included, and a focus on pedagogy. It’d combo well with
the:
Pedagogy K: A look at the educational aspects of whiteness. This may have particular utility as a
framework/prior question type argument against race affirmatives.
Sexual Politics: The purpose of this section is for people who are looking to reject the patriarchal norms
of society. The Millet ev is all talking about how we have blinders an making it so the lens we view
through seems right when in actuality it perpetuates the violence of the skwo. There's a link to almost
every aff relating it back to patriarchy. You should use cross ex to set up a further link the ev is really
good on the subject. The impact section of the file is realistic and should be able to be explained with
logic. Read through the entire file before you decide to run this. There are two alts in this file, feel free
to alter/ create a new one for the sake of coherence. --SC
Latino Identity: Just a couple cards about Latino identity’s relationship to the racial binary. The second
card may have some utility for answering affirmatives that attempt to conflate Latin American struggles
for freedom with racism or slavery.
“AT: Grade it like a paper:” A short criticism of the framework argument that the judge should “Grade
the 1AC like a paper.” Might or might not be useful ever.
Quar: One card about intersectionality and Quar. #unitethecrowns
Sheshadri-Crooks K: Kalpana Sheshadri-Crooks wrote a super sweet book called Desiring Whiteness: A
Lacanian Analysis of Race. This K consists of various cards from that book. The thesis, put simply, is that
Whiteness has become a master signifier, the result of which is that individuals come to desire a place
within that framework. These networks of repressed desire make impossible resistance to the ordering
force of race. A key distinction is between race, which S-C identifies as an ontology, and racism, which
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she calls epistemological. It links particularly well to affirmative’s that claim to perform a genealogy or
use a genealogical approach. The kritik can function as an independent K of race affirmatives, or as one
link in a larger Lacanian criticism.
Loren and Metelmann: Calum talked about this argument in his Debating Race lecture. Wilderson
believes racism to be situated in the Lacanian order of the Real, while race is in the Symbolic. Loren and
Metelmann’s short article criticizes this same notion in the work of Mitchell, arguing that instead Race is
the Real, and Racism the Symbolic. Race, thus, is lacking—racism is not an inevitability but a flawed
attempt at representing/signifying race in the order of the symbolic. Only this change in
conceptualization makes possible resistance to biologism/racism. This argument is surprisingly well
evidenced, but might require a large amount of time to explain in the block…I’d recommend planning
accordingly.
Hammersley: This argument is frequently deployed as a framework argument, but the same article can
be used to criticize the model of evidence comparison that many race affirmative’s deploy. Put simply,
the argument is that evidence should be judged based on its empirical/scientific validity, not on its
functional merit, or utility for solving racism. Failure to take this into account might turn the aff or be a
reason why the judge should reject the team on presumption.
Quiet K: This argument consists of three somewhat distinct authors who all think that
resistance/speaking out is a bad model for dealing with racism and oppression.
1. Quashie—he’s specific to racism. The argument centers around aesthetics, claiming that
resistance reduces our ability to understand the interiority of blackness to the point at which the
aff will end up being reductionist and racist as supposed to productive in reducing racism. Some
teams have deployed this argument in coordination with Badiou. The cards are relatively tricky
in terms of a possible floating PIK…
2. Brown—Wendy Brown writes some very high quality cards about how “breaking silence” can
become a fetish, and thus be not liberating but oppressive overall. This would likely mix well
with Quashie, with Brown being a part of the 2NC.
3. Hundleby—this author claims that standpoint epistemology and speaking as/for the oppressed
has the unintentional result if giving away valuable secrets that are key to achieving freedom.
For example, speaking in a public space about Blackness might be tantamount to telling one’s
oppressors about the Underground Railroad. This argument may have some degree of tension
with Quashie’s position about resistance…
Nuclear Racism: These cards talk about how racism is perpetuated through nuclear risk logic. Nuclear
plants are more prevalent in minority communities.
Yancy: This critique is a performative one of sorts. It might hybrid well with the Whiteness K. The second
card isn’t quite done, so you should finish underlining it if you intend to read this argument.
Ontological Whiteness: This card is both an answer to the above Yancy argument and an independent K
of the logic of white judges voting to affirm black experience.
--LA
Alayna, Brittany, Brook, Lev, Greg, Sierra, Rubaie
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Whiteness
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1NC
This debate held a radical potential for resistance that was foreclosed by the 1ac’s glorification of
America, the world’s largest purveyor of white supremacy. Active and ever-present consciousness
raising and resistance in the wake of the Zimmeran trial is key; it’s not about developing new
alternatives, but tearing down anti-blackness
Goldberg 7/14 (Jesse, State University of New York, Do not act surprised by the verdict in the
Zimmerman trial, 7/14/13, http://liberaldogmablog.blogspot.com/2013/07/do-not-act-surprised-byverdict-in.html)//LA
Black life is not worth as much as other life. Black death is not mourned like other death. In fact, it is
celebrated, as we saw in the post-verdict press conferences and on Twitter (trigger warning: there are very
painful Tweets collected in that link). And for those who, be it consciously or unconsciously, retain a commitment
to American democracy and American justice systems because of their protection within them thanks
to the fact that both are deeply entrenched in the ideology of white supremacy (and despite what SCOTUS may
think, white supremacy was not eradicated in the 1960s), this celebration makes total sense. Celebrate the
sacrificial expenditure that makes possible the continuity of the community. That’s just what’s done.
Because in order for American society to continue, blackness must be contained, and those bearing its
mark must be ghettoized, stopped and frisked, locked up, disenfranchised, and killed in order that the
machine keeps moving. But so many folks are already saying all of this, and saying it much better than I can. So what are we to do?
First of all, we can’t do nothing, and we can’t tell folks who are doing something to slow down. If you
don’t want to change the system, you are not being cautious or careful or moderate, you are being
actively oppressive. Because the system as it currently exists is unjust; the status quo is morally
unacceptable. So to call for a halt of attempts to overhaul this status quo is to call for the continuity of
oppression – of murder. Second, we all have skin in this game. Fellow white folks, don’t you dare for a minute believe
that this isn’t a fight for us as well. (“Whiteness to me is oppression. And it oppresses not just black people, but people who think it offers them
something other than dominance over their fellow man. Poor white people have been sold a bill of goods that offers them white supremacy
and takes away jobs and economic growth.” – Steve Locke). Don’t
you dare for a minute try to silence movements
which call attention to race by shaking your white liberal finger at them and telling them that they’re
naïve and we should all really be talking about class. Instead, we must ask ourselves what we can do to actively
resist a system that is set up to our advantage. And a word of advice along the way: we must never forget our
privilege as long as it exists. As tempting as it will be to echo cries of “We are Trayvon Martin” or to
take to the streets wearing hoodies, we must remember that hoodies draped over our white bodies
do not hold the same meaning as hoodies draped over black bodies. As long as that's true, we must
fight. Third, we all can do something. Not everyone has to become a street-marching activist, or a
politician, or a director of a non-profit, or a public defense attorney, or an academic, or a journalist. But, to channel Fred Moten, and
perhaps offer a different inflection, everywhere there is the potential for performance (which is everywhere, because we
are always performing, whether we’re paid to do so or not), there is potential for resistance. My pessimism is a
resignation to the facts of history which create our contemporary moment, facts which unequivocally
demonstrate that America is a country inextricably built upon an ideology of white supremacy and
anti-blackness, and that our current systems have not exorcised this legacy. Me pessimism is an acknowledgement that
anti-blackness is not a symptom of American capitalism, but one of its fundamental principles, and
one of the foundations on which this country stands. I believe we have to acknowledge the enormity
of these things (especially white folks, since it is our interests which are most clearly served by not acknowledging these things),
but my pessimism is not a resignation to a belief that things will always be this way. I retain a
profound commitment to working towards a Justice that does not yet exist. I have no idea yet what it
will look like, but I know it will look nothing like this.
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2NC Impacts
The murder of Trayvon Martin has sent a shockwave throughout the mass media and political system
– however, Trayvon is but one piece of the puzzle – we live in an anti-black society – nowhere is this
more evident than the legal system – black bodies are marked as “born dead” – they are not
delegitimized because they were never legitimized to begin with – this system of gratuitous violence
makes possible mass extermination
Brady 12 (Nicholas Brady, activist scholar, executive board member of Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle,
BA in philosophy from Johns Hopkins, PhD student at the University of California-Irvine Culture and
Theory program, 10-26-12, “The Flesh Grinder: Prosecutorial Discretion and the Terror of Mass
Incarceration,”
http://academia.edu/2776507/The_Flesh_Grinder_Prosecutorial_Discretion_and_the_Quotidian_Terror
_of_Mass_Incarceration) gz
The recent murder of Trayvon Martin brought the national conversation back to a topic that had been
repressed for the myth of a post-racial America propagated since the election of Barack Obama to the
presidency: the fundamental openness of the black body to wanton and excessive abuse and
“premature death” (Gilmore, 28). That the national narrative around Martin’s death, even the narratives
built by black political and civil leaders, only had Emit Till to compare his death to is example par
excellance of the complete lack of any language we have to discuss the machinations that make a
phrase such as “black death” into a redundancy. Trayvon Martin was not a singular case but was one
of 120 black people killed extra-judicially (by police officers, security officials, and vigilante justice-seekers) in 2012
between January and July . That every 36 hours on average a black life is taken extra-judicially means
that Trayvon Martin is not exceptional, but we do not have a language to deal with either the
exceptional or the quotidian. Into the abyss, though the demand for justice, something productive happened: the rallying cry for
justice made an invisible and ethereal part of the justice system into something a little more material. The call to arrest and charge
George Zimmerman brought our attention to the role of the Prosecutor in the criminal punishment
system. After the protests, statement from the President, and daily media blitzes, a special prosecutor was assigned to the case to meet the
calls for justice. Angela Corey would become the face for an area of the law that is both ubiquitous and unthought. It seems she understood this
for her statement, before officially giving the charge, set up a context for evaluating prosecutors, ¶ The Supreme Court has defined our role as
Proscutors [as] not only “ministers of justice” but “seekers of the truth.”… Every single day our prosecutors across this great country handle
difficult cases and they adhere to that same standard: a never ending search for the truth and a quest to always do the right thing for the right
reason. There is a reason cases are tried in a court of law and not in the court of public opinion or the media. Because details have to come out
in excruciating and minute fashion. Detail by detail, bit of evidence by bit of evidence. And it is only then, when the Trier of fact whether judge
or jury, gets all the details that then a decision can be rendered. ¶ Corey is laboring to legitimize a system that took weeks to actually arrest
George Zimmerman, yet this labor represses her own case history, for example the case of Marissa
Alexander. Alexander is a
mother who was convicted of attempted murder because she shot a warning shot at the father of her
children who has admitted to beating her on several occasions before. Alexander was arrested on
spot and charged within days in a case where the “stand your ground” defense was also being called
upon. This supposed contradiction of methods that meet different bodies is the norm of the criminal punishment system, and this paper will
attempt to string out some parts of the structure that make it so. ¶ In many disciplines there has been renewed attention given to mass
incarceration. Yet, in spite of the growing level of multidisciplinary scrutiny on police surveillance and violent gulags, a major actor has slipped
through virtually untouched in the humanities' attention to prisons. This major actor, regularly described in criminology and legal scholarship as
the most powerful agent in the criminal punishment system, is the Prosecutor. The office of the prosecutor exists in a place where matter
doesn't matter. Or put differently, the
prosecutor’s agency is assembled where black matter no longer matters
and where what matters, the happenings of the human and the quest for civil justice, can only be
produced through the quotidian grinding and destruction of black flesh.¶ This paper will seek to shine a light, or
better yet a shadow, on the white knights of the justice system. While one would think they know the job of a Prosecutor given its ubiquity on
television crime dramas and movies, the mundaneness of their actual day-to-day activities are mystified by television's fascination with the
drama of the trial, whether fictional or "real." In fact, it is rare that you will find a prosecutor who takes even 10 percent of their cases to trial.
Over 90 percent of cases are settled through a plea bargain where the defendant will agree to plead guilty usually for the guarantee of less
time, parole, or a lighter charge. As one law professor put it, the plea bargain is not an addendum to the criminal justice system, it is the
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criminal justice system (Scott and Stuntz, 1912). In spite of its centrality, there is little literature on the inner-workings of the plea bargain
outside of schematic analysis in criminology. Instead of focusing on the theatrics of the trial, this paper will analyze the day-to-day grind of the
plea bargain in order to explicate the quotidian terror that lies at the heart of prosecutorial discretion. ¶ From day-to-day a Prosecutor can be
working on anywhere between 20 to 100 cases at a time (Heumann, 98). While a Prosecutor is given wide discretion to charge a case the way
they want, there are hierarchies that determine the norms and procedures of each office. There are the district attorneys that the general
population votes into office and the deputy attorneys that answer directly to him or her. Underneath them are the line prosecutors who work
on the majority of the cases but whose decisions generally follow the established protocols of the veteran prosecutors and deputies. New
prosecutors often come straight from law school with lofty dreams of becoming courtroom heroes only to learn that their job is much more
akin to assembly-line justice. Legal scholar Abraham Blumberg describes this as the, “emergence of ‘bureaucratic due process,’… consist[ing] of
secret bargaining sessions [and] employing subtle, bureaucratically ordained modes of coercion and influence to dispose of large case loads”
(Blumberg, 69). ¶ While each office is different from the next, there is a stunning amount of unity at the procedural level. Deputy district
attorneys will reject thirty to forty percent of cases the police send to them on face. The remaining 60 percent are considered suspects that are,
according to the evidence provided, conclusively guilty. For the Prosecutor, these cases would be slam-dunk wins in front of a jury (Lewis, 51).
This begs the question: What is the dividing line between cases that are charged and cases that get dropped by Prosecutors? ¶ Some statistics
on the racial component of sentencing might lead us to an answer. In
terms of drug crimes, according to a comprehensive
report by Human Rights Watch, blacks are 14 percent of drug users, but are 37 percent of people
arrested for drug possession, and are anywhere between 45 to 60 percent of those charged . These
strings of numbers reveal an anti-black trajectory: the cases that the Prosecutor overwhelmingly
pursues are black cases, the ones he drops are overwhelmingly non-black. A defense attorney called
these for-sure-guilty cases “born dead.” This is a curious phrase, but when considering the historic
connection between blackness and crime dating back to the inception of the national polity through
slavery, the defense attorney’s phrasing gets us to a much more paradigmatic argument. Walt Lewis, a
Los Angeles prosecutor, describes a “criminal justice” continuum where bodies are transformed from being
“free” to being “incarcerated” (Lewis, 20). One is first arrested by the police and becomes a “suspect.” If
the prosecutor decides to charge, then you go from being a “suspect” to a “defendant.” Finally if you
are found guilty, you go from being a “defendant” to a “convict.” This process describes a temporality
that transforms the “human” into the incarcerated “inhuman.” As violent as this process can be, the
black’s fate is fundamentally different and more terrifying. The black is arrested, charged, and
convicted at disproportionate rates because we were never actually “suspects” or “defendants.”
Instead, we were always criminals, always already slaves-in-waiting. Instead of a continuum, the black
body floats in a “zone of non-being” where time and transformation lose all meaning. Cases involving
black bodies do not need to be rock-solid in terms of facts for their bodies have already been marked
by the law as criminal (Fanon, 2). Thus cases involving black bodies are always for-sure victories, are
always already “born dead.” ¶ In an interesting case that made it all the way to the Supreme Court titled United States versus
Armstrong, a group of black defendants levied a critique similar to this paper’s argument . A group of black men were brought
on charges of possessing 50 grams of crack cocaine. Unlike a normal defense where the details of the state’s accusation
would be called into question, the defense instead argued that the prosecution selectively charges black people
in cases involving crack cocaine. The first argument of the defense was that the majority of crack cocaine users in California are
actually whites, not black people. The second argument of the defense used testimonies from government lawyers to prove that of all 841
cases the state brought against people possessing crack cocaine, all of them were black. Using these two claims, the defense said there was
adequate proof to show that prosecutors were using unconstitutional means, racial markers, to select who would be charged and who wouldn’t
be charged. According to past rulings by the Supreme Court, if selective prosecution can be proven then that is adequate grounds to vacate the
sentence, even if the defendants were caught “red-handed.” Against this defense, the prosecution counter-argued that it does not selectively
prosecute based on race, but instead on fact and circumstance. The district court that initially heard the appeal ruled that the state should turn
over records of the 841 cases in question to prove who was right in the dispute. The state refused to reveal its documents and instead appealed
the decision all the way up to the Supreme Court. Overturning the district and federal circuit court, the
Supreme Court ruled in
favor of the prosecution for a few reasons. The first reason Rehnquist gave was that it is not in the best
interest of the government’s war on crime to monitor prosecutors. Rehnquist argued that the prosecutor must have
the freedom to operate in the way she sees fit. The second and most important reason Rehnquist gave was by far
the most explicitly racist and I will quote it in full: quote “a published 1989 Drug Enforcement
Administration report concluded that "[l]arge scale, interstate trafficking networks controlled by
Jamaicans, Haitians and Black street gangs dominate the manufacture and distribution of crack.…
[and] the most recent statistics of the United States Sentencing Commission… show that: More than
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90% of the persons sentenced in 1994 for crack cocaine trafficking were black.” . The Supreme Court answered
the defendant’s accusation of selective prosecution by arguing that such a prosecution strategy is legitimate because it can be verified through
statistics that black people are the major users and distributors of crack cocaine. To word it differently, the
Supreme Court ruled
that it was in the state’s interest to terrorize black communities because we are the most heinous
drug users in the country. To be black is to be marked as a danger that must be controlled, seized, and
incarcerated. Prosecutors act within and perpetuate this matrix of violence that precedes discourse.
When a Prosecutor sees a case with a black body, he knows the same statistic the Supreme Court
quoted and he knows, if not consciously then unconsciously, that this case is already done, already
guilty, already “born dead.”
Blackness is social death and unimaginable exclusion
Vargas and James 13 (João Costa and Joy, University of Texas and Williams University, Refusing
Blackness-as-Victimization: Trayvon Martin and the Black Cyborgs, Chapter 14 in Pursuing Trayvon
Martin: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Manifestations ed. George Yancy and Janine Jones)//LA
What happens when, instead of becoming enraged and shocked every time a black person is killed in
the United States, we recognize black death as a predictable and constitutive aspect of this
democracy? What will happen then if instead of demanding justice we recognize (or at least consider) that
the very notion of justice-indeed the gamut of political and cognitive elements that constitute formal,
multiracial democratic practices and institutions-produces or requires black exclusion and death as
normative? To think about Trayvon Martin's death not merely as a tragedy or media controversy but as a political marker of possibilities
permits one to come to terms with several foundational and foretold stories, particularly if we understand that death or killing to
be prefigured by mass or collec- tive loss of social standing and life. One story is of impossible redemption in
the impossible polis. It departs from, and depends on, the position of the hegemonic, anti-black-which is not
exclusively white but is exclusively non-black-subject and the political and cognitive schemes that
guarantee her ontology and genealogy. Depending on the theology, redemption requires deliverance from sin, and/or
deliverance from slavery. 1 Redemption is a precondition of integration into the white-dominated social universe2 Integration thus requires
that the black become a non-slave, and that the black become a non-sinner. The
paradox or impossibility is that if blackness
is both sin and sign of enslavement, the mark of "Ham,'; then despite the legal abolition of juridical
enslavement or chattel slavery or the end of the formal colony, the sinner and enslaved endure; and
virtue requires the eradication of both. If we theorize from the standpoint say of Frantz Fanon, through the lens of the fiftieth
anniversary of the English publication, The Wretched of the Earth (or Ida B. Wells's Southern Horrors, Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark, Frank
Wilderson's Jncognegro, etc.), we can follow a clear heuristic formulation: from
the perspective of the dominant, whiteinflected gaze and predisposition, blacks can be redeemed neither from sin nor from slavery. 3 For a
black person to be integrated, s/he must either become non-black, or display superhuman and/or
infrahuman qualities. (In Fanonian terms she would become an aggrandized slave or enfranchised slave-that is, one who owns property
still nonetheless remains in servitude or colonized.) The imagination, mechanics, and reproduction of the ordinary
polis rely on the exclusion of ordinary blacks and their availability for violent aggression and/ or
premature death or disappearance (historically through lynching and the convict prison lease system, today through
"benign neglect" and mass incarceration). The ordinary black person can therefore never be
integrated. The "ordinary negro" is never without sin. Thus, to be sinless or angelic in order to be recognized as citizenry has been the
charge for postbellum blackness. Throughout the twentieth century, movements to free blacks from what followed in the wake of the abolition
of chattel slavery ushered in the postbellum black cyborg: the call for a "Talented Tenth" issued by white missionaries and echoed by a young
W. E. B. Du Bois, Bayard Rustin's imploring a young Martin Luther King Jr. to become "angelic" in his advocacy of civil rights and to remove the
men with shotguns from his front porch despite the bombings and death threats against King, his wife Corella, and their young children. The
angelic negro/negress is not representative and his or her status as an acceptable marker for U.S.
democracy is predicated upon their usefulness for the transformation of whiteness into a loftier, more
ennobled formation. This performance or service of the angelic black would be resurrected in the
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reconstruction of Trayvon Martin as a youth worthy of the right to life, the right of refusal to wear
blackness as victimization; the right to fight back. That is, the right to the life of the polis; so much of
black life, particularly for the average fellah, is mired in close proximity to the graveyard, hemmed in
by the materiality of social margins and decay, exclusion and violence.
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2NC Silence Link
Their silence about the structures of Whiteness is a link, and it has consequences—desire is
productive
Mazzei 11 (Lisa A., Gonzaga U, Desiring Silence: Gender, Race, and Pedagogy in Education, British
Educational Research Journal, Vol. 37, No. 4, August 2011, p. 657-96)//LA
In framing whiteness in the context of this paper, I am interested in how a lack of cognition regarding one's
racial identity/position as white serves to explain away and in many cases perpetuate the existence of
racial barriers to social mobility (Sleeter, 2004). Since whiteness as a descriptor for whites often goes
unnamed, unnoticed and unspoken, the silence or absence (that which is not spoken) of this racial
identity continues to provide a framework for the analysis of the conversations I have with white teachers at both the
preservice and inservice levels. If white teachers continue to effectively deny or fail to see their whiteness as
raced then they will continue to see students of colour as 'Other' and respond to them from that
perception- i.e., they are raced, I am not. Such an orientation perpetuates a racially inhabited silence
that limits, if not negates, an open dialogue regarding race and culture. In such an environment
stereotypes are furthered rather than confronted and perceptions of self and Other are allowed to
remain circumscribed in a protective caul. In short, education as a means of transformation or change
is subverted and silence as a means of control and protection of privilege is accepted. If we think silence is
an enactment of a desire to be recognized as governed by social norms, then we acknowledge that the desire on
the part of these white preservice teachers is a desire to be recognized 'within the constraints of normativity' Jackson, 2009, p .
171). If they are recognized within such constraints, then their mark as white teacher remains intact. Privilege remains
unchallenged and is thus exercised as a desiring silence that maintains an invisible mask of whiteness.
In other words, these white preservice teachers do not speak of whiteness, or more specifically their
own race, therefore whiteness is reinscribed as that which need not be named, thereby reproducing
what Seshadri-Crooks refers to as a 'neutral epistemology' . Instead of asking, 'What is desire?' the impetus is instead to ask, 'What
does desire ask of these students?' Not what does it mean, but what does it do? Deleuze draws on Nietzsche for his theory of desire. For
Nietzsche, the
notion of desire has to do with drive. 'What we call 'thinking' , 'feeling' , reason' is nothing more than a
as a lack, gap or what is missing and,
instead, puts forth an immanent concept of desire. As such, desire is primary, positive and not left
wanting but, instead, producing something. What matters for Deleuze is not what desire means;
instead, he wants to know 'whether it works, and how it works, and who it works for' (Deleuze, 1990, p. 22).
Through an engagement with Deleuzian desire, I focus on what is producing the silence and/or what
the silence produces, in other words, a desiring silence. Not as in 'to desire' silence, but silences that are produced and
competing of the passions or drives' (Smith, 2007). Deleuze rejects desire
that produce an effect, emerging from a 'production of production' (O'Sullivan & Zepke, 2008, p. 1, emphasis in original). Such silences may be
produced by resistance or the attempt to maintain power that resists the 'gravity of the circle of recognition and its representations' (p. 1).
What is desire? If desire does not begin from lack, in other words, desiring what we do not have, then
where does it begin or, put differently, what spawns desire? Discussing Deleuzian desire, Claire Colebrook (2002)
writes, 'life strives to preserve and enhance itself and does so by connecting with other desires' (p. 91).
This preserving and enhancing of desire coalesces with power, not in a 'repression of desire but the
expansion of desire' (p. 91). The task of Deleuze's own method is to 'explain how interests—such as humanism,
individualism, capitalism or communism—are produced from desires: the concrete and specific
connection of bodies' (p. 92), in this case the bodies of white preservice teachers. The charge then becomes not to
define desire, but to understand the interests that produce desire and the interests that desire seeks to produce
and/or protect. In the case of white preservice teachers, the visibleness of white as a marker of their bodies
has previously been deemed invisible because of its normative presence. This failure to have
previously named whiteness thereby produces a desire to protect the invisibleness and hence a
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maintenance of whiteness as an unchallenged norm. 'Desire ilself is power, a power to become and
produce images' (Colebrook, 2002, p. 94, emphasis in original). A powerful white presence is an unnamed and silent
image that continues to be masked in the power of that which will not be named. Desiring silence
then re-produces an unspoken white presence.
The Affs silence towards anti-blackness only endorses into the racism of the Status Quo
Fung 12 (Brian Fung, is a writer at National Journal. He was previously an associate editor at The Atlantic
and has written for Foreign Policy and The Washington Post, article is based off a research study
performed by Yale and the City University of New York, The Quiet Racism of Abortion Bans, AUG 28
2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/08/the-quiet-racism-of-abortionbans/261665/, //AR)
Like prohibitions on other goods and services, an abortion ban of the kind national conservatives propose would take a
disproportionate toll on those least equipped to adapt, and would advance little but ideology.¶ As
national Republicans in Tampa have added a ban on abortions as an official plank in their party platform -a proposal whose draft language is so severe, it doesn't make exceptions for cases of rape or incest -liberal commentators have grown accustomed to speaking of the right's strict stance on reproductive
issues as a war on women. But it might be more accurate to say that it's really an attack on women
of a specific stripe: those from disadvantaged minorities and the poor .¶ What would happen if the GOP got its
way and control over abortion rights were returned to the states? A new study by researchers at Yale University and the
City University of New York, published in NBER, imagines how overturning Roe v. Wade might play out.¶ ¶
Using analyses that predicted which states might be likeliest to ban abortion if they could, the scientists established a set of hypothetical
scenarios and compared them to actual abortion data from both the pre- and the post-Roe v. Wade era. The researchers estimate that if 31
anti-abortion states made the procedure illegal tomorrow, the national abortion rate would drop by 14.9 percent. In a more extreme example,
banning abortion in 46 states -- while preserving it in places where reproductive rights enjoy constitutional protection -- would result in the
abortion rate falling 29 percent.¶
But whatever you make of those topline numbers, one thing seems certain:
an abortion ban would disproportionately affect women from non-white and low-income
backgrounds .¶ To understand how that works, we need to look at the way distance acts as a deterrent against abortion access. Among
women overall in the 1970s after New York legalized abortion but before Roe v. Wade was decided, every 100-mile increase in
distance between a patient and a New York clinic corresponded to a 12 percent decrease in abortion
rates, the researchers wrote.¶ The challenges posed by distance are still valid today -- and they affect nonwhites at far greater rates than whites. In the scenario involving a 31-state ban, minorities would see their abortion rates drop
1.8 percentage points more than whites. In the extreme example of a 46-state ban, the difference would be 12.3 points.¶ "If race serves
as a crude proxy for socio-economic status," the authors conclude, "and if distance proxies the cost of an
abortion, then the racial differences are consistent with less well-off women being more sensitive to
the availability of abortion services than more advantaged women."¶ But we don't need to take the researchers'
word for it. Dr. Patrick Whelan, a Harvard rheumatologist who's studied abortion rates in Massachusetts, argues that financial incentives don't
work with abortion they way they might in other industries. In a phone interview last week, Whelan cited data on women who choose to pay
out-of-pocket for their abortions even when they could get the procedure done for free or at a discount thanks to insurance. ¶ "Whether that's
a modesty issue, or they don't think it might be covered, or they don't want a public record of it someplace," Whelan said, "cost is not a
deterrent for a lot of people." Whatever the reasons behind women's choices, Whelan's larger point is this: financial barriers aren't enough to
dissuade women from getting an abortion if they want one.¶ At first blush, Whelan and the NBER study appear to be saying different things.
The former suggests that abortions will continue irrespective of the price tag, while the latter suggests cost really is a limiting factor for women
in that living farther away from a legal abortion clinic tends to depress abortion rates. ¶ These statements aren't really mutually exclusive,
though; they're just different ways of explaining how women of different backgrounds respond to the problem of cost. Where
they
agree is that the wealthy, who are generally white, are better able to eat the cost of extra travel
compared to low-income non-whites. In other words, white women are able to go to longer lengths
(literally) to get a legal abortion. ¶ Non-white and low-income women aren't so lucky. For them, an
abortion ban would mean either carrying their unplanned pregnancies to term -- something the NBER
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paper predicts could happen to some degree, and which
would likely be exacerbated by conservative attempts to
limit contraception access at the same time that they crack down on abortion -- or resorting to unsafe,
illegal abortions. These procedures, by their very nature, would be ignored by official abortion figures so
that to speak of the "gains" of a ban would be to turn a blind eye to a very nasty black-market
business.
It'd also create new headaches for states: between the threat to public health posed by underground abortions, and the rise of
teen birth rates; the added economic burden on state social and health-care services;
the mockery it'd make of public
statistics; and their inherent racial and socio-economic unfairness,
it's hard to see how abortion bans would
advance anything except ideology.
The 1ac's silence on race IS OUR LINK -- racism permeates politics -- the alternative is key starting
point for countering anti-blackness
Bobo 13(Lawrence D. Bobo, is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University.
He is a contributing editor for The Root., Quiet Bias: The Racism of 2013 Straight Up: Let's get real -- and
start talking -- about the anti-black prejudice that infects the U.S. March 13, 2013
http://www.theroot.com/views/quiet-bias-racism-2013?page=0,1 , //AR)
¶ Let's be honest: Our culture is still deeply suffused with anti-black bias, despite an African-American
president in office. National surveys (pdf) continue to reveal commonly held stereotypes of African
Americans as less hardworking and less intelligent than whites. Political resentments of blacks remain
a centerpiece -- indeed, a genuine third rail -- of American domestic politics: Do anything to seriously activate
these resentments, and you run the risk of immediate political electrocution. The last time we saw any major political
figure come close to touching the rail, of activating these political resentments against blacks, occurred when Obama offered his off-the-cuff remarks about the
arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Root's editor-in-chief, by the Cambridge, Mass., police. The level of negative stereotypes and attitudes tapped in polls and
surveys may only reveal the most easily observable symptoms of the illness .
A number of powerful psychological experiments
show the extent to which blackness for Americans is intimately tied to images of violence and danger .
Indeed, one of the most depressing lines of research suggests a core underlining psychological association of blackness
with apes, an ugly, old racist trope from the age of the Great Chain of Being, in which the African was
seen as closer to primitive animals in the hierarchy of species (pdf).To be sure, this whole issue of racism had a more
straightforward quality in the past. We did not have to resort to complex surveys and experiments to reveal its depth. There used to be something loud and obvious
and terrible about racism -- circumstances with some ironic virtues. A visible and openly declared enemy is so much more directly confronted than one that
operates stealthily.And that is the dilemma of racism in our times .
We have hints, suggestions, indications, if you will, of racial
bias all around us today. But it is typically unspoken, if not altogether invisible, much of the time. And where it's not invisible, there
is often a plausible cover story that can be told as to why racially differential treatment was somehow
justifiable or legitimate. All of this makes waging the fight against racism much tougher. It is now quiet -- or rationalized on some nonracial grounds
and thereby hidden in plain view -- and seemingly, as a consequence, perhaps not such a bad thing after all.But it is a bad thing. Let's be clear: There is
plenty of research showing that actual discrimination remains remarkably common. For example, one
major study of low-skilled workers in New York found high rates of bias against black job applicants.
Princeton sociologist Devah Pager and her colleagues showed that otherwise identical black job
seekers were 50 percent less likely to achieve success in a job search (pdf) than their white
counterparts.The discrimination was so subtle that only a systematic experiment could reveal it. This was not the loud de jure discrimination of the era of
"no blacks need apply," but instead today's quiet bias of "Oh, we already filled that position" or "We were actually looking for someone with more experience" or
"Maybe you'd be better suited to this lower-paying job."¶ There are few things as sickening as the ongoing, well-known
practice of stop-
and-frisk policing in New York. Absent a deep-rooted culture of anti-black bias, which is racism, the practice would not be tolerated,
given the radically disproportionate intrusion by state police power that it involves in identifiable minority communities.¶ Records for 2011
In a city where
blacks make up just under a quarter of the population, blacks constitute more than half of those so
detained by police. Citywide polls show an enormous gap between blacks and whites in approval of the stop-and-frisk practice, with a
show almost 700,000 such incidents, with almost nine out of 10 incidents involving African Americans or Hispanics.
substantial number of blacks, at 80 percent (and even a plurality of New York's whites: 48 percent), saying that the police are biased in favor of
whites. It
is unclear whether the tactic has any meaningful impact on crime, but it is screamingly plain
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that it adds to racial tension and misunderstanding while deepening minority cynicism about the
police . And so we get today's quiet bias of a major-city mayor and police commissioner defending a
dubious practice of aggressive state intrusion into the lives of black and Hispanic youths on an
astonishing scale. This quiet bias is a routine feature of our national politics as well. We are all aware of how constrained President
Obama is in terms of what he can say or do regarding race. I believe that the culture of racism still alive in the U.S. remains potent enough that
Obama must, in fact, routinely accomplish a complex, three-part balancing act. He must consistently rise above prevalent stereotypes of blacks
as less capable and intelligent, thus always standing as the exception to the assumed rule. He must never be seen as openly advocating policies
that run against the third rail of resentment against blacks as a sort of untouchable special-interest category in the body politic, who lack
legitimate claims on the nation's resources. And he must do all this while somehow keeping African Americans and other people of color highly
politically mobilized segments of his constituency. But make no mistake, racism
remains a living and highly adaptive thing
in our times. Yes, Jim Crow racism has effectively been defeated. An insidious quiet bias remains today, however. And in this guise ,
racism is still distorting American life.
History,
The late Stanford University historian George Fredrickson wrote in Racism: A Short
"The legacy of past racism directed at blacks in the United States is more like a bacillus that we
have failed to destroy, a live germ that not only continues to make some of us ill but retains the
capacity to generate new strains of a disease for which we have no certain cure."
We will make little or no
progress against this underlying illness by becoming complicit in ignoring the deep-rooted character of anti-black bias in our culture and in so
many everyday practices and habits. Racism
is a powerful word. Using it can quickly shut down a conversation.
But such sensitivity cannot excuse silence in the face of a real problem and ongoing injustice. For me, a
key element of the continued quest for racial justice in America is the outing of today's "quiet bias."
Like a patient told to take the full regimen of antibiotics or run the risk of the ailment coming back even more strongly in the future, we must
remain ready to challenge racism no matter how discreetly or politely it presents itself.
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Alt—Rejection/Recognition
As a K—Rejecting whiteness solves; As a PIK—Recognition solves the K; there’s only a risk of a DA.
Mazzei 11 (Lisa A., Gonzaga U, Desiring Silence: Gender, Race, and Pedagogy in Education, British
Educational Research Journal, Vol. 37, No. 4, August 2011, p. 657-96)//LA
Returning to Jan's statements in the previous section, while she in some ways engages the silence, and was in fact very
progressive in many of her attitudes as demonstrated in class and her field placement, she is also caught in the
stratification that threatens her survival, or rather, her survival within a plane of whiteness. To
encounter all of her inconsistencies, desires and silences at once is too much and may result in a
suicidal collapse of her subjectivity. It is not possible for her, or the other students in my classes for that matter, to
completely destratify at once. But what is possible is that as teacher educators, we provide
opportunities that encourage a continual search for the potential movements of deterritorialization or
possible lines of flight that may, over time, produce not a desiring silence, but the production of a
desiring pedagogy. If, as teacher educators, we fail to recognize how desire functions with white
preservice teachers by failing to attend to a desiring silence, then students can resist and reassert their
power. If, on the other hand, we engage the silence, connect our desires with those of our students,
then students may still resist, but they may also begin to destratify in ways that produce the
possibility of deterritorialization, the possibility of a desiring pedagogy. Judith Butler (2004) reminds us that in the
Hegelian tradition, desire is linked with recognition, 'claiming that desire is always a desire for recognition and that it is only through the
experience of recognition that any of us becomes constituted as socially viable beings' (p. 2). She goes on to argue that while to some degree
this is both alluring and true, it also confers 'humanness' on those with whom we can identify, consistent with Seshadri-Crooks's argument as to
why we continue to maintain a
normative distinction as defined by whiteness that refuses to be dis-located
due to the regime of visibility. If white teachers name whiteness, and name the silent desires that
foster a clinging to this in/visible marker, then the process of dis-location commences. There came a point in
the semester with this group of students when I recognized that I was complicit in a production of the desiring silences,
not just because I 'desired' acceptable responses from the students that demonstrated their genuine
affirmation of difference, but also because I permitted the silences to be ignored for fear of what they
might reveal about me: as a teacher; as a white woman; and as a white teacher educator. I had not
yet thought of the silences as producing privilege, but as masking that which was unthinkable, or
unspeakable. I asked the students to complete two sentences: 'Sometimes I am silent because .. .' and 'Sometimes I am silent in this class
because .. .'. My methodological approach and analysis is detailed in a previous publication (Mazzei, 2008) so I will not repeat that in the
present context; however, what is important is how the
simple act of acknowledging the presence of a purposeful
silence and confronting their/our production of this silence permitted an opening up or rather
undoing of the desiring silence functioning to produce and maintain privilege. Students think that by
looking past skin colour they are above racist attitudes and actions. 'Is it ever going to stop?' was a question asked
by one of my students referring to the continued emphasis on multicultural education, racial identity and a corresponding need to discuss
attitudes regarding gender, race and class inequities. Not
allowing it to stop forces a move that is a return to how our
desire functions to produce 'accepted' performances of whiteness and white teacher. In reading the
standards for 'culturally competent' (Ladson-Billings, 1994) teachers that guide the curriculum for many teacher preparation programmes, both
in the USA and the UK, there is little tolerance for a voicing of racist and sexist attitudes. How
might we offer opportunities for
detertitorialization that don't mask 'unacceptable' attitudes because silences function to preserve the
system but, instead, provide opportunities for a deterritorialization that 'outs' the silences protecting
the strata. Such a movement requires us to rethink desiring silence as an investment in whiteness and
its attendant privileges. It is a recognition of these collective desires on the part of our students (and
ourselves) as producing a desiring silence that maintains and sustains whiteness through a connection
of desires, flows and intensities. To further understand how desires connect with one another to produce silences is to return once
again to NietzSche. Leaning on Nietzsche's theory of desire, we see the drives as always disquieted and destabilized. As such, we might ask,
how can desire desire its own transformation? And if so, how might teacher educators further
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disquiet and destabilize a desiring silence toward a production of the new? For, as O'Sullivan aand Zepke (2008)
remind us, it is only through an engagement with what is that we can produce something new. If desire
can desire its own transformation, perhaps it does so through such engagement that produces a
desiring pedagogy.
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“Project Team” Link
Identifying “this kind” of round or “this kind” of team perpetuates whiteness
Mazzei 8 (Lisa A., Now—Gonzaga U; Then—Manchester Metropolitan U, Silence speaks: Whiteness
Revealed in the Absence of Voice, Teaching and Teacher Education 24 (2008) p. 1125-1136)//LA
Reading Ladson-Billings (2001), she confirmed that this is not just the language of my students but of educators in general. ‘‘So prevalent is the
language of at-risk-ness that it is not unusual for urban teachers to define their entire class as at-risk’’ (p. 15). What I find particularly troubling,
however, is that even those who are not yet teachers have appropriated this language. Citing Haberman, Ladson-Billings elaborated further
when she asked, ‘How
is it possible for schools and teachers to define a majority of their clients as people who
does Cassidy mean when she describes a field
placement experience at an elemen- tary school in the large urban district as her ‘‘first experience in this type of school
setting [emphasis mine].’’ What are the differences, the at-risk-ness that are spoken between the words that
Cassidy articulates? When Cassidy and the other students speak between words and make
assumptions about their entire class using the language of at-risk-ness, they are talking about race, even if they
do not notice it. They are silently voicing a norming presence of whiteness that they risk losing if the
silences of race and of whiteness are noticed and articulated.
shouldn’t be there, or people they are unable to help?’’ (p. 15). What
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Dehumanization Impacts
Allowing Institutional racism allows for the dehumanization of blacks
Blow 9(CHARLES M. BLOW , Times’s visual Op-Ed columnist, conducts a discussion about all things
statistical — from the environment to entertainment — and their visual expressions., Cites studies
written by Phillip Atiba Goff¶ The Pennsylvania State University¶ Jennifer L. Eberhardt¶ Stanford
University¶ Melissa J. Williams¶ University of California, Berkeley¶ Matthew Christian Jackson¶ The
Pennsylvania State University ‘Not Yet Human’¶ February 25, 2009
http://blow.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/not-yet-human/, //AR)
Those following the New York Post cartoon flap might find this interesting.¶ Six studies under the title “Not Yet Human:
Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization, and Contemporary Consequences” were published in last
February’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.¶ Among the relevant findings:¶ Historical representations explicitly depicting Blacks as
apelike have largely disappeared in the United States, yet a
mental association between Blacks and apes remains.
Here, the authors demonstrate that U.S. citizens implicitly associate Blacks and apes. ¶ And …¶ After having
established that individuals mentally associate Blacks and apes, Study 4 demonstrated that this implicit association is not due to personalized,
In Study 5, we demonstrated that, even controlling for
implicit anti-Black prejudice, the implicit association between Blacks and apes can lead to greater
endorsement of violence against a Black suspect than against a White suspect. Finally, in Study 6, we
demonstrated that subtle media representations of Blacks as apelike are associated with jury
decisions to execute Black defendants.This may provide some context for considering the motives of the cartoonist and his
implicit attitudes and can operate beneath conscious awareness.
editors, and for understanding the strong public reaction.
Blacks are displayed as apes
Chan and Peters 9(SEWELL CHAN and JEREMY W. PETERS, Chimp-Stimulus Cartoon Raises Racism
Concerns, February 18, 2009, http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/chimp-stimulus-cartoonraises-racism-concerns/, //AR)
Gov. David A. Paterson, Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, the Rev. Al Sharpton and others expressed
concern on Wednesday morning over an editorial cartoon in The New York Post that showed a police
officer telling his colleague who just shot a chimpanzee, “They’ll have to find someone else to write
the next stimulus bill.Ӧ Critics said the cartoon, drawn by Sean Delonas, implicitly compared President Obama
with the primate and evoked a history of racist imagery of blacks. The chimpanzee was an apparent reference to the
200-pound pet chimpanzee that was shot dead by a police officer in Stamford, Conn., on Monday evening, after it mauled a friend of his
owner.¶ Speaking at a conference of the New York Academy of Medicine on Wednesday morning, Mr. Paterson said that while he had not seen
the cartoon, he believed that The Post should explain it. Given the possibility that some people could conclude the cartoon had a racial subtext,
Mr. Paterson said the newspaper needed to clarify its meaning.¶ “It would be very important for The New York Post to explain what the cartoon
was intended to portray,” Mr. Paterson said in response to a question about whether the cartoon’s depiction of a monkey was racist, as Mr.
Sharpton has suggested. “Obviously those types of associations have been made. They do feed a kind of negative and stereotypical way that
people think. But I think if it’s enough that people are raising this issue, I hope they would clarify.”¶ Senator
Gillibrand, Democrat
of New York, said in a statement: “I found the Post cartoon offensive and purposefully hurtful. This
type of cartoon serves no productive role in the public discourse.Ӧ City Councilman Leroy G. Comrie Jr., a Queens
Democrat, called for a boycott of the newspaper. “To run such a violent, racist cartoon is an insult to all New Yorkers,” he
said in a statement. “This was an unfortunate incident in which a human being was seriously injured- not an
opportunity to sling dangerous rhetoric. It is my belief that The New York Post owes an immediate
apology to this city for demonstrating such terrible judgment and insensitivity.Ӧ Mr. Comrie urged New Yorkers
to “demonstrate their displeasure with the New York Post by writing letters to their advertisers and simply stop purchasing a publication that
clearly has no respect or sensitivity for people of color.Ӧ On Wednesday evening, the Brooklyn borough president, Marty Markowitz, also
weighed in, saying:¶ My office has received complaints about this so-called cartoon, and I can see why. If its disturbing connection to
reprehensible racial stereotyping was unintentional, it just proves once again how disconnected The Post is from New York City and its
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residents. And for such a weak joke? There’s no excuse. The ‘editors’ overseeing such content should be ashamed—and held accountable. The
Post is always quick on the attack, so now we ask that they do the right thing and apologize to all who were offended by this tasteless cartoon. ¶
A newsroom employee at The Post, who spoke on condition of anonymity because employees were not permitted to comment on the matter,
said its newsroom received many calls of complaints on Wednesday morning after the publication of the cartoon. “Every line was lit up for
several hours,” the employee said. “The phones on the city desk have never rung like that before.” Many Post staff members were dismayed by
the cartoon, the employee added.¶ The cartoon was on Page 12 of Wednesday’s edition, next to the paper’s Page Six gossip column. On Page
11, the reverse side, was a photograph of President Obama signing the stimulus bill into law in Denver.¶ Mr.
Sharpton, who has been an
said in a statement on his Web site:¶ The cartoon in today’s
New York Post is troubling at best, given the racist attacks throughout history that have made AfricanAmericans synonymous with monkeys. One has to question whether the cartoonist is making a less
than casual inference to this form of racism when, in the cartoon, the police say after shooting a
chimpanzee, “now they will have to find someone else to write the stimulus bill.”¶ Being that the stimulus bill
unflattering subject in cartoons drawn by Mr. Delonas in The Post,
has been the first legislative victory of President Barack Obama (the first African American president) and has become synonymous with him it
is not a reach to wonder whether the Post cartoonist was inferring that a monkey wrote it?¶ In a statement, Col Allan, editor in chief of The
Post, denied Mr. Sharpton’s assertion that the cartoon was “racially charged.” Mr. Allan said:¶ The cartoon is a clear parody of a current news
event, to wit the shooting of a violent chimpanzee in Connecticut. It broadly mocks Washington’s efforts to revive the economy. Again, Al
Sharpton reveals himself as nothing more than a publicity opportunist.¶ A 2001 cartoon by Mr. Delonas depicted Fernando Ferrer, the Bronx
borough president who was seeking the Democratic nomination for mayor that year, kissing the buttocks of Mr. Sharpton — a depiction that
was widely criticized as demeaning, and even racist.¶ In a phone interview, Mr. Sharpton said he planned to hold a protest outside The Post’s
Midtown offices at noon on Thursday.¶ “What
does shooting a chimpanzee have to do with a stimulus bill?” Mr.
Sharpton said. “This raises all the racial stereotypes we are trying to get away from in this country.” ¶
He added: “I’m not speaking on behalf of the president or the chimpanzee. I‘m speaking on behalf of the
offended African-American community.Ӧ Mr. Delonas has drawn ire from a number of groups for past cartoons in The Post. In
2006, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation denounced a cartoon of his that showed a man carrying a sheep wearing a bridal veil to
a “New Jersey Marriage Licenses” window, a reference to the State Supreme Court’s ruling that year requiring the state to grant same-sex
couples the same legal rights and benefits as heterosexual couples through civil unions.¶ Andrew
Rojecki, associate professor of
communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago and co-author of “The Black Image in the White Mind” (University of
Chicago Press, 2000), a study of racial attitudes and their relationship to mass media content, said he found the cartoon deeply
troubling.¶ “Of course I would say it’s racist,” Professor Rojecki said in an interview. “There’s no
question about it.”¶ He added, “ The cartoonist, whether he did this consciously or not, was drawing
upon a very historically deep source of images about African-Americans that African-Americans do
not have a lot of control over.”¶ Such images are harmful on a number of levels, he said. “Even people who do not
harbor deep-seated prejudices, because they have stereotypes deeply embedded in their
consciousness, may react unconsciously when those associations are triggered,” he said.¶ Professor Rojecki
rejected Mr. Allan’s assertion that the cartoon was devoid of racial content. “It strains credulity to imagine that there is any association
between a chimpanzee that was shot because it had attacked someone and a bill that has successfully passed through Congress,” he said. “It
makes no sense. What possible explanation could there be?Ӧ Jan Nederveen Pieterse, a professor of global studies and sociology at the
University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of “White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture” (Yale University
Press, 1995), said, “I agree the cartoon is racist, without a doubt.”¶ Professor Pieterse, who is Dutch, said that portrayal of non-Westerners as
primates became well-established in both the United States and Europe in the late 19th century, and has affected not only blacks, but also the
Irish and Chinese, for example.¶ “It’s
absolutely outrageous,” he said of the cartoon, “and I think people are
concerned because it sets a nasty, mean, very aggressive tone. You can’t get any lower.”
Racism has allowed blacks to be categorized into negative stereotypes making it impossible for
prosperity
Kaplan 9(Karen Kaplan | Kaplan is a Times staff writer, Racial stereotypes and social status, December 9
2008 http://articles.latimes.com/2008/dec/09/science/sci-race9, //AR
Barack Obama's election as president may be seen as a harbinger of a colorblind society, but a new study suggests that derogatory
racial stereotypes are so powerful that merely being unemployed makes people more likely to be
viewed by others -- and even themselves -- as black.¶ In a long-term survey of 12,686 people, changes in social
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circumstances such as falling below the poverty line or being sent to jail made people more likely to
be perceived by interviewers as black and less likely to be seen as white. Altogether, the perceived race of 20% of
the people in the study changed at least once over a 19-year period, according to the study published today in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences.¶ "After [junk bond financier] Michael Milken goes to prison, he'll be no more likely to say he's a black person or any less
likely to say he's a white person," said Amon Emeka, a social demographer at USC who was not involved in the study. "[U.S. Supreme Court
Justice] Clarence Thomas might say he's transcended race, but he wouldn't say that he's a white person, and certainly no one on the planet
would say he's a white person."¶ Researchers
have long recognized that a person's race affects his or her social
status, but the study is the first to show that social status also affects the perception of race .¶ "Race
isn't a characteristic that's fixed at birth," said UC Irvine sociologist Andrew Penner, one of the study's authors. "We're
perceived a certain way and identify a certain way depending on widely held stereotypes about how
people believe we should behave."¶ Penner and Aliya Saperstein, a sociologist at the University of Oregon, examined data from
the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics' National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Though the ongoing survey is primarily focused on the work
history of Americans born in the 1950s and 1960s, participants have also provided interviewers with information on a variety of topics,
including health, marital status, insurance coverage and race.¶ On 18 occasions between 1979 and 1998, interviewers wrote down whether the
people they spoke with were "white," "black" or "other."¶
The researchers found that people whom the interviewers
initially perceived as white were roughly twice as likely to be seen as nonwhite in their next
interview if they had fallen into poverty, lost their job or been sent to prison . People previously
perceived as black were twice as likely to continue being seen as black if any of those things had
happened to them.¶ For example, 10% of people previously described as white were reclassified as belonging to another race if they
became incarcerated. But if they stayed out of jail, 4% were reclassified as something other than white.¶ The effect has staying
power. People who were perceived as white and then became incarcerated were more likely to be
perceived as black even after they were released from prison, Penner said.¶ The racial assumptions
affected self-identity as well. Survey participants were asked to state their own race when the study began in 1979 and again in
2002, when the government streamlined its categories for race and ethnicity.¶ Of the people who said they were white in 1979 and stayed out
of jail, 95% said they were white in 2002. Among those who were incarcerated at some point, however, only 81% still said they were white in
2002.¶ The results
underscore "the pervasiveness of racial stratification in society," said Emeka. " The fact
that both beholders and the observers of blackness attach negative associations to blackness speaks
volumes to the continuing impact of racial stratification in U.S. society." ¶ But Robert T. Carter, a professor of
psychology and education at Columbia Teachers College in New York who studies race, culture and racial identity, said he wasn't convinced that
stereotypes had the power to change the perception of race.¶ "It's not social status that shapes race, it's race that shapes social status," he said.
"Stratification on the basis of racial group membership has been an integral part of our society since prior to the inception of the United States.
It's been true for hundreds of years."¶ To see if the changes were the result of simple recording errors made when interviewers filled out their
surveys, the researchers checked how often a participant's gender changed from one year to the next. They found changes in 0.27% of cases,
suggesting that interviewers weren't being sloppy.¶ They also looked for subjects who were interviewed by the same person two years in a row.
Even in those cases, the results were the same.¶ The researchers are examining whether other social stereotypes have a similar effect on
perceived race. People who have less education, live in the inner city instead of the suburbs and are on welfare are more likely to be seen as
black, Saperstein said.¶ "The data is really interesting, but it doesn't allow us to say what was going on in these people's heads," she said. "Our
story is consistent with the story that there's implicit prejudice."
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AT: Framework
Their presumptions of democratic deliberation presume that the agons exist within a range of
ontological equivalency which paves over the fungible body
Brady 12 (Nicholas Brady, activist scholar, executive board member of Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle,
BA in philosophy from Johns Hopkins, PhD student at the University of California-Irvine Culture and
Theory program, 10-26-12, “The Flesh Grinder: Prosecutorial Discretion and the Terror of Mass
Incarceration,”
http://academia.edu/2776507/The_Flesh_Grinder_Prosecutorial_Discretion_and_the_Quotidian_Terror
_of_Mass_Incarceration) gz
If the prosecutor and the defense attorney are locked in an agonistic sport, the black body is akin to a
tennis ball. The prosecutor serves it to the defense attorney, they smack it around until someone wins
the point. Then the ball is discarded and a new ball is brought out so the contest can continue ad
infinitum. In order for the sport of plea-bargaining to occur, both sides must agree that the cases of
the black are “born dead.” Once a case is dead, then the very life of the supposed defendant becomes an object for the amusement
of this “criminal justice club.” What is revealed in the politics of the plea bargain is how the pleasure of
democracy is born from the agony of the black. Proponents of agonism, from Chambers to Laclau, posit this democratic
ideology as the response to antagonism. Where antagonist are different in such a way that one must kill the other, agonists are different in a
way they can respect each other and mutually grow from one another. The plea bargain reveals that agonism,
as a democratic way
of dealing with difference, requires an ontological equivalency that is only produced in
contradistinction to the antagonism of non-black-over-black. To put it differently, the discursive
conflicts happening in the world between adversaries are secured and produced by the gratuitous
violence against blackness.
Ignoring issues of White supremacy perpetuates racial violence
Bogado 7/14 (Aura, The Nation, White Supremacy Acquits George Zimmerman, 7/14/13,
http://www.thenation.com/blog/175260/white-supremacy-acquits-georgezimmerman#axzz2Z1gHXtGC)//LA
When Zimmerman was acquitted today, it wasn’t because he’s a so-called white Hispanic. He’s not. It’s
because he abides by the logic of white supremacy, and was supported by a defense team—and a
swath of society—that supports the lingering idea that some black men must occasionally be killed
with impunity in order to keep society-at-large safe. Media on the left, right and center have been
fanning the flames of fear-mongering, speculating that people—and black people especially—will take
to the streets. That fear-mongering represents a deep white anxiety about black bodies on the streets,
and echoes Zimmerman’s fears: that black bodies on the street pose a public threat. But the real
violence in those speculations, regardless of whether they prove to be true, is that it silences black
anxiety. The anxiety that black men feel every time they walk outside the door—and the anxiety their loved
ones feel for them as well. That white anxiety serves to conceal the real public threat: that a black man is
killed every twenty-eight hours by a cop or vigilante. People will take to the streets, and with good
reason. They’ll be there because they know that, yes, some people do always get away—and it tends
to be those strapped with guns and the logic of white supremacy at their side.
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The neg’s attempt to bracket out our discussion perpetuates exclusionary limits—we must expand our
conceptions beyond the realm of evidence-based policy in order to effectively investigate
Mazzei 10 (Lisa A., Prof @ Gonzaga U, Thinking Data with Deleuze, International Journal of Qualitative
Studies in Education, Vol. 23, No. 5, Sept-Oct 2010, p. 511-23)//LA
Positioned in an era of evidence-based policy and research-funding practices, I follow Deleuze’s
practice of thinking with the object of cinema, and do so in a productive resistance to those who wish to narrow
notions of what counts as research and evidence – those who cling to a sameness perpetuated by
maintaining a distinction between the material and the discursive. What is produced by my desire to
think alternative imagings of voice, and further, what might be gained from creative stuttering – do I risk being
trapped in a repetition of consonants that evoke nonsense? Deleuze maintains that it is only out of nonsense that
thinking occurs. In this time of researching situations that we no longer understand, ‘situations which
we no longer know how to react to, in spaces which we no longer know how to describe’ (Deleuze
1985/1989, xi), how can thinking with Deleuze help us create a language and a way of thinking that are up
to the task? It is hoped, for starters, that one may use such think- ing and straining to push against the
limits of the present toward a recognition of those limits that bind us and those limits which produce
productive resistances. What are the limits that we might make better use of, or put differently, how
might we think at the limit of voice2 toward new limits that produce alternative imagings of voice? To further this
blurring and to engage with Deleuze and cinema is to think the ‘speech-act’ as an ‘image’ in keeping with the visual, because as he states, ‘The
heard speech-act, as component of the visual image, makes something visible in that image’ (Deleuze 1985/1989, 223). If ‘viewed’ as an image
in the visual sense of the word, might it be possible to read the image of voice from a multi-dimensional perspective?3 Deleuze
compares the components of the silent image with the talking image and in so doing makes it possible to question what is made ‘visible’ in the
image of voice, or the speech-act broadly defined. ‘Looking’ at voice in cinema, I navigate using Deleuze’s map to think the following questions:
(1) What becomes naturalized and denaturalized in the transition from silent to talking films? How does a repositioning of voice as ‘direct’ in
talking cinema change the way we think of voice? (2) What does it mean to ‘see’ a speech-act according to Deleuze and how does this inform
methodological thinking that discards the material/binary distinc- tion? How do we account for doings and actions as constitutive of voice? (3)
If we agree that talking cinema is much more than filmed dialogue, then what implications does this have for how we ‘film’ and treat voice in
qualitative inquiry? (4) How does a disequilibrium of voice occur in film and what is to be learned or gained? Question 1: (de)naturalizing voice?
Before pictures became talking, they still conveyed speech. ‘The silent film was not silent, but only “noiseless”’ (Deleuze 1985/1989, 216). In
silent cinema, the visual image is presented as ‘naturalized’ and innocent. We view artifacts and objects used by the director that ‘present us
with the natural being of man in history or society’ (217). At the same time, the
nature of discourse is indirect or
denaturalized. The visual image is constructed in such a way that it, ‘points to an innocent physical nature, to an immediate life which has
no need of language, whilst the intertitle or piece of writing [used to transmit dialogue] shows the law, the forbidden, the transmitted order’
(216). It is this transmitted
order, or voice as truth, that is reinscribed when qualitative researchers privilege
voice and bestow upon it a similar naturalness or innocence in presenting the unadulterated voices of their research participants.
When pictures begin to talk with noise, an obvious observation is that the ‘speech- act ... is no longer read but heard. It becomes direct, and
recovers ... features of “discourse” which were altered in the silent or written film’ (Deleuze 1985/1989, 217). What happens as a result is that
the talking picture not only naturalizes speech or voice, but it denaturalizes the visual image: ‘in so far as it is heard, it makes visible in itself
something that did not freely appear in the silent film’ (218). Whereas before, interactions in the visual image constituted speech-acts, they are
now rendered by a spoken voice, robbing the framed image because we now see based on what we hear, rather than hearing based on what
we see. Question 2: seeing speech? If,
in our work as researchers, we seek data and meaning in the form of a
text that is directly communicated by participants, in other words, basing what we know on what we
hear, then we also fail to consider how what we know and subsequently hear might be based on what
we see. Not in a literal sense of what we see, although this can be the case, especially if we are researching our Other, but in the sense
that we narrowly define voice and thereby consider only one aspect employed by our research participants to convey meaning. Put differently, we focus only on the scripted, spoken words or intertitles in our
strategies to capture data and make meaning, thereby limiting our understandings of what our
research participants are saying, or trying to say. We gather and produce ‘evidence’ of these voiced
encounters in the form of transcripts that reproduce and classify direct speech-acts. In a move to unloose such
strictured notions of voice, we can turn to a performative understanding of discursive practices, which
according to Barad (2008), if properly constructed, ‘is not an invitation to turn everything ... into words’ but is instead ‘a contestation of
the excessive power granted to language to determine what is real’ (121). Such a move shifts the
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focus method- ologically ‘from questions of correspondence between descriptions and reality ... to
matters of practices/doings/actions’ (121). In silent pictures, the voice is not contained by a speaking subject because subjects
speak only indirectly through the use of intertitles, visual text in the form of written documents, and visually constituted speech-acts (e.g.,
gestures, facial expressions, movements). The voices of the actors are communicated through the use of a ‘seen’ image and an ‘intertitle’ that is
read. The intertitles are thus used to convey in addition to other elements, ‘speech-acts’. Deleuze continues to write that the silent film did not
just call for the talkie but ‘already implied it’ (Deleuze 1985/1989, 216). Prompted
by Deleuze, we might consider how our
participants give voice, not in ways that are deemed absent as silent, but in ways that are meaningful
as noiseless. By so doing, we begin to consider the intertitles and images used by our participants that
function to convey voice. To consider the voices, both performed and projected through these
intertitles and images, is to consider what is missed if we only rely on one or the other in the viewing of film
(or encounter with research participants) as silent rather than noiseless. If we depend on the ‘filmed’ dialogue in the form of tapes
and transcripts, then we miss the noiseless properties of voice.
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AT: What about the Holocaust?
Despite the banality of the Holocaust as an atrocity, the markings of the Jew are not ontological –
anti-Semitic violence is contingent rather than structural while black lived experience is a daily horror
of gratuitous violence
Reece 13 (Charles Reece, film critic, 1-8-13, “Snowball’s Chance in Hell: Django Unchained,”
http://hoodedutilitarian.com/2013/01/snowballs-chance-in-hell-django-unchained/) gz
Along with Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained forms something of a diptych for Tarantino insofar as both are revenge fantasies set in two
of history’s greatest atrocities: the Holocaust and American chattel slavery. In the interview he gave at the screening I saw last week, he
certainly thinks of them that way. But before either film could begin to be written, one crucial difference in their respective historical situations
delimited the possibilities of fantasy: one
can fantasize about the end of the Holocaust by killing the highest
members of the Nazi party, whereas there is no easily imagined personalized end to slavery through a
few targeted acts of vengeance. Thus, the use of explosives against the Nazis seems a tactical act, a
logical means of warfare. The use of bombs against slavery would border on what we call terrorism
these days, or “irrationally” violent outbursts against a society (targeting civilians who can’t do
anything to change the way things are, or think of the portrayal of the Watts riots, for example: why
did they destroy property?). Slavery was a deeply structural violence, an ontological domination of a
people that didn’t obtain in the instance of the Holocaust. Any heroic narrative set in the slave-built Southern economy
is going to have a major hurdle to overcome: there is no real end in sight, the villain remains like the renewable
heads of a hydra, nor is there a place to go where the hero’s limited victory will be recognized, much
less celebrated (excepting the audience who might applaud at the film’s end). As Frantz Fanon famously wrote in Black Skin, White
Masks:¶ The Jewishness of the Jew, however, can go unnoticed. He is not integrally what he is. We can but hope
and wait. His acts and behavior are the determining factor. He is a white man, and apart from some
debatable features, he can pass undetected. [...] Of course the Jews have been tormented — what am I saying? They have
been hunted, exterminated, and cremated, but these are just minor episodes in the family history. The Jew is not liked as soon as
he has been detected. But with me things take on a new face. I’m not given a second chance. I am
overdetermined from the outside. I am a slave not to the “idea” others have of me, but to my
appearance.¶ I arrive slowly in the world; sudden emergences are no longer my habit. I crawl along.
The white gaze, the only valid one, is already dissecting me. I am fixed. Once their microtones are sharpened, the
Whites objectively cut sections of my reality. I have been betrayed. I sense, I see in this white gaze that it’s the
arrival not of a new man, but of a new type of man, a new species. A Negro, in fact! [p. 95]¶ That provides an
alternative to the film’s plantation owner Calvin Candie’s theory as to why slaves don’t rise up and kill their masters. He posits phrenology, that
the black skull is built to encase a servile brain. (Odd how the guy doesn’t know words like ‘panache’ while being up to date on phrenology, but
I digress ….) Instead of racist science: the slaves had little chance of escape — only a minority could get to border countries and the free states
would return them without proof of freedman status (even freedmen had trouble fighting against a legal challenge to their status). More
fundamentally and universally, there was little possibility for or hope of fundamentally destroying the system of white power that, as Fanon
described, defined them on every level of “civil” society (including free states and the minds of many, if not most, abolitionists). Blackness
was placed on the outside, no place, as mere alterity to whiteness. It was not purely coincidence that
liberalism, the philosophy of liberty, developed alongside chattel slavery. Slavery gave dialectical
meaning to liberty by providing the liberals with something to negate (e.g., the American colonies would not be the
slaves to the English any longer). (I highly recommend Domenico Losurdo’s Liberalism: A Counter-History, which provides a mountain of
evidence for liberalism’s primary theorists either outwardly supporting or giving backhanded defense to slavery on such grounds.) In Frank B.
Wilderson’s terms, blacks
experienced a structural suffering that is not analogous to the social oppression
so many other groups have been under throughout history. For hundreds of years, they were denied
ontological status, relegated to non-being. blackness constituted as a comparison to whiteness — i.e.,
what it meant not to be white or a subject and, by extension, what it meant not to be free.
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AT: Link of Omissions Bad
New link—the idea that omissions are unimportant causes greater harm
Hanson 6 (Jon Hanson & Kathleen Hanson Harvard Law School Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review Summer, 2006)
Lerner's experiment indicates just how ready we are to short-circuit potential perceptions of injustice. When behavior that
causes harm is perceived as normal--part of the script, the way things are, the plan, nature, or an act of God--that
behavior is less likely to be viewed as blameworthy than is abnormal behavior. In a related phenomenon,
we often deem "omissions" that produce suffering far less culpable than "acts" that lead to similar
suffering. For example, some parents are reluctant to vaccinate their child if the vaccination has some
mortality risk, even if the risk of death from foregoing the vaccination is substantially greater. n22
Similarly, some people have argued that hurricanes should not be seeded, even if seeding would likely reduce the storm's expected damage.
n23 An unseeded hurricane is perceived as an act of nature or God, to which blame does not generally attach. But a person or institution that
actively seeded a hurricane would likely be considered responsible for the actual harm that hurricane caused. Thus
risks "caused" by
salient individual action (choosing the vaccine or seeding a hurricane) are perceived as worse than the greater
risk posed by inaction (the virus or the flooded city). When individual action is salient, we see choice (and
sometimes intent n24) and attribute causal responsibility accordingly, but where individuals fail to act, the
omissions tend to fade into the surrounding situation. n25 Policy and policy analysis reflect that omission
bias. For example, pharmaceutical [*422]companies have never been held liable for failing to produce
vaccines, but have sometimes been liable for the harm caused even by vaccines whose dangers are
unavoidable. n26 Tort law traditionally has been reluctant to impose responsibility for doing nothing n27 and generally
imposes no duty to rescue. Thus, the "sunbather who watches a child going under the waves has no duty to dive in the water,
throw her a life ring, or even notify a nearby lifeguard." n28 Similar techniques shield the legal regime itself from
responsibility. As Philip Bobbitt and Guido Calabresi have argued, lawmakers engage in legitimating subterfuges
to avoid explicitly making "tragic choices" that would cause suffering or death. n29 Policies ostensibly
pursuing some justified end, but having untoward consequences for some groups, typically are viewed
less as actions causing harm than as situationally excused omissions. n30 Of course, a purported goal
need not be the actual motivation for an act or a policy in order to have the absolving effect. Often a
"cover story" need not be very strong to justify harmful conduct. In the Lerner experiment, the subjects without a
salient choice to end the shocking (the second group) could more easily excuse themselves from blame than the subjects who were presented
an alternative. The "optionless" subjects took cover behind their assigned roles in an ostensibly valuable, scientific inquiry. Stopping the
experiment would have required affirmative, abnormal actions--going against the flow. In part because no one expects such actions to be
taken, no blame attaches to not taking them. And in part because such omissions would be blameless, no one acts. n31
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Institutions Key
Race is the root cause of institutional analysis—failure to recognize this perpetuates racism
Dutta 7/14 (Mohan, Purdue University, Health disparities: What the Florida rulings teach us, 7/14/13—
the day after the Zimmerman verdict, http://culture-centered.blogspot.com/2013/07/that-addressinghealth-disparities-in.html)//LA
However, there are much deeper structural inequities that are played out in the very organisational
structure of US society that often go unnoticed in the calls for addressing health disparities that are rooted
in these very structures. These structural inequities are so fundamental, so normal to the framework
of American society that most efforts at addressing health disparities unknowingly end up perpetuating
them, often focusing on individual behaviour change, building self efficacy, creating positive role
models etc., and at the same time being oblivious to the deeply pervasive structures of racism in US
society. What goes hidden in the mainstream narrative of health disparities is the racism that is inbuilt into
the processes, institutions, and logics of mainstream American society. Everyday conversations,
expectations, values and principles governing everyday life are built on the superiority of a White
mainstream that dictates the rules of representation, participation, and engagement. This structural
inequity in the organising of American society is well evident in the recent court ruling in Florida that
found the killer of Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman not guilty on the grounds that the shooting
was an act of self-defense. Trayvon, who had stepped out to buy iced tea and a bag of skittles, was followed and chased by George
Zimmerman. The shooting was an outcome of the fight that had ensued between Zimmerman and Martin. Zimmerman, who was leading a
neighborhood watch team, has since offered the explanation that Martin looked threatening because he was wearing a hoodie and walking in
an area where there have earlier been burglaries. The accounts of the exact order of events remains contested and that eventually became the
basis for the judgment. Yet, what does remain clear is that Trayvon was profiled and chased, and ultimately shot by Zimmerman. Coming back
then to the fundamental structural inequities that constitute US society, what
we learn from the above example is the
culture of profiling of African American youth that is inherent in the assumptions of US society. That
African Americans are perceived as criminals is an organising frame that makes up the US; its public
policies, police surveillance, justice system, and jails are organised around this racist logic of
systematically criminalising African Americans, and profiting from this process of criminalisation. This
deep-rooted racism of American society is intrinsic to the large disparities in health outcomes that are experienced by Blacks compared to
Whites. The
acknowledgment of this racism would push those of us doing health disparities work toward
transformative politics that takes as its starting point the need to fundamentally rework American
society, its expectations, and its history of racism. Deep interrogation of health disparities work would
systematically guide social scientists toward examining the power exerted by the gun industry, and
the intrinsic relationship of this industry to racism. In this sense then, the social sciences that are
constituted within the broader framework of health disparities would need to be fundamentally transformed, working
toward addressing the underlying racism of American society, culture, legal system, educational
system, housing, employment, gun regulation and so on. To get here, we have to collectively fight the
whitewashing that is built into the funding agencies and federal structures that determine what we do
and how we do what we do.
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Williams
Racism thrives in every core institution individual action is key to breakdown the anti-black
hegemonic system of the Status Quo
Williams 13 (Chris Williams, Writer, The Cancer of Racism Thrives in America 07/16/2013 3:53
pmhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-williams/the-cancer-of-racism-thri_b_3602319.html , //AR)
Famous literary stalwart James Baldwin once said, "I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to
criticize her perpetually."As the words "not guilty" fell from the lips of the six jurors in the Trayvon
Martin murder case on Saturday night, I thought to
myself how those two words have never been applied to African-American humanity in America.This opprobrious verdict reaffirmed everything
African-Americans thought about this country that our humanity and citizenship isn't recognized
under the laws of the United States. I've never been more disappointed in the country of my birth. The American justice
system continues to set a double standard when it comes to dishing out prison sentences to AfricanAmericans and whites.As a young African-American man living in the south, it made me pause and
realize that this ruling can give anyone the opportunity to take my life whenever they feel threatened
because of my skin color or how I walk, talk or dress. What is a black life worth? The answer was already
those six jurors confirmed our deepest, darkest suspicions. Since arriving on the
shores of Jamestown, Virginia in 1619, African-Americans have been convicted in the court of white
supremacy as being less than human. Our hellacious suffering provided whites the capital to build a
country based on the principles of white hegemony. African-Americans were never part of their equation other than providing a
consistent source of free labor. When the founding fathers were writing the Declaration of Independence and Constitution,
they couldn't fathom the humanity of their slaves and their offspring. For 394 years, we've been America's doormat and
punching bag. The cancer of racism thrives in America because the ones with the power refuse to
abundantly clear from history, but
acknowledge minorities as their equals.
Race was devised as a social construct in order for whites to establish and maintain their
dominance in political and economic affairs in America. The truth is we've been living in two Americas based on race and class.
The United States of
America is in name only. If we were truly united, African-Americans wouldn't have to endure
systematic subjugation and degradation on a daily basis. The cancer of racism thrives in the halls of
Congress, state legislatures, educational institutions, judicial proceedings, and the evidence can be
seen in the refusal to work with the first African-American president to pass laws to uplift minorities
out of their perilous conditions . If it's not gerrymandering or redistricting to dilute our voting power,
it's constructing private prisons and using the War on Drugs as a conduit to incarcerate AfricanAmericans at an astronomical rate. If it's not closing schools in impoverished neighborhoods across
the nation, it's cutting social programs that ease the strenuous burden put on our households every
day.Racism is as American as Uncle Sam and his red, white, and blue outfit. Then, you wonder why
African-Americans have the highest rates of high blood pressure, prostate and breast cancer, diabetes,
among other ailments. It's because we're stressed out and tired of being confined in an unjust system
that was never intended for us to become successful. But it's a testament to our character of how we've been able to rise above it
and achieve numerous successes.¶ There have been countless examples ranging from police brutalities, murders, and
passage of laws that continue the troubling trend of psychological and physical oppression. This
white hegemonic system has stalled the progression of African-Americans for far too long.
These latest
atrocities of Jordan Davis, Marissa Alexander, and Gabby Calhoun are an extension of this system, which is pervasive throughout our culture. Most of our white
brethren still refuse to acknowledge these facts as well as the statistics proving black disenfranchisement. Before
we can fully progress as a
society, this ignorant denial has to cease.¶ The cancer of racism fools poor whites into voting for a political party that has no interest in
solving their financial and social ills. The cancer of racism makes voting damn near impossible in the south after the
Voting Rights Act was dismantled. The cancer of racism has the Republican Party wanting to turn the clock back to 1913 through their divisive
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policies. The cancer of racism allows defense attorneys Don West and Mark O'Mara and jurors to exercise their privilege in portraying Trayvon Martin as a criminal
when he was an innocent child. The
cancer of racism provides the opportunity for police militarized states to stop
and frisk young African-American men every day.¶ For every person in this society to begin receiving a
fair shake, each one of us has to become proactive in fighting on the side of right and not on the side
of privilege . America will never be a post-racial society unless serious dialogue and actions to reform
these inadequate measures begin. The work needs to take place in American homes and to a larger
extent our schools and lawmaking bodies. The responsibility of tackling this dreaded disease falls at the feet of Generations X and Y. ¶ To
my white brothers and sisters, it must begin with you all. The time has arrived for racism to be discussed, denounced, and
deposed of. No more standing on the sidelines. If our country is to become truly united, these unlawful injustices
and practices must be addressed and policies must be enacted to curtail the centuries of damage
already done. African-Americans have been fighting on the battlefield of justice for as long as you've been conspiring against us. While you hold
the cards, we've more than earned our seat at the playing table to start this process of gaining racial
conciliation and economic empowerment.¶ ¶ The future of our society is contingent upon this potential of mutual respect. It's 2013, start
treating us like family instead of like strangers. Otherwise, the cancer of racism will destroy this country.
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Simmerson-Gomes
Very powerful card on whiteness and Zimmerman—critiques evidence and racial minimization—we
don’t defend ableist language
Simmerson-Gomes 7/14 (Matthew, MLitt Student @ U of Aberdeen, B.Th St Paul University Ottowa,
Early Modern Intellectual History Specialist, An open letter to whites about the black community and the
Trayvon Martin case on his Blog The Molinist, 7/14/13—the day following the George Zimmerman trial
verdict, http://themolinist.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/an-open-letter-to-whites-about-the-blackcommunity-and-the-trayvon-martin-case/)//LA
This morning, I woke up to this. Like many, many people within and without the black community, I followed this case intently and had
(continue to have) definite opinions on them (the justice of those opinions is another matter) and, like many, I
received the news not
with anger or frustration but a sort of quiet sadness that is difficult to explain. I’m going to try,
though, in the hopes that I can share some insight into what this case, and this verdict, mean for
communities of colour in and outside the United States. I wasn’t present when George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin,
so I don’t know what transpired. I cannot peer into George Zimmerman’s soul, so I don’t know what he was
thinking or with what intent he followed Martin down the street. What I do know is what it’s like to be a Trayvon
Martin. To be suspect. I do know what it’s like to be followed by staff in a nice clothing store; to be stopped by
police for walking down the street; to endure the thousand micro-aggressions and the hundred fearful
looks, the patronising astonishment coupled with quiet indignation at my education or erudition. I know, in other words, what it is to be a
person of colour in a world that privileges whiteness. Deafness While I cannot speak for my community I am certain that
I am not alone in the sense that what many of us were hoping for with this case was a degree of
vindication, a recognition by the courts of a Western nation that the racism we face is a real, day-today reality. I want racism to end but almost as much I want to stop being told by whites that it has. I want every white person I
ever complain to about the years of piling slights, the extra hours at airport security, the half-seen glances from
across the bus from eyes that fearfully refuse to meet mine, to respond with compassion and credulity and not to even
think about explaining them away or ‘informing’ me that racism died with Rosa Park or MLK or
whatever and they would know. I want white people to stop questioning my experience of racism, to
stop defending every offender as ‘just doing his job’ or ‘just doing whatever.’ I want the excuses and the explanations to
stop. I know where they come from. I know you feel accussed. I know you feel that you are not racist
(after all, you have that black friend and your maternal grandmother is Chinese). I know you think I’m being too sensitive or
too quick to judge (after all, he didn’t call me a nigger and you didn’t notice any racism and you would know). I know that you feel like
affirmative action gives me a leg up because you work just as hard and where’s your quota? I know it’s easier to pretend that
racism is a thing of the past because you can get by just fine doing that so why can’t I? But here’s the
thing: it’s not about you. You are not the one who is slurred, you’re not the one who is refused
service, and you’re certainly not the one who is shot in the street. It’s about us. I want you to
acknowlegde that fact. To recognise that I experience racism. This case offered me some sliver of that
recognition, that vindication. The tantalising prospect that a white-passing man with a white name would
be found guilty of murdering an unarmed teenaged boy for no other reason than his race and his hoodie
filled me with hope that my plight would no longer be so easily dismissed, hope that made the slights
easier to endure for its impending fulfillment and that prejudiced me against any possibility of
Zimmerman’s innocence in any trifling legal sense. That is, I think, much of why this decision has been met with so much
anger. Our hopes for a world where our voices would be heard were dashed. Sight Karen Grigsby Bates observed
today that this case has confirmed for blacks and members of many other communities of colour, that we still need to wear protective clothing.
We must still, in her words, appear church-ready whenever we walk out the door. I
have long described to white friends the
process of dressing (or otherwise self-presenting) to ‘white’ myself. The way I dress in an academic
setting, the way I speak and write, the extra-curricular activities I put on my resume as a teenager, all
carefully considered to avoid any shred of ‘blackness.’ Why? Because blacks with the gall to be black,
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to act and speak as you have deemed ‘black,’ are rarely deemed worthy of your respect. In this world
you have created for me my blackness is a handicap I must not acknowledge, a loadstone around my
neck that I dare not draw attention to because then I will be the ‘activist;’ the ‘angry black guy’ who
doesn’t know that MLK fixed the system, reshuffled the deck so now that everyone gets the same
hand but who still needs to be Snoop Dog; or worse yet I will simply be criminal and suspect, a
potential gangbanger who might be carrying so we better stop him just in case. So I must perform if I
am to get ahead or even to get by. And perform I will, because I want nice clothes and good jobs and to walk down the
street unhindered by the authorities. I will do so to please you and you will think it right. On the night he was killed, Trayvon
Martin was dressed in a way that does not please you. He wore his hoodie over his head. In words well-practised from
the press conferences and talking heads sessions that follow every high-profile sexual assault, police officials and pundits suggested that Tayvon
Martin’s choice of clothing was a factor in his death. Some cried victim blaming, apologism. Others replied ‘prudence.’ Black voices intoned
both. Whoever is right, Trayvon Martin’s clothing was not protective, instead it painted a target on his back and hung around his neck a sign
that read ‘threat.’ Right or not, this ruling has reminded me why I prefer to let the rain fall unhindered onto my head. Blindness I
have seen
it observed more times than I care to count today that justice is supposed to be blind. This case, they
say, was not about race. It was about a boy who was killed and the man who killed him. It was about
evidence. Lord, how I wish I had the privilege of their naiveté. Lady Justice may be blind but George
Zimmerman is not. If he were, maybe the sight of a teenaged boy wearing a hoodie after dark would not have frightened him so
severely that he decided to follow that boy with a firearm at the ready. If the police were blind, maybe they would have
charged a man who shot dead a 17 year old boy before mass protests forced them. If Lady Justice
removed her blindfold maybe she would have seen that her scales were weighted against Trayvon
Martin from his first breath. Maybe she would have known that by refusing to see the racial dynamics of the case before her, she
was blinding herself to the very substance of the case. Race was at the core of this case and race it why it became a
symbol of such great weight and meaning. To us Trayvon Martin was not just murdered, he was
martyred. In death he bore witness to the racism and oppression that blacks and other people of
colour experience every day. Why was Trayvon Martin threatening to George Zimmerman? For the
same reason that I am threatening to the mothers who claw their children back when I smile and wave back to them on the bus,
the men who watch me like hawks when I pet their dogs on the street, and the staff who follow me in their stores. Everywhere I go I
am a threat, an outsider, an other. I am a threat because you see me, or at least some of me, yet
somehow you do not see this. In Trayvon Martin’s death and George Zimmerman’s trial the world, for a moment, saw. For a few
short seconds all eyes turned upon a racially motivated crime, upon a black boy killed for blackness
itself. But now the world has turned away because the court has comfortably ruled that blackness
really is threatening and you really are justified in keeping watch for it in your communities and
resisting it with deadly force. We were wrong, it seems. You will not see. You will not see his
martyrdom because it is woven into the frabic of your privilege, the cloth that the world has tied
around your eyes. I will see it every time I look in the mirror, because in my brown skin is the crime
for which Trayvon Martin died. Speech I’ve added my voice to the cacophony of this verdict in the hopes
of granting a little insight to those outside my community to whom our response to the case has been
opaque. I’ve done so knowing it will open me up to dismissal and scorn (after all, who am I to accuse
you?). I’ve brought all my eloquence to bear and had a friend copy-edit my words because I know all too well the lesson we
all learned from Rachel Jeantel: that black speech is suspect and blacks who speack publically on race represent
us all. In spite of that I’ve spoken only for myself, only from my own experience and perspective,
because I can no more speak on behalf of blacks than you can speak on behalf of whites (not least because
to some, I am not one). I pray that my words will not fall only on deaf ears and blind eyes.
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Loudmouthedbookworm
NOW IS KEY—reject their evidentiary reformism in favor of pure RAGE
Anonymous 7/14 (Pseudonym Loudmouthedbookworm, A “20-something, Korean-American, cisgender,
male student at a private university in Boston majoring in English with a possible double or minor in
Latin American Studies.”—his own description, To Anyone who Doubted (For Trayvon), 7/14/13—the
day after the Zimmerman verdict, http://loudmouthedbookworm.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/toanyone-who-doubted-for-trayvon/)//LA
To Anyone Who Doubted: Last night, the American judicial system reiterated the right of white and white
passing citizens to murder people of color with impunity in the name of security and property. Last
night, the value of white freedom and suspicions over black and brown death and childhood was
restated, plain as day. This is not about idiotic jurors. This is not about a stunning defense. This is not about
incontrovertible evidence, because none of that was present. This is about white supremacy. It was about
that from the moment Zimmerman spotted Trayvon walking down the street at night in his own father’s neighborhood, because Trayvon’s
blackness marked him as a threat, a disturbance. It was about white supremacy when Judge Debra
Nelson refused to put Zimmerman on trial for racial profiling by banning the phrase from her
courtroom, because the American courtroom is designed to uphold, not challenge, racism. It was
about white supremacy when the trial became about Zimmerman’s capacity to prove he felt
threatened by Trayvon, because white anxiety is enough to justify black death. Now, a 17-year-old has been
killed, his murderer acquitted, and his family left heartbroken, all in the name of white supremacy; all for upholding the truth of
the threat black and brown bodies present to whiteness simply by and for existing in public, and the
legitimacy of violent, “defensive” action in response to any suspicions held of “suspicious” bodies. To
anyone who doubted this was the case, and now finds they cannot doubt it anymore, hear this: this is not the time for guilt .
Privilege too often makes guilt seem redeeming; it is not. Your guilt will not bring Trayvon back. Your
guilt will not console his family. Your guilt will not bring Zimmerman to justice. Your guilt will likely be
just as useless to the next person of color to be killed in America. It is also not a time to bend to fear.
The reason for that fear is ever-present. It was there long before the night Trayvon went walking. It has been
there all our lives. It is not the time for these things. It is a time for other emotions. It is a time for
grief. Grief for Trayvon, his family, the innumerable flaws in the trial and system that managed the possibility of justice for him, and ourselves.
It is a time for rage . Even if black and brown grief and rage are criminalized, unjustified, and
unacceptable before the law and the White Gaze, it is a time for these things because, above all, the
time for responsibility is here, and the urgency of now only grows with every moment. Today,
tomorrow, for every day of life that Trayvon, Emmett, Brisenia, and countless unnamed children of
color have been denied, responsibility must manifest through our grief and rage. But I reiterate: It is not the
time for guilt. Guilt is paralyzing and uninspiring. Guilt will do nothing, can do nothing. For you, for me, for
these children, or for the unknowable quantity of people of color whose death and prohibition from
justice will occur under similar circumstances. Guilt is useless, so let there be rage. For Trayvon.
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Pedagogy K
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Silence—L/O
Failure to confront whiteness through an educational model prevents productive pedagogy—that's a
prerequisite to chage
Mazzei 8 (Lisa A., Now—Gonzaga U; Then—Manchester Metropolitan U, Silence speaks: Whiteness
Revealed in the Absence of Voice, Teaching and Teacher Education 24 (2008) p. 1125-1136)//LA
Since that initial research I have continued to explore the importance of racially inhabited silence in classes
with preservice teachers, particularly as it arises in conversations regarding issues of diversity. This attention
serves as a means of both identifying and challenging responses to those who are ‘‘differ- ent’’ or
‘‘Other’’ especially as those responses, both silent and muted, serve to expose and solidify
circumscribed perceptions. These racially inhabited silences are particularly noticeable in settings
where white preservice teachers are challenged to deal with issues of diversity, finding themselves
uncomforta- ble in the context of a discourse of diversity, especially when the conversation engages
the social and economic implications of racial diversity and when the critical gaze is shifted from the
racial object, i.e., the non-white Other, to the racial subject, i.e., white self (Morrison, 1992). They will talk
about difference, and acknowledge that we must incorporate diversity into education classes, but
when asked to specifically discuss their percep- tions or experiences based on race and ethnicity, it is
as if I have asked them to divulge the password of a secret society. In the words of one student, ‘‘Why
do we need to talk about it? Isn’t it best if we don’t notice it? Isn’t it an issue because we [You] keep
making it an issue?’’ This discussion then is presented as a continuing engagement with those racially
inhabited silences in an attempt to further ascertain their relevance and to formulate pedago- gical
responses so we can get students to talk about it. So we can adequately prepare teachers to recognize
when they are responding to their students based on their own biases, stereotypes, and ignorance in order to help future teachers
not just mouth the mantra of a culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1994, 2001), but actu- ally mean
it and enact it.
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Alt/Prior Question
The alternative is an uncomfortable recognition of whiteness—only pedagogical spaces can reshape
whiteness
Mazzei 8 (Lisa A., Now—Gonzaga U; Then—Manchester Metropolitan U, Silence speaks: Whiteness
Revealed in the Absence of Voice, Teaching and Teacher Education 24 (2008) p. 1125-1136)//LA
It is my insistence, and I believe that chronicled by others in education (see for e.g. Cochran-Smith, 2000; Valli,
1995; Villegas & Lucas, 2002), that change in the arena of racial discourse comes by encouraging our
students to brush up against their own whiteness. For this to happen we must attempt to develop
pedagogical strategies that encourage the breaking of silences, both our own and those of our
students. But it is not as simple as distributing note cards and assuming that a recognition of the silences on
our part as teacher educators will lead to a breaking of the silence on the part of our students. As
described in the previous section, there is the potential for much loss on the part of our students, and to deny
this loss is to fail to develop a pedagogy that not only recognizes and confronts the silences, but also
accepts and acknowledges the fears associated with such a loss. Students may resist breaking the
silence, for to do so means they risk a loss of privilege, identity and comfort. As educators, we can
provide experiences in our classrooms that are potentially transforma- tive, but to do so, we must
admit the potential for loss that our students recognize and resist as we challenge them to engage the
silences. The loss of comfort, for example, when they are ‘‘forced’’ to go into settings where they are not the majority, be it according to
race, gender, sexual orientation, or social class. The loss of privilege when they begin to acknowledge the norming
presence of whiteness by which they are judged, and subsequently advan- taged, but which serves to
disadvantage their students because the students cannot wear the same mask. A loss of identity when
an undoing of white privilege means that their unspoken, unacknow- ledged, unnoticed position of
whiteness is suddenly called into question and redefined, reinscribed, or refuted. An awareness of
loss might mean that we recognize the loss and the fear inhabiting the silence and develop
pedagogical strategies that commu- nicate to our students that we do not discount the fear or the
loss, but that we also refuse the silence on their part as a strategy of avoidance. As acknowl- edged by Amanda,
‘‘the issue of racism is very much alive in schools today,’’ and as future teachers they must accept the
potential loss of comfort and privilege toward a recognition that they are as much a part of a racial or
multicultural discourse as their non-white students. The fact that racism is present in schools means
that they participate, whether knowingly or not, and a claiming of this participation is also a claiming
of innocence lost. In order that we not ‘‘silence’’ the fears associated with these losses, our challenge as teacher educators
is to engage these losses and the silences that they inhabit.
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Prior Question
Questions of pedagogy come first—determines whiteness in the debate space
Mazzei 8 (Lisa A., Now—Gonzaga U; Then—Manchester Metropolitan U, Silence speaks: Whiteness
Revealed in the Absence of Voice, Teaching and Teacher Education 24 (2008) p. 1125-1136)//LA
They are not knowingly racist, in fact many are appalled at racist attitudes and actions by others and
sometimes angrily ask why we have to keep talking about the inequities they believe are no longer
important or relate to them. They think that by looking past skin colour they are above racist attitudes
and actions. ‘‘Is it ever going to stop?’’ was a question asked by one of my students referring to the continued emphasis on
multicultural education, racial identity, and a corresponding need to discuss attitudes regarding gender, race, and class inequi- ties. It is a valid
question and one which gives pause to hope that such
a day might come, but it will not arrive as long as teachers,
particularly white teachers, are unaware of our own socially con- structed attitudes and remain blind
to our position as whites in a racial discourse, or worse fail to see ourselves as ‘‘raced’’ thereby
continuing a racial discourse that identifies all non-whites as ‘‘Other.’’ We must seriously expose and
critique any position that fosters the view articulated by Frankenberg (1996), ‘‘It is interesting that one can in fact (re)tell a white
life through a racial lens y Seeing blackness was not seeing whiteness’’ (p. 5). When Margaret in another assignment for the ‘‘Diversity and the
Learner’’ class wrote of her impressions of a young woman with a Korean mother but who grew up in the United States, she revealed her
tendency to see life through a white racial lens. She made
assumptions about the Other from an uncritical position of
whiteness. ‘‘I looked at her as the ‘Korean girl.’ I didn’t realize that she grew up the same way as I did. I questioned her knowledge of
American culture just because of the way her eyes looked and the darkness of her hair.’’ When Andrea wrote ‘‘my life as a young, middle class,
Caucasian American provided advantages that were not there for others in minority cultures. These advantages were present in the
opportunities available to me. I was educated in Catholic schools. I had access to jobs that probably were not available to people of other
cultures. It is almost as if my success was jump-started from the beginning,’’ she
acknowledged the advantage that white
privilege and affluence afforded. Yet, she unproblemmati- cally wrote in the same paper, ‘‘Like so many
other young black males, John has no father in his everyday life.’’ This statement reveals the unstated assumptions that Andrea makes
about black students (i.e., that they do not live with their fathers), and is thereby silent regarding how such
assumptions impact the ways in which she makes judgements about the students and their families
that she works with. When Linda wrote ‘‘multicultural students strug- gle most with communicating and making friends,’’ she revealed
two beliefs that are assumed but rarely stated by many white teachers. One, multicultural education is for those who are other than white and
is of most benefit for those students who are non- native English speaking students. Two, these designated multicultural students are behind or
lacking in some way. In a review of educa- tional research that focused on the preparation of teachers for urban schools of the 60’s, 70’s, and
80’s, Weiner (1993) asserted that in each of the three periods, the discussion was framed as ‘‘preparing teachers of deprived, disadvantaged, or
at-risk students’’ (pp. 72–73). Further she stated that since the early 1970s ‘‘educators began to describe urban school populations as
‘multicultural,’ a label that ignored the absence of white students in urban school systems’’ (p. 73). Finally, when
Jennifer asks ‘‘why
[does] it matter to even talk about race? Isn’t it best if we don’t notice it?’’ we can no longer remain
silent or uncritical. We must understand that when we ‘‘don’t notice’’ or when we ‘‘don’t talk about
it’’ we, both teacher educators and students, are talking about it. When one of the cooperating teachers responded
to a question by Linda that the Asian children ‘‘struggle with the language arts but never the subject of math,’’ and my student rationalized that
this is because math is pretty universal and the English language is not, then we
are engaging in a racial discourse as
experienced through a white lens. This discourse, dependent on a racially inhabited silence that
perpetuates stereotypes of the Other also serves to define ‘‘different’’ through a racial lens which is
both culturally determined by and uncritical of its racial position.
Pedagogy is a prior question—it’s a crucial part of networks of Whiteness
Mazzei 8 (Lisa A., Now—Gonzaga U; Then—Manchester Metropolitan U, Silence speaks: Whiteness
Revealed in the Absence of Voice, Teaching and Teacher Education 24 (2008) p. 1125-1136)//LA
More than a decade ago, I began a qualitative research project whose purpose was to consider how a group of white teachers in an urban
school district in the US understood their racial position and to examine how that understanding impacted their curricular decisions and work
Race File 7wS BFJR 2013
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as teachers. The two most notable learnings emerging from that initial research were the realization that the
white teachers who
participated in the study, including myself, had little or no experience of themselves as having a
‘‘racial position’’ and that their experience of having lived in a world of white privilege severely
limited their ability to see or express themselves as ‘‘Other.’’ This lack of awareness led to noticeable
silences in the conversations related to race,1 racial position, and racial identity, subsequently
reflected in the pedagogical and curricular decisions made by these teachers. In the course of the research
these silences were shown to be both purposeful and meaningful in reaffirming the espoused perspective
of the participants. As a means of acknowledging the importance of these silences and addressing their relevance in circumscribing
identity, a methodolo- gical strategy was developed to identify and examine the significance and myriad meanings inhabiting the silences.
While the research and teaching described in this article have occurred in a US context, such discussions
and learnings have
much wider implica- tions. According to Leonardo (2004a), ‘‘race, and in particular whiteness, must be situated
in the global context’’ (p. 117). And while the local context for my work is the Midwest region of the United States, the global
context for this work is teacher education that concerns itself with the development of racially aware
and culturally sensitive teachers. Many who grew up in the US with white skin were taught not to notice or to mention one’s skin
colour for fear of being impolite or racist. I was carefully taught this by parents who did not wish for their children to perpetuate much of what
they had experienced as whites growing up long before civil rights and integration.2 So what
happens when we do not notice,
or are taught not to notice, or pretend not to notice? What can happen is that we lull ourselves into a
dream state induced by this soporific silence. A silence that shields and veils until finally, something,
someone, shatters the dream.3
Pedagogy comes first
Jennings and Lynn 5 (Michael E. and Marvin, UT San Antonio and U of Maryland College Park, The
House That Race Built: Critical Pedagogy, African-American Education, and the Re-Conceptualization
of a Critical Race Pedagogy, Educational Foundations, Summer-Fall 2005, p. 15-32)//LA
Critical Pedagogy as a discourse on schooling and inequality relies mainly on three theoretic and analytic strands of
thought: (1) Social Reproduction Theory, (2) Cultural Reproduction Theory, and (3) Theories of
Resistance. These areas of study, have contributed, in unique ways to the development of critical
pedagogy. Social Reproduction theorists believe that schools maintain the status quo by making certain that
existing social and economic relations remain constant. The work of Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (1976) is
largely based on five key principles that undergird their political economy of education. First, that “market,
property and power relationships” (p. 11) determine and shape the looming disparities in wealth that exist between the rich and the poor. In
other words, the
capitalist economy is responsible for creating and maintaining widespread poverty and
disenfranchisement among minorities and the poor in most industrialized democracies. The second, and probably the most
important principle is that schools act as agents in the regeneration and solidification of existing political,
social, and economic arrangements by preparing students for predetermined roles in the labor force.
To that extent, students from working class families are trained to work in low paying non-skilled jobs, since it is highly likely that they will
attend schools that foster this kind of mentality. The third principle recognizes that school
profession- als do not necessarily
reproduce social inequalities with malice of intent. Instead, this principle recognizes the hierarchical
structure of schooling and its tendency to mirror the “top-down” structure of the labor market which
aids in the reproduction of social inequality. To the extent that school officials and teachers work to
maintain the bureaucratic structure of schooling, they are implicated as agents of this capitalist
domination. The very basis of the argument here is that “the U.S. economy is a formally totalitarian system in
which the actions of the vast majority (workers) are controlled by a small minority (owners and
managers)” (Bowles & Gintis, 1976, p. 55). Moreover, the U.S., with its run-a-way capitalist economy, allows
the forces of the market to dictate what happens in the rest of society. To that extent, schools were
designed for the purpose of maintaining current economic relations. As a result, schools have not
been instrumental in helping the majority of poor and working class people achieve social mobility.
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Rather schools have helped solidify poor people’s position at the bottom of the economic hierarchy. In
other words, “Schooling has been...something done to the poor” and not in the interest of the poor (MacLeod ,1995, p. 29). The fourth
principle is that schooling is “contradictory” in nature (Bowles & Gintis, 1976). While schooling (in this sense) primarily
supports the aims of the dominant class, it can be credited with contributing to the overall
development of consciousness about social inequalities. In other words, Bowles and Gintis also recognize
that schools can sometimes serve as sites where social awareness takes place. This idea is further
expounded upon in the work of resistance theorists, whose ideas we will address later. The last principle is that the
relationship between the organization of schools and the structure of the labor market changes and
shifts according to the particular sociopolitical and historical context. In other words, any critique of
schools must be situated within an understanding of the particular socio- historical forces that have
led to current conditions within a given society. In this regard, Bowles and Gintis’ (1976) attempt to first understand the
particular social, political and economic circumstances of the time period being described before undertaking an analysis of schooling as an
agent of capitalist hegemony. Cultural
Reproduction Theory offers an important analysis of how schools, in
fact, support particular patterns of behavior in school. Cultural Reproduction (Bourdieu, 1977; Bourdieu & Passeron,
1977) in educa- tion refers to the ways in which schools and teachers reproduce social inequalities through the
promotion of certain forms of class-specific cultural knowledge. This theory presents a departure from theories
of social reproduction because it includes an analysis, albeit a materialist one, of culture. It also looks more micro-analytically at the
ways in which school norms contribute to the systematic exclusion of ethnic minorities and poor
whites from the educational system. Bourdieu, the leading cultural reproduction theorist, begins with the notion that students who lack the
cultural capital or the requisite knowledge and skills with which to successfully navigate the parameters of middle class culture inevitably fail at
school (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). In this sense, cultural capital is a form of symbolic wealth that one acquires through membership and
participation in the dominant or middle-class culture. The accumulation of cultural capital is also related to one’s degree of wealth in the sense
that those who can afford it, participate, to a much greater degree, in the consumption of what is considered “high culture” or the arts
(Bourdieu, 1977). Because
schools are established in relation to these norms and standards, they also
legitimize and therefore reinforce such standards while promoting the myth of meritocracy (Bourdieu,
1977; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). Moreover, the economi- cally privileged utilize schools as a way in which to
sustain and legitimate their “high- status knowledge” which, helps to maintain existing social, political
and economic arrangements. This greatly disadvantages children from lower and working class backgrounds who are not aware of
the rules required for successfully working within the culture of power (Bourdieu, 1977; Delpit, 1995). The effects of cultural reproduction are
mitigated, in some ways, by each individual’s habitus, or “the way a culture is embodied” within the individual (Harker, 1990, p. 118). One’s
habitus refers to the specific way in which an individual acts and responds to the system and the practices of those who maintain it. To this
extent, the
individual has some degree of agency in making choices that will benefit him or her. In this
(1977) is quick to point out, however, that one’s agency
is limited in a class-stratified society especially if we consider that people “can’t teach what [they]
don’t know” (Howard, 1999). Consequently, since the majority of poor and working class students have not had the same experiences as
instance, the habitus is indeed a mitigating factor. Bourdieu
middle and upper class students, their habitus will be markedly different. Therefore, while one’s degree of agency is considered an important
component, it is rendered nearly inconsequential when we consider how economic, political and social structures shape and constrict individual autonomy and agency (Bourdieu, 1977).
Pedagogy is key to interrogate power
Jennings and Lynn 5 (Michael E. and Marvin, UT San Antonio and U of Maryland College Park, The
House That Race Built: Critical Pedagogy, African-American Education, and the Re-Conceptualization
of a Critical Race Pedagogy, Educational Foundations, Summer-Fall 2005, p. 15-32)//LA
Critical pedagogy has been widely characterized as a crucial construct in challenging the inequalities
that have evolved in the context of schooling in the U.S. Evidence of this can be found in critical
pedagogy’s attempt to offer critique of the analytic connections between race and education within
the context of the African-American struggle for humanity. In particu- lar, critical pedagogy has functioned
as a discourse on schooling and inequality that has developed in tan- dem with theories of race and
pedagogical practice in ways that reflect the context of African-American education. This work expounds
Race File 7wS BFJR 2013
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upon our previous scholarship to offer
a broadened conception of critical race pedagogy that incorporates
central aspects of critical pedagogy but is drawn from African-American epistemological frameworks.
Origins of Critical Pedagogy within Critical Theory Critical pedagogy has maintained its status as an important
component of educational research and inquiry since the early 1980s when critical educational theorist popularized the
concept in academic writing (Bennett & LeCompte, 1999; Sleeter & Bernal, 2004). Since that time, these theorists have
continued to struggle with the central question of critical pedagogy: “Whose interests are served?”
(Bennet & LeCompte 1999, p. 250). In answer to this query, Gordon (1995) asserts that “Critical theory seeks to
understand the origins and operation of repressive social structures. Critical theory is the critique of
domination. It seeks to focus on a world becoming less free, to cast doubt on claims of technological scientific rationality, and then to
imply that present configurations do not have to be as they are” (p. 190). Not only do critical theorists
attempt to discover why oppressive structures exist and offer criticisms of their effects; they also
explore the ways in which we can transform our society. In this sense, critical theory is not simply a
critique of social structures it is an analysis of power relations that asks questions regarding: what
constitutes power; who holds power; and in what ways power utilized to benefit those already in
power.
Race and pedagogy are intertwined—[also, link of omission]
Jennings and Lynn 5 (Michael E. and Marvin, UT San Antonio and U of Maryland College Park, The
House That Race Built: Critical Pedagogy, African-American Education, and the Re-Conceptualization
of a Critical Race Pedagogy, Educational Foundations, Summer-Fall 2005, p. 15-32)//LA
First, critical race pedagogy must recognize and understand the endemic nature of racism. Racism is a
concept is played out world wide but has a particularly significant meaning in the history of the United
States (Feagin, 2001). Critical legal scholar Derrick Bell (1992) argues that racism is a permanent fixture of American society. That is, racism
is not an aberrant entity but is instead an integral part of the American socio-political landscape.
Being such an integral part of America has allowed racism to shape and be shaped by the major
institutions within American society (Feagin, 2001; Hacker 1995). Among these institutions is the compulsory
public education system that developed from the Common School movement of the 19th century (Spring, 2005). This system is
an integral part of American society and has historically reflected the racialized nature of American
society. In other words, educational institutions in America have historically reflected the same types of
institutionalized racism that exist within multiple contexts of American life. Racism and education are
thus tightly interwoven in a manner that is complex, pervasive and constantly evolving within and
across a variety of social contexts. It is an understanding of these complexities that is necessary
precursor for the existence of any Critical Race Pedagogy. This is not meant to establish race as the only construct of
importance when critiquing the oppressive nature of schooling in American society. Any form of Critical Race Pedagogy must
be intimately cognizant of the necessary intersection of other oppressive constructs such as class,
gender and sexual orientation. Theorizing these intersections is of high importance because
individuals prioritizing one facet of their identity over another can create a false dichotomy that does
not address the reality that we exist within society as subjective entities whose identities are
negotiated through multiple lenses that privilege certain race, class, gender and sexual “norms.”
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AT: We solve
Magnifies the link—any risk their pedagogy is flawed turns the case—makes it try or die for the alt
Jennings and Lynn 5 (Michael E. and Marvin, UT San Antonio and U of Maryland College Park, The
House That Race Built: Critical Pedagogy, African-American Education, and the Re-Conceptualization
of a Critical Race Pedagogy, Educational Foundations, Summer-Fall 2005, p. 15-32)//LA
Resistance Theory expands these ideas in important ways. A theory of resistance in education
necessarily begins with a critique of theories of social and cultural reproduction (Giroux, 1983; McLaren, 1998).
Giroux (1983), Willis (1997) and Morrow & Torres (1995) argue that these theories are overly deterministic because they fail to
adequately define the role of the oppressed actor in negotiating and responding to structures of
domination. Resistance theory (Giroux 1983) is grounded in the notion that the oppressed have a degree of agency that
allows them to actively resist and sometimes collude with structures of domination. In other words,
resistance theory points to the “dialectical” nature of oppression and sees domination as “not only
[the] result of the structural and ideological constraints embedded in capitalist social relationships,
but also as part of the process of self-formation within the working class itself” (Giroux, 1983, p. 283). In other
words, the social, economic, and political structure does not act alone; it is supported by the actions of
people who work to maintain it or destroy it by resisting domination in myriad ways. Therefore,
resistance theory does not charac- terize all oppositional behavior as counterhegemonic because it
recognizes the potential for some forms of resistance to authority to be connected to patriarchal and
racist motives. Giroux (1983), Willis (1977), Delgado Bernal (1997) and MacLeod (1995) argue that certain forms of
oppositional behavior or resistance can and often do lead to greater degrees of social dislocation that
delimits the actor’s potential for further participation in liberatory practice and struggle. Ethnographic
studies of working class students illustrate Giroux’s point clearly. The working class white male students in Paul Willis’ work (1977), for
example, resisted dominant modes of thinking through their nonparticipation in and subsequent
devaluation of academic work deemed crucial by school authorities who symbolized the dominant
culture. Jay MacLeod (1987), in a similar study of white and African-American male working class youth, underscores the
importance of understanding the role of the oppressed in resisting and accommodating to certain
forms of oppression. In both studies, the resistance of working class youth to structures of domination
actually served to further marginalize them. This, the authors argue, provides a clear context for
understanding the complex nature of the relationship between structure and agency (MacLeod, 1995; Willis,
1977). Therefore, a resistance model analyzes the ways in which social structures work to reproduce
inequalities and tries to under- stand how the complex web of relationships between people can
either counteract or support the aims of the capitalist hegemony.
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Bussing Link
The affirmative’s pedagogical strategy is analogous to integration by bussing—in their rush to resist
whiteness in debate they’ve forfeited the revolutionary, pedagogical value of the 1AC
hooks 94 (bell, Prof @ Oberlin College, name intentionally left un-capitalized, Teaching to Transgress:
Education as the Practice of Freedom, p. 3-4)//LA
Almost all our teachers at Booker T. Washington were black women. They were committed to
nurturing intellect so that we could become scholars, thinkers, and cultural workers-black folks who used our
"minds." We learned early that our devotion to learning, to a life of the mind, was a counter-hegemonic
act, a fundamental way to resist every strategy of white racist coloni- zation. Though they did not define or
articulate these practices in theoretical terms, my teachers were enacting a revolutionary pedagogy of resistance
that was profoundly anticolonial. Within these segregated schools, black children who were deemed exceptional, gifted, were
given special care. Teachers worked with and for us to ensure that we would fulfill our intel- lectual destiny
and by so doing uplift the race. My teachers were on a mission. To fulfill that mission, my teachers made sure they "knew" us. They
knew our parents, our economic status, where we wor- shipped, what our homes were like, and how we were treated in the family. I went to
school at a historical moment where I was being taught by the same teachers who had taught my mother, her s1sters, and brothers. My
effort and ability to learn was always contextualized within the framework of generational family
experience. Certain behaviors, gestures, habits of being were traced back. Attending school then was sheer joy. I loved
being a stu- dent. I loved learning. School was the place of ecstasy-plea- sure and danger. To be
changed by ideas was pure pleasure. But to learn ideas that ran counter to values and beliefs learned at home was to place
oneself at risk, to enter the dan- ger zone. Home was the place where I was forced to conform to someone else's image of who and what I
should be. School was the place where I could forget that self and, through ideas, reinvent myself. School
changed utterly with
racial integration. Gone was the messianic zeal to transform our minds and beings that had
characterized teachers and their pedagogical practices in our all-black schools. Knowledge was
suddenly about information only. It had no relation to how one lived, behaved. It was no longer
connected to antiracist struggle. Bussed to white schools, we soon learned that obedience, and not a
zealous will to learn, was what was expected of us. Too much eagerness to learn could easily be seen as a threat to white
authority. When we entered racist, desegregated, white schools we left a world where teachers believed
that to educate black children rightly would require a political commitment. Now, we were mainly
taught by white teachers whose lessons reinforced racist stereotypes. For black children, education
was no longer about the practice of freedom. Realizing this, I lost my love of school. The classroom
was no longer a place of pleasure or ecstasy. School was still a political place, since we were always
having to counter white racist assumptions that we were genetically infe· rior, never as capable as
white peers, even unable to learn. Yet, the politics were no longer counter-hegemonic. We were
always and only responding and reacting to white folks.
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Pedagogy Turns Case
MUST FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY—the use of educational spaces for opportunistic attempts at material
change makes impossible radical liberation in the academy
hooks 94 (bell, Prof @ Oberlin College, name intentionally left un-capitalized, Teaching to Transgress:
Education as the Practice of Freedom, p. 11-12)//LA
These essays reflect my experience of critical discussions with teachers, students, and individuals who have entered my classes to observe.
Multilayered, then, these
essays are meant to stand as testimony, bearing witness to education as the
practice of freedom. Long before a public ever recognized me as a thinker or writer, I was recognized in the classroom by students seen by them as a teacher who worked hard to create a dynamic learning experience for all of us. Nowadays, I am rec- ognized more for
insurgent intellectual practice. Indeed, the
academic public that I encounter at my lectures always shows surprise
when I speak intimately and deeply about the class- room. That public seemed particularly surprised
when I said that I was working on a collection of essays about teaching. This surprise is a sad reminder
of the way teaching is seen as a duller, less valuable aspect of the academic profession. This
perspective on teaching is a common one. Yet it must be challenged if we are to meet the needs of
our students, if we are to restore to education and the classroom excitement about ideas and the will
to learn. There is a serious crisis in education. Students often do not want to learn and teachers do not
want to teach. More than - ever before in the recent history of this nation, educators are compelled to
confront the biases that have shaped teaching practices in our society and to create new ways of
knowing, dif- ferent strategies for the sharing of knowledge. We cannot ad- dress this crisis if
progressive critical thinkers and social critics act as though teaching is not a subject worthy of our
regard. The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy. For years it has
been a place where education has been undermined by teachers and students alike who seek to use it
as a platform for opportunistic concerns rather than as a place to learn. With these essays, I add my
voice to the collec- tive call for renewal and rejuvenation in our teaching practices. Urging all of us to
open our minds and hearts so that we can know beyond the boundaries of what is acceptable, so that
we can think and rethink, so that we can create new visions' I celebrate teaching that enables
transgressions-a movement against and beyond boundaries. It is that movement which makes
education the practice of freedom.
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Sexual Politics
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Top
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Sexual Politics K – 1nc
The 1AC’s starting point for political liberation is built upon the subjugation of women; the political
sphere is always already masculine – politics that doesn’t begin with the question of sexuality is
doomed to fail
Millett 69 (Kate Millett, Kate Millett, in full Katherine Murray Millett (born Sept. 14, 1934, St. Paul, Minn., U.S.), American feminist, author, and artist, an early and influential figure in the women’s liberation
movement, whose first book, Sexual Politics, began her exploration of the dynamics of power in relation to gender and sexuality.¶ Millett earned a bachelor’s degree with honours in 1956 from the University of Minnesota, where
she was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Two years later she was awarded a master’s degree with first-class honours from the University of Oxford. After teaching English briefly at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro,
Millett moved to New York City to pursue a career as an artist. To support herself she taught kindergarten in Harlem. In 1961 she moved to Tokyo, where she taught English at Waseda University and also studied sculpting. By the
time she married Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura in 1965, however, Millett was back in New York City, teaching English and philosophy at Barnard College. (The couple divorced in 1985.) At the same time, she pursued a
doctorate at Columbia University, and in 1970 she was awarded a Ph.D. with distinction. Her thesis, a work combining literary analysis with sociology and anthropology, was published that same year as Sexual Politics. The book,
which defined the goals and strategies of the feminist movement, was an overnight success, transforming Millett into a public figure.¶ The celebrity came at a personal cost, as Millett revealed in a 1974 autobiographical work,
Flying, which explains the torment she suffered as a result of her views in general and of her disclosure that she was a lesbian in particular. She wrote two more autobiographical books, Sita (1977) and A.D.: A Memoir (1995). The
Basement (1979) is a factual account of a young woman’s abuse, torture, and murder at the hands of a group of teenagers led by an older woman who had been appointed her protector. Millett’s subsequent books dealt with the
political oppression in Iran after the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (Going to Iran, 1982), with her own personal experiences as a psychiatric patient (The Loony Bin Trip, 1990), with the issue of cruelty in general (The Politics
of Cruelty, 1994), and with the problems of aging, as seen through the struggles of her mother (Mother Millett, 2001).
This is from an actual book, “ Sexual Politics” Ch.
2// SC)
The three instances of sexual description we have examined so far were remarkable for the large part which notions of ascendancy and power
played within them. Coitus can scarcely be said to take place in a vacuum; although of itself it appears a biological and physical activity, it is
set so deeply within the larger context of human affairs that it serves as a charged microcosm of the
variety of attitudes and values to which culture subscribes. Among other things, it may serve as a model of
sexual politics on an individual or personal plane.¶ But of course the transition from such scenes of intimacy to a wider
context of political reference is a great step indeed. In introducing the term "sexual politics," one must first answer the inevitable question
"Can the relationship between the sexes be viewed in a political light at all?" The answer depends on how one
defines politics.¶ [The American Heritage Dictionary's fourth definition is fairly approximate: "methods or tactics involved in managing a state
or government." One might expand this to a set of stratagems designed to maintain a system. If one understands patriarchy to be an institution
perpetuated by such techniques of control, one has a working definition of how politics is conceived in this essay].¶ This essay does not define
the political as that relatively narrow and exclusive world of meetings, chairmen, and parties. The
term "politics" shall refer to
power-structured relationships, arrangements whereby one group of persons is controlled by
another. By way of parenthesis one might add that although an ideal politics might simply be conceived of as the
arrangement of human life on agreeable and rational principles from whence the entire notion of
power over others should be banished, one must confess that this is not what constitutes the political as we know it, and it is to
this that we must address ourselves.¶ The following sketch, which might be described as "notes toward a theory of patriarchy," will
attempt to prove that sex is a status category with political implications. Something of a pioneering effort, it must perforce be both tentative
and imperfect. Because the intention is to provide an overall description, statements must be generalised, exceptions neglected, and
subheadings overlapping and, to some degree, arbitrary as well.¶ The
word "politics" is enlisted here when speaking of
the sexes primarily because such a word is eminently useful in outlining the real nature of their
relative status, historically and at the present. It is opportune, perhaps today even mandatory, that we develop a more
relevant psychology and philosophy of power relationships beyond the simple conceptual framework provided
by our traditional formal politics. Indeed, it may be imperative that we give some attention to defining a theory of politics which
treats of power relationships on grounds less conventional than those to which we are accustomed. I have therefore found it pertinent to
define them on grounds of personal contact and interaction between members of well-defined and coherent groups: races, castes, classes, and
For it is precisely because certain groups have no representation in a number of recognised
political structures that their position tends to be so stable, their oppression so continuous. ¶ In America,
recent events have forced us to acknowledge at last that the relationship between the races is indeed a political one
which involves the general control of one collectivity, defined by birth, over another collectivity, also defined by birth. Groups
who rule by birthright are fast disappearing, yet there remains one ancient and universal scheme for the
domination of one birth group by another - the scheme that prevails in the area of sex. The study of racism
has convinced us that a truly political state of affairs operates between the races to perpetuate a series of
oppressive circumstances. The subordinated group has inadequate redress through existing political
institutions, and is deterred thereby from organising into conventional political struggle and
opposition.¶ Quite in the same manner, a disinterested examination of our system of sexual relationship must point out
that the situation between the sexes now, and throughout history, is a case of that phenomenon Max Weber defined as herrschaft,
a relationship of dominance and subordinance. What goes largely unexamined, often even unacknowledged (yet is
institutionalised nonetheless) in our social order, is the birthright priority whereby males rule females. Through this system a most
sexes.
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ingenious form of "interior colonisation" has been achieved. It is one which tends moreover to be
sturdier than any form of segregation, and more rigorous than class stratification, more uniform,
certainly more enduring.
However muted its present appearance may be, sexual dominion obtains nevertheless as perhaps the most
pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its most fundamental concept of power.¶ This
is so because our society, like all other
a patriarchy. The fact is evident at once if one recalls that the military, industry, technology, universities, science,
political office, and finance - in short, every avenue of power within the society, including the coercive force of the police, is
entirely in male hands. As the essence of politics is power, such realisation cannot fail to carry impact. What lingers
historical civilisations, is
of supernatural authority, the Deity, "His" ministry, together with the ethics and values, the philosophy and art of our culture - its very
civilisation - as T. S. Eliot once observed, is of male manufacture.¶ If one takes patriarchal government to be the institution whereby that half of
the populace which is female is controlled by that half which is male, the principles of patriarchy appear to be two fold: male
shall
dominate female, elder male shall dominate younger. However, just as with any human institution, there is frequently
a distance between the real and the ideal; contradictions and exceptions do exist within the system.
While patriarchy as an institution is a social constant so deeply entrenched as to run through all other political, social, or economic forms,
whether of caste or class, feudality or bureaucracy, just as it pervades all major religions, it also exhibits great variety in history and locale. In
democracies, for example, females have often held no office or do so (as now) in such minuscule numbers as to be
below even token representation. Aristocracy, on the other hand, with its emphasis upon the magic and dynastic properties of
blood, may at times permit women to hold power. The principle of rule by elder males is violated even more frequently. Bearing in mind the
variation and degree in patriarchy - as say between Saudi Arabia and Sweden, Indonesia and Red China - we also recognise our own form in the
U.S. and Europe to be much altered and attenuated by the reforms described in the next chapter.
The alt is to reject affirmative fiat and enable discussion to create a political space of coherent groups
and dismantle patriarchal norms that reinforce oppression, sexism, and racism
Millett 69 (Kate Millett, Kate Millett, in full Katherine Murray Millett (born Sept. 14, 1934, St. Paul, Minn., U.S.), American feminist, author, and artist, an early and influential figure in the women’s liberation
movement, whose first book, Sexual Politics, began her exploration of the dynamics of power in relation to gender and sexuality.¶ Millett earned a bachelor’s degree with honours in 1956 from the University of Minnesota, where
she was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Two years later she was awarded a master’s degree with first-class honours from the University of Oxford. After teaching English briefly at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro,
Millett moved to New York City to pursue a career as an artist. To support herself she taught kindergarten in Harlem. In 1961 she moved to Tokyo, where she taught English at Waseda University and also studied sculpting. By the
time she married Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura in 1965, however, Millett was back in New York City, teaching English and philosophy at Barnard College. (The couple divorced in 1985.) At the same time, she pursued a
doctorate at Columbia University, and in 1970 she was awarded a Ph.D. with distinction. Her thesis, a work combining literary analysis with sociology and anthropology, was published that same year as Sexual Politics. The book,
which defined the goals and strategies of the feminist movement, was an overnight success, transforming Millett into a public figure.¶ The celebrity came at a personal cost, as Millett revealed in a 1974 autobiographical work,
Flying, which explains the torment she suffered as a result of her views in general and of her disclosure that she was a lesbian in particular. She wrote two more autobiographical books, Sita (1977) and A.D.: A Memoir (1995). The
Basement (1979) is a factual account of a young woman’s abuse, torture, and murder at the hands of a group of teenagers led by an older woman who had been appointed her protector. Millett’s subsequent books dealt with the
political oppression in Iran after the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (Going to Iran, 1982), with her own personal experiences as a psychiatric patient (The Loony Bin Trip, 1990), with the issue of cruelty in general (The Politics
This is from an actual book, “ Sexual Politics” Ch.
2// SC)
Is it possible to regard the relation of the sexes in a political light at all? It depends on how one defines
politics. I do not define the political area here as that narrow and exclusive sector known as institutional
or official politics of the Democrat or Republican – we have all reason to be tired and suspicious of them.
By politics I mean power structured relationships, the entire arrangement whereby one group of
people is governed by another, one group is dominant and the other subordinate.¶ It is time we
developed a more cogent and relevant psychology and philosophy of power relationships not yet
considered in out institutional politics. It is time we gave attention to defining a theory of politics which
treats of power relationships on the less formal than establishmentarian grounds of personal
intercourse between members of well defined and coherent groups – races, castes, classes and sexes. It
is precisely because such groups have no representation in formal political structures that their
oppression is so entire and so continuous.¶ In the recent past, we have been forced to acknowledge
that the relationship between the races in the United States is indeed a political one – and one of the
control of collectivity defined by birth, or another collectivity also defined by birth. Groups who rule by
birth are fast disappearing in the West and white supremacists are fated to go the way of aristocrats and
other extinct upper castes. We have yet one ancient and universal arrangement for the political
exploitation of one birth group by another – in the area of sex.¶ Just as the study of racism has
convinced as that there exists a truly political relationship between races, and an oppressive situation
from which the subordinated group had no redress through formal political structures whereby they
might organize into conventional political struggle and opposition – just so any intelligent and
of Cruelty, 1994), and with the problems of aging, as seen through the struggles of her mother (Mother Millett, 2001).
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objective examination of our system of sexual politics or sex role structure will prove that the
relationship between the sexes now – and throughout history – is one of what Max Weber once termed
“Herrschaft” – or dominance and subordination – the birthright control of one group by another-the
male to rule and the female to be ruled. Women have been placed in the position of minority status
throughout history and even after the grudging extension of certain minimal rights of citizenship and
suffrage at the beginning of this century. It is fatuous to suppose that women – white or black – have
any greater representation now that they vote – than that they ever did. Previous history has made it
clear that the possession of the vote for 100 years has done the black man precious little good at all.¶
Why, when this arrangement of male rule and control of our society is so obvious – why is it never
acknowledged or discussed? Partly, I suspect because such discussion is regarded as dangerous in the
extreme and because a culture does not discuss its most basic assumptions and most cherished
bigotries. Why does no one ever remark that the military, industry,the universities, the sciences,
political office and finance (despite absurd declarations to the contrary on the evidence that some little
old lady owns stock over which she has no control). Why does no one ever remark that every avenue of
power in our culture including the repressive forces of the police – entirely in male hands? Money,
guns, authority itself, are male provinces. Even God is male – and a white male at that.¶ The reasons for
this gigantic evasion of the very facts of our situation are many and obvious. They are also rather
amusing. Let’s look at a few of the thousand defenses the masculine culture has built against any
infringement or even exposure of its control: is to react with ridicule and the primitive mechanism of
laughter and denial. Sex is funny – it’s dirty – and it is something women have. Men are not sexual
beings – they are people – they are humanity. Therefore, any rational discussion of the realities of
sexual life degenerate as quickly as men can make them into sniggering sessions, where through cliché
so ancient as to have almost ritual value, women who might be anxious to carry on an adult dialogue
are bullied back into “their place".
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Links
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Link – Anti-Cap Affs
Focusing on class liberation without first addressing the subject position of the female in the economy
is doomed to fail and props up racism and sexism
Millett 69 (Kate Millett, Kate Millett, in full Katherine Murray Millett (born Sept. 14, 1934, St. Paul, Minn., U.S.), American feminist, author, and artist, an early and influential figure in the women’s liberation
movement, whose first book, Sexual Politics, began her exploration of the dynamics of power in relation to gender and sexuality.¶ Millett earned a bachelor’s degree with honours in 1956 from the University of Minnesota, where
she was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Two years later she was awarded a master’s degree with first-class honours from the University of Oxford. After teaching English briefly at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro,
Millett moved to New York City to pursue a career as an artist. To support herself she taught kindergarten in Harlem. In 1961 she moved to Tokyo, where she taught English at Waseda University and also studied sculpting. By the
time she married Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura in 1965, however, Millett was back in New York City, teaching English and philosophy at Barnard College. (The couple divorced in 1985.) At the same time, she pursued a
doctorate at Columbia University, and in 1970 she was awarded a Ph.D. with distinction. Her thesis, a work combining literary analysis with sociology and anthropology, was published that same year as Sexual Politics. The book,
which defined the goals and strategies of the feminist movement, was an overnight success, transforming Millett into a public figure.¶ The celebrity came at a personal cost, as Millett revealed in a 1974 autobiographical work,
Flying, which explains the torment she suffered as a result of her views in general and of her disclosure that she was a lesbian in particular. She wrote two more autobiographical books, Sita (1977) and A.D.: A Memoir (1995). The
Basement (1979) is a factual account of a young woman’s abuse, torture, and murder at the hands of a group of teenagers led by an older woman who had been appointed her protector. Millett’s subsequent books dealt with the
political oppression in Iran after the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (Going to Iran, 1982), with her own personal experiences as a psychiatric patient (The Loony Bin Trip, 1990), with the issue of cruelty in general (The Politics
This is from an actual book, “ Sexual Politics” Ch.
2// SC)
IV Class
It is in the area of class that the caste-like status of the female within patriarchy is most liable to
confusion, for sexual status often operates in a superficially confusing way within the variable of class. In
a society where status is dependent upon the economic, social, and educational circumstances of class,
it is possible for certain females to appear to stand higher than some males. Yet not when one looks
more closely at the subject. This is perhaps easier to see by means of analogy: a black doctor or lawyer
has higher social status than a poor white sharecropper. But race, itself a caste system which
subsumes class, persuades the latter citizen that he belongs to a higher order of life, just as it
oppresses the black professional in spirit, whatever his material success may be. In much the same
manner, a truck driver or butcher has always his "manhood" to fall back upon. Should this final vanity be
offended, he may contemplate more violent methods. The literature of the past thirty years provides a
staggering number of incidents in which the caste of virility triumphs over the social status of wealthy
or even educated women. In literary contexts one has to deal here with wish-fulfilment. Incidents from
life (bullying, obscene, or hostile remarks) are probably another sort of psychological gesture of
ascendancy. Both convey more hope than reality, for class divisions are generally quite impervious to
the hostility of individuals. And yet while the existence of class division is not seriously threatened by
such expressions of enmity, the existence of sexual hierarchy has been re-affirmed and mobilised to
"punish" the female quite effectively.¶ The function of class or ethnic mores in patriarchy is largely a
matter of how overtly displayed or how loudly enunciated the general ethic of masculine supremacy
allows itself to become. Here one is confronted by what appears to be a paradox: while in the lower
social strata, the male is more likely to claim authority on the strength of his sex rank alone, he is
actually obliged more often to share power with the women of his class who are economically
productive; whereas in the middle and upper classes, there is less tendency to assert a blunt
patriarchal dominance, as men who enjoy such status have more power in any case.¶ It is generally
accepted that Western patriarchy has been much softened by the concepts of courtly and romantic
love. While this is certainly true, such influence has also been vastly overestimated. In comparison
with the candour of "machismo" or oriental behaviour, one realises how much of a concession
traditional chivalrous behaviour represents - a sporting kind of reparation to allow the subordinate
female certain means of saving face. While a palliative to the injustice of woman's social position,
chivalry is also a technique for disguising it. One must acknowledge that the chivalrous stance is a game
the master group plays in elevating its subject to pedestal level. Historians of courtly love stress the fact
that the raptures of the poets had no effect upon the legal or economic standing of women, and very
little upon their social status. As the sociologist Hugo Beigel has observed, both the courtly and the
romantic versions of love are "grants" which the male concedes out of his total powers. Both have
had the effect of obscuring the patriarchal character of Western culture and m their general tendency
to attribute impossible virtues to women, have ended by confining them in a narrow and often
of Cruelty, 1994), and with the problems of aging, as seen through the struggles of her mother (Mother Millett, 2001).
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remarkably conscribing sphere of behaviour. It was a Victorian habit, for example, to insist the female
assume the function of serving as the male's conscience and living the life of goodness he found tedious
but felt someone ought to do anyway.¶ The concept of romantic love affords a means of emotional
manipulation which the male is free to exploit, since love is the only circumstance in which the female
is (ideologically) pardoned for sexual activity. And convictions of romantic love are convenient to both
parties since this is often the only condition in which the female can overcome the far more powerful
conditioning she has received toward sexual inhibition. Romantic love also obscures the realities of
female status and the burden of economic dependency. As to "chivalry," such gallant gesture as still
resides in the middle classes has degenerated to a tired ritualism, which scarcely serves to mask the
status situation of the present.¶ Within patriarchy one must often deal with contradictions which ale
simply a matter of class style. David Riesman has noted that as the working class has been assimilated
into the middle class, so have its sexual mores and attitudes. The fairly blatant male chauvinism which
was once a province of the lower class or immigrant male has been absorbed and taken on a certain
glamour through a number of contemporary figures, who have made it, and a certain number of other
working-class male attitudes, part of a new, and at the moment, fashionable life style. So influential is
this working class ideal of brute virility (or more accurately, a literary and therefore middle-class version
of it) become in our time that it may replace more discreet and "gentlemanly" attitudes of the past.¶
One of the chief effects of class within patriarchy is to set one woman against another, in the past
creating a lively antagonism between whore and matron, and in the present between career woman
and housewife. One envies the other her "security" and prestige, while the envied yearns beyond the
confines of respectability for what she takes to be the other's freedom, adventure, and contact with the
great world. Through the multiple advantages of the double standard, the male participates in both
worlds, empowered by his superior social and economic resources to play the estranged women against
each other as rivals. One might also recognise subsidiary status categories among women: not only is
virtue class, but beauty and age as well.¶ Perhaps, in the final analysis, it is possible to argue that women
tend to transcend the usual class stratifications in patriarchy, for whatever the class of her birth and
education, the female has fewer permanent class association than does the male. Economic
dependency renders her affiliations with any class a tangential, vicarious, and temporary matter.
Aristotle observed that the only slave to whom a commoner might lay claim was his woman, and the
service of an unpaid domestic still provides working-class males with a "cushion" against the buffets of
the class system which incidentally provides them with some of the psychic luxuries of the leisure class.
Thrown upon their own resources, few women rise above working class in personal prestige and
economic power, and women as a group do not enjoy many of the interests and benefits any class may
offer its male members. Women have therefore less of an investment in the class system. But it is
important to understand that as with any group whose existence is parasitic to its rulers, women are a
dependency class who live on surplus And their marginal life frequently renders them conservative, for
like all persons in their situation (slaves are a classic example here) they identify their own survival with
the prosperity of those who feed them. The hope of seeking liberating radical solutions of their own
seems too remote for the majority to dare contemplate and remains so until consciousness on the
subject is raised.¶ As race is emerging as one of the final variables in sexual politics, it is pertinent,
especially in a discussion of modern literature, to devote a few words to it as well. Traditionally, the
white male has been accustomed to concede the female of his own race, in her capacity as "his
woman" a higher status than that ascribed to the black male. Yet as white racist ideology is exposed
and begins to erode, racism's older protective attitudes toward (white) women also begin to give way.
And the priorities of maintaining male supremacy might outweigh even those of white supremacy;
sexism may be more endemic in our own society than racism. For example, one notes in authors whom
we would now term overtly racist, such as D. H. Lawrence - whose contempt for what he so often
designates as inferior breeds is unabashed - instances where the lower-caste male is brought on to
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master or humiliate the white man's own insubordinate mate. Needless to say, the female of the nonwhite races does not figure in such tales save as an exemplum of "true" womanhood's servility,
worthy of imitation by other less carefully instructed females. Contemporary white sociology often
operates under a similar patriarchal bias when its rhetoric inclines toward the assertion that the
"matriarchal" (e.g. matrifocal) aspect of black society and the "castration" of the black male are the
most deplorable symptoms of black oppression in white racist society, with the implication that racial
inequity is capable of solution by a restoration of masculine authority. Whatever the facts of the
matter may be, it can also be suggested that analysis of this kind presupposes patriarchal values
without questioning them, and tends to obscure both the true character of and the responsibility for
racist injustice toward black humanity of both sexes.
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Link – Econ Education 1nc**
The Aff’s use of an educational space to advance an economic cause overlooks the legacy of
oppression of the feminine that always already foregrounds that dialogue – this promotes patriarchy
and subjugation of women
Millett 69 (Kate Millett, Kate Millett, in full Katherine Murray Millett (born Sept. 14, 1934, St. Paul, Minn., U.S.), American feminist, author, and artist, an early and influential figure in the women’s liberation
movement, whose first book, Sexual Politics, began her exploration of the dynamics of power in relation to gender and sexuality.¶ Millett earned a bachelor’s degree with honours in 1956 from the University of Minnesota, where
she was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Two years later she was awarded a master’s degree with first-class honours from the University of Oxford. After teaching English briefly at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro,
Millett moved to New York City to pursue a career as an artist. To support herself she taught kindergarten in Harlem. In 1961 she moved to Tokyo, where she taught English at Waseda University and also studied sculpting. By the
time she married Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura in 1965, however, Millett was back in New York City, teaching English and philosophy at Barnard College. (The couple divorced in 1985.) At the same time, she pursued a
doctorate at Columbia University, and in 1970 she was awarded a Ph.D. with distinction. Her thesis, a work combining literary analysis with sociology and anthropology, was published that same year as Sexual Politics. The book,
which defined the goals and strategies of the feminist movement, was an overnight success, transforming Millett into a public figure.¶ The celebrity came at a personal cost, as Millett revealed in a 1974 autobiographical work,
Flying, which explains the torment she suffered as a result of her views in general and of her disclosure that she was a lesbian in particular. She wrote two more autobiographical books, Sita (1977) and A.D.: A Memoir (1995). The
Basement (1979) is a factual account of a young woman’s abuse, torture, and murder at the hands of a group of teenagers led by an older woman who had been appointed her protector. Millett’s subsequent books dealt with the
political oppression in Iran after the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (Going to Iran, 1982), with her own personal experiences as a psychiatric patient (The Loony Bin Trip, 1990), with the issue of cruelty in general (The Politics
of Cruelty, 1994), and with the problems of aging, as seen through the struggles of her mother (Mother Millett, 2001).
This is from an actual book, “ Sexual Politics” Ch.
2// SC)
One of the most efficient branches of patriarchal government lies in the agency of its economic hold
over its female subjects. In traditional patriarchy, women, as non-persons without legal standing were
permitted no actual economic existence as they could neither own nor earn in their own right. Since
women have always worked in patriarchal societies, often at the most routine or strenuous tasks, what
is at issue here is not labor but economic reward. In modern reformed patriarchal societies, women
have certain economic rights, yet the "woman's work" in which some two thirds of the female
population in most developed countries are engaged is work that is not paid for. In a money economy
where autonomy and prestige depend upon currency, this is a fact of great importance. In general, the
position of women in patriarchy is a continuous function of their economic dependence. Just as their
social position is vicarious and achieved (often on a temporary or marginal basis) though males, their
relation to the economy is also typically vicarious or tangential.¶ Of that third of women who are
employed, their average wages represent only half of the average income enjoyed by men. These are
the U. S. Department of Labor statistics for average year-round income: white male, $6704, non-white
male $4277, white female, $3991, and non-white female $2816. The disparity is made somewhat more
remarkable because the educational level of women is generally higher than that of men in
comparable income brackets. Further, the kinds of employment open to women in modem patriarchies
are, with few exceptions, menial, ill paid and without status.¶ In modem capitalist countries women also
function as a reserve labor force, enlisted in times of war and expansion and discharged in times of
peace and recession. In this role American women have replaced immigrant labor and now compete
with the racial minorities. In socialist countries the female labor force is generally in the lower ranks as
well, despite a high incidence of women in certain professions such as medicine. The status and rewards
of such professions have declined as women enter them, and they are permitted to enter such areas
under a rationale that society or the state (and socialist countries are also patriarchal) rather than
woman is served by such activity.¶ Since woman's independence in economic life is viewed with distrust,
prescriptive agencies of all kinds (religion, psychology, advertising, etc.) continuously admonish or even
inveigh against the employment of middle-class women, particularly mothers. The toil of working class
women is more readily accepted as "need," if not always by the working-class itself, at least by the
middle-class. And to be sure, it serves the purpose of making available cheap labor in factory and lowergrade service and clerical positions. Its wages and tasks are so unremunerative that, unlike more
prestigious employment for women, it fails to threaten patriarchy financially or psychologically.
Women who are employed have two jobs since the burden of domestic service and child care is
unrelieved either by day care or other social agencies, or by the cooperation of husbands. The
invention of labor-saving devices has had no appreciable effect on the duration, even if it has affected
the quality of their drudgery. Discrimination in matters of hiring, maternity, wages and hours is very
great. In the U. S. a recent law forbidding discrimination in employment, the first and only federal
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legislative guarantee of rights granted to American women since the vote, is not enforced, has not been
enforced since its passage, and was not enacted to be enforced.¶ In terms of industry and production,
the situation of women is in many ways comparable both to colonial and to pre-industrial peoples.
Although they achieved their first economic autonomy in the industrial revolution and now constitute a
large and underpaid factory population, women do not participate directly in technology or in
production. What they customarily produce (domestic and personal service) has no market value and is,
as it were, pre-capital. Nor, where they do participate in production of commodities through
employment, do they own or control or even comprehend the process in which they participate. An
example might make this clearer: the refrigerator is a machine all women use, some assemble it in
factories, and a very few with scientific education understand its principles of operation. Yet the heavy
industries which roll its steel and produce the dies for its parts are in male hands. The same is true of the
typewriter, the auto, etc. Now, while knowledge is fragmented even among the male population,
collectively they could reconstruct any technological device. But in the absence of males, women's
distance from technology today is sufficiently great that it is doubtful that they could replace or repair
such machines on any significant scale. Woman's distance from higher technology is even greater:
large-scale building construction; the development of computers; the moon shot, occur as further
examples. If knowledge is power, power is also knowledge, and a large factor in their subordinate
position is the fairly systematic ignorance patriarchy imposes upon women.¶ Since education and
economy are so closely related in the advanced nations, it is significant that the general level and style
of higher education for women, particularly in their many remaining segregated institutions, is closer to
that of Renaissance humanism than to the skills of mid-twentieth-century scientific and technological
society. Traditionally patriarchy permitted occasional minimal literacy to women while higher education
was closed to them. While modern patriarchies have, fairly recently, opened all educational levels to
women, the kind and quality of education is not the same for each sex. This difference is of course
apparent in early socialisation but it persists and enters into higher education as well. Universities, once
places of scholarship and the training of a few professionals, now also produce the personnel of a
technocracy. This is not the case with regard to women. Their own colleges typically produce neither
scholars nor professionals nor technocrats. Nor are they funded by government and corporations as are
male colleges and those co-educational colleges and universities whose primary function is the
education of males.¶ As patriarchy enforces a temperamental imbalance of personality traits between
the sexes, its educational institutions, segregated or coeducational, accept a cultural programming
toward the generally operative division between "masculine" and "feminine" subject matter,
assigning the humanities and certain social sciences (at least in their lower or marginal branches) to the
female - and science and technology, the professions, business and engineering to the male. Of course
the balance of employment, prestige and reward at present lie with the latter. Control of these fields
is very eminently a matter of political power. One might also point out how the exclusive dominance
of males in the more prestigious fields directly serves the interests of {patriarchal power in industry,
government, and the military. And since patriarchy encourages an imbalance in human temperament
along sex lines, both divisions of learning (science and the humanities) reflect this imbalance. The
humanities, because not exclusively male, suffer in prestige: the sciences, technology, and business,
because they are nearly exclusively male reflect the deformation of the "masculine" personality, e.g., a
certain predatory or aggressive character.¶ In keeping with the inferior sphere of culture to which
women in patriarchy have always been restricted, the present encouragement of their "artistic"
interests through study of the humanities is hardly more than an extension of the "accomplishments"
they once cultivated in preparation for the marriage market. Achievement in the arts and humanities is
reserved, now, as it has been historically, for males. Token representation, be it Susan Sontag's or Lady
Murasaki's, does not vitiate this rule.
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Link – Economics/Growth
The 1AC focuses on the national economy while overlooking the everyday economies of violence that
block female advancement and uphold patriarchal dominance
Millett 69 (Kate Millett, Kate Millett, in full Katherine Murray Millett (born Sept. 14, 1934, St. Paul, Minn., U.S.), American feminist, author, and artist, an early and influential figure in the women’s liberation
movement, whose first book, Sexual Politics, began her exploration of the dynamics of power in relation to gender and sexuality.¶ Millett earned a bachelor’s degree with honours in 1956 from the University of Minnesota, where
she was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Two years later she was awarded a master’s degree with first-class honours from the University of Oxford. After teaching English briefly at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro,
Millett moved to New York City to pursue a career as an artist. To support herself she taught kindergarten in Harlem. In 1961 she moved to Tokyo, where she taught English at Waseda University and also studied sculpting. By the
time she married Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura in 1965, however, Millett was back in New York City, teaching English and philosophy at Barnard College. (The couple divorced in 1985.) At the same time, she pursued a
doctorate at Columbia University, and in 1970 she was awarded a Ph.D. with distinction. Her thesis, a work combining literary analysis with sociology and anthropology, was published that same year as Sexual Politics. The book,
which defined the goals and strategies of the feminist movement, was an overnight success, transforming Millett into a public figure.¶ The celebrity came at a personal cost, as Millett revealed in a 1974 autobiographical work,
Flying, which explains the torment she suffered as a result of her views in general and of her disclosure that she was a lesbian in particular. She wrote two more autobiographical books, Sita (1977) and A.D.: A Memoir (1995). The
Basement (1979) is a factual account of a young woman’s abuse, torture, and murder at the hands of a group of teenagers led by an older woman who had been appointed her protector. Millett’s subsequent books dealt with the
political oppression in Iran after the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (Going to Iran, 1982), with her own personal experiences as a psychiatric patient (The Loony Bin Trip, 1990), with the issue of cruelty in general (The Politics
This is from an actual book, “ Sexual Politics” Ch.
2// SC)
III Sociological
Patriarchy's chief institution is the family. It is both a mirror of and a connection with the larger society;
a patriarchal unit within a patriarchal whole. Mediating between the individual and the social structure,
the family effects control and conformity where political and other authorities are insufficient. As the
fundamental instrument and the foundation unit of patriarchal society the family and its roles are
prototypical. Serving as an agent of the larger society, the family not only encourages its own members
to adjust and conform, but acts as a unit in the government of the patriarchal state which rules its
citizens through its family heads. Even in patriarchal societies where they are granted legal citizenship,
women tend to be ruled through the family alone and have little or no formal relation to the state.¶ As
co-operation between the family and the larger society is essential, else both would fall apart, the fate
of three patriarchal institutions, the family, society, and the state are interrelated. In most forms of
patriarchy this has generally led to the granting of religious support in statements such as the Catholic
precept that "the father is head of the family," or Judaism's delegation of quasi-priestly authority to the
male parent. Secular governments today also confirm this, as in census practices of designating the male
as head of household, taxation, passports etc. Female heads of household tend to be regarded as
undesirable; the phenomenon is a trait of poverty or misfortune. The Confucian prescription that the
relationship between ruler and subject is parallel to that of father and children points to the essentially
feudal character of the patriarchal family (and conversely, the familial character of feudalism) even in
modern democracies.¶ Traditionally, patriarchy granted the father nearly total ownership over wife or
wives and children, including the powers of physical abuse and often even those of murder and sale.
Classically, as head of the family the father is both begetter and owner in a system in which kinship is
property. Yet in strict patriarchy, kinship is acknowledged only through association with the male line.
Agnation excludes the descendants of the female line from property right and often even from
recognition. The first formulation of the patriarchal family was made by Sir Henry Maine, a nineteenthcentury historian of ancient jurisprudence. Maine argues that the patriarchal basis of kinship is put in
terms of dominion rather than blood; wives, though outsiders, are assimilated into the line, while
sisters sons are excluded. Basing his definition of the family upon the patria potestes of Rome, Maine
defined it as follows: "The eldest male parent is absolutely supreme in his household. His dominion
extends to life and death and is as unqualified over his children and their houses as over his slaves." In
the archaic patriarchal family "the group consists of animate and inanimate property, of wife, children,
slaves, land and goods, all held together by subjection to the despotic authority of the eldest male."¶
McLennon's rebuttal to Maine argued that the Roman patria potestes was an extreme form of
patriarchy and by no means, as Maine had imagined, universal. Evidence of matrilineal societies
(preliterate societies in Africa and elsewhere) refute Maine's assumption of the universality of agnation.
Certainly Maine's central argument, as to the primeval or state of nature character of patriarchy is but a
rather naif rationalisation of an institution Maine tended to exalt. The assumption of patriarchy's
of Cruelty, 1994), and with the problems of aging, as seen through the struggles of her mother (Mother Millett, 2001).
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primeval character is contradicted by much evidence which points to the conclusion that full patriarchal
authority, particularly that of the patria potestes is a late development and the total erosion of female
status was likely to be gradual as has been its recovery.¶ In contemporary patriarchies the male's de
jure priority has recently been modified through the granting of divorce protection, citizenship, and
property to women. Their chattel status continues in their loss of name, their obligation to adopt the
husband's domicile, and the general legal assumption that marriage involves an exchange of the
female's domestic service and (sexual) consortium in return for financial support.¶ The chief contribution
of the family in patriarchy is the socialisation of the young (largely through the example and admonition
of their parents) into patriarchal ideology's prescribed attitudes toward the categories of role,
temperament, and status. Although slight differences of definition depend here upon the parents' grasp
of cultural values, the general effect of uniformity is achieved, to be further reinforced through peers,
schools, media, and other learning sources, formal and informal. While we may niggle over the balance
of authority between the personalities of various households, one must remember that the entire
culture supports masculine authority in all areas of life and - outside of the home - permits the female
none at all.¶ To insure that its crucial functions of reproduction and socialisation of the young take place
only within its confines, the patriarchal family insists upon legitimacy. Bronislaw Malinowski describes
this as "the principle of legitimacy" formulating it as an insistence that "no child should be brought
into the world without a man - and one man at that - assuming the role of sociological father." By this
apparently consistent and universal prohibition (whose penalties vary by class and in accord with the
expected operations of the double standard) patriarchy decrees that the status of both child and
mother is primarily or ultimately dependent upon the male. And since it is not only his social status,
but even his economic power upon which his dependents generally rely, the position of the masculine
figure within the family - as without - is materially, as well as ideologically, extremely strong.¶ Although
there is no biological reason why the two central functions of the family (socialisation and
reproduction) need be inseparable from or even take place within it, revolutionary or utopian efforts
to remove these functions from the family have been so frustrated, so beset by difficulties, that most
experiments so far have involved a gradual return to tradition. This is strong evidence of how basic a
form patriarchy is within all societies, and of how pervasive its effects upon family members. It is
perhaps also an admonition that change undertaken without a thorough understanding of the
sociopolitical institution to be changed is hardly productive. And yet radical social change cannot take
place without having an effect upon patriarchy. And not simply because it is the political form which
subordinates such a large percentage of the population (women and youth) but because it serves as a
citadel of property and traditional interests. Marriages are financial alliances, and each household
operates as an economic entity much like a corporation. As one student of the family states it, "the
family is the keystone of the stratification system, the social mechanism by which it is maintained."¶
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Link – Hegemony
Heg turn The declaration of being at war makes rape, assault, and prostitution be ignored in the face
of masculine propaganda about castration of power
Millett 69 (Kate Millett, Kate Millett, in full Katherine Murray Millett (born Sept. 14, 1934, St. Paul, Minn., U.S.), American feminist, author, and artist, an early and influential figure in the women’s liberation
movement, whose first book, Sexual Politics, began her exploration of the dynamics of power in relation to gender and sexuality.¶ Millett earned a bachelor’s degree with honours in 1956 from the University of Minnesota, where
she was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Two years later she was awarded a master’s degree with first-class honours from the University of Oxford. After teaching English briefly at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro,
Millett moved to New York City to pursue a career as an artist. To support herself she taught kindergarten in Harlem. In 1961 she moved to Tokyo, where she taught English at Waseda University and also studied sculpting. By the
time she married Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura in 1965, however, Millett was back in New York City, teaching English and philosophy at Barnard College. (The couple divorced in 1985.) At the same time, she pursued a
doctorate at Columbia University, and in 1970 she was awarded a Ph.D. with distinction. Her thesis, a work combining literary analysis with sociology and anthropology, was published that same year as Sexual Politics. The book,
which defined the goals and strategies of the feminist movement, was an overnight success, transforming Millett into a public figure.¶ The celebrity came at a personal cost, as Millett revealed in a 1974 autobiographical work,
Flying, which explains the torment she suffered as a result of her views in general and of her disclosure that she was a lesbian in particular. She wrote two more autobiographical books, Sita (1977) and A.D.: A Memoir (1995). The
Basement (1979) is a factual account of a young woman’s abuse, torture, and murder at the hands of a group of teenagers led by an older woman who had been appointed her protector. Millett’s subsequent books dealt with the
political oppression in Iran after the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (Going to Iran, 1982), with her own personal experiences as a psychiatric patient (The Loony Bin Trip, 1990), with the issue of cruelty in general (The Politics
This is from an actual book, “ Sexual Politics” Ch.
2// SC)
Because of the smoke-screen of masculine propaganda one hears endless cant about castration –
whereas real and actual crimes men commit against women are never mentioned. It is considered bad
taste, unsportsmanlike to refer to the fact that there are thousands of rapes or crimes against the
female personality in New-York City every year – I speak only of those instances which are reported –
probably one tenth of those which occur. It is also generally accepted that to regard Richard Speck and
so many others like him in anything, but the light, of exceptional and irrelevant instances of individual
pathology, is another instance of not playing that Speck merely enacted the presupposition of the
majority male supremacists of the sterner sort – and they are -legion. That his murders echo in the
surrealist chambers of masculine phantasy and wish fulfillment is testified to by every sleazy essay into
sadism and white slave traffic on the dirty movie belt of 42nd St, and anti-social character of hard core
pornography. The Story of O tells it like it is about masculine phantasy better than does Romeo and
Juliet. So does the Playboy, chortling over the con-game he has played on that Rabbit, he dreams of
screwing the Bunny, or woman reduced to a meek and docile animal toy.¶ For the extent and depth of
the male's hatred and hostility toward his subject colony of women is a source of continual
astonishment.' Just as behind the glowing' mirage of “darkeys" crooning in the twilight – is reality the
block, the whip and the manacle, the history of women is full of colorful artifact. ...the bound feet of all
of old China's women – women deliberately deformed – that they might be the better controlled – (you
can work with those useless feet, but you cannot run away) – the veil of Islam (or an attenuated
existence as a human soul condemned to wear a cloth sack over her head all the days of her half-life); –
the lash, the rod, domestic imprisonment through most of the world's history -rape, concubinage,
prostitution. Yes, we have our own impressive catalogue of open tyrannies. Woman are still sold in
Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. In Switzerland, they are even today disenfranchised. And in nearly every
rod of ground on this earth they live only via the barter system of sex in return for food of the latter.
Like every system of oppression male supremacy rests finally on force, physical power, rape, assault
and the threat of assault. A final resource when all else has failed the male resorts to attack. But the
fear of force is there before every woman always as a deterrent – dismissal, divorce, violence – personal
sexual or economic.¶ As in any society in a state of war, the enforcement of male rule which euphemism
calls “the battle of the sexes", is possible only through the usual lies convenient to countries at war –
The Enemy is Evil – the Enemy is not Human. And men have always been able to believe in the innate
evil of women. Studies of primitive societies just as studies of our own religious texts – illustrate over
and over – the innumerable instances of taboos practiced against women. A group of aborigines agree
with Judaism in the faith that a menstruating, woman is “unclean,” taboo, untouchable. Should she
have access to weapons or other sacred and ritual articles the male, she will place a hex or spell upon
them that their “masculine” owners will not survive. Everything that pertains to her physical make-up
or function -is despicable or subversive. Let side the village and inhabit a hut alone and without food
during her period - let her be forbidden the temple – even those outer precincts assigned to her for aof Cruelty, 1994), and with the problems of aging, as seen through the struggles of her mother (Mother Millett, 2001).
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specified number of-days after, as the Gospels-coolly inform us she has given birth to the very savior of
the world for she is still, dirty. Dirty and mysterious. Have you ever thought it curious that ‘nocturnal'
emissions were not regarded as either dirty or mysterious, that the penis was (until Industrialism
decided to veil it again for greater effect) never considered as dirty – but so regal and imperious that its
shape is the one assigned to scepters, bombs, guns, and airplanes?
Demeaning patriarchal practices are used to justify fear of the other
Millett 69 (Kate Millett, Kate Millett, in full Katherine Murray Millett (born Sept. 14, 1934, St. Paul, Minn., U.S.), American feminist, author, and artist, an early and influential figure in the women’s liberation
movement, whose first book, Sexual Politics, began her exploration of the dynamics of power in relation to gender and sexuality.¶ Millett earned a bachelor’s degree with honours in 1956 from the University of Minnesota, where
she was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Two years later she was awarded a master’s degree with first-class honours from the University of Oxford. After teaching English briefly at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro,
Millett moved to New York City to pursue a career as an artist. To support herself she taught kindergarten in Harlem. In 1961 she moved to Tokyo, where she taught English at Waseda University and also studied sculpting. By the
time she married Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura in 1965, however, Millett was back in New York City, teaching English and philosophy at Barnard College. (The couple divorced in 1985.) At the same time, she pursued a
doctorate at Columbia University, and in 1970 she was awarded a Ph.D. with distinction. Her thesis, a work combining literary analysis with sociology and anthropology, was published that same year as Sexual Politics. The book,
which defined the goals and strategies of the feminist movement, was an overnight success, transforming Millett into a public figure.¶ The celebrity came at a personal cost, as Millett revealed in a 1974 autobiographical work,
Flying, which explains the torment she suffered as a result of her views in general and of her disclosure that she was a lesbian in particular. She wrote two more autobiographical books, Sita (1977) and A.D.: A Memoir (1995). The
Basement (1979) is a factual account of a young woman’s abuse, torture, and murder at the hands of a group of teenagers led by an older woman who had been appointed her protector. Millett’s subsequent books dealt with the
political oppression in Iran after the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (Going to Iran, 1982), with her own personal experiences as a psychiatric patient (The Loony Bin Trip, 1990), with the issue of cruelty in general (The Politics
of Cruelty, 1994), and with the problems of aging, as seen through the struggles of her mother (Mother Millett, 2001).
This is from an actual book, “ Sexual Politics” Ch.
2// SC)
Primitive peoples explain the phenomenon of the female's genitals in terms of a wound, sometimes reasoning that she was visited by a bird or
snake and mutilated into her present condition. Once she was wounded, now she bleeds. Contemporary slang for the vagina is "gash." The
Freudian description of the female genitals is in terms of a "castrated" condition. The uneasiness and
disgust female genitals arouse in patriarchal societies is attested to through religious, cultural, and
literary proscription. In preliterate groups fear is also a factor, as in the belief in a castrating vagina dentata. The penis, badge of
the male's superior status in both preliterate and civilised patriarchies, is given the most crucial significance, the subject both of
endless boasting and endless anxiety.¶ Nearly all patriarchies enforce taboos against women touching ritual objects (those of
war or religion) or food. In ancient and preliterate societies women are generally not permitted to eat with men. Women eat apart today in a
great number of cultures, chiefly those of the Near and Far East. Some of the inspiration of such custom appears to lie in fears of
In their function of domestic servants, females are forced to prepare
food, yet at the same time may be liable to spread their contagion through ; A similar situation
obtains with blacks in the United States. They are considered filthy and infectious, yet as domestics
they are forced to prepare food for their queasy superiors. In both cases the dilemma is generally solved in a
deplorably illogical fashion by segregating the act of eating itself, while cooking is carried on out of sight by the very group
who would infect the table. With an admirable consistency, some Hindu males do not permit their wives to touch their food at all. In
contamination, probably sexual in origin.
nearly every patriarchal group it is expected that the dominant male will eat first or eat better, and even where the sexes feed together, the
male shall be served by the female.¶ All patriarchies have hedged virginity and defloration in elaborate rites and interdictions. Among
virginity presents an interesting problem in ambivalence. On the one hand, it is, as in every patriarchy, a
mysterious good because a sign of property received intact. On the other hand, it represents an
unknown evil associated with the mana of blood and terrifyingly "other." So auspicious is the event of defloration
preliterates
that in many tribes the owner-groom is willing to relinquish breaking the seal of his new possession to a stronger or older personality who can
neutralise the attendant dangers. Fears of defloration appear to originate in a fear of the alien sexuality of the female. Although
any
physical suffering endured in defloration must be on the part of the female (and most societies cause her - bodily
and mentally - to suffer anguish), the social interest, institutionalised in patriarchal ritual and custom, is exclusively on
the side of the male's property interest, prestige, or (among preliterates) hazard.
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Link-LGBTQ CP
Societal practices towards homosexuals reveal the misogyny to justify sexual politics
Millett 69 (Kate Millett, Kate Millett, in full Katherine Murray Millett (born Sept. 14, 1934, St. Paul, Minn., U.S.), American feminist, author, and artist, an early and influential figure in the women’s liberation
movement, whose first book, Sexual Politics, began her exploration of the dynamics of power in relation to gender and sexuality.¶ Millett earned a bachelor’s degree with honours in 1956 from the University of Minnesota, where
she was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Two years later she was awarded a master’s degree with first-class honours from the University of Oxford. After teaching English briefly at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro,
Millett moved to New York City to pursue a career as an artist. To support herself she taught kindergarten in Harlem. In 1961 she moved to Tokyo, where she taught English at Waseda University and also studied sculpting. By the
time she married Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura in 1965, however, Millett was back in New York City, teaching English and philosophy at Barnard College. (The couple divorced in 1985.) At the same time, she pursued a
doctorate at Columbia University, and in 1970 she was awarded a Ph.D. with distinction. Her thesis, a work combining literary analysis with sociology and anthropology, was published that same year as Sexual Politics. The book,
which defined the goals and strategies of the feminist movement, was an overnight success, transforming Millett into a public figure.¶ The celebrity came at a personal cost, as Millett revealed in a 1974 autobiographical work,
Flying, which explains the torment she suffered as a result of her views in general and of her disclosure that she was a lesbian in particular. She wrote two more autobiographical books, Sita (1977) and A.D.: A Memoir (1995). The
Basement (1979) is a factual account of a young woman’s abuse, torture, and murder at the hands of a group of teenagers led by an older woman who had been appointed her protector. Millett’s subsequent books dealt with the
political oppression in Iran after the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (Going to Iran, 1982), with her own personal experiences as a psychiatric patient (The Loony Bin Trip, 1990), with the issue of cruelty in general (The Politics
of Cruelty, 1994), and with the problems of aging, as seen through the struggles of her mother (Mother Millett, 2001).
This is from an actual book, “ Sexual Politics” Ch.
2// SC)
Considerable sexual activity does take place in the men's house, all of it, needless to say, homosexual. But the
taboo against homosexual behaviour (at least among equals) is almost universally of far stronger force than the impulse and tends to effect a
rechannelling of the libido into violence. This
association of sexuality and violence is a particularly militaristic
habit of mind. The negative and militaristic coloring of such men's house homosexuality as does exist,
is of course by no means the whole character of homosexual sensibility. Indeed, the warrior caste of mind with its ultra-virility, is more
incipiently homosexual, in its exclusively male orientation, than it is overtly homosexual. (The Nazi experience is an extreme case in point here.)
And the
heterosexual role-playing indulged in, and still more persuasively, the contempt in which the younger, softer, or
more "feminine" members are held, is proof that the actual ethos is misogynist, or perversely rather than
positively heterosexual. The true inspiration of men's house association therefore comes from the patriarchal
situation rather than from any circumstances inherent in the homo-amorous relationship.¶ If a positive
attitude toward heterosexual love is not quite, in Seignebos' famous dictum, the invention of the twelfth century, it can still claim to be a
novelty.
Most patriarchies go to great length to exclude love as a basis of mate selection. Modern
patriarchies tend to do so through class, ethnic, and religious factors. Western classical thought was prone to see in
heterosexual love either a fatal stroke of ill luck bound to end in tragedy, or a contemptible and brutish consorting with inferiors. Medieval
opinion was firm in its conviction that love was sinful if sexual, and sex sinful if loving.¶ Primitive society
practices its misogyny
in terms of taboo and mana which evolve into explanatory myth. In historical cultures, this is transformed into ethical, then
literary, and in the modem period, scientific rationalisations for the sexual politic. Myth is, of course, a felicitous advance in
the level of propaganda, since it so often bases its arguments on ethics or theories of origins. The two leading myths of Western culture are the
classical tale of Pandora's box and the Biblical story of the Fall. In both cases earlier mana concepts of feminine evil have passed through a final
literary phase to become highly influential ethical justifications of things as they are.
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Link – Pandora’s Box
Pandora’s Box and the Bible reinforce patriarchal religion and ethics, blames the women for the
burdens of humankind
Millett 69 (Kate Millett, Kate Millett, in full Katherine Murray Millett (born Sept. 14, 1934, St. Paul, Minn., U.S.), American feminist, author, and artist, an early and influential figure in the women’s liberation
movement, whose first book, Sexual Politics, began her exploration of the dynamics of power in relation to gender and sexuality.¶ Millett earned a bachelor’s degree with honours in 1956 from the University of Minnesota, where
she was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Two years later she was awarded a master’s degree with first-class honours from the University of Oxford. After teaching English briefly at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro,
Millett moved to New York City to pursue a career as an artist. To support herself she taught kindergarten in Harlem. In 1961 she moved to Tokyo, where she taught English at Waseda University and also studied sculpting. By the
time she married Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura in 1965, however, Millett was back in New York City, teaching English and philosophy at Barnard College. (The couple divorced in 1985.) At the same time, she pursued a
doctorate at Columbia University, and in 1970 she was awarded a Ph.D. with distinction. Her thesis, a work combining literary analysis with sociology and anthropology, was published that same year as Sexual Politics. The book,
which defined the goals and strategies of the feminist movement, was an overnight success, transforming Millett into a public figure.¶ The celebrity came at a personal cost, as Millett revealed in a 1974 autobiographical work,
Flying, which explains the torment she suffered as a result of her views in general and of her disclosure that she was a lesbian in particular. She wrote two more autobiographical books, Sita (1977) and A.D.: A Memoir (1995). The
Basement (1979) is a factual account of a young woman’s abuse, torture, and murder at the hands of a group of teenagers led by an older woman who had been appointed her protector. Millett’s subsequent books dealt with the
political oppression in Iran after the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (Going to Iran, 1982), with her own personal experiences as a psychiatric patient (The Loony Bin Trip, 1990), with the issue of cruelty in general (The Politics
of Cruelty, 1994), and with the problems of aging, as seen through the struggles of her mother (Mother Millett, 2001).
This is from an actual book, “ Sexual Politics” Ch.
2// SC)
Pandora appears to be a discredited version of a Mediterranean fertility goddess, for in Hesiod's Theogony she wears a wreath of flowers and a
sculptured diadem in which are caned all the creatures of land and sea. Hesiod ascribes to her the introduction of sexuality which puts an end
to the golden age when "the races of men had been living on earth free from all evils, free from laborious work, and free from all wearing
Pandora was the origin of "the damnable race of women - a plague which men must live with."
The introduction of what are seen to be the evils of the male human condition came through the
introduction of the female and what is said to be her unique product, sexuality. In Works And Days Hesiod elaborates on Pandora
and what she represents - a perilous temptation with "the mind of a bitch and a thievish nature," full of "the
cruelty of desire and longings that wear out the body," 'lies and cunning words and a deceitful soul," a
snare sent by Zeus to be "the ruin of men."¶ Patriarchy has God on its side. One of its most effective agents of control is the
sickness."
powerfully expeditious character of its doctrines as to the nature and origin of the female and the attribution to her alone of the dangers and
evils it imputes to sexuality. The Greek example is interesting here: when it wishes to exalt sexuality it celebrates fertility through the phallus;
when it wishes to denigrate sexuality, it cites Pandora.
Patriarchal religion and ethics tend to lump the female and sex
together as if the whole burden of the onus and stigma it attaches to sex were the fault of the female
alone. Thereby sex, which is known to be unclean, sinful, and debilitating, pertains to the female, and the male identity is
preserved as a human, rather than a sexual one.¶ The Pandora myth is one of two important Western archetypes which
condemn the female through her sexuality and explain her position as her well-deserved punishment for the primal sin under whose
unfortunate consequences the race yet labours. Ethics have entered the scene, replacing the simplicities of ritual, taboo, and mana. The more
sophisticated vehicle of myth also provides official explanations of sexual history. In Hesiod's tale, Zeus, a rancorous
and arbitrary father figure, in sending Epimetheus evil in the form of female genitalia, is actually chastising him for adult heterosexual
knowledge and activity. In opening the vessel she brings (the vulva or hymen, Pandora's "Box") the
male satisfies his curiosity but
sustains the discovery only by punishing himself at the hands of the father god with death and the assorted calamities of
postlapsarian life. The patriarchal trait of male rivalry across age or status line, particularly those of powerful father and rival son, is present as
well as the ubiquitous maligning of the female.¶ The myth of the Fall is a highly finished version of the same themes. As the central myth of the
Judeo-Christian imagination and therefore of our immediate cultural heritage, it is well that we appraise and acknowledge the enormous power
it still holds over us even in a rationalist era which has long ago given up literal belief in it while maintaining its emotional assent intact. This
mythic version of the female as the cause of human suffering, knowledge, and sin is still the
foundation of sexual attitudes, for it represents the most crucial argument of the patriarchal tradition
in the West.¶ The Israelites lived in a continual state of war with the fertility cults of their neighbours; these latter afforded sufficient
attraction to be the source of constant defection, and the figure of Eve, like that of Pandora, has vestigial traces of a fertility goddess
overthrown. There is some, probably unconscious, evidence of this in the Biblical account which announces, even before the narration of the
fall has begun - "Adam called his wife's name Eve; because she was the mother of all living things." Due to the
fact that the tale represents a compilation of different oral traditions, it provides two contradictory schemes for Eve's creation, one in which
both sexes are created at the same time, and one in which Eve
is fashioned later than Adam, an afterthought born from his rib,
a god who created the world without benefit of
peremptory instance of the male's expropriation of the life force through
female assistance.¶ The tale of Adam and Eve is, among many other things, a narrative of how humanity invented sexual intercourse.
Many such narratives exist in preliterate myth and folk tale. Most of them strike us now as delightfully funny stories of primal innocents who
require a good deal of helpful instruction to figure it out. There are other major themes in the story: the loss of primeval simplicity, the arrival
of death, and the fist conscious experience of knowledge. All of them revolve about sex. Adam is forbidden to eat of the fruit of life or of the
knowledge of good and evil, the warning states explicitly what should happen if he tastes of the latter: "in that day that thou eatest thereof
thou shalt surely die." He eats but fails to die (at least in the story), from which one might infer that the serpent told the truth.¶ But at the
moment when the pair eat of the forbidden tree they awake to their nakedness and feel shame. Sexuality is clearly involved, though the fable
insists it is only tangential to a higher prohibition against disobeying orders in the matter of another and less controversial appetite - one for
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food. Roheim points out that the Hebrew
verb for "eat" can also mean coitus. Everywhere in the Bible
"knowing" is synonymous with sexuality, and clearly a product of contact with the phallus, here in the fable objectified as a
snake. To blame the evils and sorrows of life - loss of Eden and the rest - on sexuality, would all too logically implicate the male, and such
implication is hardly the purpose of the story, designed as it is expressly in order to blame all this world's discomfort on the female.
Therefore it is the female who is tempted first and "beguiled" by the penis, transformed into
something else, a snake. Thus Adam has "beaten the rap" of sexual guilt, which appears to be why the sexual motive is so repressed
in the Biblical account. Yet the very transparency of the serpent's universal phallic value shows how uneasy the mythic mind can be about its
shifts. Accordingly, in
her inferiority and vulnerability the woman takes and eats, simple carnal thing that she is,
affected by flattery even in a reptile. Only after this does the male fall, and with him, humanity - for the
fable has made him the racial type, whereas Eve is a mere sexual type and, according to tradition, either expendable or replaceable. And as the
myth records the original sexual adventure, Adam was seduced by woman, who was seduced by a penis. 'The woman
whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the fruit and I did eat" is the first man's defence. Seduced by the phallic snake, Eve is
convicted for Adam's participation in sex.¶ Adam's curse is to toil in the "sweat of his brow," namely the labor the male associates with
civilisation. Eden
was a fantasy world without either effort or activity, which the entrance of the female,
and with her sexuality, has destroyed. Eve's sentence is far more political in nature and a brilliant "explanation" of her inferior
status. "In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children. And thy desire shall be to thy husband. And he shall
rule over thee." Again, as in the Pandora myth, a proprietary father figure is punishing his subjects for adult heterosexuality. It is easy to
agree with Roheim's comment on the negative attitude the myth adopts toward sexuality: "Sexual maturity is regarded as a
misfortune, something that has robbed mankind of happiness . . . the explanation of how death came
into the world.''¶ What requires further emphasis is the responsibility of the female, a marginal creature, in bringing on this
plague, and the justice of her suborned condition as dependent on her primary role in this original sin. The connection of woman,
sex, and sin constitutes the fundamental pattern of western patriarchal thought thereafter
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Link – Race
Failure to interrogate gender makes understandings of racial inequity impossible—Trayvon proves
Mata 12 (Eric, DePaul University, When Race and Gender Intersect: Trayvon Martin and George
Zimmerman(updated), on his blog, Against Me(n), 3/20/12,
http://ericmata.blogspot.com/2012/03/when-race-and-gender-intersect-trayvon.html)//LA
The death of Trayvon Martin is a travesty. Social media (at least those I follow) is up in arms as to why George Zimmerman, the
man who is said to have shot and killed Martin has not been arrested. Police say they don't have enough evidence to arrest him. As I write this,
the Justice Department and the FBI and looking into the case to determine the next steps. My hope is that the family of Trayvon Martin get the
justice they deserve to stay to find some semblance of closure in this tragic event. Trayvon
is dead because he is Black. I truly
believe that the combination of racial profiling and a neighborhood watch system, coupled with
conceal and carry laws is the reason he is dead. At 17. Racism is still alive. We do not live in a postracial society. Barack Obama becoming president did not change the course for all Black men and boys
in this country. Trayvon is also dead because George Zimmerman, although not White, lives in a
country where Racism dictates a lot of how he thinks about Black boys and men . It is Racism and
white privilege that caused Zimmerman to follow Trayvon. It is Racism and White privilege that
caused Zimmerman to call the police, to label him suspect, to guess that he was on drugs. It is Racism
and White privilege that made Zimmerman confront Trayvon on that gated community sidewalk.
Trayvon is also dead because Zimmerman is a man. The notions of gender of masculinity is what lead
Zimmerman to a Neighborhood Watch group. Notions of gender and masculinity drove Zimmerman to
buy a gun, to apply for and obtain a conceal and carry license. It is these notions of gender and
masculinity that drove Zimmerman to disobey the 911 operator, to confront Trayvon about his
presence in that gated community. And it is these notions of gender and masculinity that drove
Zimmerman to pull that trigger, to protect his community from what he determined, through the
lens of both race and masculinity , to be a threat. I don't want us to overlook that race had a significant impact
do want us to consider that gender, masculinity and maleness also had
something to do with Trayvon's death. But if we fail to look at gender also , we miss out on an
opportunity to highlight an extremely important component of this atrocity. The intersection of White
privilege and gender normative male dominance is what drove Zimmerman to kill Martin. Yes, we
must definitely address the fact that Racism is still alive and breathing in our country. That it defines and
dictates the experiences of people in color in a very real, and tangible way. We address that White
privilege is also very real and tangible and that too defines and dictates the experiences of White people in the US. We must
on the events of that evening. I
also address the role that gender and masculinity play in the lives of men and boys and how that
sometimes leads to violence. It is Zimmerman having been impacted by White privilege that led him to profile Trayvon, and it was
his maleness that led him to confront and ultimately shoot Trayvon.
It’s not just a question of race – Marissa Alexander exists at the vertex of race and gender but the
latter is never investigated – Alexander exists as a gender transgressor and as such, was put in her
place
CD 12 (CrimeDime, blog run by criminologists and criminal justice professionals, 5-28-12, “Part I: Marissa
Alexander Isn’t Really About Stand Your Ground,” http://crimedime.com/2012/05/28/marissaalexander-isnt-really-about-stand-your-ground-part-i/) gz
In Alexander’s case, she is middle class, educated with a master’s degree, and a mommy. Alexander is
also black. Her race and ethnicity are powerful variables which, in this case, may have been strong
enough to override her overall higher social status. Or, at the very least, it played a role. Imagine for a moment a woman in
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an orange jumpsuit behind bars. Is it easier to picture that woman as white? Or as a person of color?¶ Alexander’s race, in turn, is connected to
the crime she committed. Was it something we think of as stereotypically feminine like teen girls shoplifting? Or was it something we think of
as more masculine, something involving violence and a gun?¶ To the extent that a woman or girl accused of committing a crime is still
performing her gender, she tends to still be treated reasonably fairly. Certain crimes are not exactly thought of as acceptable for women to
commit, but not serious affronts to the social order. These include things like shoplifting, passing bad checks, stealing from the petty cash or the
supply room, and so on.¶ Violence
in general, and guns in particular, however, are primarily the social
domain of men. Consider infanticide. When women commit this crime, it is seen as an abomination,
fundamentally unnatural. We ask, how could a woman, a mother, do this horrible thing, this crime
against nature? And in the social imagination, fueled by the inaccuracies of a public educated by the
media, we tend to think that women do this more than men.¶ In fact, that’s not true. Men commit
more infanticides than women, but it just doesn’t capture our attention in the same way. Because
violence perpetrated by men is treated as natural. Tragic, upsetting, but not unnatural. Not something
that shocks the social conscience, because we’ve more or less accepted male violence as an
unfortunate, but understandable, presence in our society.¶ Alexander got a gun to protect herself,
knew how to use it, and then did, in fact, fire the weapon to protect herself and her child. This is not
how women are supposed to behave. Guns are intrinsically associated with masculinity, not
femininity.¶ Marissa Alexander did not act like a lady, she did not cower in a corner, she did not
submit to her husband.¶ Marissa Alexander was a gender transgressor, operating outside the
proscribed boundaries of acceptable female behavior. That transgression has helped to cost her the
next twenty years of her life.
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Impact- VTL
Patriarchy kills value to life of the woman until she becomes the burden it is said to be
Millett 69 (Kate Millett, Kate Millett, in full Katherine Murray Millett (born Sept. 14, 1934, St. Paul, Minn., U.S.), American feminist, author, and artist, an early and influential figure in the women’s liberation
movement, whose first book, Sexual Politics, began her exploration of the dynamics of power in relation to gender and sexuality.¶ Millett earned a bachelor’s degree with honours in 1956 from the University of Minnesota, where
she was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Two years later she was awarded a master’s degree with first-class honours from the University of Oxford. After teaching English briefly at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro,
Millett moved to New York City to pursue a career as an artist. To support herself she taught kindergarten in Harlem. In 1961 she moved to Tokyo, where she taught English at Waseda University and also studied sculpting. By the
time she married Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura in 1965, however, Millett was back in New York City, teaching English and philosophy at Barnard College. (The couple divorced in 1985.) At the same time, she pursued a
doctorate at Columbia University, and in 1970 she was awarded a Ph.D. with distinction. Her thesis, a work combining literary analysis with sociology and anthropology, was published that same year as Sexual Politics. The book,
which defined the goals and strategies of the feminist movement, was an overnight success, transforming Millett into a public figure.¶ The celebrity came at a personal cost, as Millett revealed in a 1974 autobiographical work,
Flying, which explains the torment she suffered as a result of her views in general and of her disclosure that she was a lesbian in particular. She wrote two more autobiographical books, Sita (1977) and A.D.: A Memoir (1995). The
Basement (1979) is a factual account of a young woman’s abuse, torture, and murder at the hands of a group of teenagers led by an older woman who had been appointed her protector. Millett’s subsequent books dealt with the
political oppression in Iran after the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (Going to Iran, 1982), with her own personal experiences as a psychiatric patient (The Loony Bin Trip, 1990), with the issue of cruelty in general (The Politics
of Cruelty, 1994), and with the problems of aging, as seen through the struggles of her mother (Mother Millett, 2001).
This is from an actual book, “ Sexual Politics” Ch.
2// SC)
Evidence from anthropology, religious and literary myth all attests to the politically expedient character of patriarchal convictions about
women. One anthropologist refers to a consistent patriarchal strain of assumption that "woman's biological differences set her apart . . . she is
essentially inferior," and since "human institutions grow from deep and primal anxieties and are shaped by irrational psychological mechanisms
...
socially organised attitudes toward women arise from basic tensions expressed by the male."
Under patriarchy the female did not herself develop the symbols by which she is described. AS both the
primitive and the civilised worlds are male worlds, the ideas which shaped culture in regard to the
female were also of male design. The image of women as we know it is an image created by men and
fashioned to suit their needs. These needs spring from a fear of the "otherness" of woman. Yet this
notion itself presupposes that patriarchy has already been established and the male has already set himself as the
human form, the subject and referent to which the female is "other" or alien. What ever its origin, the function of the male's sexual
antipathy is to provide a means of control over a subordinate group and a rationale which justifies the inferior
station of those in a lower order, "explaining" the oppression of their lives.¶ The feeling that woman's sexual functions
are impure is both world-wide and persistent. One sees evidence of it everywhere in literature, in myth, in primitive and civilised life. It is
striking how the notion persists today. The event of menstruation, for example, is a largely clandestine affair, and the psycho-social effect of the
stigma attached must have great effect on the female ego. There is a large anthropological literature on menstrual taboo; the practice of
isolating offenders in huts at the edge of the village occurs throughout the primitive world. Contemporary slang denominates menstruation as
"the curse."
There is considerable evidence that such discomfort as women suffer during their period is
often likely to be psychosomatic, rather than physiological, cultural rather than biological, in origin. That this may also be true
to some extent of labor and delivery is attested to by the recent experiment with "painless childbirth." Patriarchal circumstances
and beliefs seem to have the effect of poisoning the female's own sense of physical self until it often
truly becomes the burden it is said to be.
Patriarchy forces women into being minorities by status not numbers- loss of vtl
Millett 69 (Kate Millett, Kate Millett, in full Katherine Murray Millett (born Sept. 14, 1934, St. Paul, Minn., U.S.), American feminist, author, and artist, an early and influential figure in the women’s liberation
movement, whose first book, Sexual Politics, began her exploration of the dynamics of power in relation to gender and sexuality.¶ Millett earned a bachelor’s degree with honours in 1956 from the University of Minnesota, where
she was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Two years later she was awarded a master’s degree with first-class honours from the University of Oxford. After teaching English briefly at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro,
Millett moved to New York City to pursue a career as an artist. To support herself she taught kindergarten in Harlem. In 1961 she moved to Tokyo, where she taught English at Waseda University and also studied sculpting. By the
time she married Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura in 1965, however, Millett was back in New York City, teaching English and philosophy at Barnard College. (The couple divorced in 1985.) At the same time, she pursued a
doctorate at Columbia University, and in 1970 she was awarded a Ph.D. with distinction. Her thesis, a work combining literary analysis with sociology and anthropology, was published that same year as Sexual Politics. The book,
which defined the goals and strategies of the feminist movement, was an overnight success, transforming Millett into a public figure.¶ The celebrity came at a personal cost, as Millett revealed in a 1974 autobiographical work,
Flying, which explains the torment she suffered as a result of her views in general and of her disclosure that she was a lesbian in particular. She wrote two more autobiographical books, Sita (1977) and A.D.: A Memoir (1995). The
Basement (1979) is a factual account of a young woman’s abuse, torture, and murder at the hands of a group of teenagers led by an older woman who had been appointed her protector. Millett’s subsequent books dealt with the
political oppression in Iran after the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (Going to Iran, 1982), with her own personal experiences as a psychiatric patient (The Loony Bin Trip, 1990), with the issue of cruelty in general (The Politics
of Cruelty, 1994), and with the problems of aging, as seen through the struggles of her mother (Mother Millett, 2001).
This is from an actual book, “ Sexual Politics” Ch.
2// SC)
The continual surveillance in which she is held tends to perpetuate the infantilisation of women even in situations such as those of higher
The female is continually obliged to seek survival or advancement through the approval of
males as those who hold power. She may do this either through appeasement or through the exchange of her sexuality for
support and status. As the history of patriarchal culture and the representations of herself within all levels of its cultural media, past
and present, have a devastating effect upon her self image, she is customarily deprived of any but the
most trivial sources of dignity or self-respect. In many patriarchies, language, as well as cultural tradition, reserve the human
education.
condition for the male. With the Indo-European languages this is a nearly inescapable habit of mind, for despite all the customary pretence that
"man" and "humanity" are terms which apply equally to both sexes, the fact is hardly obscured that in practice, general application favours the
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male far more often than the female as referent, or even sole referent, for such designations.¶ When in any group of persons, the ego is
subjected to such invidious versions of itself through social beliefs, ideology, and tradition, the effect is bound to be pernicious. This coupled
with the persistent though frequently subtle denigration women encounter daily through personal contacts, the impressions gathered from the
images and media about them, and the
discrimination in matters of behaviour, employment, and education
which they endure, should make it no very special cause for surprise that women develop group characteristics
common to those who suffer minority status and a marginal existence. A witty experiment by Philip Goldberg
proves what everyone knows, that having internalised the disesteem in which they are held, women despise both themselves and each other.
This simple test consisted of asking women undergraduates to respond to the scholarship in an essay signed alternately by one John McKay and
one Joan McKay. In making their assessments the students generally agreed that John was a remarkable thinker, Joan an unimpressive mind.
Yet the articles were identical: the reaction was dependent on the sex of the supposed author.¶ As women
in patriarchy are for
the most part marginal citizens when they are citizens at all, their situation is like that of other minorities, here
defined not as dependent upon numerical size of the group, but on its status. "A minority group is any group of people
who because of their physical or cultural characteristics, are singled out from others in the society in
which they live for differential and unequal treatment." Only a handful of sociologists have ever addressed themselves in
any meaningful way to the minority status of women. And psychology has yet to produce relevant studies on the subject of ego damage to the
female which might bear comparison to the excellent work done on the effects of racism on the minds of blacks and colonials. The remarkably
small amount of modern research devoted to the psychological and social effects of masculine supremacy on the female and on the culture in
general attests to the widespread ignorance or unconcern of a conservative social science which takes patriarchy to be both the status quo and
the state of nature.
Patriarchy denies minorities access to a better life creating a cycle of wanting to be the fortunate who
get to entertain the rulers- kills vtl
Millett 69 (Kate Millett, Kate Millett, in full Katherine Murray Millett (born Sept. 14, 1934, St. Paul, Minn., U.S.), American feminist, author, and artist, an early and influential figure in the women’s liberation
movement, whose first book, Sexual Politics, began her exploration of the dynamics of power in relation to gender and sexuality.¶ Millett earned a bachelor’s degree with honours in 1956 from the University of Minnesota, where
she was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Two years later she was awarded a master’s degree with first-class honours from the University of Oxford. After teaching English briefly at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro,
Millett moved to New York City to pursue a career as an artist. To support herself she taught kindergarten in Harlem. In 1961 she moved to Tokyo, where she taught English at Waseda University and also studied sculpting. By the
time she married Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura in 1965, however, Millett was back in New York City, teaching English and philosophy at Barnard College. (The couple divorced in 1985.) At the same time, she pursued a
doctorate at Columbia University, and in 1970 she was awarded a Ph.D. with distinction. Her thesis, a work combining literary analysis with sociology and anthropology, was published that same year as Sexual Politics. The book,
which defined the goals and strategies of the feminist movement, was an overnight success, transforming Millett into a public figure.¶ The celebrity came at a personal cost, as Millett revealed in a 1974 autobiographical work,
Flying, which explains the torment she suffered as a result of her views in general and of her disclosure that she was a lesbian in particular. She wrote two more autobiographical books, Sita (1977) and A.D.: A Memoir (1995). The
Basement (1979) is a factual account of a young woman’s abuse, torture, and murder at the hands of a group of teenagers led by an older woman who had been appointed her protector. Millett’s subsequent books dealt with the
political oppression in Iran after the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (Going to Iran, 1982), with her own personal experiences as a psychiatric patient (The Loony Bin Trip, 1990), with the issue of cruelty in general (The Politics
of Cruelty, 1994), and with the problems of aging, as seen through the struggles of her mother (Mother Millett, 2001).
This is from an actual book, “ Sexual Politics” Ch.
2// SC)
As with other marginal groups a certain handful of women are accorded higher status that they may perform a species of cultural policing over
the rest. Hughes speaks of marginality as a case of status dilemma experienced by women,
blacks, or second-generation
Americans who have "come up" in the world but are often refused the rewards of their efforts on the
grounds of their origins. This is particularly the case with "new" or educated women. Such exceptions are generally obliged to make
ritual, and often comic, statements of deference to justify their elevation. These characteristically take the form of pledges of "femininity,"
namely a delight in docility and a large appetite for masculine dominance. Politically, the most useful persons for such a role are entertainers
and public sex objects. It
is a common trait of minority status that a small percentage of the fortunate are
permitted to entertain their rulers. (That they may entertain their fellow subjects in the process is less to the point.) Women
entertain, please, gratify, satisfy and flatter men with their sexuality. In most minority groups athletes
or intellectuals are allowed to emerge as "stars," identification with whom should content their less fortunate fellows. In
the case of women both such eventualities are discouraged on the reasonable grounds that the most popular explanations of the female's
inferior status ascribe it to her physical weakness or intellectual inferiority. Logically, exhibitions of physical courage or agility are indecorous,
just as any display of serious intelligence tends to be out of place.¶ Perhaps
patriarchy's greatest psychological weapon is
simply its universality and longevity. A referent scarcely exists with which it might be contrasted or by which it might be
confuted. While the same might be said of class, patriarchy has a still more tenacious or powerful hold through its
successful habit of passing itself off as nature. Religion is also universal in human society and slavery was once nearly so;
advocates of each were fond of arguing in terms of fatality, or irrevocable human "instinct" - even "biological origins." When a system of power
is thoroughly in command, it has scarcely need to speak itself aloud; when its workings are exposed and questioned, it becomes not only
subject to discussion, but even to change. Such a period is the one next under discussion.
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Internal Links + Impacts
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Rape (IL)
I/l Patriarchy’s control over pornography exposes antagonism in the male- reinforces masculine
hostility
Millett 69 (Kate Millett, Kate Millett, in full Katherine Murray Millett (born Sept. 14, 1934, St. Paul, Minn., U.S.), American feminist, author, and artist, an early and influential figure in the women’s liberation
movement, whose first book, Sexual Politics, began her exploration of the dynamics of power in relation to gender and sexuality.¶ Millett earned a bachelor’s degree with honours in 1956 from the University of Minnesota, where
she was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Two years later she was awarded a master’s degree with first-class honours from the University of Oxford. After teaching English briefly at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro,
Millett moved to New York City to pursue a career as an artist. To support herself she taught kindergarten in Harlem. In 1961 she moved to Tokyo, where she taught English at Waseda University and also studied sculpting. By the
time she married Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura in 1965, however, Millett was back in New York City, teaching English and philosophy at Barnard College. (The couple divorced in 1985.) At the same time, she pursued a
doctorate at Columbia University, and in 1970 she was awarded a Ph.D. with distinction. Her thesis, a work combining literary analysis with sociology and anthropology, was published that same year as Sexual Politics. The book,
which defined the goals and strategies of the feminist movement, was an overnight success, transforming Millett into a public figure.¶ The celebrity came at a personal cost, as Millett revealed in a 1974 autobiographical work,
Flying, which explains the torment she suffered as a result of her views in general and of her disclosure that she was a lesbian in particular. She wrote two more autobiographical books, Sita (1977) and A.D.: A Memoir (1995). The
Basement (1979) is a factual account of a young woman’s abuse, torture, and murder at the hands of a group of teenagers led by an older woman who had been appointed her protector. Millett’s subsequent books dealt with the
political oppression in Iran after the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (Going to Iran, 1982), with her own personal experiences as a psychiatric patient (The Loony Bin Trip, 1990), with the issue of cruelty in general (The Politics
This is from an actual book, “ Sexual Politics” Ch.
2// SC)
Hostility is expressed in a number of ways. One is laughter. Misogynist literature, the primary vehicle of
masculine hostility, is both an hortatory and comic genre. Of all artistic forms in patriarchy it is the
most frankly propagandistic. Its aim is to reinforce both sexual factions in their status. Ancient,
Medieval, and Renaissance literature in the West has each had a large element of misogyny. Nor is the
East without a strong tradition here, notably in the Confucian strain which held sway in Japan as well as
China. The Western tradition was indeed moderated somewhat by the introduction of courtly love.
But the old diatribes and attacks were coterminous with the new idealisation of woman. In the case of
Petrarch, Boccaccio, and some others, one can find both attitudes fully expressed, presumably as
evidence of different moods, a courtly pose adopted for the ephemeral needs of the vernacular, a grave
animosity for sober and eternal Latin. As courtly love was transformed to romantic love, literary
misogyny grew somewhat out of fashion. In some places in the eighteenth century it declined into
ridicule and exhortative satire. In the nineteenth century its more acrimonious forms almost
disappeared in English. Its resurrection in twentieth-century attitudes and literature is the result of a
resentment over patriarchal reform, aided by the growing permissiveness in expression which has
taken place at an increasing rate in the last fifty years.¶ Since the abatement of censorship, masculine
hostility (psychological or physical) in specifically sexual contexts has become far more apparent. Yet as
masculine hostility has been fairly continuous, one deals here probably less with a matter of increase
than with a new frankness in expressing hostility in specifically sexual contexts. It is a matter of release
and freedom to express what was once forbidden expression outside of pornography or other
"underground" productions, such as those of De Sade. As one recalls both the euphemism and the
idealism of descriptions of coitus in the Romantic poets (Keats's Eve of St. Agnes), or the Victorian
novelists (Hardy, for example) and contrasts it with Miller or William Burroughs, one has an idea of how
contemporary literature has absorbed not only the truthful explicitness of pornography, but its antisocial character as well. Since this tendency to hurt or insult has been given free expression, it has
become far easier to assess sexual antagonism in the male.
of Cruelty, 1994), and with the problems of aging, as seen through the struggles of her mother (Mother Millett, 2001).
Guilt of sexuality is placed upon women in the patriarchal system with double standards on virginity
and abortion
Millett 69 (Kate Millett, Kate Millett, in full Katherine Murray Millett (born Sept. 14, 1934, St. Paul, Minn., U.S.), American feminist, author, and artist, an early and influential figure in the women’s liberation
movement, whose first book, Sexual Politics, began her exploration of the dynamics of power in relation to gender and sexuality.¶ Millett earned a bachelor’s degree with honours in 1956 from the University of Minnesota, where
she was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Two years later she was awarded a master’s degree with first-class honours from the University of Oxford. After teaching English briefly at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro,
Millett moved to New York City to pursue a career as an artist. To support herself she taught kindergarten in Harlem. In 1961 she moved to Tokyo, where she taught English at Waseda University and also studied sculpting. By the
time she married Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura in 1965, however, Millett was back in New York City, teaching English and philosophy at Barnard College. (The couple divorced in 1985.) At the same time, she pursued a
doctorate at Columbia University, and in 1970 she was awarded a Ph.D. with distinction. Her thesis, a work combining literary analysis with sociology and anthropology, was published that same year as Sexual Politics. The book,
which defined the goals and strategies of the feminist movement, was an overnight success, transforming Millett into a public figure.¶ The celebrity came at a personal cost, as Millett revealed in a 1974 autobiographical work,
Flying, which explains the torment she suffered as a result of her views in general and of her disclosure that she was a lesbian in particular. She wrote two more autobiographical books, Sita (1977) and A.D.: A Memoir (1995). The
Basement (1979) is a factual account of a young woman’s abuse, torture, and murder at the hands of a group of teenagers led by an older woman who had been appointed her protector. Millett’s subsequent books dealt with the
political oppression in Iran after the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (Going to Iran, 1982), with her own personal experiences as a psychiatric patient (The Loony Bin Trip, 1990), with the issue of cruelty in general (The Politics
of Cruelty, 1994), and with the problems of aging, as seen through the struggles of her mother (Mother Millett, 2001).
This is from an actual book, “ Sexual Politics” Ch.
2// SC)
The aspects of patriarchy already described have each an effect upon the psychology of both sexes. Their principal result is the interiorisation of
patriarchal ideology. Status, temperament, and role are all value systems with endless psychological ramifications for each sex. Patriarchal
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marriage and the family with its ranks and division of labor play a large part in enforcing them. The male's superior economic position, the
female's inferior one have also grave implications. The
large quantity of guilt attached to sexuality in patriarchy is
overwhelmingly placed upon the female, who is, culturally speaking, held to be the culpable or the more culpable party in
nearly any sexual liaison, whatever the extenuating circumstances. A tendency toward the reification of the female
makes her more often a sexual object than a person. This is particularly so when she is denied human rights through
chattel status. Even where this has been partly amended the cumulative effect of religion and custom is still very powerful and has enormous
psychological consequences. Woman
is still denied sexual freedom and the biological control over her body
through the cult of virginity, the double standard, the prescription against abortion, and in many
places because contraception is physically or psychically unavailable to her.
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Rape (!)
Patriarchy endorses dominance by forcing subjects into silence through rape, pornography, and
racism- affects sexual politics
Millett 69 (Kate Millett, Kate Millett, in full Katherine Murray Millett (born Sept. 14, 1934, St. Paul, Minn., U.S.), American feminist, author, and artist, an early and influential figure in the women’s liberation
movement, whose first book, Sexual Politics, began her exploration of the dynamics of power in relation to gender and sexuality.¶ Millett earned a bachelor’s degree with honours in 1956 from the University of Minnesota, where
she was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Two years later she was awarded a master’s degree with first-class honours from the University of Oxford. After teaching English briefly at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro,
Millett moved to New York City to pursue a career as an artist. To support herself she taught kindergarten in Harlem. In 1961 she moved to Tokyo, where she taught English at Waseda University and also studied sculpting. By the
time she married Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura in 1965, however, Millett was back in New York City, teaching English and philosophy at Barnard College. (The couple divorced in 1985.) At the same time, she pursued a
doctorate at Columbia University, and in 1970 she was awarded a Ph.D. with distinction. Her thesis, a work combining literary analysis with sociology and anthropology, was published that same year as Sexual Politics. The book,
which defined the goals and strategies of the feminist movement, was an overnight success, transforming Millett into a public figure.¶ The celebrity came at a personal cost, as Millett revealed in a 1974 autobiographical work,
Flying, which explains the torment she suffered as a result of her views in general and of her disclosure that she was a lesbian in particular. She wrote two more autobiographical books, Sita (1977) and A.D.: A Memoir (1995). The
Basement (1979) is a factual account of a young woman’s abuse, torture, and murder at the hands of a group of teenagers led by an older woman who had been appointed her protector. Millett’s subsequent books dealt with the
political oppression in Iran after the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (Going to Iran, 1982), with her own personal experiences as a psychiatric patient (The Loony Bin Trip, 1990), with the issue of cruelty in general (The Politics
of Cruelty, 1994), and with the problems of aging, as seen through the struggles of her mother (Mother Millett, 2001).
This is from an actual book, “ Sexual Politics” Ch.
2// SC)
Before assault she is almost universally defenceless both by her physical and emotional training.
Needless to say, this has the most far-reaching effects on the social and psychological behaviour of
both sexes.¶ Patriarchal force also relies on a form of violence particularly sexual in character and
realised most completely in the act of rape. The figures of rapes reported represent only a fraction of
those which occur, as the shame of the event is sufficient to deter women from the notion of civil
prosecution under the public circumstances of a trial. Traditionally rape has been viewed as an offence
one male commits upon another - a matter of abusing "his woman." Vendetta, such as occurs in the
American South, is carried out for masculine satisfaction the exhilarations of race hatred, and the
interests of property and vanity (honour). In rape, the emotions of aggression, hatred, contempt, and
the desire to break or violate personality, take a form consummately appropriate to sexual politics. In
the passages analysed at the' outset of this study, such emotions were present at a barely sublimated
level and were a key factor in explaining the attitude behind the author's use of language and tone.¶
Patriarchal societies typically link feelings of cruelty with sexuality, the latter often equated both with
evil and with power. This is apparent both in the sexual fantasy reported by psychoanalysis and that
reported by pornography. The rule here associates sadism with the male ("the masculine role") and
victimisation with the female ("the feminine role''). Emotional response to violence against women in
patriarchy is often curiously ambivalent; references to wife-beating, for example, invariably produce
laughter and some embarrassment. Exemplary atrocity, such as the mass murders committed by
Richard Speck, greeted at one level with a certain scandalised, possibly hypocritical indignation, is
capable of eliciting a mass response of titillation at another level. At such times one even hears from
men occasional expressions of envy or amusement. In view of the sadistic character of such public
fantasy as caters to male audiences in pornography or semi-pornographic media, one might expect that
a certain element of identification is by no means absent from the general response. Probably a similar
collective frisson sweeps through racist society when its more "logical" members have perpetrated a
lynching. Unconsciously, both crimes may serve the larger group as a ritual act, cathartic in effect.
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Forced Sterilization
Institutional Racism allows for black women to be striped of their basic rights
Fox 13 (Lauren R.D. Fox,writer, Female Prisoners Sterilized Without Consent In California Prisons July
9th, 2013 http://madamenoire.com/285399/female-prisoners-sterilized-without-consent-incalifornia-prisons/#sthash.mL6VdbnY.dpuf, //AR)
During the years of 2006-2010, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation sterilized
about 150 women without receiving approval from the state. The sterilization process is also known as tubal ligation;
the doctors who performed this procedure were contracted by the CDCR. The doctors were funded through state funds to
perform the procedure, with expenses totaling up to $147,460. The state of California made the practice of forced
sterilization on prison inmates (especially those who classify as ‘mentally ill’ and poor ) illegal since
1979 . Also, it is illegal for prisons to use federal funds to cover the costs of sterilization. Prisons are
able to find a loop-hole in this law by allowing doctors to visit inmates. These visitations give doctors the
opportunity to seek approval from inmates, even when they are in labor. A former inmate, Christina Nguyen who worked at
Valley State Prison overheard medical staff persuading inmates who had several prison terms to
become sterilized: “I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s not right,’ ” said Nguyen, 28. “ Do they think they’re animals, and they
don’t want them to breed anymore ?” Inmates told The Sacramento Bee: Michelle Anderson, who gave birth in December 2006
while at Valley State, said she’d had one prior C-section. Anderson, 44, repeatedly was asked to agree to be sterilized, she said, and was not told
what risk factors led to the requests. She refused. Nikki Montano also had had one C-section before she landed at Valley State in 2008,
pregnant and battling drug addiction. Montano, 42, was serving time after pleading guilty to burglary, forgery and receiving stolen property.
The mother of seven children, she said neither Heinrich nor the medical staff told her why she needed
a tubal ligation. “I figured that’s just what happens in prison – that that’s the best kind of doctor
you’re going get,” Montano said. “ He never told me nothing about nothing .” Although prison and medical
staff members told female inmates the sterilization would benefit them health wise, the underlying
tone and purpose of the procedure is being used against women who would be labeled as secondclass citizens . According to OB-GYN Dr. James Heinrich:
”I provided an important service to poor women who faced health
risks in future pregnancies because of past Caesarean sections. Over a 10-year period,
that isn’t a huge amount of money
compared to what you save in welfare paying for these unwanted children – as they procreated
more .” Sterilization goes beyond medical procedures; it becomes a race and economic issue between
the upper/lower class . During the mid-twentieth century, sterilization was tested upon African –American and Latino women. The
women who were a part of these tests were not told the precautions of sterilization. At the time most civil-rights leaders claimed
sterilization and even birth control was used to regulate or reduce the number of births by women
of color . With all the advancements in family planning and contraception, do you think the medical procedure of sterilization should be
obsolete?
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Root Cause
Patriarchy is the most controlling form of dominance against subjectivity and difference – it’s a series
of social patterns that can be challenged effectively by fierce resistance
Millett 69 (Kate Millett, Kate Millett, in full Katherine Murray Millett (born Sept. 14, 1934, St. Paul, Minn., U.S.), American feminist, author, and artist, an early and influential figure in the women’s liberation
movement, whose first book, Sexual Politics, began her exploration of the dynamics of power in relation to gender and sexuality.¶ Millett earned a bachelor’s degree with honours in 1956 from the University of Minnesota, where
she was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Two years later she was awarded a master’s degree with first-class honours from the University of Oxford. After teaching English briefly at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro,
Millett moved to New York City to pursue a career as an artist. To support herself she taught kindergarten in Harlem. In 1961 she moved to Tokyo, where she taught English at Waseda University and also studied sculpting. By the
time she married Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura in 1965, however, Millett was back in New York City, teaching English and philosophy at Barnard College. (The couple divorced in 1985.) At the same time, she pursued a
doctorate at Columbia University, and in 1970 she was awarded a Ph.D. with distinction. Her thesis, a work combining literary analysis with sociology and anthropology, was published that same year as Sexual Politics. The book,
which defined the goals and strategies of the feminist movement, was an overnight success, transforming Millett into a public figure.¶ The celebrity came at a personal cost, as Millett revealed in a 1974 autobiographical work,
Flying, which explains the torment she suffered as a result of her views in general and of her disclosure that she was a lesbian in particular. She wrote two more autobiographical books, Sita (1977) and A.D.: A Memoir (1995). The
Basement (1979) is a factual account of a young woman’s abuse, torture, and murder at the hands of a group of teenagers led by an older woman who had been appointed her protector. Millett’s subsequent books dealt with the
political oppression in Iran after the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (Going to Iran, 1982), with her own personal experiences as a psychiatric patient (The Loony Bin Trip, 1990), with the issue of cruelty in general (The Politics
of Cruelty, 1994), and with the problems of aging, as seen through the struggles of her mother (Mother Millett, 2001).
This is from an actual book, “ Sexual Politics” Ch.
2// SC)
Patriarchal religion, popular attitude, and to some degree, science as well assumes these psycho-social distinctions to rest upon biological
where culture is acknowledged as shaping behaviour, it is said to do no
more than cooperate with nature. Yet the temperamental distinctions created in patriarchy ("masculine" and
"feminine" personality traits) do not appear to originate in human nature, those of role and status still less.¶ The heavier
differences between the sexes, so that
musculature of the male, a secondary sexual characteristic and common among mammals, is biological in origin but is also culturally
encouraged through breeding, diet and exercise. Yet it is hardly an adequate category on which to base political relations within civilisation.
Male supremacy, like other political creeds, does not finally reside in physical strength but in the acceptance of a value
system which is not biological. Superior physical strength is not a factor in political relations - vide those of race and class.
Civilisation has always been able to substitute other methods (technic, weaponry, knowledge) for those of physical strength, and contemporary
civilisation has no further need of it. At present, as in the past, physical exertion is very generally a class factor, those at the
bottom performing the most strenuous tasks, whether they be strong or not.¶ It is often assumed that patriarchy is endemic in human social
life, explicable or even inevitable on the grounds of human physiology.
Such a theory grants patriarchy logical as well as
historical origin. Yet if as some anthropologists believe, patriarchy is not of primeval origin, but was preceded by some other social form
we shall call pre-patriarchal, then the argument of physical strength as a theory of patriarchal origins would hardly constitute a sufficient
explanation - unless the male's superior physical strength was released in accompaniment with some change in orientation through new values
or new knowledge. Conjecture about origins is always frustrated by lack of certain evidence. Speculation about prehistory, which of necessity is
what this must be, remains nothing but speculation. Were one to indulge in it, one might argue the likelihood of a hypothetical period
preceding patriarchy. What would be crucial to such a premise would be a state of mind in which the primary principle would be regarded as
fertility or vitalist processes. In a primitive condition, before it developed civilisation or any but the crudest technic, humanity would perhaps
find the most impressive evidence of creative force in the visible birth of children, something of a miraculous event and linked analogically with
the growth of the earth's vegetation.¶ It
is possible that the circumstance which might drastically redirect such
attitudes would be the discovery of paternity. There is some evidence that fertility cults in ancient society at some point took
a turn toward patriarchy, displacing and downgrading female function in procreation and attributing the power of life to the phallus alone.
Patriarchal religion could consolidate this position by the creation of a male God or gods, demoting, discrediting, or eliminating goddesses and
constructing a theology whose basic postulates are male supremacist, and one of whose central functions is to uphold and validate the
patriarchal structure.¶ So
much for the evanescent delights afforded by the game of origins. The question of
the historical origins of patriarchy - whether patriarchy originated primordially in the male's superior
strength, or upon a later mobilisation of such strength under certain circumstances - appears at the
moment to be unanswerable. It is also probably irrelevant to contemporary patriarchy, where we are left with the realities of sexual
politics, still grounded, we are often assured, on nature. Unfortunately, as the psycho-social distinctions made between the two sex groups
which are said to justify their present political relationship are not the clear, specific, measurable and neutral ones of the physical sciences, but
are instead of an entirely different character - vague, amorphous, often even quasi-religious in phrasing - it must be admitted that many of the
generally understood distinctions between the sexes in the more significant areas of role and temperament, not to mention status, have in fact,
essentially cultural, rather than biological, bases. Attempts
to prove that temperamental dominance is inherent in
the male (which for its advocates, would be tantamount to validating, logically as well as historically, the patriarchal situation regarding role
and status) have been notably unsuccessful. Sources in the field are in hopeless disagreement about the nature of sexual
differences, but the most reasonable among them have despaired of the ambition of any definite equation between temperament and
biological nature. It appears that we are not soon to be enlightened as to the existence of any significant inherent differences between male
and female beyond the bio-genital ones we already know. Endocrinology and genetics afford no definite evidence of determining mentalemotional differences.¶ Not only is there insufficient evidence for the thesis that the present social distinctions of patriarchy (status, role,
temperament) are physical in origin, but we
are hardly in a position to assess the existing differentiations, since
distinctions which we know to be culturally induced at present so outweigh them. Whatever the
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areal" differences between the sexes may be, we are not likely to know them until the sexes are treated
differently, that is alike. And this is very far from being the case at present. Important new research not only suggests that the possibilities of
innate temperamental differences seem more remote than ever, but even raises questions as to the validity and permanence of psycho-sexual
identity. In doing so it gives fairly concrete positive evidence of the overwhelmingly cultural character of gender, i.e. personality structure in
terms of sexual category.¶ What Stoller and other experts define as "core gender identity" is now thought to be established in the young by the
age of eighteen months. This is how Stoller differentiates between sex and gender:¶ Dictionaries stress
that the major
connotation of sex is a biological one, as for example, in the phrases sexual relations or the male sex. In agreement with this, the
word sex, in this work will refer to the male or female sex and the component biological parts that determine whether one is a male or a
female; the word sexual will have connotations of anatomy and physiology. This obviously leaves tremendous areas of behaviour, feelings,
thoughts and fantasies that are related to the sexes and yet do not have primarily biological connotations. It is for some of these psychological
phenomena that the term gender will be used: one can speak of the male sex or the female sex, but one
can also talk about
masculinity and femininity and not necessarily be implying anything about anatomy or physiology.
Thus, while sex and gender seem to common sense inextricably bound together, one purpose this study will be to confirm the fact that
the two realms (sex and gender) are not inevitably bound in anything like a one-to-one relationship, but each
may go into quite independent ways.¶ In cases of genital malformation and consequent erroneous
gender assignment at birth, studied at the California Gender Identity Center, the discovery was made that it is easier to
change the sex of an adolescent male, whose biological identity turns out to be contrary to his gender assignment and
conditioning - through surgery - than to undo the educational consequences of years, which have
succeeded in making the subject temperamentally feminine in gesture, sense of self, personality and interests.
Studies done in California under Stoller's direction offer proof that gender identity (I am a girl, I am a boy) is the primary identity
any human being holds - the first as well as the most permanent and far-reaching. Stoller later makes emphatic the distinction that sex
is biological, gender psychological, and therefore cultural: "Gender is a term that has psychological or cultural rather than biological
"masculine" and
"feminine"; these latter may be quite independent of (biological) sex. Indeed, so arbitrary is gender, that it may even be
contrary to physiology: ". . . although the external genitalia (penis, testes, scrotum) contribute to the sense of
connotations. If the proper terms for sex are "male" and "female," the corresponding terms for gender are
maleness, no one of them is essential for it, not even all of them together.
In the absence of complete evidence,
I agree in general with Money, and the Hampsons who show in their large series of intersexed patients that gender
role is
determined by postnatal forces, regardless of the anatomy and physiology of the external genitalia.''¶
It is now believed that the human fetus is originally physically female until the operation of androgen at a
certain stage of gestation causes those with y chromosomes to develop into males. Psycho-sexually (e.g., in terms of masculine and
feminine, and in contradistinction to male and female) there is no differentiation between the sexes at birth. Psychosexual personality is therefore postnatal and learned.¶ ... the condition existing at birth and for several
months thereafter is one of psycho-sexual undifferentiation. Just as in the embryo, morphologic sexual differentiation
passes from a plastic stage to one of fixed immutability, so also does psycho-sexual differentiation become fixed and immutable - so much so,
so strong and fixed a feeling as personal sexual identity must stem
from something innate, instinctive, and not subject to postnatal experience and learning. The error of
this traditional assumption is that the power and permanence of something learned has been
underestimated. The experiments of animal ethologists on imprinting have now corrected this misconception.¶ John Money who is
quoted above, believes that "the acquisition of a native language is a human counterpart to imprinting," and gender first established
"with the establishment of a native language.'' This would place the time of establishment at about eighteen months.
that mankind has traditionally assumed that
Jerome Kagin's studies in how children of pre-speech age are handled and touched, tickled and spoken to in terms of their sexual identity ("Is it
the most considerable emphasis on purely tactile
learning which would have much to do with the child's sense of self, even before speech is attained. ¶
a boy or a girl?" "Hello, little fellow," "Isn't she pretty," etc.) put
Because of our social circumstances, male and female are really two cultures and their life experiences are utterly different and this is crucial.
Implicit in all the gender identity development which takes place through childhood is the sum total of the parents', the peers', and the
culture's notions of what is appropriate to each gender by way of temperament, character, interests, status, worth, gesture, and expression.
Every moment of the child's life is a clue to how he or she must think and behave to attain or satisfy
the demands which gender places upon one. In adolescence, the merciless task of conformity grows to crisis proportions,
generally cooling and settling in maturity. Since patriarchy's biological foundations appear to be so very insecure, one
has some cause to admire the strength of a "socialisation" which can continue a universal condition "on faith alone," as it were, or through an
acquired value system exclusively. What does seem decisive in assuring the maintenance of the temperamental differences between the sexes
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is the conditioning of early childhood. Conditioning runs in a circle of self-perpetuation and self-fulfilling prophecy. To take a simple example:
expectations the culture cherishes about his gender identity encourage the young male to develop
aggressive impulses, and the female to thwart her own or turn them inward. The result is that the male tends to
have aggression reinforced in his behaviour, often with significant anti-social possibilities. Thereupon the culture consents to believe the
possession of the male indicator, the testes, penis, and scrotum, in itself characterises the aggressive impulse, and even vulgarly celebrates it in
such encomiums as "that guy has balls." The same process of reinforcement is evident in producing the chief "feminine" virtue of passivity. In
contemporary terminology, the basic division of temperamental trait is marshalled along the line of "aggression is male" and "passivity is
female." All other temperamental traits are somehow - often with the most dexterous ingenuity - aligned to correspond. If aggressiveness is the
trait of the master class, docility must be the corresponding trait of a subject group. The usual hope of such line of reasoning is that "nature,"
by some impossible outside chance, might still be depended upon to rationalise the patriarchal system. An
important consideration to be remembered here is that in patriarchy, the function of norm is unthinkingly delegated to the male - were it not,
one might as plausibly speak of "feminine" behaviour as active, and "masculine" behaviour as hyperactive or hyperaggressive.¶ Here it might
be added, by way of a coda, that data from physical sciences has recently been enlisted again to support sociological arguments, such as those
of Lionel Tiger who seeks a genetic justification of patriarchy by proposing a '"bonding instinct" in males which assures their political and social
control of human society. One sees the implication of such a theory by applying its premise to any ruling group. Tiger's thesis appears to be a
misrepresentation of the work of Lorenz and other students of animal behaviour. Since his evidence of inherent trait is patriarchal history and
organisation, his pretensions to physical evidence are both specious and circular. One
can only advance genetic evidence
when one has genetic (rather than historical) evidence to advance. As many authorities dismiss the possibility of instincts
(complex inherent behavioural patterns) in humans altogether, admitting only reflexes and drives (far simpler neural responses), the prospects
of a "bonding instinct" appear particularly forlorn.¶ Should
one regard sex in humans as a drive, it is still necessary to
point out that the enormous area of our lives, both in early "socialisation" and in adult experience, labelled "sexual behaviour," is
almost entirely the product of learning. So much is this the case that even the act of coitus itself is the product of a
long series of learned responses - responses to the patterns and attitudes, even as to the object of sexual choice, which are set up
for us by our social environment.¶ The arbitrary character of patriarchal ascriptions of temperament and role
has little effect upon their power over us. Nor do the mutually exclusive, contradictory, and polar qualities of the categories
"masculine" and "feminine" imposed upon human personality give rise to sufficiently serious question among us. Under their aegis each
personality becomes little more, and often less than half, of its human potential. Politically, the fact that each group exhibits a circumscribed
but complementary personality and range of activity is of secondary importance to the fact that each represents a status or power division. In
the matter of conformity patriarchy
is a governing ideology without peer; it is probable that no other system
has ever exercised such a complete control over its subjects.¶
Patriarchy creates gender inequality which helps fuel racism
Millett 69 (Kate Millett, Kate Millett, in full Katherine Murray Millett (born Sept. 14, 1934, St. Paul, Minn., U.S.), American feminist, author, and artist, an early and influential figure in the women’s liberation
movement, whose first book, Sexual Politics, began her exploration of the dynamics of power in relation to gender and sexuality.¶ Millett earned a bachelor’s degree with honours in 1956 from the University of Minnesota, where
she was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Two years later she was awarded a master’s degree with first-class honours from the University of Oxford. After teaching English briefly at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro,
Millett moved to New York City to pursue a career as an artist. To support herself she taught kindergarten in Harlem. In 1961 she moved to Tokyo, where she taught English at Waseda University and also studied sculpting. By the
time she married Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura in 1965, however, Millett was back in New York City, teaching English and philosophy at Barnard College. (The couple divorced in 1985.) At the same time, she pursued a
doctorate at Columbia University, and in 1970 she was awarded a Ph.D. with distinction. Her thesis, a work combining literary analysis with sociology and anthropology, was published that same year as Sexual Politics. The book,
which defined the goals and strategies of the feminist movement, was an overnight success, transforming Millett into a public figure.¶ The celebrity came at a personal cost, as Millett revealed in a 1974 autobiographical work,
Flying, which explains the torment she suffered as a result of her views in general and of her disclosure that she was a lesbian in particular. She wrote two more autobiographical books, Sita (1977) and A.D.: A Memoir (1995). The
Basement (1979) is a factual account of a young woman’s abuse, torture, and murder at the hands of a group of teenagers led by an older woman who had been appointed her protector. Millett’s subsequent books dealt with the
political oppression in Iran after the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (Going to Iran, 1982), with her own personal experiences as a psychiatric patient (The Loony Bin Trip, 1990), with the issue of cruelty in general (The Politics
of Cruelty, 1994), and with the problems of aging, as seen through the struggles of her mother (Mother Millett, 2001).
This is from an actual book, “ Sexual Politics” Ch.
2// SC)
the presence in women of the expected traits of
minority status: group self-hatred and self-rejection, a contempt both for herself and for her fellows the result of that continual, however subtle, reiteration of her inferiority which she eventually accepts
as a fact. Another index of minority status is the fierceness with which all minority group members are judged. The double standard is
What little literature the social sciences afford us in this context confirms
applied not only in cases of sexual conduct but other contexts as well. In the relatively rare instances of female crime too: in many American
states a woman convicted of crime is awarded a longer sentence. Generally an accused woman acquires a notoriety out of proportion to her
acts and due to sensational publicity she may be tried largely for her "sex life." But so effective is her conditioning toward passivity in
patriarchy, woman is rarely extrovert enough in her maladjustment to enter upon criminality. Just
as every minority member
must either apologise for the excesses of a fellow or condemn him with a strident enthusiasm, women
are characteristically harsh, ruthless and frightened in their censure of aberration among their numbers.¶ The
gnawing suspicion which plagues any minority member, that the myths propagated about his
inferiority might after all be true often reaches remarkable proportions in the personal insecurities of women. Some find their
subordinate position so hard to bear that they repress and deny its existence. But a large number will recognise and admit their circumstances
when they are properly phrased. Of two studies which asked women if they would have preferred to be born male, one found that one fourth
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of the sample admitted as much, and in another sample, one half. When one inquires of children, who have not yet developed as serviceable
techniques of evasion, what their choice might be, if they had one, the answers of female children in a large majority of cases clearly favour
The phenomenon of parents' prenatal
preference for male issue is too common to require much elaboration. In the light of the imminent possibility of parents
birth into the elite group, whereas boys overwhelmingly reject the opinion of being girls.
actually choosing the sex of their child, such a tendency is becoming the cause of some concern in scientific circles.¶ Comparisons such as
blacks and women reveal that common opinion
associates the same traits with both: inferior intelligence, an instinctual or sensual gratification, an
emotional nature both primitive and childlike, an imagined prowess in or affinity for sexuality, a
contentment with their own lot which is in accord with a proof of its appropriateness, a wily habit of
deceit, and concealment of feeling. Both groups are forced to the same accommodational tactics: an ingratiating or supplicatory
Myrdal, Hacker, and Dixon draw between the ascribed attributes of
manner invented to please, a tendency to study those points at which the dominant group are subject to influence or corruption, and an
assumed air of helplessness involving fraudulent appeals for direction through a show of ignorance. It is ironic how misogynist literature has for
centuries concentrated on just these traits, directing its fiercest enmity at feminine guile and corruption, and particularly that element of it
which is sexual, or, as such sources would have it, "wanton."
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Death penalty
Patriarchy deprives women of control on their own body results the death penalty of the woman and
fetus
Millett 69 (Kate Millett, Kate Millett, in full Katherine Murray Millett (born Sept. 14, 1934, St. Paul, Minn., U.S.), American feminist, author, and artist, an early and influential figure in the women’s liberation
movement, whose first book, Sexual Politics, began her exploration of the dynamics of power in relation to gender and sexuality.¶ Millett earned a bachelor’s degree with honours in 1956 from the University of Minnesota, where
she was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Two years later she was awarded a master’s degree with first-class honours from the University of Oxford. After teaching English briefly at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro,
Millett moved to New York City to pursue a career as an artist. To support herself she taught kindergarten in Harlem. In 1961 she moved to Tokyo, where she taught English at Waseda University and also studied sculpting. By the
time she married Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura in 1965, however, Millett was back in New York City, teaching English and philosophy at Barnard College. (The couple divorced in 1985.) At the same time, she pursued a
doctorate at Columbia University, and in 1970 she was awarded a Ph.D. with distinction. Her thesis, a work combining literary analysis with sociology and anthropology, was published that same year as Sexual Politics. The book,
which defined the goals and strategies of the feminist movement, was an overnight success, transforming Millett into a public figure.¶ The celebrity came at a personal cost, as Millett revealed in a 1974 autobiographical work,
Flying, which explains the torment she suffered as a result of her views in general and of her disclosure that she was a lesbian in particular. She wrote two more autobiographical books, Sita (1977) and A.D.: A Memoir (1995). The
Basement (1979) is a factual account of a young woman’s abuse, torture, and murder at the hands of a group of teenagers led by an older woman who had been appointed her protector. Millett’s subsequent books dealt with the
political oppression in Iran after the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (Going to Iran, 1982), with her own personal experiences as a psychiatric patient (The Loony Bin Trip, 1990), with the issue of cruelty in general (The Politics
of Cruelty, 1994), and with the problems of aging, as seen through the struggles of her mother (Mother Millett, 2001).
This is from an actual book, “ Sexual Politics” Ch.
2// SC)
We are not accustomed to associate patriarchy with force. So perfect is its system of socialisation, so
complete the general assent to its values, so long and so universally has it prevailed in human society,
that it scarcely seems to require violent implementation. Customarily, we view its brutalities in the past
as exotic or "primitive" custom. Those of the present are regarded as the product of individual deviance,
confined to pathological or exceptional behaviour, and without general import. And yet, just as under
other total ideologies (racism and colonialism are somewhat analogous in this respect) control in
patriarchal society would be imperfect, even inoperable, unless it had the rule of force to rely upon,
both in emergencies and as an ever-present instrument of intimidation.¶ Historically, most patriarchies
have institutionalised force through their legal systems. For example, strict patriarchies such as that of
Islam, have implemented the prohibition against illegitimacy or sexual autonomy with a death sentence.
In Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia the adulteress is still stoned to death with a mullah presiding at the
execution. Execution by stoning was once common practice through the Near East. It is still condoned in
Sicily. Needless to say there was and is no penalty imposed upon the male correspondent. Save in
recent times or exceptional cases, adultery was not generally recognised in males except as an offence
one male might commit against another's property interest. In Tokugawa Japan, for example, an
elaborate set of legal distinctions were made according to class. A samurai was entitled, and in the face
of public knowledge, even obliged, to execute an adulterous wife, whereas a chonin (common citizen) or
peasant might respond as he pleased. In cases of cross-class adultery, the lower-class male convicted of
sexual intimacy with his employer's wife would, because he had violated taboos of class and property,
be beheaded together with her. Upper strata males had, of course, the same license to seduce lowerclass women as we are familiar with in Western societies.¶ Indirectly, one form of "death penalty" still
obtains even in America today. Patriarchal legal systems in depriving women of control over their own
bodies drive them to illegal abortions; it is estimated that between two and five thousand women die
each year from this cause.¶ Excepting a social license to physical abuse among certain class and ethnic
groups, force is diffuse and generalised in most contemporary patriarchies. Significantly, force itself is
restricted to the male who alone is psychologically and technically equipped to perpetrate physical
violence? Where differences in physical strength have become immaterial through the use of arms, the
female is rendered innocuous by her socialisation.
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Battle of the sexes
Patriarchy puts the sexes at war justifying heinousness activities against woman by making her an
inferior species
Millett 69 (Kate Millett, Kate Millett, in full Katherine Murray Millett (born Sept. 14, 1934, St. Paul, Minn., U.S.), American feminist, author, and artist, an early and influential figure in the women’s liberation
movement, whose first book, Sexual Politics, began her exploration of the dynamics of power in relation to gender and sexuality.¶ Millett earned a bachelor’s degree with honours in 1956 from the University of Minnesota, where
she was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Two years later she was awarded a master’s degree with first-class honours from the University of Oxford. After teaching English briefly at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro,
Millett moved to New York City to pursue a career as an artist. To support herself she taught kindergarten in Harlem. In 1961 she moved to Tokyo, where she taught English at Waseda University and also studied sculpting. By the
time she married Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura in 1965, however, Millett was back in New York City, teaching English and philosophy at Barnard College. (The couple divorced in 1985.) At the same time, she pursued a
doctorate at Columbia University, and in 1970 she was awarded a Ph.D. with distinction. Her thesis, a work combining literary analysis with sociology and anthropology, was published that same year as Sexual Politics. The book,
which defined the goals and strategies of the feminist movement, was an overnight success, transforming Millett into a public figure.¶ The celebrity came at a personal cost, as Millett revealed in a 1974 autobiographical work,
Flying, which explains the torment she suffered as a result of her views in general and of her disclosure that she was a lesbian in particular. She wrote two more autobiographical books, Sita (1977) and A.D.: A Memoir (1995). The
Basement (1979) is a factual account of a young woman’s abuse, torture, and murder at the hands of a group of teenagers led by an older woman who had been appointed her protector. Millett’s subsequent books dealt with the
political oppression in Iran after the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (Going to Iran, 1982), with her own personal experiences as a psychiatric patient (The Loony Bin Trip, 1990), with the issue of cruelty in general (The Politics
This is from an actual book, “ Sexual Politics” Ch.
2// SC)
The history of patriarchy presents a variety of cruelties and barbarities: the suttee execution in India,
the crippling deformity of foot-binding in China, the lifelong ignominy of the veil in Islam, or the
widespread persecution of sequestration, the gynaecium, and purdah. Phenomenon such as
clitoridectomy, clitoral incision, the sale and enslavement of women under one guise or another,
involuntary and child marriages, concubinage and prostitution, still take place - the first in Africa, the
latter in the Near and Far East, the last generally. The rationale which accompanies that imposition of
male authority euphemistically referred to as "the battle of the sexes" bears a certain resemblance to
the formulas of nations at war, where any heinousness is justified on the grounds that the enemy is
either an inferior species or really not human at all. The patriarchal mentality has concocted a whole
series of rationales about women which accomplish this purpose tolerably well. And these traditional
beliefs still invade our consciousness and affect our thinking to an extent few of us would be willing to
admit.
of Cruelty, 1994), and with the problems of aging, as seen through the struggles of her mother (Mother Millett, 2001).
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Alt Solvency
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Castration Alt
The alt is a rejection of the aff’s ideology to metaphorically castrate them of the patriarchal status quo
Millett 69 (Kate Millett, Kate Millett, in full Katherine Murray Millett (born Sept. 14, 1934, St. Paul, Minn., U.S.), American feminist, author, and artist, an early and influential figure in the women’s liberation
movement, whose first book, Sexual Politics, began her exploration of the dynamics of power in relation to gender and sexuality.¶ Millett earned a bachelor’s degree with honours in 1956 from the University of Minnesota, where
she was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Two years later she was awarded a master’s degree with first-class honours from the University of Oxford. After teaching English briefly at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro,
Millett moved to New York City to pursue a career as an artist. To support herself she taught kindergarten in Harlem. In 1961 she moved to Tokyo, where she taught English at Waseda University and also studied sculpting. By the
time she married Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura in 1965, however, Millett was back in New York City, teaching English and philosophy at Barnard College. (The couple divorced in 1985.) At the same time, she pursued a
doctorate at Columbia University, and in 1970 she was awarded a Ph.D. with distinction. Her thesis, a work combining literary analysis with sociology and anthropology, was published that same year as Sexual Politics. The book,
which defined the goals and strategies of the feminist movement, was an overnight success, transforming Millett into a public figure.¶ The celebrity came at a personal cost, as Millett revealed in a 1974 autobiographical work,
Flying, which explains the torment she suffered as a result of her views in general and of her disclosure that she was a lesbian in particular. She wrote two more autobiographical books, Sita (1977) and A.D.: A Memoir (1995). The
Basement (1979) is a factual account of a young woman’s abuse, torture, and murder at the hands of a group of teenagers led by an older woman who had been appointed her protector. Millett’s subsequent books dealt with the
political oppression in Iran after the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (Going to Iran, 1982), with her own personal experiences as a psychiatric patient (The Loony Bin Trip, 1990), with the issue of cruelty in general (The Politics
This is from an actual book, “ Sexual Politics” Ch.
2// SC)
At the level of common attitude – sex and particularly that very explosive subject of the relationship of
the sexes – is a subject closed to intelligent investigation and accessible only to persiflage and levity.¶
The second evasion our culture has evolved is via folk myth. From Dagwood to the college professor,
sex is folklore and the official version of both is that the male is the “victim” of a widespread conspiracy.
From the folk figure of Jiggs or Punch to the very latest study of the damage which mothers wreak upon
their sons, we are assailed by the bogey of the overbearing woman – woman as some terrible and
primitive natural evil – our twentieth-century remnant of the primitive fear of the unknown, unknown
at least to the male, and remember, it is the male in our culture who defines reality. Man is innocent,
he is put upon, everywhere he is in danger of being dethroned. Dagwood – the archetypal henpecked
husband – is a figure of folk fun only because the culture assumes that a man will rule his wife or cease
to be very much of a man. Like a dimwitted plantation owner who is virtually controlled by his farcleverer steward or valet, Dagwood is a member of the ruling class held up both to scorn and to
sympathy-scorn for being too human or too incompetent to rule, yet sympathetic because every other
member of the privileged group knows in his heart how burdensome it is to maintain the illusory
facade of superiority over those who are your natural equals.¶ The phantasy of the male victim is not
only a myth, it is politically expedient myth, myth either invented or disseminated to serve the political
end of a rationalization or a softening and partial denial of power. The actual relation of the sexes in our
culture from the dawn of history has been diametrically opposite to the of official cult of the
downtrodden. Yet our culture seeks on every level of discussion to deny logical charge of oppression
which any objective view of the, sex structure would bring up, masculine society has a fascinating tactic
of appropriating all sympathy for itself. It has lately taken up the practice of screaming out that it is the
victim of unnatural surgery ... it has been “castrated". Even Albert Shanker has discovered of late that
black community control, the Mayor, and the Board of Education have performed this abomination
upon his person. To those in fear of castration word one word of comfort. The last instance of its
practice on a white man in western culture was the late l8th century when the last castrati lost a vital
section of his anatomy in the cause of the art of music – at the hands of another male, I must add. For
castration is an ancient cruelty which males practice on each other. In the American South it was as a
way to humiliate black victims of the Klan. In the Ancient East it was a barbarous form of punishment
for crime. In the courts of the Italian Renaissance castration was a perverse method of providing
soprano voices for the Papal Choir. It was felt that women were too profane to sing the holy offices so to
supply the demand for the higher musical register, eunuchs were created through putting young men to
the knife¶ As the practice of physical castration has been abolished clear that the word in current
usage must be accepted in a metaphoric rather than literal connotation, if we are to any sense of the
fantastic anxiety contemporary male egos, for on every hand, in the media and in the culture both high
and low, men today have come to see the terrible specter of the “castrating female” all about them,
their paranoiac delusions are taken for social fact. Having in a confused way, associated his genitals
with his power, the male now bellows in physical pain and true hysteria every time his social and
of Cruelty, 1994), and with the problems of aging, as seen through the struggles of her mother (Mother Millett, 2001).
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political prerogatives are threatened. If by castration is meant a loss through being forced to share
power: with oppressed groups deprived of power- or even of human status, then there are many
white men in America who will suffer this psychic operation, but it will be the removal of a cancer in
the brain and heart not of any. pleasurable or creative organ. To, argue that any woman who insists on
full human, status is a “castrating bitch” or guilty of the obscure evil: of “penis envy” (only the
consummate male chauvinist could have imagined this term) is as patently silly as to argue that
dispossessed blacks want to become white men issue is not to be Whitey, but to have a fair share of
what Whitey has the whole world of human possibility.¶ While I am fully aware that equal rights entail
equal responsibility there are some things Whitey has which I- am very sure I don’t want, for example,
a Green Beret, a Zippo for burning down, villages the ear of a dead of peasant, the burden of the
charred flesh a Vietnamese child. Nor do I have any interest in acquiring the habits of violence, warfare
(unless in the just cause of self-defense – a cause I cannot foresee ever happening in American foreign
policy), or the white man's imperialist racism, or rape or the capitalist exploitation of poverty and
ignorance.
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AT: Alt Fails
The alt. is possible, it’s a matter of us having it within our power to create a world that is bearable, we
hold fate in our hands
Millett 69 (Kate Millett, Kate Millett, in full Katherine Murray Millett (born Sept. 14, 1934, St. Paul, Minn., U.S.), American feminist, author, and artist, an early and influential figure in the women’s liberation
movement, whose first book, Sexual Politics, began her exploration of the dynamics of power in relation to gender and sexuality.¶ Millett earned a bachelor’s degree with honours in 1956 from the University of Minnesota, where
she was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Two years later she was awarded a master’s degree with first-class honours from the University of Oxford. After teaching English briefly at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro,
Millett moved to New York City to pursue a career as an artist. To support herself she taught kindergarten in Harlem. In 1961 she moved to Tokyo, where she taught English at Waseda University and also studied sculpting. By the
time she married Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura in 1965, however, Millett was back in New York City, teaching English and philosophy at Barnard College. (The couple divorced in 1985.) At the same time, she pursued a
doctorate at Columbia University, and in 1970 she was awarded a Ph.D. with distinction. Her thesis, a work combining literary analysis with sociology and anthropology, was published that same year as Sexual Politics. The book,
which defined the goals and strategies of the feminist movement, was an overnight success, transforming Millett into a public figure.¶ The celebrity came at a personal cost, as Millett revealed in a 1974 autobiographical work,
Flying, which explains the torment she suffered as a result of her views in general and of her disclosure that she was a lesbian in particular. She wrote two more autobiographical books, Sita (1977) and A.D.: A Memoir (1995). The
Basement (1979) is a factual account of a young woman’s abuse, torture, and murder at the hands of a group of teenagers led by an older woman who had been appointed her protector. Millett’s subsequent books dealt with the
political oppression in Iran after the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (Going to Iran, 1982), with her own personal experiences as a psychiatric patient (The Loony Bin Trip, 1990), with the issue of cruelty in general (The Politics
This is from an actual book, “ Sexual Politics” Ch.
2// SC)
It is time we realized that the whole structure of male and female personality is arbitrarily imposed by
social conditioning a social conditioning which has taken all the possible traits of human personality –
which Margaret Mead once, by way of analogy, compared to the many colors of the rainbow's spectrum
– and arbitrarily assigned traits into two categories; thus aggression is masculine, passivity-feminine
violence- masculine, tenderness feminine, intelligence masculine and emotion feminine, etc., etc...
arbitrarily departmentalizing human qualities into two neat little piles which are drilled into children
by toys, games, the social propaganda of television and the board of education's deranged whim as to
what is proper male – female Role-Building. What we must now set about doing is to reexamine this
whole foolish and segregated house of cards, and pick from it what we can use: Dante, Shakespeare,
Lady Murasaki and Mozart, Einstein and the care for life which we have bred into women – and accept
these as human traits. Then we must get busy to eliminate what are not properly humane or even
human ideas – the warrior, the killer, the hero as homicide, the passive, dumb cow victim.¶ We must
now begin to realize and to retrain ourselves to see that both intelligence and a reverence for life are
HUMAN qualities. It is high time we began to be reasonable about the relationship of sexuality to
personality and admit the facts -the present assignment of temperamental traits to sex is moronic,
limiting and hazardous. Virility - the murderer's complex- or self definition in terms of how many or how
often or how efficiently he can oppress his fellow – - This has got to go. There is a whole generation
coming of age in America who have already thoroughly sickened of the military male ideal, who know
they were born men and don't have to prove it by killing someone or wearing crew cuts. There is also a
vast number of women who are beginning to wake out of the long sleep known as cooperating in one's
own oppression and self-denigration, and they are banding together, in nationwide chapters of the
National Organization for Women – in the myriad groups of Radical Women springing up in cities all over
the country and the world, in the women's liberation groups of SDS and in other groups or, on campus,
and they are joining together to make the beginnings of a new and massive women's movement in
America and in the world – to establish true equality between the sexes, to break the old machine of
sexual politics and replace it with a more human and civilized world for both sexes, and to end the
present system's oppression of men as well as women.¶ There are other forces at work to change
thewhole face of American society: the black movement to end racism, the student movement with its
numbers and powers for spreading the idea of a new society founded on democratic principles, free of
the war reflex. free of the economic and racial exploitation reflex. Black people, students and women –
that's alot of people with our combined numbers it is probably 70% of the population or more. It is
more than enough to change the course and character of our society – surely enough to cause a radical
social revolution. And maybe it will also be the first Revolution to avoid the pitfall of bloodshed, a
mere change of dictators and the inevitable counter-revolution which follows upon such betrayal and
loss of purpose.¶ We are numbers sufficient to alter the course of human history -by changing
fundamental values by affecting an entire change of consciousness. We cannot have such a change of
of Cruelty, 1994), and with the problems of aging, as seen through the struggles of her mother (Mother Millett, 2001).
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consciousness unless we rebuild values – -we cannot rebuild values unless we ‘restructure personality.'
But we cannot do this or solve racial and economic crimes unless we end the oppression of all people
– unless we end the idea of violence, of dominance, of power, unless we end the idea of oppression
itself – unless we realize-that a revolution in sexual policy is not only part of but basic to any real
change in the quality life. Social and cultural revolution in America and the world depend on a change of
consciousness of which a new relationship between the sexes and a new definition of humanity and
human personality are an integral part.¶ As we awake and begin to take action, there will be enough of
us and we will have both a purpose and a goal – the first truly human condition, the first really human
society. Let us begin the revolution and let us begin it with love: All of us, black, white, and gold, male
and, female, have it, within our power to create a world we could bear out of the desert we inhabit for
we hold our very fate in our hands.
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AT: Alt Causes/Alt Fails
Action now is key as students we live in a utopia of being almost treated equally we can solve for a
lack of representation and oppression
Millett 69 (Kate Millett, Kate Millett, in full Katherine Murray Millett (born Sept. 14, 1934, St. Paul, Minn., U.S.), American feminist, author, and artist, an early and influential figure in the women’s liberation
movement, whose first book, Sexual Politics, began her exploration of the dynamics of power in relation to gender and sexuality.¶ Millett earned a bachelor’s degree with honours in 1956 from the University of Minnesota, where
she was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Two years later she was awarded a master’s degree with first-class honours from the University of Oxford. After teaching English briefly at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro,
Millett moved to New York City to pursue a career as an artist. To support herself she taught kindergarten in Harlem. In 1961 she moved to Tokyo, where she taught English at Waseda University and also studied sculpting. By the
time she married Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura in 1965, however, Millett was back in New York City, teaching English and philosophy at Barnard College. (The couple divorced in 1985.) At the same time, she pursued a
doctorate at Columbia University, and in 1970 she was awarded a Ph.D. with distinction. Her thesis, a work combining literary analysis with sociology and anthropology, was published that same year as Sexual Politics. The book,
which defined the goals and strategies of the feminist movement, was an overnight success, transforming Millett into a public figure.¶ The celebrity came at a personal cost, as Millett revealed in a 1974 autobiographical work,
Flying, which explains the torment she suffered as a result of her views in general and of her disclosure that she was a lesbian in particular. She wrote two more autobiographical books, Sita (1977) and A.D.: A Memoir (1995). The
Basement (1979) is a factual account of a young woman’s abuse, torture, and murder at the hands of a group of teenagers led by an older woman who had been appointed her protector. Millett’s subsequent books dealt with the
political oppression in Iran after the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (Going to Iran, 1982), with her own personal experiences as a psychiatric patient (The Loony Bin Trip, 1990), with the issue of cruelty in general (The Politics
This is from an actual book, “ Sexual Politics” Ch.
2// SC)
And now we have it we realize how badly we were cheated – we had fought so long, worked so hard,
pushed back despair so many times that we were exhausted – we just said then give us that and we will
do the rest ourselves. But -we didn't realize, as perhaps blacks never realized until the Civil Rights
Movement, that the ballot is no real admission to civil life in America; it means nothing at all if you
are not represented in a representative democracy. And we are not represented now any more than
black people... both groups have only one senator one Tom apiece. The United States has fewer women
in public office than hardly any nation in the world – we are more effectively ostracized from political
life – in this country than any other constituency in America – and we are 53% of its population. Political
nominees announced their intention of helping asthmatic children and the mentally retarded of every
age, if elected – but not a word about women half the population- but not a word – the largest minority
status group in history. But not one word.¶ It is time the official fallacy of the West and of the United
States particularly - that the sexes are now equal socially and politically - be exploded for the hoax it
really is. For at present any gainsaying of this piety is countered with the threat that “women have got
too much power I they're running the world”, and other tidbits of frivolity which the speaker, strange as
it may seem, might often enough believe. For the more petty male ego(like that of the cracker or the
Union man..in the North who voted for Wallace) – in his paranoia is likely to believe that because one
woman or one black man in millions can make nearly or even a bit more than he does – the whole
bunch are taking over that sordid little corner of the world he regarded as his birthright because the
was white and male – and on which he had staked his very identity-just because it prevented him from
seeing himself as exploited by the very caste he had imagined he was part of and with whom, despite all
evidence to the contrary, he fancied he shared the gifts of the earth and the American dream – .
Nightmare that it is.¶ The actual facts of the situation of woman in America today are sufficient evidence
that, white or black, women are at the bottom unless they sleep with the top. On their own they are
Nobody and taught every day they are Nobody and taught so well they have come to internalize that
destructive notion and even believe it. The Department of Labor statistics can't hide the fact that this is
a man's world – a white man's world: the average year-round income of the white male is $6,704, of a
black male $4,277, of a white I female $3,991, and of the black woman $2,816. As students you live in a
Utopia – enjoy it, for it is the only moment in your lives when you will be treated nearly as equals.
When you get married or get a job you will be made to see where power is, but then it will be too late.
That is why you should organize now: look at your curriculum and look at your housing rules, – that's a
start at realizing how-you are treated unfairly.¶ But the oppression of women is not only economic;
that's just a part of it. The oppression of women is Total and therefore it exists in the mind, it is
psychological oppression. Let's have a look at how it works, for it works like a charm. From earliest
childhood every female child is carefully taught that she is to be a life-long incompetent at every sphere
of significant human activity therefore she must convert herself into a sex object – a Thing. She must be
pretty and assessed by the world: weighed, judged and measured by her looks alone. If she's pretty,
of Cruelty, 1994), and with the problems of aging, as seen through the struggles of her mother (Mother Millett, 2001).
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she can marry; then she can concentrate rate her energies on pregnancy and diapers. That's life – that's
female life. That's what it is to reduce and limit the expectations and potentialities of one half of the
human race to the level animal behavior.
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Alt Solvency
The alt is key to other radical reforms
Baskerville 8 ( Stephen Baskerville, Ph.D.*Stephen Baskerville teaches political science at Patrick Henry College. He is the author of Taken Into Custody: The
War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (Cumberland Books). http://profam.org/pub/fia/fia.2202.htm, "The Family in America” Online Edition Volume 22
Number 02) //
SC
Divorce also demonstrates how sexual radicalism reproduces itself in new forms. It has almost certainly led to same-sex marriage, which would not be an issue today if marriage had not already been devalued by divorce.
“Commentators miss the point when they oppose homosexual marriage on the grounds that it would undermine traditional understandings of marriage,” writes Bryce Christensen. “It is only because traditional understandings of
marriage have already been severely undermined that homosexuals are now laying claim to it.”[46] Though gay activists cite their very desire to marry as evidence that their lifestyle is not inherently promiscuous, they also
acknowledge that that desire arises only by the promiscuity permitted in modern marriage. Stephanie Coontz notes that gays are attracted to marriage only in the form debased by heterosexual divorce: “Gays and lesbians simply
¶ Same-sex marriage is therefore only a
symptom of the larger politicization of private and sexual life. Further, just as the divorce revolution led to
same-sex marriage, so through the child abuse industry it has extended this to parenting by same-sex
couples. ¶ Most critiques of homosexual parenting have focused on the therapeutic question of whether it is developmentally healthy for children to be raised by two homosexuals.[48] Few have stopped to ask the
looked at the revolution heterosexuals had wrought and noticed that, with its new norms, marriage could work for them, too.”[47]
more momentous political question of where homosexual “parents” get children in the first place. Here the discussion does not require esoteric child-development theory or psychological jargon from academic “experts.” It can
readily be understood by any parent who has been interrogated by Child Protective Services. The answer is that homosexuals get other people’s children, and they get them from the same courts and social service bureaucracies
While attention has been focused on sperm donors and surrogate mothers, most of
the children sought by potential homosexual parents are existing children whose ties to one or both
of their natural parents have been severed. Most often, this has happened through divorce.[49]¶ The question then
that are operated by their feminist allies.
arises whether the original parent or parents ever agreed to part with their children or did something to warrant losing them. Current law governing divorce and child custody renders this question open. The explosion of foster
care and the assumed but unexamined need to find permanent homes for allegedly abused children provides perhaps the strongest argument in favor of gay marriage and gay parenting.[50] Yet the politics of child abuse and
divorce indicate that this assumption is not necessarily valid. ¶ The government-generated child abuse epidemic, and the mushrooming foster care business which it feeds, have allowed government agencies to operate what
amounts to a traffic in children. The San Diego Grand Jury reports “a widely held perception within the community and even within some areas of the Department [of Social Services] that the Department is in the ‘baby brokering’
Introducing same-sex marriage and adoption into this political dynamic could dramatically
increase the demand for children to adopt, thus intensifying pressure on social service agencies and
biological parents to supply such children. While sperm donors and surrogate mothers supply some children for gay parents, in practice most are already taken from their natural
business.”[51]
parents because of divorce, unwed parenting, child abuse accusations, or connected reasons. Massachusetts Senator Therese Murray, claiming that 40% of adoptions have gone to gay and lesbian couples, urges sympathy for
“children who have been neglected, abandoned, abused by their own families.”[52] But false and exaggerated abuse accusations against not only fathers but mothers too make it far from self-evident that these children are in fact
he very issue of gay parenting has arisen as the direct and perhaps
inevitable consequence once government officials got into the business — which began largely with
divorce — of distributing other people’s children.
victims of their own parents. What seems inescapable is that t
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Answers To
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AT: Perm
Only rejection solves—any powerful circle is controlled by man including politics means even if
women initiate change it still imitates the males efforts and methods
Millett 69 (Kate Millett, Kate Millett, in full Katherine Murray Millett (born Sept. 14, 1934, St. Paul, Minn., U.S.), American feminist, author, and artist, an early and influential figure in the women’s liberation
movement, whose first book, Sexual Politics, began her exploration of the dynamics of power in relation to gender and sexuality.¶ Millett earned a bachelor’s degree with honours in 1956 from the University of Minnesota, where
she was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Two years later she was awarded a master’s degree with first-class honours from the University of Oxford. After teaching English briefly at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro,
Millett moved to New York City to pursue a career as an artist. To support herself she taught kindergarten in Harlem. In 1961 she moved to Tokyo, where she taught English at Waseda University and also studied sculpting. By the
time she married Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura in 1965, however, Millett was back in New York City, teaching English and philosophy at Barnard College. (The couple divorced in 1985.) At the same time, she pursued a
doctorate at Columbia University, and in 1970 she was awarded a Ph.D. with distinction. Her thesis, a work combining literary analysis with sociology and anthropology, was published that same year as Sexual Politics. The book,
which defined the goals and strategies of the feminist movement, was an overnight success, transforming Millett into a public figure.¶ The celebrity came at a personal cost, as Millett revealed in a 1974 autobiographical work,
Flying, which explains the torment she suffered as a result of her views in general and of her disclosure that she was a lesbian in particular. She wrote two more autobiographical books, Sita (1977) and A.D.: A Memoir (1995). The
Basement (1979) is a factual account of a young woman’s abuse, torture, and murder at the hands of a group of teenagers led by an older woman who had been appointed her protector. Millett’s subsequent books dealt with the
political oppression in Iran after the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (Going to Iran, 1982), with her own personal experiences as a psychiatric patient (The Loony Bin Trip, 1990), with the issue of cruelty in general (The Politics
of Cruelty, 1994), and with the problems of aging, as seen through the struggles of her mother (Mother Millett, 2001).
This is from an actual book, “ Sexual Politics” Ch.
2// SC)
Patriarchal myth typically posits a golden age before the arrival of women, while its social practices permit males to be relieved of female
Sexual segregation is so prevalent in patriarchy that one encounters evidence of it everywhere. Nearly every
powerful circle in contemporary patriarchy is a men's group. But men form groups of their own on every level.
Women's groups are typically auxiliary in character, imitative of male efforts and methods on a generally trivial or
ephemeral plane. They rarely operate without recourse to male authority , church or religious groups appealing to the
superior authority of a cleric, political groups to male legislators, etc.¶ In sexually segregated situations the distinctive
company.
quality of culturally enforced temperament becomes very vivid. This is particularly true of those exclusively masculine organisations which
anthropology generally refers to as men's house institutions. The men's house is a fortress of patriarchal association and emotion. Men's
houses in preliterate society strengthen masculine communal experience through dances, gossip, hospitality, recreation, and religious
ceremony. They are also the arsenals of male weaponry.¶ David Riesman has pointed out that sports
and some other activities
provide males with a supportive solidarity which society does not trouble to provide for females. While
hunting, politics, religion, and commerce may play a role, sport and warfare are consistently the chief cement of men's
house comradery. Scholars of men's house culture from Hutton Webster and Heinrich Schurtz to Lionel Tiger tend to be sexual patriots whose
aim is to justify the apartheid the institution represents. Schurtz believes an innate gregariousness and a drive toward fraternal pleasure among
peers urges the male away from the inferior and constricting company of women. Notwithstanding his conviction that a mystical "bonding
The
institution's less genial function of power center within a state of sexual antagonism is an aspect of
the phenomenon which often goes unnoticed.¶ The men's house of Melanesia fulfil a variety of purposes and are both
instinct" exists in males, Tiger exhorts the public, by organised effort, to preserve the men's house tradition from its decline.
armory and the site of masculine ritual initiation ceremony. Their atmosphere is not very remote from that of military institutions in the
modern world: they reek of physical exertion, violence, the aura of the kill, and the throb of homosexual sentiment. They are the scenes of
scarification, head-hunting celebrations, and boasting sessions. Here
young men are to be "hardened" into manhood. In the
the term "wife" implying both
men's houses boys have such low status they are often called the "wives" of their initiators,
inferiority and the status of sexual object. Untried youths become the erotic interest of their elders and betters, a relationship
also encountered in the Samurai order, in oriental priesthood, and in the Greek gymnasium. Preliterate wisdom decrees that
while inculcating the young with the masculine ethos, it is necessary first to intimidate them with the
tutelary status of the female. An anthropologist's comment on Melanesian men's houses is applicable equally to Genet's
underworld, or Mailer's U. S. Army: "It would seem that the sexual brutalising of the young boy and the effort to turn him into a woman both
enhances the older warrior's desire of power, gratifies his sense of hostility toward the maturing male competitor, and eventually, when he
takes him into the male group, strengthens the male solidarity in its symbolic attempt to do without women." The
derogation of
feminine status in lesser males is a consistent patriarchal trait. Like any hazing procedure, initiation once endured
produces devotees who will ever after be ardent initiators, happily inflicting their own former sufferings on the newcomer.¶ The psychoanalytic
term for the generalised adolescent tone of men's house culture is "phallic state." Citadels of virility, they reinforce the most saliently poweroriented characteristics of patriarchy. The Hungarian psychoanalytic anthropologist Geza Roheim stressed the patriarchal character of men's
house organisation in the preliterate tribes he studied, defining their communal and religious practices in terms of a "group of men united in
the cult of an object that is a materialised penis and excluding the women from their society." The tone and ethos of men's house culture is
sadistic, power-oriented, and latently homosexual, frequently narcissistic in its energy and motives. The
men's house inference
that the penis is a weapon, endlessly equated with other weapons is also clear. The practice of castrating
prisoners is itself a comment on the cultural confusion of anatomy and status with weaponry. Much of the glamorisation of
masculine comradery in warfare originates in what one might designate as "the men's house
sensibility." Its sadistic and brutalising aspects are disguised in military glory and a particularly cloying species of masculine sentimentality.
A great deal of our culture partakes of this tradition, and one might locate its first statement in Western literature in the heroic intimacy of
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Patroclus and Achilles. Its development can be traced through the epic and the saga to the chanson de geste.
flourishes in war novel and movie, not to mention the comic book.
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The tradition still
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AT: Framework
Focusing on policy at the expense of sexual politics is a form of violence through demanded consent
and dominance
Millett 69 (Kate Millett, Kate Millett, in full Katherine Murray Millett (born Sept. 14, 1934, St. Paul, Minn., U.S.), American feminist, author, and artist, an early and influential figure in the women’s liberation
movement, whose first book, Sexual Politics, began her exploration of the dynamics of power in relation to gender and sexuality.¶ Millett earned a bachelor’s degree with honours in 1956 from the University of Minnesota, where
she was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Two years later she was awarded a master’s degree with first-class honours from the University of Oxford. After teaching English briefly at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro,
Millett moved to New York City to pursue a career as an artist. To support herself she taught kindergarten in Harlem. In 1961 she moved to Tokyo, where she taught English at Waseda University and also studied sculpting. By the
time she married Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura in 1965, however, Millett was back in New York City, teaching English and philosophy at Barnard College. (The couple divorced in 1985.) At the same time, she pursued a
doctorate at Columbia University, and in 1970 she was awarded a Ph.D. with distinction. Her thesis, a work combining literary analysis with sociology and anthropology, was published that same year as Sexual Politics. The book,
which defined the goals and strategies of the feminist movement, was an overnight success, transforming Millett into a public figure.¶ The celebrity came at a personal cost, as Millett revealed in a 1974 autobiographical work,
Flying, which explains the torment she suffered as a result of her views in general and of her disclosure that she was a lesbian in particular. She wrote two more autobiographical books, Sita (1977) and A.D.: A Memoir (1995). The
Basement (1979) is a factual account of a young woman’s abuse, torture, and murder at the hands of a group of teenagers led by an older woman who had been appointed her protector. Millett’s subsequent books dealt with the
political oppression in Iran after the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (Going to Iran, 1982), with her own personal experiences as a psychiatric patient (The Loony Bin Trip, 1990), with the issue of cruelty in general (The Politics
of Cruelty, 1994), and with the problems of aging, as seen through the struggles of her mother (Mother Millett, 2001).
This is from an actual book, “ Sexual Politics” Ch.
2// SC)
Hannah Arendt has observed that government is
upheld by power supported either through consent or
imposed through violence. Conditioning to an ideology amounts to the former. Sexual politics obtains consent
through the "socialisation" of both sexes to basic patriarchal polities with regard to temperament,
role, and status. As to status, a pervasive assent to the prejudice of male superiority guarantees superior status in the male, inferior in
the female. The first item, temperament, involves the formation of human personality along stereotyped
lines of sex category ("masculine" and "feminine"), based on the needs and values of the dominant group and dictated by what its
members cherish in themselves and find convenient in subordinates: aggression, intelligence, force, and efficacy in the male; passivity,
decrees a
consonant and highly elaborate code of conduct, gesture and attitude for each sex. In terms of activity, sex
ignorance, docility, "virtue," and ineffectuality in the female. This is complemented by a second factor, sex role, which
role assigns domestic service and attendance upon infants to the female, the rest of human achievement, interest, and ambition to the male.
The limited role allotted the female tends to arrest her at the level of biological experience. Therefore,
nearly all that can be described as distinctly human rather than animal activity (in their own way animals also give birth and care for their
young) is largely reserved for the male. Of course, status again follows from such an assignment. Were one to analyse the three categories
one might designate status as the political component, role as the sociological, and temperament as the psychological yet their interdependence is unquestionable and they form a chain. Those awarded higher status tend
to adopt roles of mastery, largely because they are first encouraged to develop temperaments of
dominance. That this is true of caste and class as well is self-evident.
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*AFF—Sexual Politics
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A2: Prior question
Criticism of feminist thought is a prior question
Baskerville 8 ( Stephen Baskerville, Ph.D.*Stephen Baskerville teaches political science at Patrick Henry College. He is the author of Taken Into Custody: The
War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (Cumberland Books). http://profam.org/pub/fia/fia.2202.htm, "The Family in America” Online Edition Volume 22
Number 02) //
SC
“All politics is on one level sexual politics.” — George Gilder, 1986¶ Four decades into the boldest social experiment ever undertaken in the
Western democracies, the full impact of what was once quaintly known as “women’s liberation” is at last becoming clear. The political class of
both the Left and Right have colluded to limit the debate to a series of innocuous controversies: job discrimination, equal pay, affirmative
action. Only abortion has any depth, and that debate has been mired in stalemate.¶ Meanwhile,
beneath the political radar
screen, the real consequences are finally emerging: a massive restructuring of the social order,
demographic trends that threaten the very survival of Western civilization, and perhaps least noticed, an exponential growth in the size
and power of the state — the state at its most bureaucratic and tyrannical.¶ Feminism has now positioned itself as the vanguard of the Left,
shifting the political discourse from the economic and racial to the social and increasingly the sexual. What was once a socialistic assault on
property and enterprise has become a social and sexual attack on the family, marriage, and masculinity. This marks a truly new kind of politics,
the most personal and thus potentially the most total politics ever devised: the politics of private life and sexual relations.¶ Sexual
politics
is both feminist and homosexual, with no distinct line separating them. Feminism has been the more overtly
political doctrine. Until recently, gays asked mostly to be left alone and as such gained widespread sympathy.¶ Many homosexuals, especially
males, probably do not consciously think about their sexuality in expressly political terms. Yet homosexuality in itself can be a political
statement, especially lesbianism, which for many constitutes the personal dimension of feminist ideology. “Feminism is the theory, lesbianism
is the practice,” in words attributed to Ti-Grace Atkinson. “For many of today’s feminists, lesbianism is far more than a sexual orientation
‘an ideological, political, and philosophical means of
liberation of all women from heterosexual tyranny.’”[1] For sexual activists, sex itself is not a private but a political act.
or even a preference. It is, as students in many colleges learn,
Recalling Henry Adams’ definition of politics as the “systematic organization of hatreds,” it requires little imagination to see that this rebellion
against sexual “tyranny” has politicized and transformed sex, an act associated at its most sublime with love, into what may yet prove history’s
purest distillation of hate.¶ No
sexual ideology has ever appeared before, and its unprecedented power is at
once obvious and disguised. Obvious, because it is not difficult to see that politicizing sex and sexual
relations potentially penetrates far deeper into the human psyche, unleashes energies and emotions,
and disrupts relationships and institutions far more fundamental than those attacked by radical
ideologies of the past. The capacity for intrusion into the private sphere of life is unrivalled since the bureaucratic dictatorships of the
last century and potentially surpasses even them. “Radical feminism is the most destructive and fanatical movement to come down to us from
the Sixties,” writes Robert Bork. “This is a revolutionary, not a reformist, movement, and it is meeting with considerable success. Totalitarian in
it is deeply antagonistic to traditional Western culture and proposes the complete restructuring
of society, morality, and human nature.”[2] Yet how precisely the scenario is playing out is far less clear and, indeed, has
spirit,
¶
escaped most observers. The grip that sexual politics already commands over our political culture is so profound that its most destabilizing
few have even singled out sexual politics
for focused critical attention. It is bemoaned as simply another facet of leftist politics, like socialism and racial nationalism. But it is
much more.¶ Sexual politics is the most complex and subtle political ideology today. On the one hand, the excesses of organized
features are often undetected even by its harshest critics. Apart from its advocates,
feminism’s formal agenda no longer command serious respect. Many assume it is spent as a political force, that “feminism is dead” and we live
in a “post-feminist” age. At the same time, unspoken feminist assumptions no longer hover in the political margins; they have permeated the
mainstream and thrive unchallenged and unchallengeable on the Left, the Center, and even the Right. The danger is not the absurdities of its
extremists, whom few now regard, but the steady erosion of social cohesion, civic freedom, and above all privacy, as well as the politicization of
personal life by a sexual ideology that has so mesmerized us all that we are largely immune from realizing it.
Perhaps the greatest
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danger is the absence of coherent opposition. For more than any other political movement, feminism
neuters, literally emasculates its opposition.
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AT: Poverty/ Racism= root cause
The alt makes the skwo violence worse surpassing race and poverty
Baskerville 8 ( Stephen Baskerville, Ph.D.*Stephen Baskerville teaches political science at Patrick Henry College. He is the author of Taken Into Custody: The
War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (Cumberland Books). http://profam.org/pub/fia/fia.2202.htm, "The Family in America” Online Edition Volume 22
Number 02) //
SC
It is well documented that virtually every social
pathology today — including violent crime and the drug abuse driving much of it — is attributable to single-parent homes
and fatherless children more than any other factor, far surpassing race and poverty. [80] That toxic
More crimes than these may be attributable to sexualized public life.
environment is usually and resignedly attributed to paternal abandonment, with the only available response being ever-more repressive but
ineffective child-support “crackdowns.” If
instead we see single parenthood as the deliberate product of the
feminist revolution, then the explosion of crime, addiction, and truancy — and with them the massive expansion
of the penal system and state apparatus generally — takes on new significance. It is then far from fanciful to
suggest that sexual militancy also lies behind larger trends in actual violent crime and incarceration. “Solid research links the nightmarish
increases in crime and violence among young people between 1960 to 1990 to the entry of large numbers of mothers into the work force [and]
the rise in single-parent households,” Bryce Christensen points out.[81] Feminism
may be driving not only the
criminalization of the innocent but also the criminality of the guilty. We are thus fighting a losing
battle against crime, incarceration, and expanding state power generally until we confront the role of
sexual ideology in family breakdown and the social anomie that ensues. While increased police and penal
measures are usually associated with right-wing politics, it is becoming clear that the long-term force is sexual radicalism. Marie Gottschalk
describes how “women’s organizations played a central role” in the dramatic rise of the “carceral” state.[82] Gottschalk laments that her fellow
feminists who demand more incarceration of men have “entered into some unsavory coalitions” with conservative “law-and-order groups.” But
conservatives might ask if their own legitimate concern about crime has led them to serve inadvertently as the unwitting instruments of a
repressive ideology.[83] For ever-more-draconian police measures will only create a fortress state. No free or civilized society can survive the
mass criminalization of its male population. ¶ Indeed, the fortress state may be developing externally as well as internally. Indications exist that
recent Islamic militancy is fueled in large part from perceptions of Western sexual decadence.[84] Conversely, while many feminists identify
with the antiwar Left, the
future may belong to hawks like Phyllis Chesler and Hillary Clinton, who push war
as an instrument of worldwide women’s liberation and pressure governments to justify military
policies in feminist terms. Sexuality transforms military life in complex ways. Bork criticizes feminism for weakening our military
readiness, emphasizing the dangers of women in combat roles.[85] Yet a more far-reaching consequence may be how
divorce debilitates military men. Men are increasingly aware how easily they can be divorced
unilaterally while serving their country, lose their children and everything else they possess, and even return home to face
criminal penalties if they cannot pay child support imposed in their absence.[86]
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Alt fails
The alt prevents the guilty from being punished while the innocent fall victim to the blame
Baskerville 8 ( Stephen Baskerville, Ph.D.*Stephen Baskerville teaches political science at Patrick Henry College. He is the author of Taken Into Custody: The
War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (Cumberland Books). http://profam.org/pub/fia/fia.2202.htm, "The Family in America” Online Edition Volume 22
Number 02) //
SC
Many have discerned a similarity between feminism and Marxism, but few appreciate how feminism
extends the socialist logic
and may actually exceed its intrusive potential. “Women’s liberation, if not the most extreme then certainly the most
influential neo-Marxist movement in America, has done to the American home what communism did to the Russian economy, and most of the
ruin is irreversible,” writes Ruth Wisse of Harvard. “By defining relations between men and women in terms of power and competition instead
of reciprocity and cooperation, the movement tore apart the most basic and fragile contract in human society, the unit from which all other
social institutions draw their strength.”[3]¶ Politicizing
sex takes the logic of class conflict a great leap forward. The
charge of “oppression” is leveled not at broad, impersonal social classes but at the most intimate personal
relationships. The oppressor is not the entrepreneurial class or entrepreneur but the husband (or “intimate
partner”), the father, even the son. To relieve the oppressed, the all-powerful state nationalizes not only
the private firm but the private family. Human intimacy — the individual’s last refuge from state power — is not only a
collateral casualty but a targeted enemy. The danger therefore comes not so much from the assault on freedom generally
¶
(which traditional tyrannies also threaten) but specifically from the attack on private life, especially family life (which traditional dictatorships
usually left alone). “Radical feminism is totalitarian because it denies the individual a private space; every private thought and action is public
and, therefore, political,” writes Bork. “The party or the movement claims the right to control every aspect of life.”[4] Daphne Patai also
perceives this hostility to privacy.
“Feminism today, in its erasure of the boundaries between public and
private, is writing a new chapter in the dystopian tradition of surveillance and unfreedom,” she observes, “...whereby one’s every
gesture, every thought, is exposed to the judgement of one’s fellow citizens.”[5]¶ This attack on
privacy is especially dangerous, because today many conservatives — those otherwise most likely to challenge
feminism — themselves do not value privacy and civil liberties. By a destructive irony, feminists have already
appropriated “privacy” as a rationale for abortion in legal cases like Roe v. Wade, leading conservatives (who at one time extolled the
virtues of private life) to abandon the concept itself. Many conservatives also dismiss civil liberties as a pretext for acquitting criminals. This
leaves the Left with a monopoly as guardians of the Bill of Rights.
The guilty do indeed go unpunished, but partly
because the innocent are convicted in their place. As we will see, the principal political force driving
incarceration today — of both the innocent and the guilty — is politicized sexuality. ¶ “Revolutions are very hard indeed on
privacy,” observes our leading sociologist of revolution.[6] That the totalitarian governments of the twentieth century intruded themselves into
the most intimate corners of personal life, politicized the private, and destroyed much of family life is well known.[7] But even they did not
usually make the destruction of private life their explicit aim.¶ Modern sexual politics, by contrast, specifically targets privacy, and especially
family privacy. Political theorist Carol Pateman insists that denying “the
dichotomy between the public and the
private...is, ultimately, what the feminist movement is about,” and two prominent feminists sneer at “the ideology of the
family as a bastion of privacy.”[8] Feminism’s fundamental principle — that “the personal is political” — is so obviously totalitarian
that historian Eugene Genovese (himself a former Marxist) has termed it “Stalinist.”[9] Again, this potential is obvious theoretical. What is
seldom appreciated is how far the potential has been realized. “Radical feminists must regard it as unfortunate that they lack the power and
mechanisms of the state to enforce their control over thoughts as well as behavior,” muses Bork. “However, the
movement is
gradually gaining that coercive power in both private and public institutions.”[10] Actually, they have it now.
The alt creates more single mother homes increasing the likely hood of child abuse and murder
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Baskerville 8 ( Stephen Baskerville, Ph.D.*Stephen Baskerville teaches political science at Patrick Henry College. He is the author of Taken Into Custody: The
War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (Cumberland Books). http://profam.org/pub/fia/fia.2202.htm, "The Family in America” Online Edition Volume 22
Number 02) //
SC
The divorce machinery intertwines the personal and the political as nothing before, and its personal dimension is precisely what disguises the
intrusiveness of its political power. Divorce injects state power — including the penal apparatus with its police and prisons — directly into
private households and private lives. “The
personal is political” is no longer a theoretical slogan but a codified
reality institutionally enforced by new and correspondingly feminist tribunals: the “family” courts. These bureaucratic
pseudo-courts permit politicized wives to subject their husbands to criminal penalties for their personal conduct, without having to charge the
men with any actionable offense for which they can be tried in a criminal court. To enforce this, divorce vastly expanded the cadres of feminist
police — child protective services plus domestic violence and child support enforcement agents — that target men almost exclusively and
operate outside due process protections.¶ To
justify its growth and funding, this government machinery in turn
generated a series of hysterias against men and fathers so inflammatory and hideous that no one, left
or right, dared question them or defend those accused: pedophilia, wife-beating, and nonpayment of
“child support.” While family law is ostensibly the province of state government, Congress heavily subsidizes family dissolution through
child abuse, domestic violence, and child support enforcement programs. It invariably approves these by near-unanimous majorities, fearing
feminist accusations of being soft on “pedophiles,” “batterers,” and “deadbeat dads.” Each
of these hysterias originated in
welfare, each is propagated largely by feminist social workers and feminist lawyers who receive the
federal funding, and each is closely connected with divorce. Child abuse hysteria targets both men and women, as we
¶
have seen. Yet most accusations are leveled against fathers in divorce cases. The irony is that it is easily demonstrable that child abuse is almost
entirely a product of feminism itself and its welfare bureaucracies. ¶ The
growth of child abuse coincides directly with the
rise of single-mother homes which are the setting for almost all of it. Department of Health and Human Services
(HHS) figures demonstrate that children in single-parent households are at much higher risk for physical violence and sexual molestation than
A British study found that children are up to thirty-three times more likely
to be abused in single-mother homes than in intact families.[54] The principal impediment to child abuse is thus
those living in two-parent homes.[53]
¶
precisely the first person the feminist bureaucracies remove: the father. “The presence of the father...placed the child at lesser risk for child
sexual abuse,” concludes one study, defensively. “The protective effect from the father’s presence in most households was sufficiently strong to
offset the risk incurred by the few paternal perpetrators.”[55] In fact, the risk of “paternal perpetrators” is miniscule, since it is well established
that not married fathers but single mothers
are most likely to injure and kill their children.[56] Sexual abuse, much less
common than severe physical abuse, is perpetrated mostly by boyfriends and stepfathers, though government figures often include them as
“fathers” to disguise the fact that biological fathers are the least likely child abusers.[57] A 2005 PBS documentary asserts without evidence
that “Children are most often in danger from the father.”¶ Feminist child protection agents implement this propaganda as policy. A San Diego
grand jury found that false accusations during divorce were not only tolerated but encouraged. “The
system appears to reward a
parent who initiates such a complaint,” it states, describing “allegations which are so incredible that authorities should have
been deeply concerned for the protection of the child.”[58]
This movement makes the government corrupt and makes the welfare state dangerous
Baskerville 8 ( Stephen Baskerville, Ph.D.*Stephen Baskerville teaches political science at Patrick Henry College. He is the author of Taken Into Custody: The
War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (Cumberland Books). http://profam.org/pub/fia/fia.2202.htm, "The Family in America” Online Edition Volume 22
Number 02) //
SC
Child support was originally rationalized (and federalized) as a means of recovering welfare costs from allegedly absconding low-income
fathers. Feminists transformed it into a huge subsidy on middle-class divorce. A child support schedule will tell a mother exactly how large a
tax-free windfall she can force her husband to pay her simply by divorcing, regardless of any fault on her part (or absence of fault on his). The
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amount is set by enforcement agents and collected at gunpoint if necessary.¶ Mothers are not the only ones who profit by creating fatherless
children.
Governments also generate revenue from child support and therefore from breaking up
families. State governments receive federal funds for every child support dollar collected,
incentivizing them to create as many single-mother households as possible. Mothers are encouraged to divorce
and governments simultaneously maximize revenue by setting support at levels that are generous for mothers and onerous for fathers. While
little government revenue is generated from the impecunious young unmarried fathers who hold most child support debt (and for whom the
system was ostensibly created), middle-class divorced fathers offer deeper pockets to loot. By
including middle-class divorcees,
the welfare machinery became a means not of distributing money but of collecting it, and
governments began raising revenue — which they can add to their general funds and use to expand
their overall operations — by promoting single motherhood among the affluent.[79]¶ This marked a new
stage in the expansion and redefinition of the welfare state: from distributing largesse to collecting it. The result is a self-financing machine,
generating government profits through expanded police actions by proliferating single-parent homes and fatherless children. The
welfare
state has become a self-financing perpetual growth machine for destroying families, bribing mothers,
rendering children fatherless, plundering family wealth, eroding due process, and criminalizing
fathers.
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Alt=Utopian
The alt is dangerously utopian it causes us to be immunized from recognizing the real thing
Baskerville 8 ( Stephen Baskerville, Ph.D.*Stephen Baskerville teaches political science at Patrick Henry College. He is the author of Taken Into Custody: The
War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (Cumberland Books). http://profam.org/pub/fia/fia.2202.htm, "The Family in America” Online Edition Volume 22
Number 02) //
SC
This points to feminism’s most institutionalized and destructive legacy: not eliminating gender roles, which it has not
done and can never do, but politicizing the feminine. While some among feminism’s elites moved into traditional male occupations,
many more women entered the workforce at functions that extended the domestic roles with which
they were comfortable. Thus rather than caring for their own children within the family, women began working in new professions
where they care for other people’s children as part of the public economy: daycare, early education, and “social services.” This transformed
child-rearing from a private familial into a public communal and taxable activity, expanding the tax base and with it the size and power of the
state, while also driving down male wages. Soon, a political class paid from those taxes began to take command position in control of vastly
expanded public education and social services bureaucracies, where they supervise other women who look after other people’s children,
¶ This trend renders the dream of a more
caring public sphere through feminism not only naïve but dangerously utopian. For as feminists correctly
further expanding the size and scope of the state into what had been private life.
pointed out, the feminine functions were traditionally private. Politicizing the feminine has therefore meant politicizing and bureaucratizing
This is how the “totalitarian” potential which Bork and others perceive is already being realized in ways even they may
many overuse this term, one danger of loose usage is to immunize us from
recognizing the real thing. For long recognized as a defining feature of totalitarianism is that it is specifically bureaucratic
dictatorship, which is precisely what the ideological politics of Marxism-feminism have produced. Controversies over equal pay
and affirmative action have diverted attention from the massive feminist breakthrough in the hidden realm
private life.
have yet to grasp.¶ Though
of bureaucratic politics, where it encountered virtually no opposition or even notice. With striking resemblance to Djilas’ “new class” of
apparatchiks, what the institutional Left generally and feminism in particular are constructing today is not simply tyranny but bureaucratic
tyranny, tyranny no individual consciously planned and no individual can stop. ¶ Far
from softening the hard edges of power
politics, feminism has merely inserted calculations of power into the most private corners of life. It has
subjected family life to increasing political and bureaucratic control. It has decimated families through twin processes whose direct
connection with feminism have not been fully appreciated: the weakening of parents and the politicization of children. The most
obvious example, as Bork and others point out — and where, again, some opposition has arisen — is in the politics of
schooling. Public schools were the earliest triumph of socialism and of the state’s gradual usurpation of parental roles within the liberal
¶
¶
democracies. The ideological foundation of public education in weakening parental authority and transferring it to the state emerges in the
words of a political scientist: ¶ Children are owed as a matter of justice the capacity to choose to lead lives — adopt values and beliefs, pursue
an occupation, endorse new traditions — that are different from those of their parents. Because the child cannot him or herself ensure the
acquisition of such capacities and the parents may be opposed to such acquisition, the state must ensure it for them. The state must guarantee
that children are educated for minimal autonomy.[27]¶ What
has not been appreciated — again, even by critics such as private
is
that
the
schools
were
the first triumph of not simply the welfare state but the
school and homeschool advocates —
welfare state matriarchy. ¶ Connected to this matriarchy is another that has become even more powerful and authoritarian because
it has grown up upon less resistant low-income communities and, until recently, was largely hidden from the middle class: the massive and
constantly expanding political underworld of the “social services” bureaucracies.¶ Ironically, two leftist authors have perceived the danger more
readily than most conservatives. They even adopt Djilas’ term, describing “a new class of professionals — social workers, therapists, foster care
providers, family court lawyers — who have a vested interest in taking over parental function.” “If children are the clients, parents can quite
easily become the adversaries,” write Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Cornel West, “— the people who threaten to take business away.”[28] What
Hewlett and West do not tell us is that
this new class is driven — in addition to self-interest and bureaucratic
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aggrandizement — largely by feminist ideology.¶ The power of this bureaucratic underworld derives almost entirely from
children. It is the world of social work, child psychology, child and family counseling, child care, child protection, child support enforcement,
and juvenile and family courts. Overwhelmingly, it is feminist-dominated. This is not always obvious, because its matriarchs are not necessarily
Vassar women’s studies majors indulging in tedious dorm-room debates about whether feminists may wear lipstick. But what it lacks in
ideological purity it more than makes up for in coercive power. Its operatives are quasi-police functionaries with an agenda, and they are
concerned less with ideological consistency than with political power.¶ These
feminists created and now control the vast
and impenetrable social services industries that most journalists and scholars find too dreary to
scrutinize. They dominate the $47 billion federal Administration for Children and Families, itself part of the gargantuan $700 billion
Department of Health and Human Services. They are both dispensers and recipients of its $200 billion grant program (“larger than all other
federal agencies combined,” according to HHS) among local “human services” or “social services” bureaucracies — probably the largest
patronage machine ever created in the Western world, reaching virtually into every household in the land and one that makes the former
Soviet nomenklatura look ramshackle. They created and control the “family law sections” of the bar associations and the family courts, which
they modified into their image from an earlier incarnation as juvenile courts (themselves created from “compassion”). And they dominate the
forensic psychotherapy industry, with its close ties to the courts, social work agencies, and public schools. By no means are they all doctrinaire
when push comes to shove, they know their power
comes from being female. And again, their most potent source of power is children.
devotées of The Feminine Mystique or The Female Eunuch. But
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Loss of vtl
The alt is a worse form of living, the skwo feminist movement has already left children without vtl and
parents a guilt free conscious
Baskerville 8 ( Stephen Baskerville, Ph.D.*Stephen Baskerville teaches political science at Patrick Henry College. He is the author of Taken Into Custody: The
War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (Cumberland Books). http://profam.org/pub/fia/fia.2202.htm, "The Family in America” Online Edition Volume 22
Number 02) //
SC
The matriarchal logic of the welfare state became apparent as it expanded, perhaps inexorably, into the middle class. This was effected through
what is by far the most subtle and potent weapon ever devised in the arsenal of sexual warfare, the one which brought underclass problems
(and the state welfare machinery that had grown up to address them) to the middle class: divorce. ¶ Divorce has never been analyzed politically.
Not generally perceived as a political issue or a gender battleground, and never one they wished to advertise (largely because they triumphed
divorce became the most devastating weapon in the arsenal of gender warriors,
because it brought the gender war into every household in the Western world. What media accounts
without opposition),
facetiously laugh off as an amusing “battle of the sexes” is in reality an intrusive, lethal political apparatus whose fallout is hate, poverty,
violence, and incarceration.¶ Conservatives have seriously misunderstood the divorce revolution. While they bemoan mass divorce, they also
refuse to confront its political causes. Maggie Gallagher once attributed this silence to “political cowardice”: “Opposing gay marriage or gays in
the military is for Republicans an easy, juicy, risk -free issue,” she complained. “The message [is] that at all costs we should keep divorce off the
political agenda.” The first and foremost assault on marriage came not from gays but from feminists. Michael McManus of Marriage Savers
writes that “divorce is a far more grievous blow to marriage than today’s challenge by gays.”¶ No American politician of national stature has
seriously challenged involuntary divorce. “Democrats did not want to anger their large constituency among women who saw easy divorce as a
hard-won freedom and prerogative,” writes Barbara Dafoe Whitehead. “Republicans did not want to alienate their upscale constituents or their
libertarian wing, both of whom tended to favor easy divorce, nor did they want to call attention to the divorces among their own
leadership.”[38] In his famous denunciation of single parenthood, Vice President Dan Quayle was careful to make clear, “I am not talking about
a situation where there is a divorce.”[39] The exception proves the rule. When the late Pope John Paul II spoke out against divorce in January
2002, he was attacked from the right as well as the left.[40] To the extent that conservatives have addressed divorce at all, they tend to parrot
the feminist line that divorce is perpetrated by philandering men who inflict hardship on “women and children.” ¶ Yet feminists long ago
recognized its political power. As early as the American Revolution,
divorce has represented female rebellion: “The association
of divorce with women’s freedom and prerogatives, established in those early days, remained an enduring and important feature of American
divorce,” writes Whitehead. Into the nineteenth century, “divorce became an increasingly important measure of women’s political freedom as
well as an expression of feminine initiative and independence.”[41]¶ But it was in the twentieth century that feminists teamed up with trial
lawyers and other legal entrepreneurs to institutionalize “no-fault” divorce — a measure that subtly but decisively amounted, no less, to “the
abolition of marriage” as a legally enforceable contract, in Gallagher’s phrase. The National Association of Women Lawyers (NAWL) claims
credit for pioneering no-fault divorce as early as 1943, which it describes as “the greatest project NAWL has ever undertaken.” By 1977, “the
ideal of no-fault divorce became the guiding principle for reform of divorce laws in the majority of states.”[42] ¶ Today, divorce stands as the
proudest celebration of feminine power. “Exactly the thing that people tear their hair out about is exactly the thing I am very proud of,” says
Germaine Greer.[43] Contrary to popular belief, the overwhelming majority of divorces are filed by women. Few involve grounds, such as
desertion, adultery, or violence. Nebulous justifications suffice: “growing apart,” “not feeling loved or appreciated.”[44] This includes divorces
involving children.¶ Divorce
demonstrates how the hoax of paternal abandonment is an optical illusion, for
today it is not fathers who are abandoning both their marriages and their children en masse. A glance at
our social infrastructure reveals that, under feminist influence, it is mothers. We have created a panoply of mechanisms and
institutions allowing divorcing mothers to rid themselves, temporarily or permanently, of
inconvenient children: “safe havens” have legalized child abandonment by mothers; daycare is tailored to the
needs of mothers, not children; foster care relieves single mothers who cannot provide basic care and protection;
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“CHINS” petitions allow single mothers to turn over unruly adolescents to the care and custody of social workers; “SIDS” and in some
countries infanticide laws have even made the murder of children semi-legal. And then of course there is abortion.¶ When one adds the
extension and proliferation of institutions not normally associated with divorce but whose purpose is to relieve parents in general and mothers
in particular of childrearing duties — public schools, organized after-school activities, convenience and fast food, psychotropic drugs to control
unruly boys —
we can begin to see how massively our society and economy have been gearing up for
decades to cater to divorce, facilitate single motherhood, marginalize fathers, and generally render
parents and families redundant.[45]
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Skwo solves
Skwo solves the focus of politics has shifted to the politics of maternity
Baskerville 8 ( Stephen Baskerville, Ph.D.*Stephen Baskerville teaches political science at Patrick Henry College. He is the author of Taken Into Custody: The
War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (Cumberland Books). http://profam.org/pub/fia/fia.2202.htm, "The Family in America” Online Edition Volume 22
Number 02) //
SC
Feminism’s triumph has not come through its most extreme ideologues. Much as Stalinism inherited the methods and practices of czarist
absolutism and Russian nationalism, the triumphal phase of the new feminist and gay politics comes by commandeering and politicizing the
very institutions they once renounced: motherhood, marriage, the family, the church, the state. ¶ The early feminist attack on marriage and the
family is now largely forgotten or dismissed. “We can’t destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage,” Ms.
magazine editor Robin Morgan wrote in her 1970 book, Sisterhood is Powerful.[11] Sheila Cronin, head of the National Organization for
Women, said that “Freedom for women cannot be won without the abolition of marriage.”[12] Linda Gordon elaborated in a famous 1969
article in WOMEN: A Journal of Liberation. “The nuclear family must be destroyed,” she declared:¶ The break-up of families now is an objectively
revolutionary process.… Families have supported oppression by separating people into small, isolated units, unable to join together to fight for
common interests.… Families make possible the super-exploitation of women by training them to look upon their work outside the home as
peripheral to their “true” role.… No woman should have to deny herself any opportunities because of her special responsibilities to her
children.… Families will be finally destroyed only when a revolutionary social and economic organization permits people’s needs for love and
security to be met in ways that do not impose divisions of labor, or any external roles, at all.[13]¶ While such statements are often dismissed as
the ranting of extremists, a glance at the state of marriage and the family today reveals that this is precisely what feminists have achieved. But
they achieved it in ways much more subtle than these screeds indicate. While Germaine Greer famously urged women to refuse to marry, that
strategy could achieve nothing.[14] It
was by participating in marriage that feminists destroyed it. ¶ Homosexual
activists are now simply following the feminists’ lead. The most extreme homosexual activists renounce marriage altogether and leave it in
peace; it is the “moderates” who hope to transform marriage in their image and thereby undermine it. Yet precisely because it is obvious,
homosexual marriage is not the most dangerous threat to marriage today; it has provoked vocal opposition. ¶ The really dangerous trends are
more subtle and arouse little opposition; some have even been enabled and abetted by conservatives. While feminism in its earliest,
ideologically pure stage demanded “equality” and “rights,” today, even as the ideological purists are relegated to the margins, it is nonetheless
wheedling its way into the mainstream and conservative culture by appropriating traditional morality, including the very feminine
“stereotypes” against which it initially rebelled.¶ Feminism’s current campaign to appropriate motherhood, for example, cynically but
Feminists like Ann
Crittenden have learned to extol motherhood, enabling them to pose as victims and gain sympathy from
the general public and even from conservatives. Waving the banner of motherhood, feminists leave
the patriarchy little defense.¶ But feminists are not defending motherhood; they are politicizing it. “The
superficially exploits the pieties of traditional morality and the sentimentalities of uninformed conservative people.
feminists...want to thoroughly politicize the last bastion of personal life in our society: families,” writes Wendy McElroy. “They want to wrest
motherhood from its traditional right-wing associations and make it a left/liberal issue, with ‘Mothers Are Victims’ writ-large on its banner.”
The deception is subtle but profound. Motherhood
is no longer a private relationship but a claim to political
power and to marshal the coercive state apparatus against those depicted as the oppressors of mothers. The feminization of a wide range of
issues having no obvious connection with sexuality is now culminating in what one newspaper calls “the radicalization of America’s mothers”:
the whole agenda in the US is shifting towards ‘the politics of maternity’. ”[15]
Code
Pink,
Not only
mobilized in opposition to the Iraq war, but more subtle are the Million Mom March (criminalizing gun
ownership), Mothers Against Drunk Driving (criminalizing private, nonviolent acts), and more recently the militant Moms
Rising, are variations on the theme. “These ‘pro-family’ women wish to ‘harness’ what [Naomi] Wolf calls the ‘pissed-offedness’ of mothers
in order to play ‘hardball politics,’” says McElroy. Many are deceived into believing that feminists have become the champions of traditional
motherhood and families, when their actual agenda is to make them dependants of the state. “Crittenden indicts not
“Some commentators argue that
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feminism, but capitalism, and argues for
government to ‘economically recognize’ motherhood so that women
will not be dependent upon husbands.”[16]¶ The deception succeeds because motherhood is an easy
claim to privilege and always has been. Crittenden’s 2002 book title, The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in
the World Is Still the Least Valued, is itself a revealing sleight-of-hand. If anyone has devalued motherhood, of course, it is feminists. Susan
Douglas and Meredith Michaels demonstrate with their own book title, registering precisely the opposite gripe: The Mommy Myth: The
Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women. Apparently opposites, these authors all share the conviction that mothers are
oppressed by something. The two titles succinctly convey feminism’s determination to depict everything pertaining specifically to women as
“oppression” and highlight feminist complaints as a strategy to, as they say, “have it all” without regard for consistency or logic. This points to a
trait feminism shares with all radical ideologies but carries much further: the capacity to expand its own power and that of the state by creating
the very problems about which it complains. “Mothers do not receive sufficient respect from society,” McElroy paraphrases Crittenden, “as if
feminism weren’t largely to blame.”¶ This is potent because it politicizes the private and cynically exploits society’s natural sympathy for
women. The older battle cries of liberal feminism, opposing traditional gender roles or promoting equal pay, have given way to “victim
feminism” which insists that women are by definition victims. The
shift was almost imperceptible but profound, for the
victim posture exploits, rather than renounces, women’s traditional weaknesses, which are also and always have been claims to
privilege: motherhood, children, domesticity, sex. Feminists have turned these into claims to state intervention by posing
as victims of not just an impersonal “society” but newly invented or redefined “crimes” of which only women can be
victims and that only men can commit: rape, sexual harassment, domestic violence, child abuse,
nonpayment of child support (plus lesser, more vague offenses like “aggressive driving”). These new crimes politicize
precisely the spheres of life that normally we are at pains to protect from politics and the competition for power:
home, family, children — and the criminal justice system. They succeed because they exploit the natural desire of both
men and women to protect and provide for women. (Though here too, homosexuals are following the feminists’ lead with
demands for “hate crimes” laws that likewise politicize criminal justice.)
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Impact defense
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Rape
Rape impact is flawed- rape is one of the most falsely reported and fabricated crimes
Baskerville 8 ( Stephen Baskerville, Ph.D.*Stephen Baskerville teaches political science at Patrick Henry College. He is the author of Taken Into Custody: The
War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (Cumberland Books). http://profam.org/pub/fia/fia.2202.htm, "The Family in America” Online Edition Volume 22
Number 02) //
SC
These are all appeals to female fear. Ironically, they are also appeals to male chivalry, to rescue damsels in distress, to display masculinity (an
emergent theme in conservative literature) by creating occasions for combat with other men. But in contrast to traditional chivalry, this
gallantry does not proceed from personal duty and requires no risk, courage, or self-sacrifice. The chivalry feminists demand is bureaucratic,
exercised by officials with a professional or pecuniary interest. It is politicized
chivalry, displayed not by individual men but by
cadres wielding state power such as police and plainclothes quasi-police functionaries.¶ This is evident in the
campaign for “victims’ rights.” This began as an effort by conservatives to provide more effective recourse to crime victims, largely in response
to liberal moves to weaken punishments. President Reagan’s 1982 Task Force on Victims of Crime led to the creation of US Justice
Department’s Office of Victims of Crime. A glance at that agency’s website reveals that the campaign has been hijacked by feminists, and most
of the “crimes” have been redefined in feminist terms: the “victims” are mostly women, the “perpetrators” are mostly men, and the “crimes”
are mostly political.[17]¶ The
politicization of criminal justice is seen in the redefinition of rape and explosion
of false rape accusations. Legal theorists like Catherine MacKinnon, who asks “whether consent is a meaningful concept” and who
has repeatedly suggested that virtually all heterosexual intercourse amounts to rape, have been highly influential at law
schools throughout the United States and with the governments of individual states and Canada. “Any honest veteran sex assault investigator
will tell you that rape
is one of the most falsely reported crimes,” says Craig Silverman, a former Colorado prosecutor known
for his zealous pursuit of alleged rapists.[18] Purdue University sociologist Eugene Kanin found that “41% of the total disposed rape
cases were officially declared false” during a 9-year period, “that is, by the complainant’s admission
that no rape had occurred and the charge, therefore, was false.” Unrecanted accusations mean the actual percentage of
false allegations is almost certainly higher. Kanin concluded that “these false allegations appear to serve three major functions for the
complainants: providing an alibi, seeking revenge, and obtaining sympathy and attention. ”[19] The Center for
Military Readiness provides additional motivations: “False rape accusations also have been filed to extort money from
celebrities, to gain sole custody of children in divorce cases, and even to escape military deployments to war zones.”[20]
¶
Almost daily we see men released after decades in prison because DNA testing proves they were wrongly convicted. And they are the fortunate
ones. While DNA testing has righted some wrongs, the corruption of the rape industry is so systemic that, as last year’s Duke University case
shows, hard evidence of innocence is no barrier to prosecution and conviction. It is well documented that feminist crime lab
technicians fabricate and doctor evidence to frame men they know to be innocent.[21] Yet there has been no
systematic investigation by the media or civil libertarians as to why so many innocent citizens are regularly incarcerated on fabricated
allegations and evidence. The exoneration of the Duke lacrosse players on an obviously trumped-up charge has resulted in few attempts to
determine how widespread such rigged justice is against those not wealthy or fortunate enough to garner media attention.[22] Even
conservative critics studiously avoided acknowledging feminism’s role in the accusations at Duke but instead emphasized race — a minor
feature of the case but a much safer one to criticize. ¶ There is little indication that white people are being systematically incarcerated on
both
white and black, accused of the kind of “gender” crimes that feminists have turned into a political
agenda.
fabricated accusations of non-existent crimes against blacks. This is precisely what is happening to men (and even some women),
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Poverty
The alt. normalizes poverty as means of sexual freedom
Baskerville 8 ( Stephen Baskerville, Ph.D.*Stephen Baskerville teaches political science at Patrick Henry College. He is the author of Taken Into Custody: The
War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (Cumberland Books). http://profam.org/pub/fia/fia.2202.htm, "The Family in America” Online Edition Volume 22
Number 02) //
SC
The growing political power of this bureaucratic underworld is manifested today in the rise of what amounts to a plainclothes feminist police
force: the dreaded, federally funded
“Child Protective Services,” who seldom see a child that is not abused. ¶ During
the 1980s and 1990s, waves of child abuse hysteria swept America and other countries, resulting in torn-apart families, hideous injustices, and
Parents were unjustly separated from their children and incarcerated by setting aside
constitutional safeguards while the media and civil libertarians looked the other way.[29] Feminist
ruined lives.
prosecutors like Nancy Lamb in North Carolina whipped up public invective against parents they had jailed yet knew to be innocent. “The press
was transfixed” by Lamb, writes William Anderson, “with her flashing eyes and bobbed hair. Lamb was speaking ‘for the children,’ you see, and
the press adored her. That she was making preposterous claims and attempting to destroy the lives of seven people despite all good evidence
to the contrary was not even discussed.” ¶ As with false rape accusations, the politicization of child abuse reached its apogee in the Clinton
administration Justice Department. “From Janet Reno’s infamous prosecutions of Grant Snowden in Florida...to the McMartin case in Los
Angeles, to Wenatchee, Washington,” writes Anderson, “the Edenton case was part of a line of what only can be called witch hunts in which
state social workers badgered very young children until they came up with lurid tales — after having denied that those things occurred.”[30] ¶ It
was also during the Clinton years that child protection was elevated to a paramilitary operation, when Attorney General Reno used
unsubstantiated child abuse rumors to justify a violent assault against American citizens in Waco, Texas, resulting in the deaths of 24 children
whom she was ostensibly protecting. This militarization of child protection was seen more recently in the largest seizure of children in American
history, also in Texas, when almost five hundred children were seized from their polygamous mothers in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus
“A night-time raid with tanks, riot police, SWAT teams,
snipers, and cars full of Texas Rangers and sheriff’s deputies — that is the new face of state child
protection,” writes attorney Gregory Hession, “social workers backed up with automatic weapons.” The role of feminist ideology was
Christ of Latter Day Saints, also without any evidence of abuse.
downplayed by the media but revealed by a spokeswoman for the state agency, who justified seizing the children because of “a mindset that
even the young girls report that they will marry at whatever age, and that it’s the highest blessing they can have to have children.” As Hession
comments, encouraging respect for motherhood is “abuse.”[31]¶ The witch hunts were carried into adulthood through “recovered memory
therapy,” another feminist innovation whereby wild tales of childhood sex crimes were manufactured from a psychological theory. In Victims of
Memory, Mark Pendergrast shows how the recovered memory hoax destroyed families, ruined lives, and sent innocent parents to prison,
though as the price of getting published Pendergrast bends over backward to insist, defensively and contrary to his own evidence, that this was
not driven by feminism.[32]¶ Sexual Politics and the Welfare State ¶ Though child abuse officials now target middle-class families, bureaucratic
child protection originated in welfare. And indeed, the earliest institution of sexual politics was the welfare state. ¶ The welfare state has
traditionally been regarded as the landmark triumph of class politics within the liberal democracies — the one successful achievement of “social
democracy” that has grown and survived even in countries, like the United States, which avoided such terms. Yet from today’s perspective,
the welfare state stands as the first salvo of gender politics, the first social experiment of government growth following
the enfranchisement of feminists.[33] ¶ Each stage of welfare state expansion has been justified not simply for the poor but specifically for poor
children. The interests of these children could also be gradually divorced from their parents, though in practice they tended to be identified
The proliferation of singlemother homes lent plausibility to the feminists’ new rallying cry, the “feminization of poverty,” that
shifted poor relief from a socialist to a feminist crusade.[34] But the feminization of poverty was a deception from the
with the mothers who claimed to be the guardians of those interests: increasingly, single mothers.
¶
start — a creation of ideology rather than of any objective social phenomena and another example of ideology creating its own grievance.
Originally justified to provide for the families of men who had been laid off during economic downturns or killed in war, the welfare state
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quickly became a subsidy of single-mother homes and fatherless children. It had immediately set in, that is, to expand precisely the problem it
claimed to be alleviating. ¶ To justify this sleight-of-hand, the architects of welfare state expansion needed a rationale, and they found it in one
of the most potent and destructive falsehoods ever foisted on a well-meaning but gullible public, a falsehood that has served, directly or
indirectly,
to justify the exponential expansion of not only the welfare state but the scope and power of
government in many other spheres. This is the falsehood that government must provide for massive numbers of women and
children whose men have abandoned them.[35] With the abrupt reversal of an airbrushed Kremlin photograph, the welfare state’s rationalizing
figure was demoted from a hero to a villain. The same working men who had been valiantly dying in imperialism’s wars or laid off as innocent
victims of heartless capitalism were suddenly and ignominiously absconding from the bastards they had sired.¶ The destructive force of this
untruth is incalculable. Accept it, and virtually every expansion of both social welfare spending and law-enforcement authority is readily
justified and indeed, unanswerable. Women and children are being abandoned by irresponsible men: What politician could resist that appeal?¶
No evidence indicates that the ongoing crisis of fatherless children is caused
primarily by fathers abandoning their children.[36] It is now very clear that it has been driven throughout by feminist policies
and programs. Single mothers were not being thrown into poverty by absconding men; they were
choosing it because it offered precisely the “sexual freedom” that was feminism’s seminal urge, regardless of the
But the truth was very different.
consequences for their children. Single motherhood is feminism’s most potent and most destructive accomplishment, and before the right
audience feminists not only concede but boast about it. Single Mothers By Choice expresses this boast organizationally, and when pressed,
most single mothers will insist that that is precisely what they are. While feminists readily pose as the champions of children when
it
comes to perpetuating welfare dependency, it is clear that, beneath the rhetorical fluff, the
exhilarating power accruing to single mothers is more than adequate compensation for pulling their
children into poverty. In fact, the very feminist intellectuals who popularized the term “feminization of poverty” have acknowledged as
much: “Independence, even in straitened and penurious forms,” write Barbara Ehrenreich and her colleagues, “still
offers more sexual freedom than affluence gained through marriage and dependence on one
man.”[37]¶ The myth of the absconding father provided a means to leverage a massive expansion of state power through emotional
blackmail. It was also a declaration of bureaucratic war against what is after all the first and foremost feminist enemy, the literal embodiment
of the hated “patriarchy”: fathers.¶ So long as the principal engine for creating single-mother homes was welfare, the abandonment myth was
only implied.
Everyone knew that welfare was subsidizing and proliferating single-mother homes in the
inner cities, but until money became contentious no one was greatly bothered with assigning blame.
Most welfare mothers producing fatherless children were never married, so no documentation attested to who was breaking up a “family” that
had seldom really existed in intact form.¶ As the phenomenon spread to the middle class (today the fastest-growing sector of unwed
childbearing), the engine driving single-mother homes was not so much welfare as divorce. Here the implicit became explicit with an open
assault on two closely connected institutions that had quietly ceased to exist in the welfare underclass but which were still thriving in the
middle class: fatherhood and marriage.
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Domestic Violence
The negs understanding of domestic violence is flawed
Baskerville 8 ( Stephen Baskerville, Ph.D.*Stephen Baskerville teaches political science at Patrick Henry College. He is the author of Taken Into Custody: The
War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (Cumberland Books). http://profam.org/pub/fia/fia.2202.htm, "The Family in America” Online Edition Volume 22
Number 02) //
SC
Seldom does public policy stand in such direct defiance of undisputed truths, to the point where the cause of the problem is presented as the
Judges are not unaware that the most dangerous environment for children is
precisely the single-parent homes they create when they remove fathers in custody proceedings. Yet
they seldom hesitate to remove them, knowing they will never be held accountable for harm to the children. On the contrary, if they do
not they may be punished by feminist-dominated bar associations and social work bureaucracies
whose business and funding depend on a constant supply of abused children. Bureaucracies often expand by
creating the very problem they exist to solve. Appalling as it sounds, the conclusion is inescapable that we have created an army of
officials with a vested interest in child abuse.¶ Child abuse is not the only “family violence” to be
exacerbated and politicized by feminists. The mammoth “domestic violence” industry arose largely as
a means of evicting divorced fathers from their homes. “It’s an easy way to kick somebody out,” says one family law
specialist.[59]¶ Like child abuse, “domestic violence” has no precise definition. It is adjudicated not as violent assault
solution, and vice-versa.
but as conflict among “intimate partners.” It therefore obliterates the distinction between crime and disagreement and need not be violent or
even physical. Definitions from the US Justice Department include “jealousy and possessiveness,” “name calling and constant criticizing,” and
“ignoring, dismissing, or ridiculing the victim’s needs.”[60] For such “crimes” men are jailed without trial.¶ Such
definitions
circumvent due process protections. “With child abuse and spouse abuse you don’t have to prove
anything,” a seminar leader instructs divorcing mothers. “You just have to accuse.”[61] One scholar calls it “an area of law
mired in intellectual dishonesty and injustice” and “a due process fiasco.”[62] Feminists portray domestic
violence as a political crime to perpetuate male power. Yet the scholarly literature has long
established that men and women commit domestic violence in comparable numbers.[63] More
important than achieving gender balance, however, is to understand how the explosion in accusations
is connected almost entirely with family dissolution.[64]¶ Practitioners and scholars now readily report that patently
trumped-up accusations are routinely used, without punishment, in custody proceedings to separate children from
fathers who have committed no actionable offense.[65] Open perjury is readily acknowledged,[66] and bar associations
and even courts actively counsel mothers on how to fabricate accusations. [67] Domestic violence is “a backwater of
¶
tautological pseudo-theory,” write Donald Dutton and Kenneth Corvo. “No other area of established social welfare, criminal justice, public
health, or behavioral intervention has such weak evidence in support of mandated practice.”[68] ¶ Feminists acknowledge that most cases arise
during custody battles.[69] Yet they strenuously oppose divorce and custody reform,[70] and their literature is dominated by complaints not
that violent convicts are walking the streets but that fathers convicted of no infraction retain access to their children after their wives divorce
them.[71] ¶ Restraining orders separating fathers from their children are routinely issued during divorce proceedings without any evidence.[72]
Due process procedures are so routinely ignored that one judge told his colleagues “not to become
concerned about the constitutional rights of the man that you’re violating.... We don’t have to worry
about the rights.”[73]¶ Specialized “domestic violence courts” are mandated not to dispense impartial justice but, says New York’s
openly feminist chief judge, to “make batterers and abusers take responsibility for their actions.”[74] These courts may seize property,
including homes, without the accused being convicted or even formally charged or present to defend themselves. “This bill is classic policestate legislation,” one scholar concludes.[75] Toronto lawyer Walter Fox calls them “pre-fascist”: “Domestic
violence courts...are
designed to get around the protections of the criminal code. The burden of proof is reduced or
removed, and there’s no presumption of innocence.”[76] ¶ Forced confessions are also routine. Fathers
are summarily incarcerated unless they sign confessions stating, “I have physically and emotionally battered my partner.” The father must then
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describe the violence, even if he insists he committed none. “I am responsible for the violence I used,” reads one form. “My behavior was not
provoked.”[77] ¶ The “deadbeat dad” is another figure largely manufactured by the divorce machinery. He is far less likely to have voluntarily
abandoned the offspring he callously sired than to be an involuntarily divorced father who has been “forced to finance the filching of his own
children.”[78]
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Extinction
The same ideological interests of the k caused the housing bubble collapse and will lead to the
collapse of civilization
Baskerville 8 ( Stephen Baskerville, Ph.D.*Stephen Baskerville teaches political science at Patrick Henry College. He is the author of Taken Into Custody: The
War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (Cumberland Books). http://profam.org/pub/fia/fia.2202.htm, "The Family in America” Online Edition Volume 22
Number 02) //
SC
the housing bubble was the result of welfarestate agencies pushing home ownership as an entitlement on low-income “families.” We do not know how
The latest manifestation may be the credit crisis. As Star Parker points out,
many of these were single parents subsisting not on productive labor but on other entitlements, but for intact, two-parent families home
ownership is not usually an impossibility at some point in life. “As
the institution of government grows, we sadly watch
the collapse of the institutions that really sustain growth of home ownership: American marriage and
families,” writes Parker, citing Census Bureau figures that homeownership overwhelmingly (86.3%) occurs among married-couple
families.[89] Decades before the family crisis became obvious, sociologist Carle Zimmerman demonstrated
that family atomization preceded civilizational collapse. Zimmerman showed how Greek and Roman
decline was preceded by a renunciation of family life, first by educated elites and then others, and
argued that our own civilization is on a similar trajectory.¶ Zimmerman was writing during the post-war baby boom —
¶
before “second wave” feminism, no-fault divorce, same-sex marriage, and “demographic winter” — when the family was generally assumed to
be stable. Yet he predicted these developments based on long-range trends — mostly elite intellectual fashions — whose significance few
others grasped. Indeed, Zimmerman emphasized how difficult the decline is to perceive while it is taking place: “These changes came about
slowly, over centuries, and almost imperceptibly.”[90] Today,
even as the family crisis becomes undeniable, there is
still little awareness of its full ramifications and how close we are to the point of no return. ¶ Modern
sexual ideologies are much more militant than anything in Greece or Rome and more self-consciously
hostile to the family. The bureaucratic machinery they have constructed around the family is also much more vast and entrenched than
any in those civilizations. Indeed, it is the most intrusive and repressive government apparatus ever created in the United States. Yet today’s
most outspoken family advocates show little awareness of it, and few seem disposed to confront it or organizationally prepared to resist it.¶
The sexualization of public life stands behind every major threat to our civilization. Unless we
summon the courage to confront it directly, Western society will become increasingly emasculated
and will not survive. This is what Zimmerman warned in the halcyon days of 1947, and since then his warnings have only been
vindicated.
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Double bind
Double bind either the neg gives up all their power for equality or gendered roles continue in order to
gain feminist power
Baskerville 8 ( Stephen Baskerville, Ph.D.*Stephen Baskerville teaches political science at Patrick Henry College. He is the author of Taken Into Custody: The
War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (Cumberland Books). http://profam.org/pub/fia/fia.2202.htm, "The Family in America” Online Edition Volume 22
Number 02) //
SC
“Power is the alpha and the omega of contemporary Communism,” wrote Milovan Djilas during the repression of the 1950s. “Ideas,
philosophical principles, and moral considerations...— all can be changed and sacrificed. But not power.”[23] Something similar can be said
about today’s feminism, an ideology with no fixed principles, as evidenced by its capacity to spawn interminable discussions about its “true
Women are oppressed
by gender roles, but those same roles confer a claim to moral superiority because they make women
more “caring” and “compassionate.” Men and women must compete on equal terms, except when men must be excluded from
nature”: At times all gender differences are social constructions; at other times women have special “needs.”
certain competitions so that women can win. Fathers should share equally in rearing children, but custody (and the power and money that
accompany it) must always go to mothers. Alison Jaggar, author of Living with Contradictions, proclaims unashamedly that feminists should
insist on “having it both ways”: “Feminists
should embrace both horns of this dilemma,” she writes. “They should use the
rhetoric of equality in situations where women’s interests clearly are being damaged by being treated either differently from or identically with
men.”[24] Her words are revealing. This “rhetoric of equality” is just that: rhetoric. As with Humpty Dumpty, words like “equality” change
meanings when convenient; “interests” alone endure. As Jaggar admits,
it proceeds from no principles other than power: to
increase the power not so much of women, as of those who claim to speak on behalf of the rest. This is revealed by the fashionable euphemism
used to disguise it: “empowerment.”¶ The shift from liberal demands for unisex “equality” to claims of a positively superior politics
What might
appear as a moderating compromise with traditional gender roles was in reality a modest sacrifice of
ideological purity in exchange for power. Political theorist Kathy Ferguson envisions a world where male-dominated power
politics would be supplanted with this feminine politics of empowerment. Male power brokers would be
replaced by quasi-Platonic female “caretakers” whose claim to leadership would be their compassion. In this feminist
utopia the only remaining problem would be who would minister to the needs of these saintly souls.
“For a feminist community, then, Plato’s question ‘Who will guard the guardians?’ might be rephrased as, ‘Who will care for the
caretakers?’”[25] Professor Ferguson would have been less visionary but more perspicacious if she had asked, “Who will guard the
characterized by greater “caring” and “sensitivity” than traditional masculine power politics carried far-reaching implications.
¶
¶
caretakers?” For her dream of a syndicalist rule by caretakers is now the reality, and the caretakers have run amok. “Caretakers routinely drug
foster children” runs a headline in the Los Angeles Times. “Children under state protection in California group and foster homes are being
drugged with potent, dangerous psychiatric medications, at times just to keep them obedient and docile for their overburdened
caretakers.”[26]
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Links to politics
The k links to immigration
Baskerville 8 ( Stephen Baskerville, Ph.D.*Stephen Baskerville teaches political science at Patrick Henry College. He is the author of Taken Into Custody: The
War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (Cumberland Books). http://profam.org/pub/fia/fia.2202.htm, "The Family in America” Online Edition Volume 22
Number 02) //
SC
Immigration pressure may also be traced to sexualized government institutions. Immigrant “families”
attracted to welfare are increasingly single mothers or become single mothers soon after arriving. In
Europe, immigration is now creating a welfare underclass similar to that familiar in the United States,
which is itself expanding through immigration. The principal rationalization for relaxing immigration standards — low birth
rates and the perceived need for younger workers and taxpayers — is another consequence of the sexual revolution, one threatening Western
civilization itself. The welfare state itself, with its offer of a universal retirement pension, certainly reduced the need for large families as an
insurance policy for old age. Yet even more direct is sexual liberation, including contraception and abortion — which shifted reproductive
decisions from the family unit to the individual woman.[87] Here too divorce may be the decisive factor (and again the most neglected) — not
only breaking up families early but also generating fear of marriage and procreation among men.[88]
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Latino Identity
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Trayvon L
Black-White binaries ignore an intersectional approach to Latino identity
Nopper 12 (Tamara, U Penn, 20 Years in the Making: George Zimmerman’s ‘Minority Defense’ and the
1992 Los Angeles Riots, 4/20/12, http://tamaranopper.com/2012/04/20/george-zimmerman’s-minoritydefense-and-the-1992-los-angeles-riots/)//LA
In some accounts, Zimmerman’s interracial lineage as well as his being Latino exemplified the “browning of
America.” According to this framework, the increasing Latino population in the United States will
change not only the racial and cultural demographics of the the country but also how we as a nation
think about race, identity, and being American. Just as “internal” diversity among Latinos by color,
nationality, migration histories, and class reportedly makes it difficult for some Latino immigrants and
their descendants to determine “who they are,” or “what box to check” on the U.S. census, non-Latino
Americans will also have to question long standing assumptions about what race is and how it
operates in the face of increasing diversity. Such sentiment was expressed in discussions about Zimmerman. For example, in
an article in The Washington Post titled “Who is George Zimmerman?” (and republished by The Seattle Times under the headline “Florida
shooter George Zimmerman not easily pigeonholed”), the reporters write, “There may be no box to check for George Zimmerman, 28, no tidy
way to categorize, define and sort the man whose pull of a trigger on a Sanford, Fla., street is forcing America to once again confront its fraught
relationship with race and identity.” In other writing, some
authors were less ambivalent about Zimmerman’s race
and declared him white. One striking example of this was an op-ed published in The Orlando Sentinel written by Leonard Pitts, in
which he responded to one reader’s frustration at his not identifying Zimmerman as Hispanic in a previous column—“‘Mr. Zimmerman was
Hispanic not White plez do your homework before writing your column!!!!’” Pitts
begins his column with: “I’m here to
explain why George Zimmerman is white.” Pointing out that according to the U.S. census, Hispanic is
an ethnicity and not a race, Pitts draws from academic scholarship on what has come to be known as
“whiteness” studies, which seeks to destabilize whiteness as the normative racial position by tracing
how whiteness developed as a social and legal category and how whites became dominant in the U.S.
racial hierarchy. Specifically, Pitts cites David Roediger, the historian famous for drawing from W.E.B. Du Bois’s psychological wage of
whiteness concept outlined in his 1935 classic Black Reconstruction in America and repackaging it as the “wages of whiteness.” Recounting
Roediger’s basic premise that European immigrants “became white” after coming to the United States and learning, as James Baldwin famously
put it, that “the price of the ticket” for whiteness is to distance oneself from Blacks, Pitts also defines being white as having your suffering and
perspective matter in the world. As he puts it, whiteness
is “not simply color, but privilege…the privilege of being
seen, of having your worth presumed, of receiving the benefit of the doubt and some human
compassion, of being treated as if you matter.” Pitts concludes that for these reasons, Zimmerman is
white. Similarly, Isabel Wilkerson, in a New York Times essay on Martin’s murder and the city of Sanford’s racial history, employs aspects of
whiteness studies in her discussion. For example, discussing how “unprecedented numbers of Latino immigrants have arrived at a place still
scarred by the history of a vigilante-enforced caste system and the stereotypes that linger from it,” she concludes, “In this context,
newcomers—like previous waves of immigrants in the past—may feel pressed to identify with the dominant caste and distance themselves
from blacks, in order to survive.” Wilkerson’s commentary suffers from one of the major limitations of some of the most popular work grouped
under whiteness studies (such as that by Roediger, Baldwin, Noel Ignatiev, and Timothy Breen), which is the assumption that certain European
immigrants or poor white Americans (or in Breen’s case, white indentured servants) had at one point a shared, or at least similar status with
African Americans in the race and class hierarchy in relation to white elites. In doing so, Wilkerson discursively transforms the descendants of
African slaves into immigrants. She writes: “One of the great tragedies of the last century was the pitting of immigrants from Eastern and
Southern Europe against African-Americans who had migrated from the rural South to the industrial North. Both groups were seeking the same
thing and were pretty much the same people—people of the land trying to make a way for their families in forbidding and alien places.”
Unlike the European immigrants, who “chose” whiteness, Latinos, according to Wilkerson, may be
forging a different path: “Despite all that has gone before, there is reason for optimism…The arrival of a new kind of
immigrant to a country that has endured so much discord offers a chance for re-examination and
redemption.” Thus, “one of the most encouraging signs,” Wilkerson asserts, is that Latinos “are increasingly
choosing to be identified as ‘other’ rather than black or white” on the U.S. census and thus may reject the
pattern of European immigrants who “became white” by distancing themselves from Blacks. What this debate about Zimmerman’s racial
identity and Black-Latino relations demonstrates is that with
few exceptions, we have no intellectual vocabulary to
adequately discuss the racial position of non-Black people of color (NBPOC) in relation to African
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Americans in the U.S. racial order. Instead, as in the case of Zimmerman, we have the following
options: argue that Latinos are “acting white,” that George Zimmerman is a “white” Latino (although I think he could easily
be read as a “Brown” Latino), or discuss the internal diversity of Latinos in terms of color, language, and
nativity and simply hope that their so-called “internal” conflicts (which are really structural) get worked out
soon. Overall, there is a difficulty, which appears to be both conceptual and emotional (or at the very
least ethical), to say that as a Latino and thus someone who exists in the world politically as “Brown,”
Zimmerman or other Latinos can be anti-Black and more importantly, have political and social power
over Blacks (in the United States and in Latin America) independent of identifying with whiteness or
being socially or legally classified as white. So what does all of this have to do with the 1992 Los Angeles Riots and more
specifically, what do I mean when I write that Zimmerman’s “minority defense” was “20 years in the making”? In brief, some of the major
patterns of progressive race scholarship emerging after, and to large degree in response to the riots, contribute to the logic of Zimmerman’s
minority defense. Post-1992 Los Angeles Riots Race Scholarship In the wake of the riots, scholars
argued that its multiethnic
composition, as well as the changing demographics of the United States (think of the projection of the
“coming white minority”), necessitated that political conversations about, and research on race go
beyond examining white America’s treatment of African Americans, a sentiment expressed in the
slogan “beyond Black and white.” Some scholars claimed that the Black-white model of race relations
was inadequate for analyzing what some (mis)labeled “America’s first multiethnic riot.” Whereas previous urban rebellions have
been characterized by African Americans looting or destroying white owned-businesses in response to police brutality and economic and
political conditions, the 1992 riots involved primarily Black and Latino rioters, with Korean immigrant-owned businesses the hardest hit. Some
scholars, denying the material basis of conflict, went so far as to suggest that one of the reasons Korean immigrants were targeted was because
they were the victims of Blacks’ misdirected anger partially caused by their purported ignorance of Korean history, people, and culture. In other
words, if
there had been more attention given to the experiences of other racial minority groups in
public discourse and scholarship prior to the riots, Blacks would have been less likely to be susceptible to
negative images of Korean immigrants circulated in the media and would have thus directed their anger at another
and more appropriate target (interestingly, Latino rioters are generally not depicted as targeting Korean storeowners for the same
reason). And so it began: going beyond Black and white would not only help us better identify what
caused the 1992 riots but also prevent, through educational measures, future multiracial explosions
(and more specifically, “Black (misdirected) rage”). More research on the shared racial oppression and
community building between people of color would presumably thwart the dividing and conquering
of oppressed peoples. In this spirit, a growing body of work examining the experiences of NBPOC and inter-minority relations has been
published in the last 20 years. Within this scholarship there are two patterns I want to emphasize that are relevant to Zimmerman’s minority
defense.
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AT: Latinos were enslaved/Race Ks about LA
You can’t group Black and Latino identity—slavery is unique
Nopper 12 (Tamara, U Penn, 20 Years in the Making: George Zimmerman’s ‘Minority Defense’ and the
1992 Los Angeles Riots, 4/20/12, http://tamaranopper.com/2012/04/20/george-zimmerman’s-minoritydefense-and-the-1992-los-angeles-riots/)//LA
Pattern 1: Comparative Racialization The first pattern is that scholars claimed Asian Americans and Latinos have unique racial
experiences that cannot be adequately understood using the Black-white framework. This work of
comparative racialization sought to identify differences among people of color while still retaining the
notion that all non-whites have a shared racial status under white supremacy. Much of this research traces its
roots to Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s book Racial Formations (1986, 1994)—treated as the bible among many progressive race
scholars—which posits the primacy of race as a determinant of inequality and proposes that each group
has a particular racial formation. This approach provided the best of both worlds for NBPOC
progressive scholars: it rejected arguments, growing in popularity among a wide spectrum of
ideological voices, that class, not race was the primary factor shaping life chances while not indicting
any particular NBPOC group as dominant in relationship to African Americans. The employment of the
racial formations approach resulted in an (unstated) return of sorts, to Robert Blauner’s colonialism
model published in his book Racial Oppression in America. Blauner’s framework examines the particular structural
degradation of each minority group in the United States, such as slavery, colonialism, genocide,
exclusion, or contract labor, while positing a shared oppressed status as non-white. From this
perspective we could conclude that Zimmerman, as a “Spanish speaking minority” and son of a
Peruvian mother, also knows discrimination and thus, “was more like the boy he killed than people
thought. George was a minority—the other—too.” While these words were actually penned by writers of the
aforementioned Washington Post article, they could easily come from the pages of an academic monograph by a comparative racialization
scholar. Yet the return to a Blaunerian approach, by way of racial formations, ignored one of the most important
points of Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton’s 1967 book Black Power—which preceded the publication of Blauner’s Racial Oppression by five
years—in which they applied the colonial model to African Americans in U.S. urban ghettoes. While
scholars have rightfully
addressed the limitations of the colonial analogy for dealing with the afterlife of slavery, it is telling that
contemporary scholarship is most likely to resemble Blauner’s approach than that of Ture and Hamilton’s. Perhaps this is because, as Ture and
Hamilton suggest, analogizing
African Americans and immigrant groups, even with the hesitance Blauner
expresses in his work, will always be flawed. As they put it, “When some people compare the black
American to ‘other immigrant’ groups in this country, they overlook the fact that slavery was peculiar
to the blacks. No other minority group in this country was treated as legal property.” In these two
sentences, Ture and Hamilton anticipated and provide a critique of the racial formations approach as
well as whiteness studies’ aforementioned claim that non-Black groups could have a shared starting
location on the “bottom” with African Americans despite not having been enslaved. Unfortunately, today,
Ture and Hamilton tend to be cited by an aging group of (primarily African American) scholars whereas Omi and Winant’s racial formations and
its variants have continued to be popular among a broad array of progressives (for a clue on why this may be so, consider the epilogues of both
books’ second versions as they each address the 1992 riots in ways that demonstrate competing political orientations).
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Shell
This approach is exclusionary—must open spaces for safe pedagogical investigation
Omolade 87 (Barbara, CUNY and Consortium of black women’s organizers in Brooklyn, A Black Feminist
Pedagogy, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 3/4, p. 35-6, JSTOR)//LA
However, when I assign a scholarly paper, I must assume the politically problematic role of evaluator. My
standards of judgment are dictated by the purpose and rationale of a college education: to produce
students who can enter the professional and managerial class because they have and can
communicate useful knowledge and information. When students fail to write and read up to par, they
become nonstudents, incapable of participating in the very medium and work of the academy. In the
past, these students, i.e., Black working-class women, never came into the academy unless they had exceptional literacy skills. Literacy
itself has further class connotations because it also means having the time and space to read and write, usually in isolation from
one's family and kin. Literacy necessarily distances and separates people: the learner from the doer, the
scholar from the worker. But the challenge of a Black feminist pedagogy is to use literacy to connect
people with ideas and histories across racial, gender, and class boundaries and to further connect
Black women to each other and to their unique history. By making available knowledge of their own history as well as
that of the ruling elite, knowledge of men and women and Black and white people, we can give students a sense of their worth and their power
to affect their position and condition. The worker can become a scholar who does not have to abandon her class in order to become educated.
The process of evaluation, of correcting and measuring the written and spoken skills of students, has
usually been used in racist and sexist and elitist ways, which serve to diminish students' integ- rity and
humanity. But a liberal feminist stance should not be used to deny the students an honest appraisal of
their learning and skills. I used to err on the side of liberalism and promoted sisterly rapport instead of directly grappling with the
difficulty of teaching scholarly writing skills and critical thinking . Such skills can assist Black women in gaining
an overall and coherent way of analyzing the information they receive in the classroom and from the
experi- ences of their lives. In attempting to avoid making Black women students feel uncomfortable, I
tried to protect those who wrote poorly and analyzed superficially from feeling a sense of failure. In
the beginning, I assigned papers but did not rigorously grade them, satisfied that students expressed themselves and
tried hard. Then, I gave double grades on term papers: one for ideas and one for grammar, stupidly
separating content from process. When my grades accurately reflected their work, I felt that I had abandoned all my sisterly
values. The double grade process, however, protected me from guilt about grading their papers at all,
and helped me avoid the truth about their writing skills and course performances. By avoiding the
struggle to face the weaknesses of my Black women students, I also avoided the essentials of the
learning proc- ess. All teaching and learning involve tensions and discomfort, as students unlearn and
replace old ideas and limited understandings with newer, and, one hopes, better, information. The
solution lay not in attempting to remove the discomfort and tension, but in creating a learning
environment where Black women could feel safe about making mistakes and taking chances. Students
have to be taught to honestly evaluate failure and turn mistakes into lessons as they face the
difficulties associated with learning mathematics, history, paper writing, or speaking in class.
Don’t baby the [Aff/Neg]—only rejecting their flawed model can produce material change [Doubles as
Pedagogy 1st card]
Omolade 87 (Barbara, CUNY and Consortium of black women’s organizers in Brooklyn, A Black Feminist
Pedagogy, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 3/4, p. 38-9, JSTOR)//LA
The struggle at Medgar Evers College revealed the responsibility of Black women academicians to develop the
meaningful content of a pedagogy that makes rigorous academic demands and the political aim of
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liberating working people, especially Black women, from ignorance and powerlessness. Then, along
with those stu- dents, Black women academicians must struggle for the power to implement their
pedagogy. Black women instructors and students who participated in the Medgar Evers College sit-in have de- veloped
the framework of that pedagogy: a Black feminist set of academic themes that centers on the
research, study, and develop- ment of Black women. In order to assume power in the urban areas of
the United States, which are increasingly populated by women and men of color, the continually
exploited and oppressed peoples, especially Black women, must develop the skills to take over and
run urban institutions. In order to transform current conditions and positions of powerlessness, those
people must have the capacity to run them differently and humanely. The development of these
leadership skills requires that students learn differently within a liberatory classroom environment.
Class- room instructors must be more like consultants to, rather than controllers of, the learning
process. Although some educators ad- vance a pedagogy that proposes to do away with all structures
such as course outlines, the absence of structure leaves students without a clear sense of where a course is
going. It is like telling students to drive to California from New York without knowing how to drive very well and without a road map. The
instructor, on the other hand, has many maps and drives very well. No one can teach students to "see," but an instructor is responsible for
providing the windows, out of which possible angles of vision emerge from a coherent ordering of information and content. The
classroom process is one of information-sharing in which students learn to generalize their particular
life experiences within a community of fellow intellectuals. The breadth of material students receive
about the diverse perspectives of women and men all over the world should give them new ideas and
new models of scholarship. This is especially critical for Black women students, since Black women's experiences and Black female
scholarship are seldom placed within the syllabi of the academy's courses. Without an explicit pedagogy, Black women and
all other working-class students will continue to be disregarded as participants in the learning
environment. They will learn in a fairy land, with the good fairy godmothers (who are Black) giving
them solace and approval without wisdom, and the bad fairy godfathers (who are white) denying
them both humanity and useful information. Neither fairy godmothers nor godfathers can be equal
partners with students engaged in a political struggle to learn enough and know enough to transform
our mutual futures within and without the academy.
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Quar
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Intersectionality
Intersectionality is inevitable—to focus on one’s own specific oppression makes impossible wider
struggles for liberation
Green and Ellison 7/4 (Kai M. and Treva, “Black, queer, trans, and anti-capitalist scholars, activists, and
artists based in Los Angeles”—their byline, Dispatch from the ‘Very House of Difference’: Anti-Black
Racism and the Expansion of Sexual Citizenship – OR – We Need to Do So Much Better at Loving Each
Other, The Feminist Wire, 7/4/13, http://thefeministwire.com/2013/07/dispatch-from-the-very-houseof-difference-anti-black-racism-and-the-expansion-of-sexual-citizenship-or-we-need-to-do-so-muchbetter-at-loving-each-other/)//LA
The productive tension between sexual citizenship and expansion of militarism, surveillance, policing,
and incarceration rely on a discursive and material separation of race from sexuality . This is why for example,
queer youth of color can be exposed to extreme police harassment and interpersonal harm even in so-called “gay ghettos.” The very
question of whether “gay is the new black” requires and enacts a unconscionable forgetting of the
systems of domination and creative destruction that operate in part through a construction of gay and
Black as mutually exclusive. These kinds of representational traps attempt to make “equality” for
queer racialized sexualities unintelligible and unthinkable as they support the kinds of relations that
perpetuate harm and violence, sometimes against the very people they purport to protect. These harmful
dichotomies aren’t just uni-directional in flow; they don’t just come from politicians and the HRC but also
from us, from how we narrate and define our struggles. In the November 1978 November issue of “The Black Panther”
journalist Reggie Major wrote a commentary titled “The Privileged ‘Oppressed,’ in which he criticizes White gay male gentrification in Alamo
Square, Haight-Fillmore, and the Mission District. Majors notes that “some Blacks” take issue with the equation of the gay rights struggle with
the Black liberation struggle saying: “One of the reasons for this objection is the fact that many gays are involved in exercising White male
privilege at the very time they are claiming to be members of an oppressed group,”[3] Majors points out that White gay males have benefited
from racist housing and loan policies by receiving bank loans, which were previously formally denied to Blacks, and taking advantage of the fact
that Black-owned properties in Black neighborhoods were appraised at lower values. He makes a call for White gays to be in solidarity noting
that Black organizations spoke out against the Briggs Initiative, which sought to bar gays and lesbians from working in California schools. Majors
ends the article with a call for solidarity: “There has to be a broad front that pushed for increased human and civil rights for all citizens, and
Blacks and gays should be members of that front,”[4]. The
disaggregation of race from gender and sexuality evinced
in the separation of “gay” and “Black” helps to cohere the polemic and call to action but also
participates in a framework of intelligibility that renders black queerness unthinkable and ignores
how White gay gentrification impacts LGBT people of color and poor White LGBT people. When we
frame our struggles in ways that ignore the various and complicated ways that harm and violence
circulate, it becomes difficult for people to show up as themselves or in some cases to show up at all.
Desires for equality have a tendency to move people to become more invested in sameness instead of
thinking about the reality of difference. We are not the same. Audre Lorde told us this. Toni Cade Bambara told us this.
Gloria Anzaldúa told us this. Marlon Riggs told us this. We are not the same and it is our differences that give us strength. It
is our ability to see that our freedoms are all connected and of equal value, but our oppressions while
linked are not the same. We must not allow one kind of oppression to displace another in our political
imaginaries, especially if that displacement is more of an ideological fallacy than a material reality. For
those who understand oppression through one dominant identity, say as a white woman, it might be
easy to come together as women to rally around how this society devalues women’s lives and labor, but it might not be
so easy to see the ways in which as a white women you can create systems that are oppressive and
closed to women of color or people of color in general. We have to do better. Our lenses must be
broadened so that at all times we are not only aware of our particular positions of oppression, but
also our relative positions of privilege. Understanding privilege is not about guilt, though this is what seems to be happening
these days. I don’t need you to feel bad about what happened during slavery or what’s happening with the expansion of the prison industrial
complex. Guilt is paralyzing and it doesn’t produce much movement or change, it’s just stifling. Relinquish your
guilt and use your
privilege to change the structures that produce that privilege. Don’t include me in your privileged
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ranks, it means nothing if I can’t take my people with me. Barack Obama as first Black president means nothing if Black
people as a class remain in crises. This essay begins with recounting places and moments of injury. These stories are the kinds of
stories that become unspeakable and unknowable in a discursive order and model of reform that
privileges single-issue politics over mobilizing around the material conditions that produce trauma,
vulnerability and death. There are certainly reforms to be made, but we need to become more aware of the places and people we are
asked to give up in order to receive something that could easily be retracted. We don’t have to become Black. We don’t
have to become gay. But we must be able to build beyond our own individual positions whether we
stand in the intersection or not, we have to develop a model for recognizing the intersection, these
moments when race, gender, class, citizenship, sexuality and ability collide (and they are always
colliding). We must look for those who are lost; those who we’ve been asked to forget about because they are not our own. To dwell in
the house of difference is to think, plan, and create with the intersection in mind and in heart. The
dispatch has been sent. Will you heed the call?
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Sheshadri-Crooks K
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1NC
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1NC Shell
Fighting racism in the name of race only reifies normative racial historicity—turns the case
Seshadri-Crooks 2k (Kalpana, Boston College, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race, p. 69)//LA
I am suggesting two things: first, the order of racial difference attempts to compensate for sex's failure in language; second, we must not
therefore analogize race and sex on the sexual model of linguistic excess or contradiction. The
signifier Whiteness tries to fill the
constitutive lack of the sexed subject. It promises a totality, an overcoming of difference itself. For the
subject of race, Whiteness represents complete mastery, self-sufficiency, and the jouissance of
Oneness. This is why the order of racial difference must be distinguished from, but read in relation to, sexual difference. If sex is
characterized by a missing signifier, race, on the contrary, is not and cannot be organized around such an absence- a
missing signifier- that escapes or confounds language and inter-subjectivity. Race has an all-toopresent master signifier- Whiteness- which offers the illegal enjoyment of absolute wholeness. Race,
therefore, does not bear on the paradigm of failure or success of inter-subjectivity on the model of the sexual relation. The rationale of racial
difference and its organization can be understood as a Hobbesian one. It is a social contract among potential adversaries secured
to perpetuate singular claims to power and dominance, even as it seeks to contain the consequences of such singular
interests. The shared insecurity of claiming absolute humanness, which is what race as a system
manages, induces the social and legal validation of race as a discourse of neutral differences. In other
words, race identity can have only one function-it establishes differential relations among the races in order to
constitute the logic of domination . Groups must be differentiated and related in order to make possible
the claim to power and domination. Race identity is about the sense of one's exclusiveness,
exceptionality and uniqueness. Put very simply, it is an identity that, if it is working at all, can only be about pride, being better,
being the best. Race is inextricably caught up in a Hobbesian discourse of social contract, where personal (or particular) interest masquerades
as public good. Sexual difference, on the other hand, cannot be founded upon such a logic. The
values attached to male and
female are historically contingent as feminists have long suggested, but power cannot be the ultimate cause of
sexual difference. Racial difference, on the other hand, has no other reason to be but power, and yet
it is not power in the sense of material and discursive agency that can be reduced to historical
mappings. If such were the case, as many have assumed, then a historicist genealogy of the discursive
construction of race would be in order: Foucault not Lacan, discourse analysis not psychoanalysis. But
race organizes difference and elicits investment in its subjects because it promises access to being itself. It offers the
prestige of being better and superior; it is the promise of being more human, more full, less lacking.
The possibility of this enjoyment is at the core of "race." But enjoyment or jouissance is, we may recall ,
pure unpleasure. The possibility of enjoyment held out by Whiteness is also horrific as it implies the
annihilation of difference. The subject of race therefore typically resists race as mere "social
construction," even as it holds on to a notion of visible, phenotypal difference. Visible difference in race has a
contradictory function. If it protects against a lethal sameness, it also facilitates the possibility of that
sameness through the fantasy of wholeness. Insofar as Whiteness dissimulates the object of desire, 10
any encounter with the historicity, the purely symbolic origin of the signifier, inevitably produces anxiety. It is
necessary for race to seem more than its historical and cultural origin in order to aim at being. Race
must therefore disavow or deny knowledge of its own historicity, or risk surrendering to the discourse of
exceptionality, the possibility of wholeness and supremacy. Thus race secures itself through visibility.
Psychoanalytically, we can perceive the object cause of racial anxiety as racial visibility, the so-called
pre-discursive marks on the body (hair, skin, bone), which serve as the desiderata of race. In other words, the
bodily mark, which (like sex) seems to be more than symbolic, serves as a powerful prophylactic against the anxiety of race as a discursive
construction. We seem to need such a refuge in order to preserve the investment we make in the signifier of Whiteness. Thus race
should
not be reduced to racial visibility, which is the mistake made by some well-meaning and not-as-wellmeaning advocates of a color blind society. Racial visibility should be understood as that which secures the much
deeper investment we have made in the racial categorization of human beings. It is a lock-and-key relation, and
throwing away the key of visibility because it happens to open and close is not going to make the lock inoperable. By interrogating visibility we
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can ask what the lock is preserving, and why. The
capacity of visibility to secure an investment in identity also
distinguishes race from other systems of difference such as caste, class, ethnicity, etc. These latter forms of group
identity, insofar as they cannot be essentialized through bodily marks, can be easily historicized and textualized. Nothing prevents their
deconstruction, whereas in the case of race, visibility
maintains a bulwark against the historicity and historicization of
race. (In fact, Brennan suggests that the "ego's era" is characterized by a resistance to history.) It is this function of visibility that renders cases
of racial passing fraught and anxious. My contention that the category of race is inherently a discourse of supremacy
may seem inattentive to the advances that our legal systems and liberal social ideologies have made
precisely in relation to "racism" and "racist" practices. Modern civil society refuses to permit its
subjects the enjoyment of supremacist rhetoric, the rhetoric of exceptionality, by distinguishing between race
and racism. It draws this distinction between a supposed ontology (the study of physical or cultural differences)
and an epistemology (discriminatory logic) in the name of preserving a semblance of inter-subjectivity. Race,
it suggests, is a neutral description of human difference; racism, it suggests, is the misappropriation of
such difference. The liberal consensus is that we must do away with such ideological
misappropriation, but that we must "celebrate difference." It is understood as a "baby and the bath
water" syndrome, in which the dirty water of racism must be eliminated, to reveal the cleansed and
beloved "fact" of racial identity. This rather myopic perspective refuses to address the peculiar
resiliency of "race," the subjective investment in racial difference, and the hyper-valorization of
appearance. It dismisses these issues or trivializes them because race seems a historical inevitability. The logic
is that people have been constituted for material and other reasons as black and white and that this has had powerful historical consequences
for peoples thus constituted. Whether
race exists or not, whether race and racism are artificial distinctions or
not, racialization is a hard historical fact and a concrete instance of social reality. We have no choice,
according to this reasoning, but to inhabit our assigned racial positions. Not to do so is a form of
idealism, and a groundless belief that power can be wished away. In making this ostensibly
"pragmatic" move, such social theorists effectively reify "race." Lukacs, who elaborated Marx's notion of reification in
relation to the commodity form in History and Class Consciousness, is worth recalling here: Its basis is that a relation between people takes on
the character of a thing, and thus acquires a 'phantom objectivity,' an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal
every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people. (1923:89) To
arrest analysis of race at the point where
one discerns and marks its historical effects is to reproduce those very relations of power that one
intends to oppose. It is to render race so objective that it is impossible to conceive human difference
or inter-subjectivity anew. Modern civil society engages in such reification because ultimately its
desire is to keep the dialectic between races alive. It must thus prohibit what it terms "racism" in
order to prevent the annihilation not so much of the "inferior" races but of the system of race itself.
This is how the system of "desiring Whiteness" perpetuates itself, even in the discourses that are
most pragmatically aimed against racism. The resilience and endurability of race as a structure can
thus be attributed to its denials and disavowals. On the one hand, it is never in the place that one expects it to be: it
disavows its own historicity in order to hold out the promise of being to the subject- the something more than symbolic- a sense of wholeness,
of exceptionality. On the other hand, as
a social law, it must disavow this object in order to keep the system
viable and to perpetuate the dialectic: the race for Whiteness. Exploring the structure of race requires a toleration of
paradox, an appreciation of the fact that it is an inherently contradictory discourse, and a willingness to see beyond relations of power in order
to mine the depth of subjective investment in it.
The alternative is to release the racial signifier from its historical mooring in a signified; their approach
only reifies racism and hopeless opposition
Seshadri-Crooks 2k (Kalpana, Boston College, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race, p. 15860)//LA
In presenting my hypothesis to various interlocutors in formal and informal settings, I have been asked how my theory of race
as a symbolic system sustained by a regime of visibility translates into social policy. How does it affect
our thinking about affirmative action, about anti-discrimination legislations, about those particularly powerful modes of
political mobilization that have aggregated around identity? It is sophisticated and easy to be dismissive of
"identity politics" because it seems naive and essentialist. But the immeasurable weightiness of, say,
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the black power movement or the women's rights movement in pushing back the forces of
exploitation and resuscitating devalued cultures through the redefinition of identity must give us
pause. Identity politics works. However, the argument of this book is that it also ultimately serves to
reinforce the very system that is the source of the symptoms that such politics confines itself to
addressing. It is race itself that must be dismantled as a regime of looking. We cannot aim at this goal
by merely formulating new social policies . In fact, my theory is anti-policy for two reasons: first, any
attempt to address race systematically through policy, and by that I mean state policy, will inevitably
end up reifying race. Second, the only effective intervention can be cultural, at the "grassroots" level.
Such intervention can and should work, sometimes in tandem and at others in tension with state
policy, but the project of dismantling the regime of race cannot be given over to the state. Gramsci speaks
of the necessity of transforming the cultural into the political; where race is concerned, it is imperative that we turn
what is now "political," an issue of group interests, into the "cultural," an issue of social practice. We
must develop a new adversarial aesthetics that will throw racial signification into disarray. Given that
race discourse was produced in a thoroughly visual culture, it is necessary that the visual itself be used
against the scopic regime of race. I have laid the basis for such an aesthetics in Chapters 4 and 5, where the relation of the
bodily mark to the signifier is thrown into perplexity. In Suture, we as spectators are asked to give up our
investment in Whiteness, the signifier that promises access to absolute humanness. The film puts pressure on
the purely symbolic origins of race by unraveling the relation between racial gestalt and one's identity. Clay is Vincent if he takes up his place in
the signifying chain. Similitude is established not on the basis of the body's gestalt, but the part object-ears, eyes, etc. In Toni Morrison's
"Recitatif," it is racial
reference that is called into question. As with Suture, the relation between visibility and the
signifier is refused , but for another purpose. By emptying the racial signifier of its properties, so that white
and black have no connotations, Morrison renders meaningless the relations among the signifier, the
body, and identity. For Morrison, it is such emptiness that makes love approachable. I am proposing an adversarial
aesthetics that will destabilize racial looking so that racial identity will always be uncertain and
unstable. The point of such a practice would be to confront the symbolic constitution of race and of
racial looking as the investment we make in difference for sameness. The confrontation has to entail
more than an exploration of the fantasy, which process I detailed in Chapter 2 on "The secret sharer." There we took measure
of the fantasy of wholeness as the obliteration of difference that Whiteness holds out to the subject of race. A simple rejection of this
fantasy of selfinflation on a political or ethical basis, such as the repugnance we see exhibited by Orwell, in Chapter 3, cannot
be adequate. In Orwell's case, his liberal rejection of mastery can only lead to the reproduction of the
system of race. For it is not enough to be aware of the affect of anxiety that race invariably generates.
One must traverse the fundamental fantasy of singular humanity upon which racial identity is
founded. It is a question of resituating oneself in relation to the raced signifier. Such a practice would
not aim so much at a cross-identification, such as ticking the "wrong" box on a questionnaire, or passing for another race. It would
confound racial signification by stressing the continuity, the point of doubt among the so-called races,
to the extent that each and every one of us must mistrust the knowledge of our racial belonging. The
idea would be to void racial knowledge by releasing the racial signifier from its historical mooring in a
signified. Such practices can only be, and must be representational, as what they necessitate is a
radical intervention into language and signification. This entails the reinvention of culture as
organized by differences based on other kinds of "reasonings" than race. Every medium of
representation can and must be harnessed for such a practice. In addition to those I have cited earlier such as film,
painting and literature, we must consider the possibilities presented by that other mode of representation, namely representation by proxy.
The possibility of unsettling political representation, for instance, or procedures of verification based on
race such as the passport, the visa and the driver's license may renew and refresh questions of identity— what is
worth preserving, what is not. The idea is not to erase identity, even if such a preposterous act were
possible. Rather, we must rethink identity in tension with our usual habits of visual categorization of
individuals. Ideally, the practice that I am advocating will deploy the visual against the visual. Such
redefinition is thinkable only as a collective and normalizing project; it should be aimed at infiltrating
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normative bourgeois self-definition. The practice of "discoloration" will be more effective if it is not
restricted to particular intellectual groups or artists. Gramsci suggests that a philosophical movement, even as it elaborates
a form of thought superior to "common sense" and coherent on a scientific plane .... never forgets to remain in contact with the "simple" and
indeed finds in this contact the source of the problems it sets out to study and to resolve. (Gramsci 1971 :330) In other words, we
cannot
voluntarily abandon the quotidian logic of race. To do so would be a form of vanguardism that will
only reinforce the system as the necessary point of differentiation. Rather, it is to the common sense
of race that we must appeal. Otherwise, we will fail to address social contradiction in its specificity.
Thus producing a sub-culture of "discolorationists" or encouraging subjects voluntarily to refuse racial
identity (as advocated for "white" people by the journal Race Traitor) possibly will not be effective. An anti-race praxis
must aim at a fundamental transformation of social and political logic. It cannot be a mere "phenomenon of
individuals" which, as Gramsci reminds us, only marks the "'high points' of the progress made by common sense" (1971 :331 ). As a praxis,
psychoanalysis is the most appropriate discourse for the examination of why we or certain groups
may resist such an adversarial aesthetics. Working through our fantasies will involve the risk of
desubjectification that many of us dread. Such dread, such an encounter with our own limit, is the
only means of articulating the possibility of an ethics beyond the specious enjoyment promised by
Whiteness.
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2NC
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2NC Thesis [MUST READ]
The 1AC affirmed WHITENESS as MASTER SIGNIFIER, the point from which their whole system may be
defined. In so doing they come to define themselves and others based upon the absolute power of the
master signifier—this turns the case because they’ll come to desire wholeness through the suturing of
the lack
Seshadri-Crooks 2k (Kalpana, Boston College, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race, p. 5860)//LA
The striking phrase "the visible absence of color" refers to Whiteness as the simultaneous presence and
absence of a certain substance. It is precisely the indefniteness, the ambivalence, the mute
meaningfulness, the colorless, all-color of Whiteness that fascinates and mesmerizes the subject as
the promise of being itself. For Melville, it is the absent cause of perceptible hues of nature which are but "the subtile deceits, not
actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without" ( 186). This cause is the "great principle of light" which "for ever remains white
or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank
tingepondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us as a lepe1" ( 186). Whiteness
here is the great and immanent
absence that sustains the system of chromatism; it actually enables one to see, even as it presents a
threat to ordinary vision. As the cause of color, of visibility itself, Whiteness as light is beyond mere
perception; he who looks upon it would, in Melville's terms, end as "the wretched infidel [who] gazes himself blind" (l86). Melville's
notion of Whiteness as the formless and dangerous essence of visibility is wholly compatible with the
view of Whiteness as the master signifier of race that I have been delineating so far. In the last chapter, my
emphasis was on the capacity of Whiteness to engender the structure of racial difference. Here, I will focus on
the lethal and illegal fantasy of sameness and mastery that Whiteness offers as the real yet concealed
motivation for the maintenance of race. The master signifier makes difference possible, but it is also
excluded from the play of signification that it supports. In Lacan's terms, we could propose that the dual character of
Whiteness, as support and panic-inducing kernel, exists in a relation of "extimacy" (Lacan's term for the paradox of the excluded interior) to the
symbolic system it engenders. This
signifier, in its awesome and terrifying aspect, discloses itself as something
inassimilable to the very system that it causes and upholds. In our terms, Whiteness engenders the scale
of human difference as racial embodiment, but this ostensibly " neutral" system of differences is
organized around the exclusion of Whiteness, particularly the terror that it presents as pure and
blinding light, which would annihilate and erase difference. I argue that this " terror" should be
understood as the raison d'etre for race itself- the will to preeminence, to mastery, to being- which
must necessarily be prohibited by social and juridical law. This ineffable and excluded power of
Whiteness, as that which makes perception possible but is itself the blinding possibility beyond the
visible, should be explored as the " lure" that fuels and perpetuates racial visibility while holding out a promise of something beyond
the empirical mark. I suggested in the previous chapter that the visible bodily marks of race serve to guarantee
Whiteness as something more than its discursive construction. Whiteness, I argue, attempts to signify
being, but this audacious attempt is impossible because of the simple fact that Whiteness is only a
cultural invention. This impossibility, based on the historicity of Whiteness, generates anxiety. But
anxiety in race identity is endemic insofar as Whiteness tries to fill a space which must remain empty,
or unsignified. This is where so-called ordinary visible difference, telling people apart on basis of bodily detail, comes to
sustain the regime of race. If we can find a non-discursive basis (the marks on the body) for our faith in race,
then the function of Whiteness, as the unconscious promise of wholeness, is preserved. Our
investment in phenotype actually serves a dual function. On the one hand, it allows the co-existence
of race as social construction, which serves to defend against the jouissance of Whiteness. On the
other, it preserves that fantasy of wholeness by valorizing phenotype as something pre-discursive. In
this chapter, I explore the lethal fantasy at the core of race, which is the possibility of transcending or
reaching beyond the visible phenotype. It is the possibility of being itself, where difference and lack
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are wholly extinguished. As the master signifier of race, Whiteness maintains the structure of (visible) diffe
rence- the chain of metonymic substitutions which locates the subject as desiring (thus eternally lacking) Whiteness.
The fantasy of encountering Whiteness would be, for the subject of race, to recover the missing
substance of one's being. It would be to coincide, not with a transcendental ideal, some rarefied model of bodily perfection, but with
the "gaze," that void in the Other, a piece of the Real, that could annihilate difference. The Lacanian view about
our general sense of visual reality or conscious perception is that it is itself subtended by our drive to search, recognize and recover the object
of desire. In other words, what
we take to be the evidence of our eyes, the fruit of our active looking, is
largely caused by an unrecognized and underlying need to encounter that which Lacan terms "the gaze." The
gaze is "that which always escapes the grasp of that form of vision that is satisfied with imagining itself as consciousness" (XI: 74). It is
beyond reality and visual perception which, as Freud established, are founded on language and thought. The
gaze is of the order of the Real, because it directly addresses lack- the lack in the Other and the lack in
the subject. Encountering it would be lethal, insofar as it is contingent on the subject's constitutive
lack or castration (XI: 73), the subject as manque a etre (or subject as a want-to-be.) To encounter the gaze would be to
relinquish one's subject status, to give up meaning for being. The gaze promotes the fantasy of
wholeness, but at the price of one's distinctive subject status. The gaze thus causes desire, it is the
consummate version of the objet petit a, and more importantly it is the object of the scopic drive. Translated or
extended to the sphere of race, it is Whiteness as being itself that functions as the lure-the gaze that
causes desire and is at the center of the drive's trajectory. Put more starkly, it is our drive for
supremacy, for the jouissance of absolute humanness, that sustains our active looking. Setting aside the
historical fact that such a goal is impossible because race has no purchase on the body's jouissance, or
in anything beyond its own cultural origins, we must nevertheless take up the persistence of the
fantasy of Whiteness.
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2NC Prior Question
The normative conclusions of the aff all presume a relationship to Whiteness as a master signifier—
the K comes first
Seshadri-Crooks 2k (Kalpana, Boston College, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race, p. 345)//LA
The above view of the ego and the body image raises the question of the relation of the ego ideal to race. What
is the status of the master signifier of race in the constitution of the bodily ego? If we agree that the body
image is constituted with the help of the signifier, then are all body images necessarily raced? Is Whiteness a founding
signifier for the subject as such, and of his/her ego? Is the racial signifier necessary for the constitution of the
bodily ego? It is important that we not mistake the moment of the constitution of the bodily ego as
the necessary moment when the body becomes racially visible. To do so would not be a sufficient
departure from the erroneous belief that race is purely a question of misrecognition or identification with a
mirror image. We would merely have added the factor of the racial signifier to the account of the mirror stage. There is no doubt that one can
be constituted as a subject with a "unified" bodily ego without necessarily identifying with a racial signifier, or seeing oneself as racially marked.
(The large point here is that race is not like sex. Not all are subject to the racial signifier.) We only have to consider the
numerous accounts from literature and autobiography that enact the scene of becoming racially visible to oneself. Besides Fanon, who speaks
of discovering that he is "black" during his first visit to France, there is Stuart Hall, who in "Minimal selves" says that for many Jamaicans like
himself, "Black is an identity which had to be learned and could only be learned in a certain moment " (
1996b: 116). This process of introjecting the signifier is repeated by other characters such as Janie in Zora Neal Hurston's Their Eyes Were
Watching God, James Weldon Johnson's protagonist in Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, and by Oulaudah Equiano in his autobiographical
narrative. There are doubtless numerous other examples that one could cite. The
fact that the secondariness of race seems
to apply only to so-called "people of color," and that there are rare, or virtually no instances of a
socalled "white" person discovering his or her race may lead to several specious speculations such as:
"black" people identify with "whites" as the latter are more powerful and define the norm. Such
misidentification on the part of "blacks" leads to trauma when they discover the reality of their
blackness (Fanon's thesis). Other problematic views might be that "white" people impose an identity upon
those they have colonized in order to justify their dominance, or "whites" have no race or race
consciousness; "whites" are not racially embodied, and this is an index of their transparency and
power, etc. While some of these propositions might make some ideological sense, all of these
conclusions nevertheless presume the pre-existence of "black" and "white" as if these were natural
and neutrally descriptive terms. I would suggest that the difference among black, brown, red, yellow
and white rests on the position of each signifier in the signifying chain in its relation to the master
signifier, which engenders racial looking through a particular process of anxiety. Perhaps the more
effective ideological stance may be not to raise race consciousness among so-called "whites," as
scholars in Whiteness studies suggest, but to trouble the relation of the subject to the master
signifier. One must throw into doubt the security and belief in one's identity, not promote more
fulsome claims to such identity.
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2NC Turns Case
Their failure to interrogate Whiteness as master signifier turns the case—perpetuates a racist system
Seshadri-Crooks 2k (Kalpana, Boston College, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race, p. 556)//LA
Guillaumin 's terms are useful not so much in distinguishing between premodern and contemporary notions of race, as she suggests, but rather
in discerning the emergence of race through the self-splitting referred to earlier. Guillaumin 's failure to discern the notion of Whiteness as the
organizing principle of Eurocentrism (as distinguished from "banal ethnocentrisms") enables her to exonerate both ethnocentrism and
aristocratism as not "true racism." But proper attention to the crucial element of class at play in Whiteness reveals that it is not about
aristocratism, but about "the people"the volk, with precisely the sense of its "own naturalness" that Guillaumin disavows as an element in autoreferential systems. I would also suggest that the altero-referential system does not so much displace but is founded on the auto-referential
notion of Whiteness. Thus the discourse of race as we understand it today is an effect of that internal splitting that we identified earlier as the
cause of race. The
structure of race is totalizing, and attempts to master and overcome all difference
within its boundaries. The dichotomy of self and other is within Whiteness in the competition over who properly possesses Whiteness,
or sovereign humanness. H.F. K.Gunther's ( 1927) classification along physiognomic lines is a part of the logical nucleus of racial visibility
grounded in "the narcissism of small differences" that grounds racial visibility. Thus in Gunther's classification, "other" European races such as
the Mediterranean can carry the "Negro strain," or the Tartar may carry the "Asiatic." The
signifier Whiteness is about gaining
a monopoly on the notion of humanness, and is not simply the displaceable or reversible pinnacle of
the great chain of beingY However, one must not forget that as the unconscious principle or the master
signifier of the symbolic ordering of race, Whiteness also makes possible difference and racial intersubjectivity. It orders, classifies, categorizes, demarcates and separates human beings on the basis of
what is considered to be a natural and neutral epistemology. This knowledge is also the agency that
produces and maintains differences through a series of socially instituted and legally enforced laws
under the name of equality, multiculturalism, anti discrimination, etc. Anti-racist legislations and
practices, in other words, work ultimately in the service of race , which is inherently, unambiguously,
structurally supremacist. The structure of race is deeply fissured, and that is discernible in the
constitutive tension, or contradiction between its need to establish absolute differences, and its illegal
desire to assert sameness. In fact, race establishes and preserves difference for the ultimate goal of sameness,
in order to reproduce the desire for Whiteness . As Foucault might have put it, race separates in order
to master. However, unlike the technologies of power that Foucault so painstakingly detailed, the
analysis of race cannot be exhausted through its historicization. Race produces unconscious effects,
and as a hybrid structure located somewhere between essence and construct, it determines the
destiny of human bodies. It is our ethical and political task to figure out how destiny comes to be
inscribed as anatomy, when that anatomy does not exist as such.
Their analysis makes racial visibility an inevitable aspect of critique—must endorse a Lacanian
investigation
Seshadri-Crooks 2k (Kalpana, Boston College, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race, p. 2830)//LA
Subjective memory works like an automaton, marking and manipulating the subject even as it produces him or her in one's
particularity. In relation to race, this model is again useful in catalyzing a major shift from essentialist, or even historicist
notions of "racial memory," as hoary contents coded genetically, spiritu ally, discursively, culturally, in particular groups
characterizing identity, to memory of race as contentless signifiers, a chain of difference reproduced
mechanically by the function ing of language. How does such an understanding of the "memory" of
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race affect analysis? First, it must be acknowledged that the account I have given of "the subject of race" using Lacan's model of the
symbolic is too deterministic . It is also incomplete. The subject is not simply the figure that emerges when all the
dots are connected; the subject is also constituted or determined by the not fully inscribed page- the
gaps in the chain that connect the pieces. This is a fundamental proposition in Lacan, and it is not the
question of a shift in emphasis referred to earlier. What the unconscious also registers is the lack or the desire of the
subject that can never be fully expressed in language. "The unconscious is, in the subject, a schism of the symbolic system,
a limitation, an alienation induced by the symbolic system" (I: 196). This discovery of fundamental disjunction in the
subject, that he/she merely marks a place between signifiers in a chain of signifiers, is the aim of analysis. The subject goes well
beyond what is experienced "subjectively" by the individual, exactly as far as the truth he is able to attain .... Yes, this truth of his history is not
all contained in his script, and yet the place marked there by the painful shock he feels from knowing only his own lines, and not simply there,
but also in pages whose disorder gives him little comfort. (E: 55) In the deployment of Lacan's theory of the subject of the symbolic to "the
subject of race," it
is necessary to inquire what the subject of race desires. Also, what kind of access does
race, as a chain of signifiers that determines the symbolic subject, have to "being," or that which is
excluded by the chain? I will be suggesting that racial visibility is to be located precisely at this point of interrogation: it is
the level at which race, or more properly its master signifier "Whiteness" aspires to being . The above questions
suggest that the model of the subject as determined by a chain of signifiers is necessarily incomplete
insofar as it cannot account for sexual difference or more properly for the body. More questions emerge: If the unconscious is
structured like a language, then how is the body constituted? If sexual difference is merely a question of the signifier, how do we account for
the body's drives, or for sexuality that is often at odds with the logic of sexual difference? In relation to "race," to
stop with the
account of the symbolic function of Whiteness would be too premature, for it does not address the
issue of visibility, or the relation of the signifier to the visible body, which is, after all, the inaugural
point of this inquiry. In order to take up in earnest the question of the body and of its constitution as
raced, it is necessary to clarify the relation between the ego as body image and racial visibility. First,
one must repudiate the notion that race is merely a process of specular identification, where a prediscursive and pre-raced entity assumes a racial identity on the basis of certain familial others whose image it identifies
with in a mirror relation. Such a notion is based on a simplified account of Lacan 's concept of the imaginary and the mirror stage. I undertake
the following discussion of the imaginary for two reasons: to suggest that insofar
as the symbolic underwrites the
imaginary, race must be understood as a symbolic phenomenon. It is a logic of difference inaugurated
by a signifier, Whiteness, that is grounded in the unconscious structured like a language. This signifier
subjects us all equally to its law regardless of our identities as "black," "white," etc. Racial visibility is a
remainder of this symbolic system. Second, the process of becoming racially visible is not coterminous with the organization of
the ego or the acquisition of the body image. In other words, the visibility of the body does not necessarily have to be a
racial visibility. It is important that one disarticulate the two processes; otherwise racial visibility will
seem to be an ontological necessity that is a universal verity of subjective existence as such.
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2NC Link (Whiteness)
Whiteness predetermines discussions of racial difference—their normative approach will only
retrench master signifiers
Seshadri-Crooks 2k (Kalpana, Boston College, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race, p. 4445)//LA
How does race articulate itself with sex? How does it produce extra-symbolic effects? I would suggest that race aims for the body in
its otherness15 by disavowing its own historicity. For what the racial symbolic promises the subject is
precisely access to being. Whiteness offers a totality, a fullness that masquerades as being. Thus for the
raced subject, to encounter the historicity of Whiteness is particularly anxiety-producing. In other
words, the cause of the raced subject is its own disavowed historicity. I refer not so much to the fact
that race is historicizable (that it has at its origin some historical, cultural or social cause) but rather to the phenomenon
of its historicity (which is the delimitation of race as a regulative norm at the expense of its natural universality) that radically
exposes the subject to its own linguistic limit. To encounter one's subjectivity as an effect of language ,
and not as an enigma, is anxiety-producing not because one is reduced to a construct (what would that really mean
experientially?) but because it implies the foreclosure of desire and the possibility of being. It is to discover
that the law of racial difference is not attached to the Real . What the raced subject encounters, in a
given moment of anxiety, is the law as purely symbolical. This is to confront the utter groundlessness
of the law of racial difference, to discover that the question of one's being is not resolved by
Whiteness, but that Whiteness is merely a signifier that masquerades as being and thereby blocks
access to lack. To pose the question of being in relation to race is to face that there is not one. It is
here that we must situate social and juridical laws against discrimination as well. Like the prohibition against
miscegenation, our legal prohibitions, couched in the language of respect for difference, ultimately serve to
protect the paradox of Whiteness. The paradox is that Whiteness attempts to signify the unsignifiable,
i.e. humanness, in order to preserve our subjective investment in race. The Other of race, in short, is
not lacking; there is no "hole" where being could be promising jouissance. All of race is expressed and
captured by language.
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2NC Link (Topic)
The aff is the ultimate manifestation of Whiteness as Master Signifier—the impact is colonialism and
violence on the colonially raced other
Seshadri-Crooks 2k (Kalpana, Boston College, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race, p. 7982)//LA
It is to Hannah Arendt ( 1973) that we owe the remarkable insight that the practice of imperialism entailed the
development of two "devices"- race and bureaucracy. Arendt's great achievement is her delineation
of the convergence of these two discourses, which she suggests were independently discovered, but
begin to dovetail with the progress of domination. Arendt characterizes the discourse of race as "the
emergency explanation of human beings whom no European or civilized man could understand, and whose
humanity so frightened and humiliated the immigrants that they no longer cared to belong to the same
human species" (Arendt 1973: 185). Bureaucracy, on the other hand, she suggests, was founded on "legend," the
"quixotic" (21 0) notion of the white man's burden to slay the dragon of primitive superstition, which deteriorated rapidly into
boyhood ideas of adventure as selfless service to the cause of Empire (209- 1 0). Arendt's analysis of bureaucracy is
particularly illuminating for an understanding of the relationship of colonial discourse to the order of
Whiteness (or race). Citing the influential colonial administrator Lord Cromer as a model of the colonial bureaucrat who articulated
a " theory" of bureaucracy, Arendt argues that his gradual persuasion to the method of a "hybrid form of government" entailed the
governance of subject territories through what he termed "personal influence," without accountability to a legal or
political policy or treaty. Cromer's perspective, which was to prove definitive for colonial rule in general, recommended
that the bureaucrat, who worked anonymously behind the scenes, be freed from any form of
accountability to public institutions such as Parliament, the law courts or the press (21 4 ). Such a form of
bureaucracy, Arendt suggests, through her reading of Cromer's letters and speeches, was the outcome of his realization of
the essential contradiction of colonial rule, the impossibility of cultivating democracy , and in his own words,
of governing "a people by a people-the people of India by the people of England" (cited in Arendt 1973:214). Thus the transformation
of the administrator as (the great English) apostle of the rule of law to one who "no longer believed in the universal
validity of law, but was convinced of his own innate capacity to rule and dominate" (221 ), meant that
the surreptitious exertion of violence, termed "administrative massacres" (216) in lieu of the
"civilizing mission," was now a "realistic" alternative for containing the natives. But such a subversive
efflorescence at the very heart of the great project of freeing the natives from the shackles of their "cruel superstitions" brought bureaucracy in
opposition to the foundations of colonial law. It
is at this moment, of the loss of faith in the so-called English ideals of
parliamentary democracy and rational government, that Arendt marks the convergence of the device
of bureaucracy with the practices of race. This does not mean that she proposes adherence to English ideals as a norm from
which colonial discourse has deviated. If anything, Arendt's thesis is that every discourse of progress always carries within
it its own negation in the form of a "subterranean" current. In her preface to the first edition of The Origins of
Totalitarianism, she writes that her book assumes that progress and Doom are two sides of the same medal; that both are articles of
superstition, not of faith ... The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting
history by commonplaces . . .. The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our
tradition. This
is the reality in which we live. And this is why all efforts to escape from the grimness of the
present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are in
vain. (Arendt 1973: vii-ix) Arendt's analysis of the confluence of colonial bureaucracy and race enables us to
discover the contradictions built into colonial discourse. It is these contrad ictions that Homi Bhabha ( 1994)
elaborates as structural ambivalence- an ambivalence that splits the discourse between official claims to the
rule of law as a rationalization of colonial power and its practical underside- that is the impossibility of
"justice" in an inherently unstable and disoriented political situation. While Bhabha pinpoints this ambivalence
under various terms- mimicry, sly civility and hybridity- what is significant is the fact that the contradiction within the order of
race- as the institution of difference and the desire for sameness- is best discerned in the field of
colonialism. As a concrete utilization of the logic of "race," colonial discourse, as the agency of a
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naming and an ordering of difference, inevitably produces, or more properly is founded upon, a
residue, namely what Arendt terms bureaucracy, the material practice entailed by the "desire" of
Whiteness for absolute mastery. But bureaucracy must not be understood as a simple and correctable
error of colonial discourse; rather, it must be understood as the "symptom" of the inherently
contradictory claims of the rhetoric of colonialism (the impossibility of the rule of law) engendered as
it is by an impossible desire. Slavoj Zizek's formulation of the symptom is useful here; he suggests that it is in a given discourse "the
point of exception functioning as its internal negation" ( 1989:23). And basically, for the symptom to function as the necessary contradiction,
the subject must have no knowledge of its logic. The
unconscious aspect of Whiteness guarantees just such a nonknowledge, while its illegal desire, articulated in the symptom of lawless bureaucracy in the scene of
colonialism, supported by the latent equation of Whiteness with humanness, remains repressed and
unacknowledged only to return in an uncanny encounter. My literary example in the last chapter, Conrad's "The secret
sharer" ( 1966), illustrated the fantasy of Whiteness fulfilling its promise and delivering a lethal enjoyment that logically and existentially would
be impossible. Such an assertion then raises the question of that impossibility, how is it encountered, and with what consequences? What
does it mean for Whiteness as wholly symbolic or bound by language (in the sense that race is "successful" and is
not missing a signifier) to fulfill or attempt to fulfill its promise as the master signifier? What is the
consequence of its failing to do so because of its "success"? How does historicity expose the "success"
of race? How does the anxiety that ensues at such exposure manifest itself? How can we map or discover such a
successful failure? Since we are dealing here with the unconscious function of the signifier in the
constitution of the subject of race, it is incumbent on us to turn to the formations of the unconscious,
i.e., dreams, parapraxes, slips of the tongue, jokes, etc. Jokes, and humor in general, are a particularly useful site for probing the working of the
signifier, as they are less particularized than dreams and the lapses of speech, and since they can only be told in a public context, intersubjectivity is an indispensable element to them. Jokes need at least three people, and exploring this triangular relation in the context of
colonialism may lead us to discern the anxious function of Whiteness. In the following I use George Orwell's anecdotes of his experience as a
policeman in Burma and as a visitor in Morocco as texts of the failure of Whiteness. Orwell's pieces are particularly useful because in their
attempt to be confessional, to speak the truth about difference and prejudice under the guise of a liberal faith in race, they display an anxiety
that divulges all .
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Link XT/Answers
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“Black” Link
Identifying individuals as “Black” or “White” is not neutral—it’s part of a system of racial biologism
based on the Master Signifier Whiteness
Seshadri-Crooks 2k (Kalpana, Boston College, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race, p. 141143)//LA
Racial identity, too, I would like to suggest- i.e., words like black and white, when used as nounsworks like names.10 That is, they are rigid designators- they are signifiers that have no signified. They
establish a reference, but deliver no connotations or meaning whatsoever. We can, of course, reasonably
argue that race does not exist insofar as the identity of a person as "black" or "white" is contingent
upon a cluster of concepts that are themselves too protean to be able to uphold anything like a
necessary truth. We can cite historical evidence to show that groups that were once considered white are no longer
classified as such for this or that reason, etc. But as my discussion in Chapter l specified, arguments leveled at race theory are
highly ineffectual and possess insufficient explanatory power. Thus rather than lapse into the
historicist argument, it may be more productive to view racial color designators as operating not
unlike proper names. The proper name is neither wholly one's own (i.e., we are all named by others) nor is it
meaningful. One inhabits the name as the reference of oneself, and as Kripke asserts, it bears no relation to a set of
properties that establish either its meaning or its reference: Nixon is Nixon, or as he says, quoting Bishop Butler, "everything is what it is and
not another thing" (Kripke 1982:94). Is this not true for
"black" and "white"? If someone is designated as one or the
other, there is a necessary truth to that designation, but does it mean? What would be the cluster of
concepts that could establish such an identity? Even in identity statements such as "blacks are people of African
descent" or "whites are people of European descent," though the predicates supposedly define and give the meaning
of black and white, establishing the necessity of these concepts in every counter-factual situation will
not be possible if only because national designations, and the notion of descent, are historically
volatile and
. 11 As Kripke says, it is not how the speaker thinks he got the reference, but the actual chain of communication, which is
relevant .... Obviously the name is passed on from link to link. But of course not every sort of causal chain reaching from me to a certain man
will do for me to make a reference. There may be a causal chain from our use of the term "Santa Claus" to a certain historical saint, but still the
children, when they use this, by this time probably do not refer to that saint. ... It seems to me wrong to think we give ourselves some
properties which somehow qualitatively uniquely pick out an object and determine our reference in that manner. (Kripke 1982:93-4) If we
substitute "black" or "white," etc. for Santa Claus in the above quotation, we discern two things immediately: first,
the paradigm of
"black" as reaching back to "Africa," as Santa Claus could to a medieval saint, is the source of an insurmountable
confusion in critical race theory. The idea that "black" means "people of African descent" leads into
the thicket of debates about biological descent, which will inevitably run into the false contradiction
between culture and biology. Second, we can now see that the notion of racial passing is nothing but an
intervention into the passing of the name from link to link. Changing one's identity from black to
white, or viceversa, means that one passes from one chain of communication to another. For instance,
when the "Ex-Colored Man" in James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man decides to pass from black to white, he does so
by passing from one chain to another: "I finally made up my mind that I would neither disclaim the black race nor claim the white race; but that
I would change my name, raise a mustache, and let the world take me for what it would" (Johnson 1995:90, emphasis added). In his last lecture,
Kripke himself suggests the possibility of "black" and "white" as rigid designators by advocating the
view that terms for natural kinds are much closer to proper names than is ordinarily supposed ... Perhaps
some "general" names ("foolish," "fat," "yellow") express properties. In a significant sense, such general names as "cow" and
"tiger" do not, unless being a cow counts trivially as a property. Certainly "cow" and "tiger" are not short for the conjunction of properties a
dictionary would take to define them. (Kripke 1982: 127- 8) It should be noted that Kripke's use of "yellow" in the above quotation is a
reference to color and not to a human race, which could not, according to the above logic, express properties. In
this context, we can
understand the utterance "black is beautiful" not as an attempt at substituting a negative cluster of
concepts with a positive one in order to reclaim the properties attached to "black" identity; rather, it
is intelligible as an attempt to preserve the rigid designation of "black," by displacing its so-called
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properties onto black as a color, to mark its function as a general name, than as a property of group
identity. We must ask what consequence race names as rigid designators have for the psychoanalytic
examination of race identity. I suggest that insofar as race identity, unlike sexual identity, has no bearing
on the real, such rigid designation is better understood not as an indication of the "failure" of the
symbolic (a symptom that escapes meaning or the possibility of interpretation), which would be the Lacanian translation
of rigid designation, but of its agency. Black and white and other racial signifiers do not fail to signify
properties (as "the" woman does in her position as objet a or the symptom); they perform the only function they can:
they designate rigidly this or that individual ("everything is what it is and not another thing"). Does this mean that race names
as rigid designators cannot be translated into Lacanian terms, that they have no psychoanalytic valence? That race names are rigid
designators is, first of all, a counterintuitive claim. If we consider how and why racial signifiers are
used in everyday speech, we encounter not only the ideological production of specific racial content
(usually referred to as stereotypes), but the fraught status of the racial referent as such. One points with a wordblack man, white woman- but this pointing cannot be "innocent" in the sense that it "merely" establishes reference as
in: "no other than Nixon might have been Nixon" (Kripke 1982:48). The pointing in this case involves the whole regime of
racial visibility which, as I have been delineating it, is founded on a certain anxiety. This relation
between racial naming as meaning, or the description of properties, and racial naming as reference, or
pure designation, is not one of misreading the logical functioning of names; rather, I suggest that
racial naming as referring to properties (or the stereotype) acts as an envelope, a cover for the anxiety
of racial reference which literally means nothing. (This is the very definition of the stereotype as a form of discourse that
attempts to produce meaning where none is possible.) There is something anxiety-producing about the fullness of the
signifier/referent relation that bypasses the signified, or the concept, that would properly produce
meaning and thus desire.
“Black”=Link—it socially constructs race reps
Seshadri-Crooks 2k (Kalpana, Boston College, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race, p.
155)//LA
What kind of an identity statement is "Maggie is black"? I have cited Kripke's thesis regarding names
as rigid designators, and we have extended that thesis to race designators such as "black" and "white"
to suggest that these nouns also function as names, insofar as they merely determine reference
without recourse to qualitative descriptions that may serve as criteria for identity. Like proper names,
"black" and "white" have no meaning, and neither is their reference determined through a cluster of
concepts such that they are true in all situations. Race identity, then, is not contingent; it is necessary,
even "essential," insofar as it is a rigid designation without qualitative criteria that can be true in all
situations. We have further extended the absence of the signified in this notion of the signifier to Lacan's notion of identity, particularly in
relation to the place of "woman" in sexual difference, as something that exceeds the symbolic. If the signified is a symbolic
construct, it is precisely in its absence or failure that identity is made possible. With reference to woman and
sexual difference, this is the excluded possibility of jouissance, the lack in the Other, that determines the subject of desire
as such. However, racial identity insofar as it is entirely symbolic has no bearing on the lack in the
Other . Thus the absence of the signified here does not mean that the symbolic has failed; it is rather
that it has succeeded too well . There is no question of mapping racial difference onto the graph of
sexual difference. "Black," "white," etc. are rigid designators, and whatever qualities or signifieds we
may attempt to attach to them will be determined by history . This does not mean that racial identity
is contingent; it is so only if we think of identity in qualitative terms . And as Kripke says, everyone knows
that there are contingent identities. Racial identity is necessary in that it rigidly designates a referent
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without need of qualitative properties. To return to the context of the story, what does it mean to say that Maggie is black?
What effect does it have, especially in relation to the fact that such reference is precisely refused, by the narrator, for Twyla and Roberta? I
have suggested that one of the effects of such narrative reticence is to exemplify racial names as rigid designators without qualitative
properties. Therefore trying to decode the narrative to read one of the other characters as black or white is to elide the fundamental
proposition of the story: racial signifiers do not mean anything in the strong sense of having "no sense." Therefore, what is the effect of
Roberta's fixing of Maggie as black, given that Twyla was unaware of Maggie's identity as black?
Their terminology PROVES the K—if language didn’t shape identity they wouldn’t use “Black” as a
descriptive term
Seshadri-Crooks 2k (Kalpana, Boston College, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race, p. 132133)//LA
Using the racial signifier to designate a person ("the black guy over there") or appending it to a name
("so-and-so, the black poet") is a dominant mode of establishing identity, especially in the absence of visual
evidence such as a photograph. However, it has of late become a questionable practice, at least in the news media, to
cite someone's race when the story is apparently "neutral."' One may refer to a person's race only
when the story warrants it. We have thus learnt to be uncomfortable in invoking racial identity
unnecessarily, especially when recounting an unsavory narrative. Most polite and "sensitive" speakers prefer the
ethnic or pseudo-technical term such as "African-American" or "Caucasian." This is perhaps because
color identities aim at a descriptive accuracy that never finds their mark. Nevertheless, it is still fairly
routine to use racial signifiers as a necessary means to establish identity. Personal ads that use abbreviations such
as SWF or DBM, or references to achievements such as "Arthur Ashe, the first black Wimbledon champion," seem to indicate that these
signifiers are doing some work. But what do we know, really, when we learn that someone has been designated as the "first black" to win a
tennis trophy, or when the "fit, dog lover" declares herself a SWF? Are "black" and "white" in these statements on par with "tennis champion"
and "single, female, dog lover," or with Ashe and anonymous? In other words, are
"black" and "white" descriptions, or are
they names? Are names descriptions? That is, of course, the more fundamental question. Actually, as
descriptions, black and white do not say much about identity, though they do establish group and
personal identifications of the subjects involved. It is customary in most cultural theory to distinguish
between identity and identification as social and psychical phenomena respectively. In
psychoanalysis, identification is the more privileged term and is elaborated as a set of finite or
incomplete processes by which identity is constituted. Freud refers to identification in several related domains. In Group
Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud proposes identification as "the earliest and original form of emotional tie" (Freud 1921 :39). The
division in psychology between group formations and the constitution of the "individual" subject, he suggests, is artificial and untenable. For
such an opposition to work, it would entail the irreducibility of a notion such as "social instinct," or "herd instinct," which Freud demonstrates
can always be broken down to its individual libidinal origins. Thus,
even though identities such as racial, ethnic, national
and cultural are primarily social or group phenomena, Freud suggests that their composition is derived from
the modes of libidinal ties, or identifications, that subjects effect with certain objects that replace
their ego ideals.2 Freud 's examples of such potentially lethal ties, or identifications, are of being in love and hypnosis, themes that Lacan
takes up in Seminar XI in relation to transference and the gaze as objet a. Elsewhere, Freud invokes the concept of identification in relation to
objects of the drive, in mourning, in narcissism, in the formation of symptoms. Identification
is the key term in conversion
hysteria and obsessional neurosis, and it is not a negligible term in his theory of other pathologies,
including the perversions and psychoses.3 In all of these discussions, identity is contingent on the
vagaries of unconscious identification and is not determined by either anatomy (biological
differences) or destiny, as in one's birth.
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Race=Master Signifier
Whiteness is a master signifier—there is no referent by which we can understand race—this makes
the 1AC’s interrogation unproductive
Seshadri-Crooks 2k (Kalpana, Boston College, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race, p. 1922)//LA
Racialist common sense asserts that race is a familial matter because we inherit our parents' physical features: little Koen looks different from Teun his twin brother. Thus the site where race
as biological inheritance seems most insistent, and that which obsesses contemporary racialized societies, is visible difference. However insignificant it may be scientifically or philosophically, it
seems to be of crucial significance psychically. This accounts for the bifurcation in the rhetoric of race between designations that are dependent upon a "theory"- philological, anthropological,
or biological- of human difference such as Indo-European or Mongoloid, and the more commonplace designations of color, often correlated with cultures or nations (white, black, brown, red
and yellow), which entirely flout "theory." What matters in racial practice today is visibility- the supposed evidence of the eyes- surface not depth.6 Racial practice is ultimately an aesthetic
practice, and must be understood above all as a regime of looking. It is necessary to focus on the way we reproduce the visibility of race as our daily common sense, the means by which we
"tell people apart," a logic that is best enshrined in the Canadian phrase "visible minorities." To focus on racial visibility is not to suggest that race refers to brute marks on the body that are
legible transhistorically and transculturally. As a first step, we must acknowledge that nothing about the body, its functions, its marks, or its sensations can be expected to carry stable
meanings across time or space. It is neither "essential," something pre-given in nature, nor is it purely "cultural," comparable to other marks of difference displayed through clothing by
members of religious orders, or class differences asserted through symbols by the aristocracy, or the branding of slaves and convicts.7 Unlike these categories, race is a less determinate
concept that invokes a system of classification according to "somatic/morphological criteria" which presumes that the bodily mark precedes the classification (Guillaumin 1995: 140). Though it
is possible to retrace the genealogy of the visibility of race as manufactured out of purely contingent historical and material interests, these factors have only a partial explanatory power.
While the visible references of race can realign visibility according to historical need , the fact of visibili ty itself remains constant. This intransigence is an outcome of the fact that the visible
reference of race makes a claim to nature- it is about "telling," like "sex," who is this or that.8 Unlike other forms of socially constructed difference, such as class or ethnicity, "race," like sex,
appears as a fundamental and normative factor of human embodiment, something that one inherently is from birth. Thus, despite historicist arguments about its social construction, which
may or may not be valid, there is a powerful semblance of necessity built into race that makes it ultimately intractable to constructionist claims. "Race," because it calls upon kinship, functions
with almost as powerful a sense of constraint as sex, that great category of human difference whose analysis, whether biological, psychical, or cultural, is inevitably relegated to or grounded in
the domain of the family. But one must be cautious about analogizing race with sex, a temptation that would greatly simplify one's analysis. To assume such symmetry would be to risk eliding
the particular mode of embodiment entailed by race that only psychoanalysis can properly reveal. It would also foreclose our attempts to grasp race in its historicity, and its protean capacity to
is no denying the fact that race is after all a historical
invention, and that like most inventions it veils the artifice of its origins. But that in itself is not
interesting, for as I have already suggested, uncovering "race's" genealogy is not to address racial
practice. What is confounding about race is its successful grafting to nature. Thus we must ask how
race appears as the logic of human difference itself. Why do we allocate difference along certain
conventional lines of looking? How do we come to be racially embodied? What is the structure of
racial difference, and what insights can psychoanalysis offer in the study of the raced subject? Argument I
propose the following working definition: the structure of racial difference is founded on a master signifierWhiteness- that produces a logic of differential relations. Each term in the structure establishes its
reference by referring back to the original signifier. The system of race as differences among black,
brown, red, yellow, and white makes sense only in its unconscious reference to Whiteness, which
subtends the binary opposition between "people of color" and "white." This inherently asymmetrical and
hierarchical opposition remains unacknowledged due to the effect of difference engendered by this
master signifier, which itself remains outside the play of signification even as it enables the system . 2
In order to understand how the signifier impacts the body, or how it institutes a regime of visibility, I will be
interested in how race confronts its own historicity. The problem is not simply a question of race disavowing the conditions
of its historical emergence, which then implies that our task is to expose that process. While such ideological critique is indispensable, it
does not adequately account for the effects of nature that race produces. Rather than reduce race to
the workings of power, I will focus on how race transmutes its historicity, its contingent foundations,
into biological necessity. It is this process, a process that depends upon and exploits the structure of sexual difference, that one must
insert itself along with sex into the structure of the subject .
For there
grasp. 3 Lacan's theory of sexual difference as that which marks the breakdown of language, thereby indexing the subject of the unconscious as
more than his/ her symbolic determination, provides the analytical tools by which we may discern the subject of race. Race depends upon the
sexed subject for its effectivity; the indeterminacy of the sexed subject is the fulcrum around which race turns. The signifier Whiteness
attempts to signify the sexed subject, which is the "more than symbolic" aspect of the subject. 4 We infer the audacious workings of the
signifier from moments when such signifying ambition fails. By focusing on moments of racial anxiety, we can discern that such affect
is
usually produced in relation to the subject's encounter with the historicity of Whiteness. The major
consequence of such anxiety is the production of an object: the marks on the body that appear as prediscursive. Racial visibility, I contend, is related to an unconscious anxiety about the historicity of
Whiteness. This anxiety is the inevitable result of being subjected to the fraudulent signifier
(Whiteness) which promises everything while disavowing its symbolic origins. These relations among historicity,
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the signifier, and anxiety are not necessarily causal. A briefer statement of the argument of this book could be made as follows: Race
is a
regime of visibility that secures our investment in racial identity. We make such an investment
because the unconscious signifier Whiteness, which founds the logic of racial difference, promises
wholeness. (This is what it means to desire Whiteness: not a desire to become Caucasian [!] but, to put it redundantly, it is an
"insatiable desire" on the part of all raced subjects to overcome difference.) Whiteness attempts to
signify being, or that aspect of the subject which escapes language. Obviously, such a project is
impossible because Whiteness is a historical and cultural invention. However, what guarantees
Whiteness its place as a master signifier is visual difference. The phenotype secures our belief in racial
difference, thereby perpetuating our desire for Whiteness. We cannot reach an understanding of this
all-important factor of racial visibility without clarifying the status of the signifier in the constitution
of the subject. What is the relevance here of Lacan's axiom that the unconscious is structured like a language? Is he suggesting that the
signifier is the foundation of the subject? It is worthwhile to sort out this issue in the context of a discussion about race, as it will lead to an
insight into the difference and implication of race and sex in terms of the body. Therefore, in the following, I take up the function of the
signifier in the constitution of the subject as the subject of the unconscious, situate
Whiteness as the master signifier of
racial difference, and then go on to pose the question of the relation between the signifier and the
body, which is the proper site of our interrogation of racial visibility.
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AT: Historicity
The argument isn’t that their analysis is wrong, but rather that it’s not productive—biologism is everpresent
Seshadri-Crooks 2k (Kalpana, Boston College, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race, p. 1617)//LA
While both Appiah and Goldberg offer persuasive analyses of the (academic) discourse of race, as
representatives of what are now entrenched positions on the race term, they fail to confront the fact that racial practice is
not fully covered by racial theory. There is a hiatus between racial theory and practice in that the two
can function quite independently of each other. Thus to proceed as if an engagement with racial
theory were to undermine the foundations of racial practice is to misrecognize the structure of the
discourse of race. Etienne Balibar suggests that we regard "shifts in doctrine and language [in race theory] as relatively incidental
matters," given the fact that from the point of view of the victims of racist practice, "these justifications simply lead to the same old acts" (Bali
bar 1991: 18). This does
not mean that race theory is irrelevant, or that we must focus entirely on racism
and racist practice at the cost of ignoring its more institutionalized forms. Rather, as a first step, we
must begin to recognize the double-edged aspect of the rhetoric of race, where so-called theory and
practice do not always coincide to produce the effect of causality. The inadequacy of critical race
theory with reference to practice is most evident in relation to cases such as that of little Koen, with which I began.
Interestingly, what is precisely at play in this case is nature and culture, or biology and the social problems of inclusion and exclusion that
Appiah and Goldberg focus on respectively. For instance, given Appiah's view that race evaporates with the exposure of race's scientific or
genetic fallibility, it is, interestingly enough, genetics itself which is at the heart of this little racial "mistake." In his argument with the DutchAfrican-American philosopher W.E.B.Du Bois, Appiah demonstrates that race
cannot be invoked, except through a specious
use of genetics, to define the destiny of a so-called people, or to delineate group aspirations. However,
what Koen as a Dutch-Afro-Caribbean child seems to represent is precisely the relation between genes and destiny. At one level, we may say
that at the age of eight months, he has already been disqualified to borrow at a bank. But more seriously, the irony of this particular case is that
genetic theory here does not serve to discredit racial identity; rather, the DNA test establishes Koen as "black" boy (though born of a "white"
mother). Admittedly, Koen's parents are not suggesting that Koen is inherently incapable of borrowing at a bank, and neither is the DNA test a
verification of race as much as of paternity; identity
and destiny here are socially interpreted rather than
genetically determined . However, the issue remains that destiny is not uncorrelated to genetics. And
no amount of argumentation disarticulating the two will do away with the fact that because
something is inherited as "race," your life is predetermined for you. As the Dutch parents testify, most of us
continue to harbor deep-seated notions of racial inheritance, despite its scientific untenability simply
due to genetic theory's claims to heritabilty as such. Some of us, as committed social constructionists, may perhaps
disclaim this notion because science tells us that the relation between genes and racial identity and destiny is not one of simple predication.
DNA tests can establish parentage, but they cannot establish a trans-historical racial identity. Nevertheless, the DNA test in this case does
determine Koen's racial identity (and his non-creditworthiness), though not directly. The relation between genes and identity/destiny is no
longer one of predication but implication. The notion of race as genetic inheritance can continue to be entertained when mediated by kinship
relations: Koen 's father is a "black man" from Aruba. It is a question, it seems of the signifier, of the Name of the Father, which imparts not only
sexual and familial identity, but also racial. Thus the signifier establishes race at the same moment that genetics establishes kinship, and it is
this synchrony that enables the simultaneous articulation of genes and identity/ destiny, though not causally. None of this alters the fact that
the bottom line in both arguments, whether that of predication or articulation, is of genetic inheritance. Thus I would affirm Appiah 's argument
that race is inextricably linked to inheritance. If we reduce the position of DuBois and that of Koen's father into simple propositions, we see
their logical similarity: "Black people (because they are born 'black') have an inherently valuable message for the world" (as this message is a
factor of their racial inheritance); and "Black people (because they are born 'black') will always be poor" (which is a factor of their social
inheritance based on their racial identity). Both statements leave intact the implication of race as inheritance and destiny. However, my
skepticism is directed not at the contents of Appiah's argument but at its utility. Appiah's impulse to
undermine race by interrogating its scientific grounds is academically valuable, but it does not address
the way in which race recoups inheritance through other rhetorical means, such as articulation with
kinship and recourse to visibility. It seems that, given the power of the notion of heritability as such,
no amount of disputation with racial theory can dislodge the association one makes of race with
inheritance. Race will continue to be articulated with kinship, with ethnicity, with culture, in ways that
will require repeated purges of its claims to inheritance. Theoretical expurgations may be useful at
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one level, but they do not undercut the emotional force of an ethnos that race so effectively and
resiliency enables. I argue that this effect is made possible primarily through race's ability to combine with narratives of the family and
kinship in order to appear as a factor of inheritance. Race, then, derives its power not from socially constructed
ideologies, but from the dynamic interplay between the family as a socially regulated institution, and
biology as the site of essences and inheritances. In fact, the more one attempts to render race as
merely a social construct, the more it contributes towards the naturalization of that construct.
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AT: Race=Biology/Appearance
Their understanding is historicist—prevents productive critique
Seshadri-Crooks 2k (Kalpana, Boston College, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race, p. 1216)//LA
Most contemporary debates over the definition of cultural identities and psychical identifications, whether
racial , ethnic or sexual, seem to lapse invariably into the opposition between biological essence and
social construction. Where race is concerned, however, the opposition, when examined closely, is more over
the terms of the debate- i.e. the deployment of the term " race" itself-than over ontological
considerations. Few if any liberally inclined persons today will hold that "race," as it was theorized in the
nineteenth century, as a concept referring to the aspirations and abilities of a homogeneous group, is an inherited biological
essence. In fact, the scientific bases of race have been thoroughly discredited, as have the
philosophical, to the point that race is now considered a "folk" belief.2 However, this has not meant the disappearance
of race from science.3 It persists, for instance, in medical literature as a means to map the demography of diseases and symptoms. But,
if one applies some pressure to the medical category of race, one discovers that it has none of the cultural valence associated with "race";
rather, it is a diffused concept that refers mostly to "human diversity" not group essence.4 Race is also
frequently equated nowadays with the term "phenotype" as an acceptable term to denote what are supposedly "gross
morphological differences," or (irrelevant visible marks of skin color, hair texture and bone structure. Nevertheless, despite (or perhaps
because of) the scientific evisceration of race as meaningful, and the narrowing of its reference to mere bodily signifiers with no signifieds, or
meanings, race
has never been more reified as a factor of cultural identity. As a concept it is acknowledged to matter in ever
more important ways as it continues to influence social legislation. In our unexamined effort to perpetuate
race as meaningful , the debate over hereditary race has today been displaced onto questions of
identity politics. Should the term race be conceived as a neutral concept designating "human
diversity," which is therefore worth salvaging for its emancipatory power? Can or should race be separated from
its history of racist practice and doctrine? Can group identity organized along the lines of racial difference ever overcome the pernicious
exclusivism endemic to the concept? Among the most vocal figures representing the two sides of this debate within the academy in the US
today are Anthony Appiah and David Goldberg. According
to Appiah (1992), any invocation of racial identity, even
when it claims to be a "socio-historical" notion, and open to affiliations, etc., is always biologically grounded. In "Illusions of race"
Appiah examines Du Bois' categorization of human races and his claim that the "Negro" race, "generally of common blood and language," has a
special message for the world. Appiah
rightly characterizes Du Bois' supposedly culturalist definition of race as
produced in and as a dialectical opposition that invariably relies on the scientific or biological view
which it contests. Delving into contemporary biological literature on "race," Appiah further elucidates the speciousness of genetic
theories of racial difference.5 Separating the "visible morphological characteristics of skin, hair, and bone" ( 1992: 35) from inherited
"characterological" traits supposedly coded in genes, Appiah is at pains to disarticulate appearance, conceived as pure contingency, from
destinypathological or political. "The truth," Appiah concludes, is that there are no races: there is nothing in the world
that can do all we ask race to do for us .... Talk of race is particularly distressing for those of us who take culture seriously. For, when race
works- in places where "gross differences" of morphology are correlated with "subtle differences" of temperament, belief, and intention- it
works as an attempt at metonym for culture, and it does so only at the price of biologizing what is culture, ideology. (Appiah 1992:45) Thus,
for Appiah, invocations of racial belonging, whether Anglo-Saxon or African, are always false if not
dangerous, insofar as they are grounded in an implicit biologism that is scientifically untenable. But
Appiah's examination of the gene theory of races, to prove that so-called racial characteristics (such as aesthetics, aspirations, potentialities)
are not heritable, overlooks an important point. Discrediting the scientific validity of race based on the relative invariability of genetic
characteristics among so-called racial populations cannot in itself obliterate race or scientific interest in it. For as Colette Guillaumin suggests,
scientific racial theory fixes on various localities of the body at different times, deploying signifiers that map the body according to convenience:
"Rooted at first in the body or the blood, this ideology later shifted to the brain and nervous system, and has now taken refuge in the genetic
and chromosome potential" (1995:63). And at present that too has given way after The Bell Curve (Herrnstein and Murray 1996) to the
measurement of IQ. In other words, arguing
with science is only to displace race onto another locus of scientific
investigation. Insofar as race is perpetuated as a meaningful category in our language, science will
continue to furnish explanations of it. Arguing with race is at some level always a futile activity. As
Guillaumin says with regard to such exorcising gestures: "Negations are not recognized as such by our unconscious mental processes. From this
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point of view, a fact affirmed and a fact denied exist to exactly the same degree, and remain equally present in our affective and intellectual
associative networks" ( 1995: 105). It is
precisely this unconscious resiliency of race that invites psychoanalytic
exploration. For Goldberg ( 1993), on the other hand, race is not necessarily a biological phenomenon.
It is a virtually "empty concept" that articulates group identity for the sake of exclusion and inclusion and can overlap with any number of
discourses on community, including ethnicity and nation. "Race has been able, in and through its intersections with other forms of group
identity, to cover over the increasing anonymity of mass social relations in modernity" (1993:81 ). Thus Goldberg
insists that race
must be grasped as a historically fluid concept that signifies differently according to the historical and
material interests of the time. For him a key question is whether any generally abstract characterization approaching definition can
be given to the concept of race. It should be obvious from all I have said that race cannot be a static, fixed entity, indeed, is not an entity in any
objective sense at all. I am tempted to say that race is whatever anyone in using that term or its cognates conceives of collective social
relations. It is, in this sense, any group designation one ascribes of oneself as such (that is, as race, or under the sign) or which is so ascribed by
others. Its meanings, as its forces, are always illocutionary. (ibid.) When using "race," Goldberg suggests, we must be clear about which
signification we are employing. Quite predi ctably, Goldberg criticizes Appiah's view (that all references to race are always grounded in a covert
biologism) as being too narrow and thus as overlooking race's productive aspect as a discourse of power (1993 :86). Classification, valuation,
and ordering are processes central to racial creation and construction. The ordering at stake need not be hierarchical but must at least identify
difference; and the valuation need not claim superiority, for all it must minimally sustain is a criterion of inclusion and exclusion. (1993:87) For
Goldberg, race can be logically separated from racism, that is, from its legacy of racist practice . He writes:
Race has been conceptually well-placed to characterize freedom's routes, to channel freedom's mobility, and so to thrive in this age of
ambiguity, for as I have made clear it is by nature (insofar as it has one) a concept virtually vacuous in its own right. Its virtual conceptual
emptiness allows it parasitically to map its signification of naturalized differences onto prevailing social views . .. to articulate and extend
racialized exclusions . . .. This prevailing historical legacy of thinking racially does not necessitate that any conceptual use of or appeal to race to
characterize social circumstance is inherently unjustifiable .... What distinguishes a racist from a non-racist appeal to the category of race is the
use into which the categorization enters, the exclusions it sustains, prompts, promotes, and extends .... Though race has tended historically to
define conditions of oppression, it could, under a culturalist interpretation . .. be the site of a counterassualt, a ground of field for launching
liberatory projects or from which to expand freedom(s) and open up emancipatory spaces. (Goldberg 1993:210-ll) Goldberg's
insistence on the emptiness of the concept of race is at first glance refreshing, in that the vacuity seems to
account for the inexhaustible capacity of race to reproduce itself. However, by suggesting that "race is whatever anyone
in using that term or its cognates" means by it, and that it is any "group designation" ascribed by oneself or by others, he
elevates the term to a universal generality that evacuates it of its linguistic specificity. His view that
cognates of "race," for instance, mean the same thing as "race," completely elides the hegemony of linguistic categories. It renders
languages wholly commensurate with one another, and hypostasizes race itself as a "natural" element
of difference that languages name in various ways. Goldberg's overtly Foucauldian emphasis on the
productivity of race may appear potentially useful. However, his focus on the socio-historical
formation of "racialized discourse," which refers to race as "meaning different things at different
times," combined with his inattention to the specificity of language, is problematic. It serves to
undermine his project, which is to argue for the political nature of "race ." By universalizing race,
Goldberg in effect conflates the Foucauldian notion of power itself with race as the effect and cause of
discourse, thus making it impossible to pose the question of the historicity of "race." There is first the
sociolinguistic counterargument, also a historicist one, that we must take seriously. As Guillaumin and others have argued, the concept of race
is specific to Europe and was invented in the late eighteenth to nineteenth century. Goldberg courts the danger of reifying race by
universalizing it as the governing epistemological paradigm, when he ascribes racial thinking to groups that conceive their identities on the basis
of other terminologies of difference (Guillaumin 1995:61). Moreover, by
separating race from racism and attempting to
deliver it to a culturalist reinterpretation, Goldberg reproduces the very problems of biologism that
Appiah critiques with reference to Du Bois. But even more importantly, by abstracting the concept
from its historical or linguistic practice, Goldberg dislodges race from any mooring in history or
language, thus rendering it, in effect, a catch-all term for difference as such. Why race should be salvaged as the
only term that can offer emancipatory possibilities despite its execrable history is never clear.
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AT: Whiteness is real
Whiteness is a system of ordering, not a description
Seshadri-Crooks 2k (Kalpana, Boston College, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race, p.
97)//LA
The issue here is not so much that of Orwell's identification with his own Whiteness. Such a reading
would merely reproduce the colonialist presumption about "race." It is more interesting to note that
Orwell is not speaking in terms of his belonging to Whiteness. Rather, underlying his more
commonplace designation of white versus non-white people, he speaks of Whiteness not merely as a
property of particular human beings, but as a technicality- that is, a system of ordering the world, a
discourse of differences which institutes a regime of looking. Also, in "A hanging," Orwell is surprised by his own
responses when he recognizes the humanity of the emaciated native prisoner. Walking ahead on his way to the gallows, the man avoids a
puddle, and Orwell is astonished by this simple human gesture in the face of death: "It is curious," he admits, "but till that moment I had never
realised what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the
unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive" (1968a: 45).
What Orwell articulates repeatedly in his brief essays about his tenure as a police officer in colonial Burma and his sojourn in Morocco is the
uncanny surprise and shock at his own responses in discovering a shared humanity. Orwell's essays are not naive articulations about
encountering the humanity of the "other," in which case the horror of difference (the fetishizing of hair, skin and bone) would have been the
predictable response. Rather, the shock is in discovering that the continuity of humanness can be surprising, thus signalling the profound
alienation or split within his own psyche between what he recognizes and what he knows. In other words, in
the extremity of the
colonial context, Orwell seems to risk encountering the aspiration at the heart of the system of race,
and that is founded on a core notion of wholeness (promised by the signifier "Whiteness") that
mandates the very notion of humanness. In other words, what is uncanny for a subject such as Orwell
is the discovery that at the core exists the untenable, unassimilable notion that the very assumption
of a human subject position is to be implicated in a racial economy of meaning.
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*AFF—Psychoanalysis
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Psychoanalysis=Bad
Psychoanalysis results in fatalism, passivity, and inaction
Gordon 1 (Psychotherapist Paul, Psychoanalysis and Racism: The Politics of Defeat, Race Class 2001 42:
17)
The postmodernists' problem is that they cannot live with dis appointment. All the tragedies of the political project of
emancipation ± the evils of Stalinism in particular ± are seen as the inevitable product of men and women trying to
create a better society. But, rather than engage in a critical assessment of how, for instance, radical political
movements go wrong, they discard the emancipatory project and impulse itself . The postmodernists, as
Sivanandan puts it, blame modernity for having failed them: `the intellectuals and academics have fled into discourse and
deconstruction and representation -- as though to interpret the world is more important than to change it, as
though changing the interpretation is all we could do in a changing world' . 58 To justify their ¯ight from a politics
holding out the prospect of radical change through self-activity, the disappointed intellectuals find abundant intellectual
alibis for themselves in the very work they champion, including, in Cohen's case, psychoanalysis. What Marshall
Berman says of Foucault seems true also of psychoanalysis; that it offers `a world-historical alibi' for the
passivity and helplessness felt by many in the 1970s, and that it has nothing but contempt for those naive enough to imagine
that it might be possible for modern human kind to be free. At every turn for such theorists, as Berman argues, whether in
sexuality, politics, even our imagination, we are nothing but prisoners: there is no freedom in Foucault's world, because his
language forms a seamless web, a cage far more airtight than anything Weber ever dreamed of, into which no life can break . . . There is no
point in trying to resist the oppressions and injustices of modern life, since even our dreams of freedom only add more links to our chains;
how ever, once we grasp the futility of it all, at least we can relax. 59 Cohen's political defeatism and his conviction in the explanatory
power of his new faith of psychoanalysis lead him to be contemptuous and dismissive of any attempt at political solidarity or collective
action. For him, `communities' are always `imagined', which, in his view, means based on fantasy, while different forms of working-class
organisation, from the craft fraternity to the revolutionary group, are dismissed as `fantasies of self-suf®cient combination'. 60 In this
scenario, the idea that people might come together, think together, analyse together and act together as rational beings is impossible. The
idea of a genuine community of equals becomes a pure fantasy, a `symbolic retrieval' of something that never existed in the ®rst place:
`Community is a magical device for conjuring something apparently solidary out of the thin air of modern times, a mechanism of reenchantment.' As for history, it is always false, since `We are always dealing with invented traditions.' 61 Now, this is not only non sense,
but dangerous nonsense at that. Is history `always false'? Did the Judeocide happen or did it not? And did not some people even try to
resist it? Did slavery exist or did it not, and did not people resist that too and, ultimately, bring it to an end? And are communities always
`imagined'? Or, as Sivanandan states, are they beaten out on the smithy of a people's collective struggle? Furthermore, all attempts to
legislate against ideology are bound to fail because they have to adopt `technologies of surveillance and control identical to those used by
the state'. Note here the Foucauldian language to set up the notion that all `surveillance' is bad. But is it? No society can function without
surveillance of some kind. The point, surely, is that there should be a public conversation about such moves and that those responsible for
implementing them be at all times accountable. To equate, as Cohen does, a council poster about `Stamping out racism' with Orwell's
horrendous prophecy in 1984 of a boot stamping on a human face is ludicrous and insulting. (Orwell's image was intensely personal and
destructive; the other is about the need to challenge not individuals, but a collective evil.) Cohen reveals himself to be deeply ambivalent
about punitive action against racists, as though punishment or other ®rm action against them (or anyone else transgressing agreed social or
legal norms) precluded `understand ing' or even help through psychotherapy. It is indeed a strange kind of `anti-racism' that portrays active
racists as the `victims', those who are in need of `help'. But this is where Cohen's argument ends up. In their move from politics to the
academy and the world of `discourse', the postmodernists may have simply exchanged one grand narrative, historical
materialism, for another, psychoanalysis. 62 For psychoanalysis is a grand narrative, par excellence. It is a theory that seeks to
account for the world and which recognises few limits on its explanatory potential. And the claimed radicalism of psycho
analysis, in the hands of the postmodernists at least, is not a radicalism at all but a prescription for a politics
of quietism, fatalism and defeat. Those wanting to change the world, not just to interpret it, need to look
elsewhere.
Psychoanalysis only explains individual decisions—not applicable to social experiences
Gordon 1 (Psychotherapist, Paul, Psychoanalysis and Racism: The Politics of Defeat, Race Class 2001 42:
17)
The problem with the application of psychoanalysis to social institu tions is that there can be no testing of the claims made. If someone
says, for instance, that nationalism is a form of looking for and seeking to replace the body of the mother one has lost, or that the popular
appeal of a particular kind of story echoes the pattern of our earliest relationship to the maternal breast, how can this be proved? The
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pioneers of psychoanalysis, from Freud onwards, all derived their ideas in the context of their work with
individual patients and their ideas can be examined in the everyday laboratory of the therapeutic encounter
where the validity of an interpretation, for example, is a matter for dialogue between therapist and patient. Outside of the
con sulting room, there can be no such verification process, and the further one moves from the individual
patient, the less purchase psycho analytic ideas can have. Outside the therapeutic encounter, anything and
everything can be true, psychoanalytically speaking. But if every thing is true, then nothing can be false and
therefore nothing can be true.
Zero truth value to psychoanalysis – can’t make truth claims, encourages infinite regress and
transforms even the clearest components of reality into a poetic phantasmagoria
Perpich 5 (Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt, Diane, “Figurative Language and the "Face" in
Levinas's Philosophy,” Philosophy & Rhetoric, Vol. 38, No. 2, p. 103-121)
Levinas's hesitations about the value of psychoanalysis—indeed, what might be called his allergic reactions to psychoanalysis—are similarly
based. Psychoanalysis, he writes, "casts a basic suspicion on the most unimpeachable testimony of self-
consciousness" (1987b, 32). Psychological states in which the ego seems to have a "clear and distinct" grasp of itself are reread by
psychoanalysis as symbols for a "reality that is totally inaccessible" to the self and that is the expression of "a social reality or a historical
influence totally distinct from its [the ego's] own intention" (34). Moreover, all of the ego's protests against the interpretations
of analysis are themselves subject to further analysis, leaving no point exterior to the analysis: "I am as it were
shut up in my own portrait" (35). Psychoanalysis threatens an infinite regress of meaning, a recursive process that
leads from one symbol to another, from one symptom to another with no end in sight and no way to break
into or out of the chain of signifiers in the name of a signified. "The real world is transformed into a poetic
world, that is, into a world without beginning in which one thinks without knowing what one [End Page 111] thinks" (35). Put less
poetically, Levinas's worry is that psychoanalysis furnishes us with no fixed point or firm footing from which to
launch a critique and to break with social and historical determinations of the psyche in order to judge
society and history and to call both to account. Indeed, his uncharacteristic allusion to "clear and distinct" ideas betrays his
intention: to seek, against both religious and psychoanalytic participations, for a relationship in which the ego is an "absolute,"
"irreducible" singularity, within a totality but still separate from it, that is, still capable of a relation with exteriority. To seek such a relation
is, Levinas says, "to ask whether a living man [sic] does not have the power to judge the history in which he is engaged, that is, whether the
thinker as an ego, over and beyond all that he does with what he possesses, creates and leaves, does not have the substance of a cynic"
(35). The naked being who confronts me with his or her alterity, the naked being that I am myself and whose being "counts as such" is now
naked not with an erotic nudity but with the nudity of a cynic who has thrown off the cloak of culture in order to present him- or herself
directly and "in person" through "this chaste bit of skin with brow, nose, eyes, and mouth" (41). Levinas picks up the thread of this worry
about psychoanalysis in "Ethics and Discourse," the main section of "The Ego and the Totality." To affirm humankind as a power to judge
history, he claims, is to affirm rationalism and to reject "the merely poetic thought which thinks without knowing what it things, or thinks
as one dreams" (40). The impetus for psychoanalysis is philosophical, Levinas admits; that is, it shares initially in this
affirmation of rationalism insofar as it affirms the need for reflection and for going "underneath" or getting behind unreflected
consciousness and thought. However, if its impetus is philosophical, its issue is not insofar as the tools that it uses
for reflection turn out to be "some fundamental, but elementary, fables . . . which, incomprehensibly, would
alone be unequivocal, alone not translate (or mask or symbolize) a reality more profound than themselves "
(40). Psychoanalysis returns one, then, to the irrationalism of myth and poetry rather than liberating one from them. It
resubmerges one within the cultural and historical ethos and mythos in a way that seems to Levinas to permit no end
to interpretation and thus no power to judge. He imagines psychoanalysis as a swirling phantasmagoria in which
language is all dissimulation and deception. "One can find one's bearings in all this phantasmagoria, one can inaugurate the
work of criticism only if one can begin with a fixed point. The fixed point cannot be some incontestable truth, a
'certain' statement that would always be subject [End Page 112] to psychoanalysis; it can only be the absolute status of an
interlocutor, a being, and not a truth about beings" (41). In this last claim, the fate of Heideggerian fundamental ontology that is an
understanding of Being rather than a relation to beings (or to a being, a face) is hitched to the fate of psychoanalysis and both linked to
participation, the "nocturnal chaos" that threatens to drown the ego in the totality.
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Psychoanalysis=Bad Policy
Psychoanalytic affirmation does not spill over to government policy
Rosen-Carole 10 (Professor of Philosophy @ Bard, Adam Rosen-Carole 10, Visiting Professor of
Philosophy at Bard College, 2010, “Menu Cards in Time of Famine: On Psychoanalysis and Politics,”
Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Vol. LXXIX, No. 1, p. 205-207)
On the other hand, though in these ways and many others, psychoanalysis seems to promote the sorts of subjective
dispositions and habits requisite for a thriving democracy, and though in a variety of ways psychoanalysis contributes to personal
emancipation— say, by releasing individuals from self-defeating, damaging, or petrified forms action and reaction, object attachment, and
the like—in light of the very uniqueness of what it has to offer, one cannot but wonder: to what extent, if at all, can the habits
and dispositions—broadly, the forms of life—cultivated by psychoanalytic practice survive, let alone flourish, under
modern social and political conditions? If the emancipatory inclinations and democratic virtues that psychoanalytic practice
promotes are systematically crushed or at least regularly unsupported by the world in which they would be realized, then isn’t
psychoanalysis implicitly making promises it cannot redeem? Might not massive social and political transformations be the condition for
the efficacious practice of psychoanalysis? And so, under current conditions, can we avoid experiencing the forms of life nascently
cultivated by psychoanalytic practice as something of a tease, or even a source of deep frustration? (2) Concerning psychoanalysis as a
politically inclined theoretical enterprise, the worry is whether political diagnoses and proposals that proceed on the
basis of psychoanalytic insights and forms of attention partake of a fantasy of interpretive efficacy (all the
world’s a couch, you might say), wherein our profound alienation from the conditions for robust political agency are registered and
repudiated? Consider, for example, Freud and Bullitt’s (1967) assessment of the psychosexual determinants of Woodrow Wilson’s political
aspirations and impediments, or Reich’s (1972) suggestion that Marxism should appeal to psychoanalysis in order to illuminate and redress
neurotic phenomena that generate disturbances in working capacity, especially as this concerns religion and bourgeois sexual ideology.
Also relevant are Freud’s, Žižek’s (1993, 2004), Derrida’s (2002) and others’ insistence that we draw the juridical and
political consequences of the hypothesis of an irreducible death drive , as well as Marcuse’s (1970) proposal that we
attend to the weakening of Eros and the growth of aggression that results from the coercive enforcement of the reality principle upon the
sociopolitically weakened ego, and especially to the channeling of this aggression into hatred of enemies. Reich (1972) and Fromm (1932)
suggest that psychoanalysis be employed to explore the motivations to political irrationality, especially that singular irrationality of joining
the national-socialist movement, while Irigaray (1985) diagnoses the desire for the Same, the One, the Phallus as a desire for a
sociosymbolic order that assures masculine dominance. Žižek (2004) contends that only a psychoanalytic exposition of the
disavowed beliefs and suppositions of the United States political elite can get at the fundamental determinants of
the Iraq War. Rose (1993) argues that it was the paranoiac paradox of sensing both that there is every reason to be frightened and that
everything is under control that allowed Thatcher “to make this paradox the basis of political identity so that subjects could take pleasure
in violence as force and legitimacy while always locating ‘real’ violence somewhere else—illegitimate violence and illicitness increasingly
made subject to the law” (p. 64). Stavrakakis (1999) advocates that we recognize and traverse the residues of utopian fantasy in our
contemporary political imagination.1 Might not the psychoanalytic interpretation of powerful figures (Bush, Bin Laden, or whomever),
collective subjects (nations, ethnic groups, and so forth), or urgent “political” situations register an anxiety regarding political impotence or
“castration” that is pacified and modified by the fantasmatic frame wherein the psychoanalytically inclined political theorist situates himor herself as diagnosing or interpretively intervening in the lives of political figures, collective political subjects, or complex political
situations with the idealized efficacy of a successful clinical intervention? If so, then the question is: are the contributions of
psychoanalytically inclined political theory anything more than tantalizing menu cards for meals it cannot deliver? As I said, the worry is
twofold. These are two folds of a related problem, which is this: might the very seductiveness of psychoanalytic theory
and practice—specifically, the seductiveness of its political promise—register the lasting eclipse of the
political and the objectivity of the social, respectively? In other words, might not everything that makes
psychoanalytic theory and practice so politically attractive indicate precisely the necessity of wide-ranging
social/institutional transformations that far exceed the powers of psychoanalysis? And so, might not the politically
salient transformations of subjectivity to which psychoanalysis can contribute overburden subjectivity as the site of political
transformation, blinding us to the necessity of largescale institutional reforms? Indeed, might not massive institutional transformations be
necessary conditions for the efficacy of psychoanalytic practice, both personally and politically? Further, might not the so-called
interventions and proposals of psychoanalytically inclined political theory similarly sidestep the question of the institutional
transformations necessary for their realization, and so conspire with our blindness to the enormous institutional impediments to a
progressive political future? The idea, then, is to use the limits of psychoanalytic practice and psychoanalytically inclined political theory as
a form of social diagnosis. I want to read the limits of psychoanalytically inclined political theory for what they can tell us about the lasting
eclipse of the political, and so, inversely, for what they can tell us about what a viable political culture requires, just as I want to read the
limits of the political efficacy of psychoanalytic practice for what they can tell us about what would be
required for their successful realization .2
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Attaching the plan to psychoanalytic prescriptions is particularly dangerous
Rosen-Carole 10 (Professor of Philosophy @ Bard, Adam Rosen-Carole 10, Visiting Professor of
Philosophy at Bard College, 2010, “Menu Cards in Time of Famine: On Psychoanalysis and Politics,”
Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Vol. LXXIX, No. 1, p. 226-229)
The second approach to the problem has to do with psychoanalytic contributions to political theory that avoid Freud’s
methodological individualism, but nevertheless run into the same problem. An expanding trend in social criticism involves a
tendency to discuss the death or aggressive drives, fantasy formations, traumas, projective identifications, defensive
repudiations, and other such “psychic phenomena” of collective subjects as if such subjects were ontologically
discrete and determinate. Take the following passage from Žižek (1993) as symptomatic of the trend I have in mind: In
Eastern Europe, the West seeks for its own lost origins, its own lost original experience of “democratic
invention.” In other words, Eastern Europe functions for the West as its Ego-Ideal (Ich-Ideal): the point from which [the] West sees itself
in a likable, idealized form, as worthy of love. The real object of fascination for the West is thus the gaze, namely the supposedly naive gaze
by means of which Eastern Europe stares back at the West, fascinated by its democracy. [p. 201, italics in original] Also, we might think
here of the innumerable discussions of “America’s death drive” as propelling the recent invasions in the
Middle East, or of the ways in which the motivation for the Persian Gulf Wars of the 1990s was a collective attempt “to kick the Vietnam
War Syndrome”— that is, to solidify a national sense of power and prominence in the recognitive regard of the international community—
or of the psychoanalytic speculations concerning the psychodynamics of various nations involved in the Cold War (here, of
course, I have in mind Segal’s [1997] work), or of the collective racist fantasies and paranoiac traits that organize various nation-
states’s domestic and foreign policies.7 Here are some further examples from Žižek, who, as a result of his popularity, might be said
to function as a barometer of incipient trends: • What is therefore at stake in ethnic tensions is always the possession of the national Thing.
We always impute to the “other” [ethnic group, race, nation, etc.] an excessive enjoyment: he wants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our
way of life) and/or he has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment. [1993, pp. 202-203] • Beneath the derision for the new Eastern
European post- Communist states, it is easy to discern the contours of the wounded narcissism of the European “great nations.” [2004, p.
27, italics added] • There is in fact something of a neurotic symptom in the Middle Eastern conflict—everyone recognizes the way to get rid
of the obstacle, yet nonetheless, no one wants to remove it, as if there is some kind of pathological libidinal profit gained by persisting in
the deadlock. [2004, p. 39, italics added] • If there was ever a passionate attachment to the lost object, a refusal to come to terms with its
loss, it is the Jewish attachment to their land and Jerusalem . . . . When the Jews lost their land and elevated it into the mythical lost object,
“Jerusalem” became much more than a piece of land . . . . It becomes the stand-in for . . . all that we miss in our earthly lives. [2004, p. 41]
Rather than explore collective subjects through analyses of their individual members, this type of psychoanalytically inclined
engagement with politics treats a collective subject (a nation, a region, an ethnic group, etc.) as if it were simply
amenable to explanation, and perhaps even to intervention, in a manner identical to an individual psyche in a
therapeutic context. But if the transpositions of psychoanalytic concepts into political theory are epistemically
questionable, as I believe they are,8 the question is: why are they so prevalent? Perhaps the psychoanalytic interpretation of collective
subjects (nations, regions, etc.), or even the psychoanalytic interpretation of powerful political figures, registers a certain anxiety regarding
political impotence and provokes a fantasy that, to an extent, pacifies and modifies—defends against—that anxiety. Perhaps such
engagements, which are increasingly prevalent in these days of excruciating political alienation, operate within a fantasmatic
frame wherein the anxiety of political exclusion and “castration”—that is, anxieties pertaining to a sense of
oneself as politically inefficacious, a non-agent in most relevant senses—is both registered and mitigated by
the fantasmatic satisfaction of imagining oneself interpretively intervening in the lives of political figures or
collective political subjects with the efficacy of a clinically successful psychoanalytic interpretation . To risk a
hypothesis: as alienation from political efficacy increases and becomes more palpable, as our sense of ourselves as political agents
diminishes, fantasies of interpretive intervention abound. Within such fantasy frames, one approaches a powerful
political figure (or collective subject) as if s/he were “on the couch,” open and amenable to one’s interpretation . 9
One approaches such a powerful political figure or ethnic group or nation as if s/he (or it) desired one’s interpretations and acknowledged
her/his suffering, at least implicitly, by her/his very involvement in the scene of analysis. Or if such fantasies also provide for the
satisfaction of sadistic desires provoked by political frustration and “castration” (a sense of oneself as politically voiceless,
moot, uninvolved, irrelevant), as they very well might, then one’s place within the fantasy might be that of the allpowerful analyst, the sujet supposé savoir, the analyst presumptively in control of her-/himself and her/his emotions, etc. Here the
analyst becomes the one who directs and organizes the analytic encounter, who commands psychoanalytic
knowledge, who knows the analysand inside and out, to whom the analysand must speak, upon whom the analysand depends, who is in
a position of having something to offer, whose advice—even if not directly heeded—cannot but make some sort of impact, and in the face
of whom the analysand is quite vulnerable, who is thus powerful, in control . . . perhaps the very figure whom the psychoanalytically
inclined interpreter fears. Minimally, what I want to underscore here is that (1) a sense of political alienation may be
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registered and fantasmatically mitigated by treating political subjects , individual or collective, as if they were “on
the couch”; and (2) expectations concerning the expository and therapeutic efficacy of psychoanalytic
interpretations of political subjects may be conditioned by such a fantasy .
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Loren and Metelmann
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Wilderson Link
Their conceptualization of race and racism links to this argument.
Wilerson 10 (Frank B., Their Author, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms,
Duke U Press, p. 101-104)//LA
Jacques Lacan and Frantz Fanon grappled with the question what does it mean to be free? and its corollary
what does it mean to suffer? at the same moment in history. To say that they both appeared at the same time is to say that they
both have, as their intellectual condition of possibility, France’s brutal occupation of Algeria. It is not my intention to dwell on Lacan’s lack of
political activism or to roll out Fanon’s revolutionary war record. My
intention is to interrogate the breadth of full
speech’s descriptive universality and the depth of its prescriptive cure—to interrogate its foundation
by staging an encounter between, on the one hand, Lacan and his interlocutors and, on the other hand, Fanon and his interlocutors. To this end
alone do I note the two men’s relation to French colonialism, as the force of that relation is felt in their texts. Frantz Fanon’s psychoanalytic
description of Black neurosis, “hallucinatory
whitening,” and his prescriptions for a cure, “decolonization” and “the end
of the world” (BSWM 96) resonate with Lacan’s categories of empty speech and full speech. There is a
monumental disavowal of emptiness involved in hallucinatory whitening, and disorder and death
certainly characterize decolonization. For Fanon the trauma of Blackness lies in its absolute Otherness in
relation to Whites. That is, White people make Black people by recognizing only their skin color. Fanon’s
Black patient is “overwhelmed...by the wish to be white” (BSWM 100). But unlike Lacan’s diagnosis of the analysand, Fanon makes a direct and
self-conscious connection between his patient’s hallucinatory whitening and the stability of White society. If Fanon’s texts ratchet violently and
unpredictably between the body of the subject and the body of the socius, it is because Fanon understands that “outside [his] psychoanalytic
office, [he must] incorporate [his] conclusions into the context of the world.” The room is too small to contain the encounter. “As a
psychoanalyst, I should help my patient to become conscious of his unconscious and abandon his attempts at a hallucinatory whitening...”
Here we have a dismantling of all the fantasms that constitute the patient’s ego and which s/he
projects onto the analyst that resonates with the process of attaining what Lacan calls full speech. But
Fanon takes this a step further, for not only does he want the analysand to surrender to the void of
language, but also to “act in the direction of a change...with respect to the real source of the conflict—
that is, toward the social structures” (BSWM 100). As a psychoanalyst, Fanon does not dispute Lacan’s claim that suffering and
freedom are produced and attained, respectively, in the realm of Symbolic; but this, for Fanon, is only half of the modality of existence. The
other half of suffering and freedom is violence. By the time Fanon has woven the description of his
patient’s condition (i.e., his own life as a Black doctor in France) into the prescription of a cure (his commitment to armed
struggle in Algeria), he has extended the logic of disorder and death from the Symbolic into the Real.
Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete
disorder...[I]t is the meeting of two forces, opposed to each other by their very nature...Their first encounter was marked by violence and
their existence together...was carried on by dint of a great array of bayonets and cannons...[T]his narrow world, strewn with prohibitions, can
only be called in question by absolute violence. (The Wretched of the Earth 36-37) This is because the structural,
or absolute,
violence or what Loic Wacquant calls the “carceral continuum,” is not a Black experience but a condition of Black
“life.” It remains constant, paradigmatically, despite changes in its “performance” over time— slave ship,
Middle Passage, slave estate, Jim Crow, the ghetto, the prison industrial complex.xxviii There is an uncanny connection
between Fanon’s absolute violence and Lacan’s Real. Thus, by extension, the grammar of suffering of
the Black itself is on the level of the Real.
In this emblematic passage, Fanon does for violence what Lacan does for
alienation: namely, he removes the negative stigma such a term would otherwise incur in the hands of theorists and practitioners who seek
coherence and stability. He also raises
within Lacan’s schema of suffering and freedom a contradiction between
the idea of universal un-raced contemporaries and two forces opposed to each other, whose first
encounter and existence together is marked by violence. In short, he divides the world not between
cured contemporaries and uncured contemporaries, but between contemporaries of all sorts and
slaves. He lays the groundwork for a theory of antagonism over and above a theory of conflict. If Lacan’s full speech is not, in
essence, a “cure” but a process promoting psychic disorder, through which the subject comes to know
her/himself, not as a stable relation to a true “self”—the Imaginary—but as a void constituted only by
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language, a becoming toward death in relation to the Other—the Symbolic—then we will see how this
symbolic self-cancellation (Silverman, Male Subjectivity...63-65, 126-128) is possible only when the subject and “his
contemporaries” (Lacan, Ecrits 47) are White or Human.xxix The process of full speech rests on a tremendous
disavowal which re-monumentalizes the (White) ego because it sutures, rather than cancels, formal stagnation by
fortifying and extending the interlocutory life of intra-Human discussions. I am arguing that (1) civil society, the terrain upon which the
analysand performs full speech, is always already a formally stagnated monument; and (2) the process by which full speech is performed
brokers simultaneously two relations for the analysand, one new and one old, respectively. The
process by which full speech is
performed brokers a (new) deconstructive relationship between the analysand and his/her formal
stagnation within civil society and a (pre-existing or) reconstructive relationship between the
analysand and the formal stagnation that constitutes civil society. Whereas Lacan was aware of how
language “precedes and exceeds us” (Silverman 2000: 157), he did not have Fanon’s awareness of how
violence also precedes and exceeds Blacks. An awareness of this would have disturbed the coherence of the taxonomy implied
by the personal pronoun “us.” The trajectory of Lacan’s full speech therefore is only able to make sense of
violence as contingent phenomena, the effects of “transgressions” (acts of rebellion or refusal) within
a Symbolic Order. Here, violence, at least in the first instance, is neither sense-less (gratuitous) nor is
it a matrix of human (im)possibility: it is what happens after some form of breach occurs in the realm
of signification. That is to say, it is contingent.
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Impact/Alt Cards
The 1A/NC posits racism as the Lacanian Real—this is backwards and makes racism an inevitability—
only shifting our conceptualization to place RACE in the realm of the Real and RACISM in that of
representation can solve
Loren and Metelmann 11 (Scott and Jörg, University of St. Gallen, What’s the Matter: Race as Res,
Journal of Visual Culture, 10(3), p. 397-405)//LA
As such, race might be thought of as having a relay function. It is a medium , so to speak, through which
meaning and relations native to various social spaces are given utterance, visualized, imagined and imaged,
and thereby negotiated. As a medium, race performs the functions of vision and division. It gives form to perception and
does so through differentiation. Race might thus be thought of as a conceptual icon, an image of the mind.
Thought of within the framework of visual culture, one might claim that according to Mitchell’s argument, race
performs the work of a visual medium in so far as ideas and perceptions are not merely given form
through the visual, but are themselves formed through the visual. This is visualization as the sorting
and mapping of social reality, making visualization through race an essentially political act. In order to
properly classify and understand race as a conceptual icon with a politico-structural function, Mitchell proposes an inversion of the usual
grammar of race as it has been mapped onto Lacan’s ontological registers of the real, the imaginary and the symbolic. How is this done? First,
Mitchell alters Lacan’s triadic syntax by extending a fourth axis upward, above and between the symbolic and the imaginary in order to indicate
that this is the space of representation (Figures 2 and 3). ‘Below’ the symbolic and the imaginary is the location of the real, of nonrepresentation, of dumb, pre-symbolic material, the Kantian Ding an sich. Mitchell’s
argument assumes that the real is the
locus ‘race’ has previously been linked to. He claims, though, that if race is a medium, a location for the
generation and transfer of meaning, then it must be moved away from the mute material of pre-symbolic ‘nature’, of
the real, into the realm of representation. Accordingly, what we need to reconceptualize in its place is
racism. Thus, an inversion calls for moving race to the location of representation and racism to the
location of the real, implying that race would have previously been associated with the real and
racism with representation. Incredibly stubborn, engendering trauma, an enduring thing in need of (the right kind of) mediation,
some of racism’s characteristics lend themselves to association with the Lacanian real. Race, on the
other hand, is the iconic location where the mediation necessary for sense-making takes place. The
intentions motivating this inversion of grammar is one we support: at first sight it appears without a doubt preferable not
to have racism as that which mediates race. We have seen too much of race projected through the
lens of racism. Nevertheless, placing racism at the locus of the Lacanian real gives way to a variety of
complications. Though it is important to iterate that traumatic encounters with the real can very well be
generated through racism (racist acts of physical or political violence, for example), placing racism per
se within the register of the Lacanian real is an impossibility. Thought alongside Linda Williams’ work on race, such an
inversion also runs the risk of falling into the melodramatic trap of classifying through Manichaean binaries. There are more effective ways to
stress the signifying magnitude of race as a medium and to theorize the tenacious and socially traumatic potential of racism through Lacanian
theory. First, we would like to propose that Mitchell’s own argument
can only be fortified by not inverting race’s
grammar mapped onto the Lacanian registers, but by aligning race with the mute material of the real
and locating racism within representation, albeit a very particular type of representation. In order to do so without
compromising the useful notion of race as a medium, we need to distinguish between two separate racial orders:
race in its mute material form and race in its meaning-making, socially significant (in all possible senses)
capacity. ‘Race’ as the Lacanian real does not signify anything. It might be thought of as the presymbolic material of bodily fluids, flesh and bone, of genetic coding, but certainly not as history, genealogy, culture, etc. Strictly
speaking, this is race as a non-ontology, or rather as ontos (of being) without logos (speech, discourse, representation). Against
the tendency of putting race in scare quotes because of a lack of consensus on what the term signifies, it is this first order of ‘race’ in
its mute material capacity that we might leave in scare quotes precisely because of its connection to the real.
If we are to maintain theoretical rigor regarding the Lacanian register of the real, we should claim that
there is no race. ‘Race’ is a lack around which various discourses are constructed. As such, racism must
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continue to be thought of as one possible attempt at articulating this lack. There is nothing mute nor material
about racism. It has no ontos without logos, but rather comes into being through expression, as speech, as
discourse, as representation, as action. This is one reason it cannot be placed at the locus of the
Lacanian real. If we want to indulge a certain theoretical flexibility and conceive of the Lacanian real not as mute material, but as a
combination of Hegelian second nature linked with the Lacanian real’s capacity to engender trauma (if we are not mistaken, it is thus that
Mitchell wants us to understand
racism as real), we not only risk taking recourse to a form of essentialism;
we risk making racism immovable. This is a second reason for not linking racism with the Lacanian
real. Before going on to talk about how to usefully theorize racism in the field of representation, we’d like to clarify second order race: race in
its meaning- making capacity. Thinking about race as a potential medium, a relay for meaning, can help us get
beyond the discussion of the pre-symbolic real, which has limited and perhaps more importantly limiting use in
theorizing social discourses. In order to make this transition, we will continue to think about race and the Lacanian real in semiotic
terms, thereby linking first and second order race: ‘race’ as dumb matter, as res, and ‘race’ as lack. These orders are
inherently linked as dumb matter and lack are both void of meaning. For Lacan, the kernel around
which language and the entirety of the symbolic order are constructed is lack. Meaning is always in a
state of negotiation, with constant slippage in the chain of signification. How to avoid, though, the
postmodern swamp of unending fluidity in meaning? Lacan proposes the point de capiton (quilting point): certain
signifiers have a greater organizing function than others (Lacan, 1993). These signifiers would have a
markedly larger cluster of associations directly attached to them, stopping up the fluidity and slippage
in signification and helping to fix meaning. If one were to visualize these, in particularly if one were to visualize race as a point
de capiton, it would probably look a lot like Mitchell’s graph of race as a medium. If we are to mobilize ‘race’ in a meaningful
way through Lacanian theory, we suggest designating a first order ‘race’, ‘race’ as res, and a second
order race, ‘race’ in the signifying function of a point de capiton. What, though, to do with racism? If it
is not placed in the realm of the real, which we view as both an ontological impossibility and a
counterproductive means of indicating its traumatic potential, then it must be within representation.
With our claim that racism re-presents ‘race’, it is essential to distinguish between the structures and functions of Lacan’s symbolic and
imaginary registers.
Instead, one should place racism in the realm of the Symbolic—only this disavows the inevitability of
Racism and makes possible change
Loren and Metelmann 11 (Scott and Jörg, University of St. Gallen, What’s the Matter: Race as Res,
Journal of Visual Culture, 10(3), p. 397-405)//LA
The phantasmatic content and context of racism become evident in the discourses of potential loss it
constructs. Tenacious adherence to the imaginary is symptomatic of a refusal to acknowledge the lack
constituting the signifier, and by extension constituting community. One might thus claim that whereas the nature
of the symbolic also serves to narrate and visualize lack in the real, strong adherence to the imaginary
is not only a defense against castration (or lack); it makes fully apparent the anxiety of castrative loss. One must point out
that, as with the lack that constitutes the signifier, the anxiety of castrative loss generally directs itself
at something always already lost and produces a denial of loss/lack as a symptom. Racist anxieties
about loss might concern the loss of jobs, land, capital, the stability of socio-economic or political
hierarchy, of exclusive access to metaphysical truths, of power, etc. It is not surprising that these are all
things colonialism made such strident efforts to accumulate. It is precisely indulgence in imaginary
fantasies of wholeness – which in psychoanalytical terms might be thought of as a refusal to forgo the object of desire,
and should within the context of race be thought of as a refusal to forgo exceptionalist status in the
face of difference – that constitutes socio-pathological behavior. Lacan suggests that the psychotic is he who is
trapped within the phantasmatic relay of imaginary desire in an attempt to block out the condition of lack
and threat of castration. Racism is thus better placed at the location of the imaginary, where it has the
function of re-presenting the real and of covering over lack, but the fault of neglecting to recognize its
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own split status as a social fiction and not an essentialist truism. Such classification helps to explain
the tenacity of racism, its capacity for engendering trauma, and its need of further mediation, all of which
Mitchell sought to achieve by placing it in the real. It is the role of the symbolic as mediator of imaginary dualisms
that establish the symbolic as the true realm of the political. How, then, can we achieve the proper
mediation and politicization of racism within the Lacanian schema of the three registers structuring ontology? By linking
processes of racialization to the symbolic. In order to keep race from becoming or remaining an
imaginarily bound idol of the mind, we might borrow Jameson’s injunction to ‘always historicize’ and claim that
one should always racialize: making sense of and within the social through the concept of race
becomes a process of racialization. Accordingly, we suggest the mapping of race as an ontology onto the Lacanian registers as
shown in Figure 5.
Turns the case—makes racism inevitable and prevents productive scholarship
Loren and Metelmann 11 (Scott and Jörg, University of St. Gallen, What’s the Matter: Race as Res,
Journal of Visual Culture, 10(3), p. 397-405)//LA
Beyond the noted benefits of placing racism in the order of the imaginary, this kind of structure
resolves an additional complication that arises if we place racism in the real. One of the points raised during
Mitchell’s talk was that if racism were to act as a kind of ontological basis for race, then race would
necessarily always be linked to a pejorative ‘nature’. That is, with racism as the real and race as the
derivative term, not only would racism take on an immovable and essentialist quality: race would also
always be an extension of this pejorative essentialism. The structure presents us with a variation on the Amfortas
question: ‘Race, what are you suffering from?’ Race would be interminable suffering as a derivative of racism. Here,
we can see how the notion of racism as immovable, traumatic real is not only problematic in a strictly
Lacanian or social constructivist sense, but troublesome from within race theory; particularly in the context of
Linda Williams’ linking of melodrama and race. ‘Racism’ as an immovable pejorative that serves as the foundation for
concepts of race within representation feeds into the archetypal Manichaean structure central to melodrama: the
eternal battle between good and evil. Mitchell’s re-articulation of the Lacanian triad might be seen as a theoretical version of
the American melodramatic racial fix that Williams put forth in her seminal book, Playing the Race Card (2001). She argues that ‘since the midnineteenth century, melodrama has been, for better or worse, the primary way in which mainstream American culture has dealt with the moral
dilemma of having first enslaved and then withheld equal rights to generations of African Americans’ (2001: 44). It
is through forms of
racial victimization within the melodramatic mode – the beaten/tortured black male body and the threatened/raped white female body
– that the ‘white supremacist American culture first turned its deepest guilt into a testament of virtue’
(Williams, 2001: 44). After Harriet Beecher Stowe’s articulation of sympathy for black suffering (Tom, Eliza), Dixon and Griffith ‘trumped Stowe’s
race card by inverting its racial polarities to show white women threatened by emancipated black men’ (Williams, 2001: 5). There is not just one
race card to be played, but different versions of racial victimization and vilification played out over time. Taking recourse to Lauren Berlant’s
theory that individual citizens are not identified through a universalist rhetoric, but through their ‘capacity for suffering and trauma’ (Williams,
2001: 43), Williams mobilizes the logic of pain as the core of personhood by applying it to the melodramas of racially beset victims. It is this
essential link between wound/trauma (in Greek it is literally the same), race and the paradoxical location of strength in weakness that we want
to stress in our response to Mitchell: What
does it mean against this background to position racism within the
traumatic real? Does it not imply that we simply have to accept the wounds that white hands inflict
on black bodies, that imperialist cultures inflict on colonized cultures? If racism is an essentialist truth,
an immovable matter of fact, then the tortures will go on forever. The problem with Mitchell’s proposition is the
following: What starts as an effort to prevent cultural studies from the overly hasty and perhaps naive
move to hail the end of race threatens to default into a melodramatic reaffirmation of binaries on the
basis of the classic victim paradigm. As, for example, the case of Rodney King and the trial of O.J. Simpson have shown, there is
an ongoing melodramatic Manichaean split of race into ‘Tom’ and ‘anti-Tom’ lenses. This could be fully consistent with Mitchell’s claim
that race is itself the medium if he were not to give in to the melodramatic temptation to completely section off racism from its
societal negotiations. As Williams ends her book by advocating intellectual rigor in the analysis of melodrama whenever it appears, we
would like to point to the possible dangers of Mitchell’s re-articulation of race and racism: calling into question the over-hasty
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proclamations of a post-racial era should not lead us to a new fixing of racial ‘realities’ that we have to
accept with all of their hatred and pain. This, we know, was not Mitchell’s intention. Seeing race, not racism, as the
matter that on the one hand has to be socially negotiated and, on the other, acts as a lens for social
negotiation, is crucial for understanding the durable, and in Lacanian terms imaginary, nature of
racism. Because the imaginary is inherent in the seeable, the scrutiny of imaginary projections where
they meet social ontologies might be understood as one of the important political functions of visual
culture studies.
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Hammersley
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1NC Shell
The affirmative’s arguments about epistemology reveal an instrumentalist mindset—they judge the
VALIDITY of arguments based on the VALUE, not their empirical basis
Hammersley 93 (Martyn, Prof @ Open University, Research and 'anti-racism': the case of Peter Foster
and his critics, British Journal of Sociology, 44.3, 429-448, JSTOR)//LA
Finally, there is instrumentalism. Here, the validity of knowledge is defined solely according to
whether action on the basis of it has desirable effects. We can find this idea among pragmatist philosophers like James
and Dewey, as well as in Marxism, Critical Theory and some forms offeminism.21 The implication of this position is that
research must be pursued in close association with practical activities and judged in terms of its
contribution to those activities. If it facilitates their success it is true, if it does not it is false. Thus, the
validity of Foster's work could be assessed in terms of whether or not it serves the fight against
racism. And, indeed, some of the criticism of his work does focus on its assumed consequences in this
respect. 22 I will consider such arguments as they apply to the issue of the relevance or value of his work later; here I am concerned
simply with the epistemological interpretation of instrumentalism. And this seems to me to be
decidedly weak. While we may recognise that the value of academic work should be judged partly in
terms of its political and social relevance, the claim that its validity should be judged in these terms is
much more questionable. In so far as the production of desirable consequences is taken as defining
validity, this position proposes a replacement for the correspondence theory of truth, yet implicitly relies on that theory. This is
because claims about the effects of acting on the beliefs being assessed cannot themselves be judged instrumentally
(otherwise we are in an infinite regress). Where instrumentalism implies treating desirable
consequences as an indicator of validity, this assumes a much stronger relationship between the truth
of a belief and the practical consequences of acting on it than is justifiable: it is clear, I think, that
validity is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition of practical success. So, to summarise, there is apparently
intractable disagreement at the level of substantive and methodological arguments between Foster and his critics. And it seems that this
probably results, in part at least, from some more profound differences of view, differences that are
indicated by what I have called
meta-methodological criticisms, criticisms that challenge the methodological framework on which
Foster is assumed to be operating. Effectively, he is accused of empiricist foundationalism, a position
that does not seem to be defensible. I examined three currently fashionable alternatives to this view, traces of which can be
found in the writings of Foster's critics. But I argued that none of these alternatives is sound. This clearly leaves us with a problem, and
it is my task in the next section of this paper to try to show how it might be resolved, and the implications of this for the debates around
Foster's work.
Reject the aff—our argument isn’t that WE’VE sufficiently undermined their epistemology but that
their stance with respect to our arguments prevents the possibility of productive racial scholarship
Hammersley 93 (Martyn, Prof @ Open University, Research and 'anti-racism': the case of Peter Foster
and his critics, British Journal of Sociology, 44.3, 429-448, JSTOR)//LA
It would be a mistake, then, it seems to me, for 'anti-racists' to dismiss Foster's work. To the extent that it
throws doubt on the accuracy of some of the assumptions on which they operate, they ought to
consider its validity seriously and not simply ignore, reject or even try to suppress it .45 It may point to
a necessary reconstruction of 'anti-racism'. This might be required if it were true that racism on the part of British
teachers was not widespread or that it did not play a significant role in the generation of 'racial' inequality.
Accepting this would not involve a denial that there may be features of the British education system and
society that generate the underachievement of black pupils. Indeed, Foster himself suggests one mechanism for this: the
allocation of black pupils to schools that are less effective educationally.46 Of course, there still remains the question of what
level or sort of evidence should persuade 'anti-racists' that Foster is right. I do not want to speculate about this
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here, merely to point out that there
should be some level of confirming evidence at which 'anti-racists' would
accept his arguments. And even if Foster does not provide that level of evidence, his work could be
accepted by them as making a potential contribution to increasing the effectiveness of their
activities.47 In my view these considerations should outweigh any negative propaganda effects that Foster's
work is likely to have. After all, racists have seldom found it difficult to invent arguments and evidence to support their position, and
have generally shown scant regard for the difference between such inventions and more soundly based scientific conclusions. I want to
conclude by going even further than this and suggesting that 'anti-racists'
are unwise to reject the conventional model
of research in favour of an activist conception. One reason for this is that the propaganda capacity of research is to a large
extent parasitic upon the conventional model. Once research becomes seen as geared to the pursuit of particular
political goals, with research results being selected, even in part, according to their suitability for propaganda purposes, its propaganda
value is gone. There are also dangers in integrating research with other sorts of practical activity. It is
likely to be difficult for practitioners of 'anti-racist' education, as for practitioners of other kinds
engaged in pressure group politics, to give separate consideration to the informational and the propaganda implications
of arguments and evidence. The virtue of the research community is that it is, or ought to be,
concerned exclusively with the validity of those findings, not with their propaganda significance . And
while the judgments of the research community in this respect are no substitute for practitioners making their own assessments, they can make
an important contribution to those assessments.
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2NC Empiricism
The 1AC is not falsifiable—there’s no way to determine the truth value of responses to their
conception of society
Hammersley 93 (Martyn, Prof @ Open University, Research and 'anti-racism': the case of Peter Foster
and his critics, British Journal of Sociology, 44.3, 429-448, JSTOR)//LA
In the discussions of non-foundationalist philosophers of science and others we can identify an empirical model of how
scientists actually judge claims in the absence of a foundation.23 This involves a process in which
consistency with existing beliefs plays a key role. While this model does not rule out the acceptance of
new ideas that are incompatible with existing beliefs, it may make this less likely than on the
foundationalist model, where these would simply be accepted if supported by decisive evidence.
Ideas that are in conflict with existing beliefs will be initially resisted and subjected to severe scrutiny,
however apparently strong the evidence available in support of them. Obversely, the nonfoundationalist model makes the acceptance of new ideas that are consistent with existing beliefs
easier than it would be on the basis of foundationalism: in this case little evidence may be needed.
This model can be elaborated by the addition of a distinction (or, better, a dimension) between core and
peripheral beliefs. Where new ideas threaten relatively peripheral existing beliefs, change may occur
without much resistance. However, where new ideas challenge core beliefs change is much less likely.
What distinguishes core and peripheral beliefs is the extent to which other beliefs depend on them, so
that if they are modified much of the rest of the belief system will need to change. Ease of acceptance
is an inverse product of how much reassessment and reorganisation of what is currently taken to be
established knowledge would be required to accept the new claim and retain overall consistency.
Furthermore, defensive cognitive strategies may be developed specifically to protect the core from criticism. 24 An obvious
implication of this model is that evidence running counter to accepted core beliefs may not be taken
seriously. Kuhn, for instance, argues that over a period when scientific work in a particular field is dominated by a single paradigm,
anomalous evidence (that is, evidence that cannot be accounted for within that paradigm) accumulates but is ignored. It only
becomes significant if and when an alternative paradigm is identified that looks as though it may be
able to account for all the evidence covered by the old one and the anomalies; at which point there
may be a scientific revolution leading to paradigm change, though even this usually depends on generational
replacement of the 'old guard' by the new.25 If we apply this to the multi-paradigmatic case of the social sciences,
where there are debates among parties adopting sharply discrepant assumptions, we can see why
discussions among them may well be inconclusive, or at least will take a very long time to resolve.26 Thus, the goal of the
early advocates of the foundationalist model, to find a method that would terminate debate by necessarily convincing anyone relying solely on
reason, seems to be beyond reach. If we look at the case ofF oster and his critics from this point of view, I think we get the following result. On
the foundationalist model, whether others would accept Foster's arguments would depend entirely
on whether he shows that the findings of the studies he criticises do not derive logically from brute
data and that those of his own study do. But, given the absence of any foundation of absolutely
certain knowledge, Foster can only do the former not the latter. And once we switch to a nonfoundationalist position, we no longer have an absolute standard by which to decide even whether
Foster's criticisms of others' work are sufficiently convincing to be accepted. Whether or not they are
accepted will depend in part on judgments about the relative benefits and costs of accepting them, in
terms of the reorganisation of existing beliefs, and this will vary among audiences. (Of course, exactly
the same applies to his critics' substantive and methodological questioning of Foster's own empirical
research.)
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AT: Racism=RC
This doesn’t disprove anything we’ve said—the burden of proof is on them here to justify
foundationalism over micro-empiricism
Hammersley 93 (Martyn, Prof @ Open University, Research and 'anti-racism': the case of Peter Foster
and his critics, British Journal of Sociology, 44.3, 429-448, JSTOR)//LA
In part, what seems to be implied in these arguments is that the evidence which Foster offers in his
study, and his questioning of the findings of other studies, must be rejected because they are
incompatible with the widely accepted theory that racism is institutionalised in British society, that it is
part of the fundamental structure of that society. On this basis his critics argue that while
discrimination may not seem to be occurring in some particular setting, once we view this setting in
the context of British (or English) society as a whole it will be seen to form part of a larger pattern of
racism. So, here Foster's claims are being questioned on the grounds of his presumed commitment to
an inadequate methodological framework, one which gives a misleading priority to micro-empirical
evidence at the expense of macro-theoretical perspective. This can be summarised as the charge that
Foster's work is empiricist. 12 And, of course, this argument connects with much discussion of the methodology of qualitative
research today, in which the empiricism of quantitative research, and of some qualitative work, is challenged on the basis of alternative
epistemological assumptions. 13 What
is being rejected here can be more usefully (because more specifically) referred to as
a foundationalist epistemology. This is the notion that research conclusions are founded, in some
rigorously determinate fashion, on a body of evidence whose own validity is beyond question (for
example, because it consists of reports of intersubjectively observable behaviour). Thus, Troyna criticises Foster for 'methodological purism',
which he interprets as requiring evidence that rules out all possible alternative interpretations. 14 Foundationalism
has, of course,
been subjected to very damaging criticism in philosophy, as well as in the social sciences , over the past 30
or 40 years, and I think it is clear that it is not defensible. There is no single, agreed alternative to
foundationalism, but we can identify three radical alternatives that have become increasingly influential in social research in
recent years; and whose influence is detectable in the writings of some of Foster's critics. These alternatives are: relativism,
standpoint theory, and instrumentalism. These are not always clearly distinguished, and they are sometimes used in
combination. However, I will try to show that none of them is very satisfactory.
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AT: “Your epistemology is bad cuz you’re white”
They say our epistemology is bad because of our standpoint—they’re in a double bind between
relativism and standpoint epistemology
A. Relativism means they lose on presumption
Hammersley 93 (Martyn, Prof @ Open University, Research and 'anti-racism': the case of Peter Foster
and his critics, British Journal of Sociology, 44.3, 429-448, JSTOR)//LA
Applying relativism to the case under discussion, it would be argued that the validity of Foster's appeal to the canons of
good research is relative to a particular methodological framework, namely positivism or postpositivism; and that other frameworks would produce different conclusions. We may, for instance, decide to
treat the claims of some black pupils that they and others have been subjected to racist treatment by teachers as necessarily true in their own
terms, as reflecting their experience and the framework of assumptions that constitute it, that framework being incommensurable with the one
adopted by Foster. Something
like this may underlie Connolly's question: 'how can Foster as a White middle
class male construct his own definition of racism to then use to judge the accuracy of Black working
class students' definitions?' 15 If treated as valid, this argument has the effect of apparently
undercutting Foster's empirical research in the sense that it need no longer be treated by others as
representing reality. Yet, at the same time, from this point of view Foster's arguments remain valid in
their own terms; in fact, they remain as valid as those of his critics. This seems to lead to a sort of
stalemate. And, of course, there is the problem that relativism is self-undermining: if it is true, then in its own
terms it can only be true relative to a relativist framework; so that from other points of view it
remains false. 16 As a non-relativist, this leaves Foster free to claim quite legitimately (even from the
point of view of relativism) that his views represent reality, whereas a relativist critic could not make the same claim for
her or his views but must treat them simply as representing a particular framework of beliefs to which he or she happens to be committed.
B. Standpoint epistemology is silly (like clowns)
Hammersley 93 (Martyn, Prof @ Open University, Research and 'anti-racism': the case of Peter Foster
and his critics, British Journal of Sociology, 44.3, 429-448, JSTOR)//LA
The second view I want to consider is sometimes associated with versions of the first, but must be kept separate because it involves a quite
distinctive and incompatible element. I will refer to this as standpoint theory. Here people's experience and knowledge
is treated as valid or invalid by dint of their membership in some social category. 17 Here again Foster's
arguments may be dismissed because they reflect his background and experience as a white, middle
class, male teacher. However, this time the implication is that reality is obscured from those with this
background because of the effects of ideology. By contrast, it is suggested, the oppressed (black, female
and/or working class people) have privileged insight into the nature of society. This argument produces a
victory for one side, not the stalemate that seems to result from relativism; the validity of Foster's
views can therefore be dismissed. But in other respects this position is no more satisfactory than
relativism. We must ask on what grounds we can decide that one group has superior insight into
reality. This cannot be simply because they declare that they have this insight; otherwise everyone
could make the same claim with the same legitimacy (we would be back to relativism). This means that some
other form of ultimate justification is involved, but what could this be? In the Marxist version of this argument the
working class (or, in practice, the Communist Party) are the group with privileged insight into the nature of social reality, but it is Marx and
Marxist theorists who confer this privilege on them by means of a dubious philosophy of history. 18 Something
similar occurs in
the case of feminist standpoint theory, where the feminist theorist ascribes privileged insight to
women, or to feminists engaged in the struggle for women's emancipation. 19 However, while we must
recognise that people in different social locations may have divergent perspectives, giving them
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distinctive insights, it is not clear why we should believe the implausible claim that some people have
privileged access to knowledge while others are blinded by ideology. 20
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AT: “Your scholarship=racist/politically motivated”
Burden of proof is on them—claiming scholarship to be bad because of its motivations requires
PROOF and isn’t in of itself a reason to reject its empirical validity
Hammersley 93 (Martyn, Prof @ Open University, Research and 'anti-racism': the case of Peter Foster
and his critics, British Journal of Sociology, 44.3, 429-448, JSTOR)//LA
The practical value criticisms made by Foster's critics are concerned with his intentions, with some
features of his research practice, and with what they see as the consequences of the publication of his
work. He has been accused, for instance, of lacking proper commitment to racial equality, indeed of
producing work that is racist.33 It has also been claimed that one of the interview questions he used with teachers invited them 'to
articulate racist stereotypes', and thereby gave these respectability.34 Finally, it is suggested that he can and will be read as
'blaming the victim' ;35 and that the publication of his work plays into the hands of those who seek to
deny the existence of racism for political reasons, thereby undermining the efforts of 'anti-racist'
activists: it is 'disabling rather than enabling'.36 In terms of the model of the research community I outlined in the previous
section, these practical value criticisms are only directly relevant if they indicate deviation on Foster's
part from the proper orientation of the researcher specified in that model. This orientation involves
researchers being primarily committed to the discovery of the truth by means of rational discussion,
being prepared to offer evidence for their claims where there is disagreement, being willing to change
their views on the basis of compelling evidence, and assuming that all this is true of other researchers
unless strong evidence to the contrary emerges. Some of the practical value criticisms of Foster imply such deviation,
suggesting for instance that he 'has not stopped to critically examine the ideology which informs his own
practice' and that in his empirical research he was 'keen to demonstrate that (the) teachers were not
racist'.37 The implication here seems to be that he had a hidden political agenda. Convincing evidence
is required to establish this claim, of course, and dismissal of Foster's work on these grounds without
strong evidence is itself a breach of the norms. 311 Most of the value criticisms of Foster's work, however, fall
outside of what is directly relevant according to the model outlined in the previous section. Examples are the charges
that he 'lacks commitment to racial equality' and that his research 'disables' those fighting racism . 39
This does not mean that these criticisms should automatically be ruled out of account by those operating on the basis of the model, however.
There are two indirect ways in which ethical issues can still be relevant.
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AT: “Judge evidence by its activist potential”
EVEN IF this is the model you use to evaluate evidence, we can access all our arguments.
Hammersley 93 (Martyn, Prof @ Open University, Research and 'anti-racism': the case of Peter Foster
and his critics, British Journal of Sociology, 44.3, 429-448, JSTOR)//LA
Nevertheless, I think questions can be raised about the practical value criticisms made of Foster's work even
from the point of view of this activist conception of social research. Central here is a distinction
between two ways in which research may serve practical purposes. First, it may provide information
about the world in which a practical activity is carried out and on the basis of which its goals and
means should be developed, reviewed and perhaps changed. Second, it may serve a propaganda role,
it may be used to legitimate the goals and means adopted or to criticise those of opponents. Much
political activity involves debate between opponents, and while no-one would suggest that conflicts
are usually resolved in a purely discursive way, propaganda is a factor that has some weight (especially in
liberal democratic societies), not least in mobilising the support of others. Now, of course, the same research
findings may serve both of these functions, but how findings are assessed by political activists will
usually vary depending on which function is treated as primary. If the first is dominant, there will be
particular concern with the accuracy and relevance of the information provided. While I do not
assume that for action to be successful it must be based on true assumptions, nor that true
assumptions will automatically lead to success, I do believe that there is a positive relationship
between the two. By contrast, from a propaganda point of view the truth of the findings is less
significant than whether relevant others regard them as true and what they take their implications to
be. What is important here is what role the findings can play in the propaganda war. Recognising the
propaganda role of information involves a view of political debate and conflict that places it at a
considerable distance from the sort of rational discourse that is central to the model of the research community
which I outlined in the previous section. In such debate dissembling, the suppression of evidence, the dismissal of
opponents' views on the basis of their motives, accusations of ideology and racism etc. may be
rational techniques, at least from a short-term and partisan perspective. This is not a novel view of politics, of
course. And it matters not at all for my argument here whether this is taken to be the universal
character of politics or whether it is specific to a particular historical period.42 Let us simply accept, for the sake
of argument, that this is how politics is today. Looking at the critical response to Foster's work in the light of this, I
think we need to recognise that the judgments that 'anti-racist' activists will and should make about
the validity, or at least the implications, of Foster's work may be different to those that researchers
(on my model) should make. Not only may the belief in widespread teacher racism be more deeply
entrenched for them than it is for some researchers, on the basis of practical experience and
commitment, but also they are not under the same obligation as researchers to treat as in need of
supporting argument all that the research community does not currently accept as beyond reasonable
doubt. Of course, in discourse with fellow practitioners, and with those with whom they must deal in the course of their practice, they will
need to take account of what is and is not shared knowledge. However, this may be different to what is accepted by
researchers, especially where the boundaries of the practitioner community are politically defined, as
they are in the case of 'anti-racism'. Furthermore, in such contacts practical considerations will be most salient, including for
instance the costs of different sorts of error. Finally, disagreements may be resolved (legitimately or illegitimately) by
other means than rational discussion, including coercion, manipulation, negotiation, delegation,
democracy, market forces etc. 43 This is not to say that practitioners, such as 'anti-racist' educators,
should simply ignore the findings of research. The point is rather that they should judge those findings
in relation to their own practical knowledge and according to what is required to pursue their work
well. On this basis it might be quite reasonable for 'anti-racists' to continue with their campaign against racism among teachers despite the
doubts that Foster has raised; though they would be foolish to completely ignore those doubts.
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Quiet K
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Quashie
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Aesthetics 1NC
The 1AC represents Blackness as resistance—this narrow view precludes the possibility of a more
capacious understanding of Black subjectivity—rather, we should affirm an Aesthetics of Quiet that
makes possible a more productive relationship to Blackness
Quashie 12 (Kevin Everod, Smith College, The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black
Culture, p. 3-9)//LA
This book explores what a concept of quiet could mean to how we think about black culture. The exploration is a shift in how we
commonly under- stand blackness, which is often described as expressive, dramatic, or loud. These qualities inherently
reflect the equivalence between resistance and blackness. Resistance is, in fact, the dominant
expectation we have of black culture. Indeed, this expectation is so widely familiar that it does not require
explanation or qualification; it is practically unconscious. These assumptions are noticeable in the
ways that blackness serves as an emblem of social ailment and progress. In an essay from his 1957 collection
White Man Listen!, Richard Wright captures this sentiment, noting that "The Negro is America's metaphor" (109). Wright's comment might be
hyperbolic, but it also summarizes the exceptional role that black experi- ence has played in American social consciousness: Blackness
here is not a term of intimacy or human vagary but of publicness. One result of this dynamic is a quality of selfconsciousness in black literature, a hyper- awareness of a reader whose presence-whether critical or sympathetic- shapes what is
expressed. Such self-consciousness is an example of the concept of doubleness that has become the preeminent trope of black cultural studies.
The result is that black
culture is celebrated for the exem- plary ways it employs doubleness as well as for its capacity to
manipulate social opinion and challenge racism. This is the politics of representation, where black
subjectivity exists for its social and political meaningfulness rather than as a marker of the human
individuality of the person who is black. As an identity, blackness is always supposed to tell us
something about race or racism, or about America, or violence and struggle and triumph or poverty and
hopefulness. The deter- mination to see blackness only through a social public lens, as if there were no
inner life, is racist- it comes from the language of racial superiority and is a practice intended to
dehumanize black people. But it has also been adopted by black culture, especially in terms of nationalism, but
also more generally: it creeps into the consciousness of the black subject, especially the artist, as the imperative to
represent. Such expectation is part of the inclina- tion to understand black culture through a lens of
resistance, and it practi- cally thwarts other ways of reading. All of this suggests that the common
frameworks for thinking about blackness are limited. Resistance is hard to argue against, since it has
been so essential to every black freedom movement. And yet resistance is too broad a term- it is too clunky and
vague and imprecise to be a catch-all for a whole range of behaviors and ambitions. It is not nuanced enough to characterize
the totality of black culture or expression. Resistance exists, for sure, and deserves to be named and studied. And still,
sometimes, when the term ''resistance" is used, what is being described is something finer. There is an instructive example of this tension in
Stephanie Camp's Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in rhe Piamarion Sortr/1, a compelling work on the lives of
black women during slavery. As Camp's title suggests, the frame for the book is resistance, the ways that black women's everyday lives
("private, concealed, and even intimate worlds" [3]) constitute a defiance of the vagaries of enslavement. Like Deborah Gray White and others
before her, Camp notices how black women's acts
of resistance appear in day-to- day activities as much as (if not
more than) in formal planned rebellions or revolts. And yet even Camp realizes that the meaning of
black women's everyday lives was not shaped entirely by their engagement with and resist- ance to
the institution of slavery-that black women and men who were enslaved grew gardens and decorated
their living spaces and organized par- ties in the woods (the chapter "The Intoxication of Pleasurable Amusement: Secret
Parties and the Politics of the Body" is beautifully imagined and written). The point here is not to dismiss the intensity and
vulgarity of slav- ery's violence on black people, but instead to restore a broader picture of the
humanity of the people who were enslaved. Under Camp's careful eye, these women's everyday lives are brought into fuller
relief, and even if Camp reads these lives as moments of resistance, their aliveness jumps out beyond that equation to offer something more.
The case for quiet is, implicitly, an argument against the limits of black- ness as a concept; as such, this book
exists alongside many others that have questioned the boundaries of racial identity. These include recent scholarly work by Robert Reid-Pharr,
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Paul Gilroy, Thomas Holt, Michelle Wright, Gene Andrew Jarrett, Kenneth Warren, Kimberly Nichele Brown, Hazel Carby, Trey Ellis, Thelma
Golden, and especially David Lionel Smith, whose essay "What Is Black Culture?" is dazzling and indispensible. There is also a large body of work
by black women scholars, especially since the 1970s, that has posed consistent challenges to the singularity of race. The
specific
concern about the dominance of resistance as a framework, how- ever, is exposed by black artists who have
always struggled with the politics of representation. From Zadie Smith, Afaa M. Weaver, and Rita Dove, to Zora Neale Hurston, Langston
Hughes, and Ralph Ellison, the black artist lives within the crosshairs of publicness and, if she or he is to produce meaningful work, has to
construct a consciousness that exists beyond the expectation of resistance. Inspired by these artists, this argument for quiet
aims to give
up resistance as a framework in search of what is lost in its all-encompassing reach.4 Resistance, yes,
but other capacities too. Like quiet. The idea of quiet is compelling because the term is not fancy- it is an everyday word-but it is
also conceptual. Quiet is often used interchange- ably with silence or stillness, but the notion of quiet in the pages that follow is neither
motionless nor without sound. Quiet, instead, is
a metaphor for the full range of one's inner life—one's desires,
ambitions, hungers, vulnerabilities, fears. The inner life is not apolitical or without social value, but
neither is it determined entirely by publicness. In fact, the interior- dynamic and ravishing- is a stay
against the dominance of the social world; it has its own sovereignty. It is hard to see, even harder to describe, but
no less potent in its ineffability. Quiet. In humanity, quiet is inevitable, essential. It is a simple, beautiful part of
what it means to be alive. It is already there, if one is looking to understand it. An aesthetic of quiet is
not incompatible with black culture, but to notice and understand it requires a shift in how we read,
what we look for, and what we expect, even what we remain open to. It requires paying attention in a
different way. This point about how we read is especially relevant to the image in the frontispiece, Whitfield Lovell's KIN Vll (Scent
o[Mt~gnolia). Lovell is a giant in contemporary art, a 2007 MacArthur fellow whose work has been show- cased at the Smithsonian, the
Whitney, the MOMA, and in various other locations in the United States and abroad. His most well-known exhibits, Whispers from the Walls
and Sanctuary. consist of a series of tableaux and full-room installations that display the daily lives of anonymous African Americans. In these
installatio ns, charcoal drawings of posed studio photo· graphs found at flea markets or town archi\•es (largely from the 1900s to the 1940s)
are paired with various objects (boxing gloves, a knife, barbed wire, a bucket). The drawings are made on pieces of wood- parts of fences or
walls-and seem to bring domestic scenes to life. More recently, in a stun- ning collection entitled Kin, Lovell has cont inued d rawing portraits o
f anonymous black people, though this time on paper; these figures are made from identification photographs (headshots from passports or
mug shots, for example) and are often paired with an object. Critics note the dignity of Lovell's figures, which is a tribute to his skill in drawing:
His portraits render their subjects in terrific clarity (the intensity in the eyes, the defined neck and cheek, the textured quality of the hair). His
use of shadow is astute, and the result is images of people who look like people- not symbols of a discourse of racism, but people in the
everyday, wary and resolute, alive. They look familiar to us even if it is rare to see black faces represented in such a studied, elegant way. But
the dignity is related also to the pairing of image and artifact, the clean juxtaposition of locating each near the other without abrasion or
overlap. This doesn't really create a sense of doubleness because the portrait is intended to be prominent; still proximity is contagion, and the
artifact insinuates itself on the portrait. In KIN VII (Scent of Magnolia), the cloth wreath becomes part of the male figure's body, making the
place where one might expect a shirt collar, a piece of jewelry, the outline of a chest. Localized and domesticated, the wreath's randomness
becomes specific to this bold beautiful black face. And the subject is clarified by the artifact: Are these flowers from his room, a private and
unusua l explosion of color? The flowers he gave to a date or the ones he brought to a funeral? A sign of his desire to visit all the world's
spectacular gardens? We might pick up the title's reference to Billie Holiday's thick voice on "Strange Fruit" ("scent of magnolia sweet and
fresh/the sudden smell of burning flesh") which might lead to a more omi- nous reading- his killed body marked by a wreath- but it is
unsatisfying to be so singular and definitive with this image. Because of the flowers, he can be a subject more than an emblem; we can wonder
if he loved pink and purple tones, without ignoring the possibility of racist violence. 'Whatever the story, the flowers are a surprise that
interrupt the dominant narratives that might be ascribed to the profile of a black man of that age. The foreboding is there to be read in some of
the objects in Lovell's work- chains, barbed wire, targets, rope- which is as it would be, o ften is, for a black person in the United States. And
still, foreboding is only part of one's life story, and it should not overwhelm how we think of the breadth of humanity. Lovell seems to aim for a
balance between the social or public meaning of a person or object, and its intimacy, its human relevance. Where his earlier work created
tableaux using full-bodied figures, the aes- thetic of juxtaposition in these more recent pieces is what evokes narrative, as if we are seeing the
unfolding of a scene of human life, as if more and more of the image will manifest if you look long enough. (This is especially true of Lovell's
drawings that lack a corresponding artifact.) The
key is to let the unexpected be possible. We might want to read a narrative
of resistance on KIN \riT (Scent of Magnolia), but there is something else there: a ravishing quiet. Quiet is
antithetical to how we think about black culture, and by exten- sion, black people. So much of the
discourse of racial blackness imagines black people as public subjects with identities formed and
articulated and resisted in public. Such blackness is dramatic, symbolic, never for its own vagary,
always representative and engaged with how it is imagined publicly. These characterizations are the
legacy of racism and they become the common way we understand and represent blackness; literally they
become a lingua franca. The idea of quiet, then, can shift attention to what is interior. This shift can fed like a
kind of heresy if the interior is thought of as apolitical or inexpressive, which it is not: one's inner life
is raucous and full of expression, especially if we distinguish the term "expressive" from the notion of public. Indeed the
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interior could be understood as the source of human action- that anything we do is shaped by the
range of desires and capacities of our inner life. This is the agency in Lovell's piece, the way that what is implied is a full
range of human life: that we don't know the subject just by looking at him or noticing the artifact; that his life is wide-open and possible; that
his life is more than familiar characterizations of victimization by or triumph over racism. For sure,
the threat and violence of
racism is one story, as is the grace and necessity of the fight. But what else is there to black humanity,
this piece seems to ask. The question is an invitation to imagine an inner life of the broadest terrain. It
is remarkable for a black artist working with black subjects (and in a visual medium) to restore humanity without being apolitical. It is remarkable, also, to make the argument that Lo vell makes so well with his work- that what
is black is at once particular and
universal, familiar and unknowable. This is challenging territory to navigate, given the importance of
resist- ance and protest to black culture. But the intent here is not to disregard these terms, but to ask
what else--what else can we say about black culture, what other frameworks might help to illuminate
aspects of the work produced by black writers and thinkers? How can quiet, as a frame for reading
black culture, expose life that is not already determined by narratives of the social world? After all, all
living is political—every human action means something—but all living is not in protest; to assume
such is to disregard the richness of life. In humanity, quiet is inevitable, essential. It is a simple
beautiful part of what it means to be alive. It is already there, if one is looking to understand it. There are
many books on black expressiveness and resistance; there will be-and should be-many more. This, however, is not one of them. This book is
about quiet.
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2NC Perm
The logic of the aff exists only insofar as it ensures effective resistance—that already precludes an
effective investigation of interiority
Quashie 9 (Kevin Everod, Smith College, The Trouble with Publicness: Toward a Theory of Black Quiet,
African American Review, 43(2-3), Summer/Fall 2009, p. 329-43)//LA
In this way, expressiveness has been vital to promoting black culture and liberation; in fact it is not an
overstatement to say that it is closely linked to every black civil rights effort, and is the ultimate
archetype of the culture. The case could even be made that black expressiveness, rather than being a
function of the public sphere, is an African cultural retention, which is what Robert Farris Thompson proposes in Flash
of the Spirit. (Vlach himself argues convincingly that the aesthetic expressiveness found in early black folk art is both a retention and a
functional reality of enslaved people.) Yet
this appreciation leaves untouched the ways that the relationship
between blackness and publicness overdetermines how expressiveness is read, what expressiveness
means. In light of the discourse of publicness, expressiveness is reduced to being contrarian and
resistant. There is little liberty or reason to consider other kinds of expressivities, ones that are
animated less by a sense of audience and more by the wide range of human impulses. Indeed this
failure to imagine other expressivities obscures and even disavows manifestations of black culture
that fall outside the aesthetic that publicness has either made, or made possible. As a consequence of this
historical significance of public expressiveness, resistance becomes the dominant idiom for reading
and describing black culture. One result of this dominance is that the major concepts used to discuss
black culture (for example, doubleness, signifying, the mask) are engaged largely for their capacity to support the
idea of resistance. In this light, these concepts say less about the interior of black subjectivity, and
leave us without a general concept that aims to describe or reference the inner life.
NOTE: [Remember to say that the K only rejects the aff’s aesthetics, not necessarily their advocacy
statement. This means Aesthetics 1st is also an answer to the perm]
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2NC Alt/FPIK
Reject the aff’s simplistic conception of Black interiority in favor of a new aesthetics of Quiet—this
doesn’t preclude resistance to racism, but rather just the aff’s public conception of resistance
NOTE: [this is distinct from the perm because it rejects PUBLICNESS, while the permutation would
include it or else they sever]
Quashie 9 (Kevin Everod, Smith College, The Trouble with Publicness: Toward a Theory of Black Quiet,
African American Review, 43(2-3), Summer/Fall 2009, p. 329-43)//LA
Exploring the connection between the discourse of resistance and the notion of publicness is
important to understanding how it is that resistance manifests as both the (sole?) subject and intent
of black aesthetics. None of this is intended to dismiss the importance of resistance in black culture.
The point is more simply that resistance alone is not (or is no longer) a sufficient frame for
understanding black culture. Black culture, and the lives it represents, is richer, fuller, more
complicated than a discourse of resistance can paint.21 Hence quiet, this thing that is sublime—
inexpressible, thunderous, full of awe. In humanity, quiet is inevitable and essential—it is our dignity. It is
represented by our interior, that “place in us below our hip personality that is connected to our breath, our words, and our death”
(Goldberg 28). In its magnificence, it is an invitation to consider cultural identity from somewhere other
than the conceptual places that we have come to accept as definitive of black culture—not the “hip
personality” exposed to and performed for the world, but the interior charisma, the reservoir of
human complexity that is deep inside. Quiet compels us to “explore the beauty of the quality of being
human,” not only our “lives weighed down by the suppositions of identity,” and in doing so, honors
the contemplative quality that is also characteristic of black culture.22 It is this exploration, this reach
toward the inner life, that an aesthetic of quiet makes possible. It is this that is the path to a sweet
freedom: a black expressiveness without publicness as its forebear, a black subject in the undisputed
dignity of its humanity.23
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AT: “You Talk, Bro”
Brief explanation of alt vs aff
Quashie 9 (Kevin Everod, Smith College, The Trouble with Publicness: Toward a Theory of Black Quiet,
African American Review, 43(2-3), Summer/Fall 2009, p. 329-43)//LA
This characterization of waiting as a quiet expressiveness is a rejection of publicness, a decided step away
from the tone and topic and advice that one might expect of an essay on being young, a woman and
colored.20 Bonner doesn’t offer a public call to arms or a private rant; she doesn’t present her
protagonist as bothered and bothersome. Instead, her subject is free, or wants to be, and her freedom
informs the narrative choices of her poetic and wandering essay.
Quiet is not silence—it’s a productive window into the interior—the distinction isn’t whether we use
words is HOW we use them—for an INTENTIONAL purpose or as a mere EXPLORTATION of Black
interiority
Quashie 9 (Kevin Everod, Smith College, The Trouble with Publicness: Toward a Theory of Black Quiet,
African American Review, 43(2-3), Summer/Fall 2009, p. 329-43)//LA
What, then, would a concept of expressiveness look like if it were not tethered to publicness? The
performative aspects of black culture are well noted, but what else can be said here? Could the
concept of quiet help to articulate a different kind of expressiveness, or even stand as a metaphor for
the interior? In everyday discourse, quiet is synonymous with silence and is the absence of sound or
movement, but for the idea of quiet to be useful here, it will need to be understood as a quality or a
sensibility of being, as a manner of expression. Such expressiveness is not concerned with publicness,
but instead is the expressiveness of the quiet symbolizes—and if interrogated, expresses—some of
the capacity of the interior. This notion of the interior is elusive but is nonetheless important to understanding quiet. Most simply,
interiority is a quality of being inward, a “metaphor” for “life and creativity beyond the public face of
stereotype and limited imagination” (Alexander x). This latter description is from Elizabeth Alexander’s collection Black Interior,
and it captures precisely the value of the concept of the interior—that it gestures away from the caricatures of
racial subjectivity that are either racist or intended to counter racism, and suggests what is essentially
and indescribably human. The interior is the inner reservoir of thoughts, feelings, desires, fears,
ambitions that shape a human self; it is both a space of a wild self-indulgence and “the locus at which
selfinterrogation takes place” (Spillers 383; original emphasis). Said another way, the interior is expansive,
voluptuous, creative, impulsive, dangerous, and not subject to one’s control—it has to be taken on its
own terms. It is not to be confused with intentionality or consciousness, since it is something more
chaotic than that; it is more akin to hunger, memory, forgetting, the edges of all the humanity one
has. Despite its name, the interior is not unconnected to the world of things (the public or political or social
world), nor is it an exact antonym for exterior. Instead, the interior shifts in regard to life’s stimuli but
it is neither resistant to nor overdetermined by the vagaries of the outer world. The interior has its
own ineffable integrity.12 There is in trying to describe the interior a predicament of expression since the interior is not
really discursive—it cannot be represented fully and is largely indescribable. Furthermore, the interior
is largely known through language or behavior, through exterior manifestations, and is therefore hard
to know on its own terms. At best, it can be approximated or implied, but its vastness and wildness
escape definitive characterization. Yet the interior is expressive; it is articulate and meaningful and
has social impact. It is indeed the combination of the interior’s expressiveness, and the inability to
articulately it fully, that makes interiority such a meaningful idiom for rethinking the nature of black
expressiveness. Quiet, then, is the expressiveness of this interior, an inexpressible expressiveness that
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can appear publicly, have and affect social and political meaning, and challenge or counter social
discourse, though none of this is its aim or essence. That is, since the interior is not essentially resistant, then quiet is
an expressiveness that is not consumed with intentionality. It is in this regard that the distinction
between quiet and silence is more clear: silence, in a purely denotative sense, implies something that
is suppressed or repressed, an interiority that is about withholding, something hidden or absent;
quiet, more simply, is presence. (One can, for example, describe a sound or prose as quiet.) It is true
that silence can be expressive, but its expression is often based on refusal or protest, not the
abundance of the interior described above. The expressiveness of silence is often aware of an
audience, a watcher or listener whose presence is the reason for the withholding. This is a key
difference between the two terms because in its inwardness, the aesthetic of quiet watcher-less.
Finally, quiet is not necessarily or essentially stillness; in fact quiet, as the expressiveness of inner life,
can encompass and represent wild motion.13 The Signifying Subject and the Aesthetic of Quiet The idea of an aesthetic
of quiet is foreign to but not incompatible with black cultural studies. For example, the trope of signifying is widely
considered distinctive of black cultural expression. Based on the “verbal art of ritualized insult in which the speaker puts down, needles, or talks
about someone, to make a point or sometimes just for fun,” the concept of signifying celebrates the use of humor, indirection, and word play
(Smitherman, Black Talk 207). Conceptually, verbal
signifying has three rhetorical components—what is said, what
is unsaid, and the relationship between the two. The piece that is said is often demonstrative,
conscious of the listening audience, and contrasts with the silence of what is unspoken. The power of
signifying as a rhetorical act lies in the third component—the dialectic produced between what is
spoken and what is not—as irony, indirection and juxtaposition coalesce to create meaning that is
complicated and subtle, even surprising. In fact, it is never assured that the act of signifying will yield, for
the reader or listener, the desired expression. In this regard, signifying is a transcendent expressiveness, relying
unreliably on prolific interplay between said and unsaid, public and private; one cannot appreciate it
by only paying attention to what is said, explicitly or directly. Nevertheless, the general discussion of
signifying as verbal exchange tends to focus on its public dimension, on the demonstrative and
cocksure exteriority of the trope rather than its capacity to serve as an idiom of interiority. This
emphasis categorizes signifying as an essentially public expressivity, for even when the act of
signifying is not in reference to a discourse of resistance, the meaningfulness of the signifying act
depends on the concept of publicness (e.g., audience).14
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AT: “Must Resist”
We don’t preclude the possibility of breaking down dominant structures or white supremacy—it’s just
that our strategy cannot be one of resistance—an aesthetics of Quiet is preferable
Quashie 9 (Kevin Everod, Smith College, The Trouble with Publicness: Toward a Theory of Black Quiet,
African American Review, 43(2-3), Summer/Fall 2009, p. 329-43)//LA
The interest in quiet arrives because of the trouble posed by public expressiveness, particularly the
assumption that black culture is predominantly resistant. This characterization is so ordinary that it
ends up simplifying blackness. Furthermore, because the characterization is supported by the political
and historical reality of black people—for example, the important role expressiveness plays in the struggles for civil rights—it
goes largely unchallenged. The problem here is not expressiveness per se, but that black
expressiveness is so tethered to what is public and to a discourse of resistance. As it is engaged, this
concept of public expressiveness presumes to know and to say everything, clearly and definitively.
This is why it is useful to political discourse, because it can allow a group to speak with a sense of singular purpose. In this
regard, public expressiveness is the workhorse of nationalism, and is vital to any marginalized
population. Perhaps this makes sense, since there is no question about the meaningfulness of race and especially racism in American
culture, the way racism influences and shapes black culture; there is also no question that resistance, as individual and collective action or as an
aesthetic, is a meaningful part of black culture, historically and in the present. But
there is still an important question about
the other qualities of black culture that are overwhelmed by the dominance of resistance as an
aesthetic. Simply, what else beyond resistance can we say about the shape and meaning of black
culture and subjectivity?16 The contention is in the way publicness has a chokehold on black culture
and identity. It is hard to imagine a conceptualization of blackness that does not already envision
itself—and the humanness of its struggle to be free—within the context set by publicness: as a subjectivity whose
expressiveness is demonstrative and resistant. Hortense Spillers is right when she notes that “every feature of social and
human differentiation disappears in public discourses regarding African-Americans” (224). This is precisely the need for a
concept of interiority, so that it may support representations of blackness that are irreverent, messy,
complicated—representations that have greater human texture and specificity than the broad caption
of resistance can offer. We should be wary of the dominance of expressiveness as a black aesthetic
and of the easy conclusions that it makes possible.17 This interior expressiveness is already present in Smith’s and Carlos’s
protest, if we can remember to ask questions about their hearts in excited flutter, their heads bowed, the inwardness of their bodies in prayer.
Part of what makes their protest so striking is its stark contrast with another iconic image of black publicness—the black body hanging from a
tree. The magnitude of the contrast is heightened by the aesthetic similarity between photographs of their 1968 protest and images of lynched
bodies. But even at its most horrible, the image of the lynchee is one of silence and speaks through the alphabet of violent repression. Smith’s
and Carlos’s image, on the other hand, is alive, is articulate in its quiet; though
they do not speak, their language is a
generous vocabulary of humanity. In this context, Smith and Carlos are a triumphant, beautiful
alternative.18 But there is also a danger in only reading their moment for the way it counters the
violence of white supremacy, as an alternative—to do so is to disregard the evidence of their
humanity for its own sake, that they are strong but also vulnerable, two people in a moment of grace,
all thrill and tremble and loveliness. It is not only the explicit public argument that they are making
about racism and poverty that should be important to us, or even their implied contrast with untold
numbers of murdered others. What must also matter is the argument announced in their posture of
surrender, the glimpse of their exquisite interiors. Their protest is more fluent because of this
expressiveness that is not dependent on publicness; they are compelling as much for their quiet as for
the very publicity of their expression.
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Brown
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Brown 1NC
The 1AC is symptomatic of the modern liberal order’s fetishization of breaking silence—this aesthetic
is flawed and will only retrench systems of domination
Brown 5 (Wendy, Prof @ UC Berkeley, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics, Freedom’s
Silences, p. 83-97)//LA
As freedom is both realized and negated by choice, so is silence con- vened, broken, and organized by
speech. Silence and speech are not only constitutive of but also modalities of one another. They are
differ- ent kinds of articulation that produce as well as negate each other. Si- lence calls for speech,
yet speech, because it is always particular speech, vanquishes other possible speech, thus canceling the promise
of full representation heralded by silence. Silence, both constituted and broken by particular speech, is neither more nor less
“truthful” than speech is, and neither more nor less regulatory. Speech harbors silences; silences harbor meaning. When
silence is broken by speech, new silences are fabricated and enforced; when speech ends, the ensuing silence carries meaning that can only be metaphorized by speech, thus producing the conviction
that silence speaks. The belief that silence and speech are opposites is a conceit underly- ing most
contemporary discourse about censorship and silence. This conceit enables both the assumption that censorship
converts the truth of speech to the lie of silence and the assumption that when an en- forced silence is
broken, what emerges is truth borne by the vessel of authenticity or experience. Calling these
assumptions into question means not only thinking about the relation between silence and speech
differently but also rethinking the powers and potentials of silence. Here is the way this problem unfolds politically:
insurrection re- quires breaking silence about the very existence as well as the activity or injury of the
collective insurrectionary subject. Even dreams of emancipation cannot take shape unless the discursively
shadowy or altogether invisible character of those subjects, wounds, events, or ac- tivities is redressed, whether through slave
ballads, the flaunting of forbidden love, the labor theory of value, or the quantification of housework. Nor are the silences
constituted in discourses of subordi- nation broken forever when they are broken once. They do not
shatter the moment their strategic function has been exposed, but must be as- saulted repeatedly with
stories, histories, theories, and discourses in alternate registers until the silence itself is rendered routinely intelligi- ble
as a historically injurious force. In this way, those historically ex- cluded from liberal personhood have
proceeded against the spectrum of silences limning the universal claims of humanist discourse for the
past several centuries. Jews, immigrants, women, people of color, homosexuals, the unpropertied: all have pressed
themselves into civic belonging not simply through asserting their personhood but through
politicizing—articulating—the silent workings of their internally excluded presence within prevailing
notions of personhood. But while the silences in discourses of domination are a site for insurrectionary noise, while they are the corridors to be filled with ex- plosive counter tales, it is also possible to make a
fetish of breaking silence. It is possible as well that this ostensible tool of emancipation carries its own
techniques of subjugation—that it converges with une- mancipatory tendencies in contemporary
culture, establishes regula- tory norms, coincides with the disciplinary power of ubiquitous confessional practices;
in short, it may feed the powers it meant to starve. Neither a defense of silence nor an injunction to silence, this essay
interrogates the presumed authenticity of “voice” in the implicit equa- tion between speech and
freedom entailed in contemporary affirma- tions of breaking silence. Borrowing tacitly from Foucault’s theorization of confessional
discourse, Joan W. Scott’s problematization of experi- ence, and Shoshana Felman’s and Dori Laub’s identification of our time as the age of
testimony,1 the essay asks whether our contemporary crisis of truth has not been displaced into an endless stream of words
about
ourselves, words that presume to escape epistemological challenges to truth because they are personal
or experiential. It asks as well whether this stream of words does not perpetuate the crisis of which it is a
symptom. In the course of this inquiry, silence is considered as not simply an aesthetic but a political
value, a means of preserving certain practices and dimensions of existence from regulatory power,
from normative violence, as well as from the scorching rays of public exposure. A link is examined, too,
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between, on the one hand, a contemporary tendency concerning the lives of public figures—the confession or extraction of every detail (sexual,
familial, therapeutic, financial) of private and per- sonal life––and, on the other, a putatively countercultural or emanci- patory practice: the
compulsive putting into public discourse of heretofore hidden or private experiences, from catalogues of sexual pleasures to litanies of sexual
abuses, from chronicles of eating disor- ders to diaries of home births and gay parenting. In linking these two phenomena—the privatization of
public life via the mechanism of public exposure of private life on the one hand, and the compulsive and compulsory cataloguing of the details
of marginalized lives on the other—I
want to highlight a modality of regulation and depoliticiza- tion specific to
our age that is not simply confessional but empties pri- vate life into the public domain. The effect is both to
abet the steady commercialization and homogenization of intimate attachments, expe- riences, and emotions already achieved by the market
and to usurp public space with often trivial matters, rendering
the political personal in a fashion that leaves injurious
social, political, and economic pow- ers unremarked and untouched. In short, while intended as a
practice of freedom (premised on the modernist conceit that the truth makes us free), these productions of truth may
have the capacity not only to chain us to our injurious histories as well as the stations of our small
lives, but to instigate the further regulation of those lives while depoliticizing their conditions.
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2NC Silence Solves
The kritik is the debate equivalent of the 5th amendment—silence makes possible resistance to the
structures of power
Brown 5 (Wendy, Prof @ UC Berkeley, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics, Freedom’s
Silences, p. 83-97)//LA
The paradoxical capacity of silence to engage opposites with regard to power—both to shelter power
and to serve as a barrier against power—is rarely accented in Foucault’s thinking as a consequence of his
emphasis (elsewhere) on discourse as a vehicle of power. In casting silence as a potential refuge from
power, I do not think he is reneging on this emphasis or suggesting a prediscursive existence to things.
Critical here is the difference between what Foucault calls unitary dis- courses, which regulate and colonize,
and those that do not perform these functions with the same social pervasiveness, even while they do
not escape the tendency of all discourse to establish norms by which it regulates and excludes. Through
this distinction one can make sense of Foucault’s otherwise inexplicable reference to sex in the eighteenth century as being “driven out of
hiding and constrained to lead a dis- cursive existence,” or his troubling example of the village simpleton whose “inconsequential” sexual game
with a little girl was suddenly subjected to medical, judicial, and popular scrutiny and condemna- tion.9 Neither in these cases nor in others
where Foucault seems to imply a “freer,” because prediscursive, existence to certain practices does he appear to mean that they really
occurred “outside” discourse; the point is rather that they
had not yet been brought into the perva- sive disciplinary
or biopolitical discourses of the age—science, psychi- atry, medicine, law, pedagogy.10 Silence, as
Foucault affirms it, is then identical neither with secrecy nor with not speaking. It instead signi- fies a
particular relation to regulatory discourses, as well as a possible niche for the practice of freedom
within those discourses. Put differently, if discourses posit and organize silences, then silences themselves
must be understood as discursively produced, as part of dis- course, rather than as its opposite. Hence
silences are no more free of or- ganization by power than speech is, nor are they any more inventable
or protectable by us than speech is. Yet, and paradoxically, silence—even that produced within
discourse—may also function as that which dis- course has not penetrated, as a scene of practices that
escape the regula- tory functions of discourse. It is this latter function that renders silence itself a
source of protection and potentially even a source of power. The Fifth Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution may be understood as mobi- lizing precisely this power against discourse, even as the
amendment itself functions discursively and leads a distinctly discursive life.
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2NC Turns Case
Speaking out makes liberation impossible and turns the case—endorse instead a productive silence
with the potential to actualize freedom
Brown 5 (Wendy, Prof @ UC Berkeley, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics, Freedom’s
Silences, p. 83-97)//LA
This problem is not specific to MacKinnon’s work nor even to femi- nist legal reform, although it emerges with particular acuteness in both.
Rather, MacKinnon’s and kindred efforts
at bringing subjugated discourses into the law merely constitute
examples of what Foucault identified as the risk of recodification and recolonization of “disin- terred
knowledges” by those “unitary discourses, which first disquali- fied and then ignored them when they
made their appearance.” These efforts suggest how the work of breaking silence can metamorphose into new
techniques of domination, how our truths can become our rulers rather than our emancipators, how our
confessions become the norms by which we are regulated. Though this kind of regulatory function is
familiar enough to stu- dents of legal and bureaucratic discourse, it is less frequently recog- nized and
perhaps more disquieting in putatively countercultural discourse, when confessing injury can become
that which attaches us to the injury, paralyzes us within it, and prevents us from seeking or even
desiring a status other than that of injured. In an age of social identification through attributes marked as culturally
significant— gender, race, sexuality, and so forth—confessional discourse, with its truth-bearing status in a postepistemological
universe, not only regu- lates the confessor in the name of freeing her, as Foucault described that logic, but extends beyond the
confessing individual to constitute a regulatory truth about the identity group: confessed truths are
assembled and deployed as “knowledge” about the group. This phe- nomenon would seem to undergird a range of
recurring troubles in feminism, from the “real woman” rejoinder to poststructuralist decon- structions of her to totalizing descriptions
of women’s experience that are the inadvertent effects of various kinds of survivor stories. Thus, for
example, the porn star who feels miserably exploited, violated, and humiliated in her work invariably monopolizes the feminist truth about sex
work, as the girl with math anxieties constitutes the feminist truth about women and math; eating disorders have become the femi- nist truth
about women and food, as sexual abuse and violation oc- cupy the feminist knowledge terrain of women and sexuality. In other words, even as
feminism aims to affirm diversity among women and women’s experiences, confession as the site of production of truth, converging with
feminist suspicion and de-authorization of truth from other sources, tends to reinstate a unified discourse in which the
story of greatest
suffering becomes the true story of woman. (This may con- stitute part of the rhetorical purchase of confessional discourse in
a postfoundational epistemological era: confession substitutes for the largely discredited charge of false consciousness, on the one hand, and
for generalized truth claims rooted in science, God, or nature on the other.) Thus, the adult who does not manifestly suffer from her or his
childhood sexual experience, the lesbian who does not feel shame, the woman of color who does not primarily or “correctly” identify with her
marking as such—these
figures are excluded as bona fide members of the identity categories that also
claim them. Their status within these discourses is that of being “in denial,” of suffering from “false
consciousness,” or of being a “race traitor.” This is the norm-making process in traditions of “breaking
silence,” which, ironically, silence and exclude the very persons these traditions mean to empower.
While these practices tacitly silence those who do not share the ex- periences of those whose suffering is most marked (or whom the discourse produces as suffering markedly), they also condemn those whose sufferings they record to a permanent
identification with that suffering. Here, there is a temporal ensnaring in “the folds of our own discourses” insofar as our manner of
identifying ourselves in speech condemns us to live in a present dominated by the past. But what if speech and silence aren’t really
opposites? Indeed, what if to speak in- cessantly of one’s suffering is to silence the possibilities of
overcoming it, of living beyond it, of identifying as something other than it? What if this incessant speech
overwhelms not only the experiences of others but also alternative (unutterable, traumatized, fragmentary, or
unas- similable) zones of one’s own experience? Conversely, what if a certain modality of silence about one’s
suffering—and we might consider modalities of silence to be as varied as modalities of speech—articulates a variety of
possibilities not otherwise available to the sufferer?
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General Impact to Identity
The aff ontologizes identity as monolithic—this locks in racism and makes resistance to domination
impossible
Brown 6 (Wendy, Prof @ UC Berkeley, Regulation Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire,
p. 143-4)//LA [NOTE: MOT = Museum of Tolerance]
Fourth, this amalgamation of differences facilitates slides between them; for example, the United Farm Workers’ struggle can be included
under tolerance because this economic justice project happens to attach to brown bodies. The amalgamation
makes possible an
especially pernicious interchangeability between religion, culture, ethnicity, and race, and
interchangeability that isn’t entirely reducible to analytic sloppiness or to the effect of extending the model of
Judaism to everything else. Rather, these categories become fungible when identity is ontologized such that
belief and practice are derived from blood or phenotype. This ontologization is what makes perversely
intelligible the inclusion of racial difference as a candidate for tolerance within a definition of tolerance as “the
acceptance of beliefs and practice that differ from one’s own.” It also permits the slip from religion to race when the Millennium Machine video
on terrorism asks viewers whether racial profiling is an acceptable security measure in the aftermath of an attack by Islamic terrorists. The
implication is that people of a certain phenotype or appearance inherently hew to a particular set of
beliefs and that those beliefs, in turn, can produce a certain set of diabolical practices. Once culture,
ethnicity, race, and religion are all part of the generic problem of difference, and once identity itself is ontologized, this chain
of logic becomes possible. Yet this derivation of belief and practices from race is what the MOT
elsewhere defines as stereotyping and condemns as an enemy of tolerance. Moreover, the naturalization
and amalgamation of difference inscribes the very racism, sexism, and homophobia is purports to
redress. It makes identity ontological rather than as an effect of the powers that produce it—indeed,
that produce every Us and Them, whether women and men, Korean and black, homosexual and heterosexual, or Jew or Christian.
In casting difference as an inherent ground of hostility, this logic affirms the tribalism it claims to
deplore. But this is also the logic that permits a definition of tolerance as “the acceptance of beliefs and practices that differ from one’s
own” to be sustained when dealing with categories such as race and gender that would seemingly undermine it. If difference is natural
and deep, then it contours belief and practice even where these do not take expressly religious or cultural shape. So race
and gender, as sites of deep difference, constitute the basis for disparate beliefs and practices; in the
process, sexism and racism are reduced to the failure to treat “difference” with respect, to accord it
human dignity despite its strangeness. In this radically depoliticized account of subordination and
domination, hegemony and marginalization, the natural diffidence of difference becomes the engine
of human history.
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*AFF—No Alt Solvency
Your author concludes aff—silence doesn’t solve oppression
Brown 5 (Wendy, Prof @ UC Berkeley, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics, Freedom’s
Silences, p. 83-97)//LA
It is tempting to end on this note. But it favors one side of a paradox about silence and silencing without recalling the other. For while silence can be a mode of resistance to power, including to our own pro- ductions of regulatory power, it
is not yet freedom precisely insofar as it constitutes resistance to domination rather than its own
discursive bid for hegemony. Put another way, one challenge to the convention of equating speaking with
power and silence with powerlessness per- tains to the practice of “refusing to speak” as a mode of
resistance. Here, even as silence is a response to domination, it is not enforced from above but rather
deployed from below: refusing to speak is a method of refusing colonization, of refusing complicity in injurious
interpella- tions or in subjection through regulation. Yet it would be a mistake to value this resistance too highly, for
it is, like most rights claims, a defense in the context of domination, a strat- egy for negotiating
domination, rather than a sign of emancipation from it. In The Alchemy of Race and Rights, the black legal scholar Patricia
Williams coins a provocative phrase that captures this feature of si- lence as discourse. Following a disturbing encounter with some ob- noxious
young students who jostled her off the sidewalk in a largely white college town, she speaks of “pursuing her way, manumitted into silence.”23
In this paradoxical locution, Williams intimates that pur- chased emancipation from slavery conferred a right to silence, one to which, however,
she is also condemned. “Manumitted
into silence”— emancipated into silence—no longer a subject of
coerced speech, no longer invaded in every domain of her being, yet also not heard, seen, recognized,
wanted as a speaking being in the public or social realm. Perhaps then, one historical-political place of
silence for collective sub- jects emerging into history is this crossed one: a place of potentially
pleasurable reprieve in newly acquired zones of freedom and privacy, yet a place of “freedom from”
that is not yet freedom to make the world.
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Hundleby
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Routes of the Oppressed 1NC
The aff reveals the perspective of the oppressed, and in so doing shares their secrets—this
undermines the potential for resistance, turning the case
Hundleby 5 (Catherine, U of Windsor, The Epistemological Evaluation of Oppositional Secrets, Hypatia,
20(4), Fall 2005, p. 44-58)//LA
I keep secrets. Even though I am told over and over by white feminists that we must reveal ourselves, open
ourselves, I keep secrets. Disclosing our secrets threatens our survival. —María Lugones Postcolonial and other
oppositional literature introduces many readers to secrets from the social margins, sometimes only
mentioning them, sometimes sharing their content. Moving beyond colonialism and other forms of
oppres- sion is as much a goal as a description of this writing. Because survival may be threatened, the
question arises in what circumstances feminists should expect the secrets of oppressed people to be
shared, and so in what circumstances we should investigate or reveal them. This issue seems to
confound the central claim of standpoint epistemologists—postcolonial, feminist, or otherwise—that
there is cognitive value in learning from people’s experiences of oppression (Harding 1991; Hartsock 1986; Mills
1998). Whether or not one shares similar experiences, standpoint theorists argue, to begin thought
from the perspective of “others” and “other ‘others,’” as Sandra Harding puts it, provides an epistemic advantage.
Secrets concerned with resistance, such as in the Underground Railroad, women’s shelters, and lesbian passing,
must be especially valuable and relevant to developing knowledge from a standpoint, because activism is
supposed to be necessary to acquire the advantage. Yet, revealing aspects of resistance so vulnerable that they are
kept secret threatens to undermine the potential of those secrets for resisting and opposing
oppression. Thus, the epistemological value of oppositional secrecy seems to conflict with standpoint
theorists’ advice of emancipatory activism. The case of oppositional secrecy seems to indicate an
exception to standpoint theory, a case in which emancipatory politics does not encourage but
prohibits sharing understanding. However, as I argue in this essay, the need to preserve oppositional secrecy is not an exception
to, but only a limited case of, standpoint epistemology. Political considerations do not bar some of the understandings
that might be gained, but political distinctions do indicate when and where the cognitive value of such
understandings tapers off. The cognitive signifi- cance of exposing hidden understanding reduces in
cases of extreme political vulnerability that morally require secrecy.
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Turns Case
Secrets are a prerequisite to liberation—revealing them endangers the lives and freedoms of the
oppressed
Hundleby 5 (Catherine, U of Windsor, The Epistemological Evaluation of Oppositional Secrets, Hypatia,
20(4), Fall 2005, p. 44-58)//LA
Given the two distinguishable forms of oppositional secrecy, the question remains what political reasons generally keep
people who oppose oppression from revealing or investigating the secrets of the oppressed despite
the potential understanding to be gained. How does a person guided by standpoint theory decide
when an oppositional secret may be revealed? How does an intellectual activist against oppression,
who may or may not share a particular experi- ence of oppression, know when to resist revealing or
investigating politically justified secrecy? Whether one shares the particular experience of oppression,
or shares the secret itself, the most obvious reasons for respecting the secrets of the oppressed rely
on moral and political considerations. The political project of emancipa- tion depends on keeping the
secret , at least to some extent or in some way, and so an inquirer must be aware that violating that secrecy
jeopardizes those who participate in it. The cost may be even their lives . Clearly, no foreseeable substantial
moral or political threat to the participants in a secret can result from a permissible revelation. How is the threat to the oppositional project
recognized and evaluated? People tend to resolve such dilemmas by seeking out those who share in the form of oppression, and those who are
already trusted in sharing the secret. In
the wrong hands, secrets are dangerous, can be misused, and indeed can
reinforce the circumstances of oppression, however noble one’s intentions. The type of ignorance
encouraged by social privilege may make a knower unaware of the dangerous implications of a
particular piece of knowledge for the welfare of marginalized people. Consider how white or straight folks may be
oblivious as they “out” and thus endanger a person who is passing. To ward off potential danger, one appeals to the
immorality of disrespecting the secrets of others. The decision of when and how to reveal a secret is
left as much as possible to the judgment of those whose secret it is.4 The more removed one is from
the content being hidden—whether or not the circumstance involves oppression, but with special care
if it does—the less political authority one has to evaluate that circumstance and to investigate or
share the secret.5 So, one avoids revealing or inquiring into the sexual or racial identity of others. The person or people in question judge
best the full practical and political import of open identification.
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AT: “But our project is important”
All the reasons why your project is important are reasons to keep it secret—comparative evidence
Hundleby 5 (Catherine, U of Windsor, The Epistemological Evaluation of Oppositional Secrets, Hypatia,
20(4), Fall 2005, p. 44-58)//LA
The very nature of secrecy makes it difficult to find examples—and so much the worse because
suppression and underdevelopment make understanding from an oppressed perspective difficult to
recognize. However, even a thoroughly privileged Western feminist can discern two forms of oppositional secrecy. First, oppressed
people build covert networks to escape or mitigate oppression, as in the Underground Railroad or
illegal systems providing contraceptive informa- tion and services. Second, people belonging to an
oppressed group may “pass” as having a more politically central identity. For instance, blacks may pass as white,
or gays and lesbians pass as straight; indeed, all sorts of passing is possible through marriage and name-changes. These two types of
oppositional secrecy take special forms. For instance, a
casual form of secret arises when people covertly share
information by using a language different from the politically dominant tongue. Francophones in anglophone
Canada and Latino/as in the United States occasionally make use of this tool for secrecy, and we can consider it an ad hoc
networking provision, an Underground Railroad in microcosm. The goal is to secure safe passage, not of
whole people or physical provisions, but of information alone, just as some birth control networks provide. Some oppositional secrets
combine the two strategies of passing and net- working. Passing as a typical house or generic institution may be
important for a women’s shelter, but this requires a network of support by volunteers, and strict privacy policies that keep the
shelter beyond easy access by abusers; all this together makes it possible for residents to hide their identities. (More completely covert
networks may be necessary for highly endangered clients.) Likewise, same-sex couples in the United States seeking access to marriage may use
networks to provide temporary addresses and pass as residents of states that provide access to legal marriage; and in Japan, they may pass as
parent and child to gain access to the property rights otherwise afforded to couples (Maree 2004). Another hybrid of passing and networking
that disrupts oppression is secret sabotage, including feigned helplessness, an underground activity that depends on passing. A slave who
intentionally damages farm machinery to provide another slave time to recuperate from an illness wishes to pass as a dutiful slave but also to
negotiate systematic reprieve for the other (Douglass 1995). Appearing dutiful is also necessary for the unhappy mother who intentionally asks
nonsensical questions, or burns dinner and breaks dishes. Her behavior
provides reprieve from the indignity that can infect
vided by demonstrating to herself her own measure of independence (Lugones 2003, 5–6). The
effects of secrecy vary according to context and are difficult to predict. What is meant to be
oppositional may instead be collaborative, and generally involves both. Any oppositional activity is
likely to be “curdled,” that is, both blended with repressive aspects and ambiguous in the face of interlocking
oppressions (Lugones 2003, 8–16). On the oppositional side, consider how passing tends be more useful for lesbians than gay men who
mothering, a reprieve pro-
may confront het- erosexism without the complications of sexism (Card 1995). Yet, for lesbians, passing entails a special risk of collaboration:
the invisibility of lesbian identity encourages neglect of lesbian issues and dismissal of specific lesbian concerns as merely personal or at best
marginal and insignificant. Thus, lesbian invis-
ibility can perpetuate lesbians’ minority status; indeed, any case of
passing can perpetuate servility to the dominant culture and so undermine personal dignity (Card 1995,
120). So, the strategy of passing is easily corrupted. Note how passing as white is fraught for African Americans seeking the
benefits of skin privilege, who may therefore perceive themselves and be perceived by others as traitors. Unintentional
collaboration in oppressive systems is less a danger for delib- erate underground avenues of
resistance. Admittedly, a casual linguistic secret or underground network depends on those in power
being substantially igno- rant, and ignorance of marginalized lives can be a source of oppression.2 The occupation of
separate physical and linguistic domains may support oppressive social systems. Yet employing the
marginalized environment as an avenue for resistance need not validate the system of privilege in the
same way or to nearly the same degree as acquiring the privileges of the political center by passing.
The ignorance that makes possible underground networks does not directly create the oppressive
environment. In no immediate sense does a slave owner’s ignorance of how to survive in the wild oppress the slaves, or a Canadian
anglophone’s ignorance of the French language oppress francophones.3 However, collaboration may result indirectly from
even the most pointed of oppositional actions, and thus to hidden emancipatory networks. The success of
the Underground Railroad was double-edged, as abolitionist and escaped slave Frederick Douglass warned. Of course, some slaves gained hope
and abo- litionists gained inspiration from hearing of it. However, even the very limited awareness of it available to slaveholders, an awareness
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that might be dismissed as rumor, could make the slaveholders extra vigilant, and may ultimately have served their interests more than the
slaves (Douglass 1995, 60). Despite
such frequently ambiguous implications of political secrecy, it cer- tainly
can be very effective, and it is not a strategy unique to the oppressed. Covert networks and disguises
also undermine legitimate forms of social control. Still, underground systems of prisoners whose social suppression is
politically warranted can be left out of this discussion, at least insofar as we can distinguish between oppression and politically warranted
suppression. Inmates in a prison may find means of sharing drugs and weapons, and for continued illegal and immoral behavior, means that
resemble those of Jews in a concentration camp for sharing food and water; yet revealing
unjust networks poses no problem
for standpoint theory. The relevant difference is not the materials exchanged and particular activities
of networks, which only illustrate the contrast with net- works mobilized against oppression. What
morally distinguishes the cases—or aspects of the cases, as they are curdled—is the purpose for the
form of under- ground network, whether the goal is politically justified. People imprisoned as a result
of racist or classist social policies that may, for instance, lead them to steal in order to eat, have oppositional
knowledge. Their perspective provides cognitive advantage, productive alternative perspectives. As for
networks, so for passing. Consider the moral dilemmas of blacks passing as white in the Harlem renaissance that provide the backdrop for Nella
Larsen’s novella Passing (1997). Gertrude’s passing as white motivated by love is sympathetic, and so it is interesting for standpoint theory. By
contrast, standpoint theorists can find little of cognitive significance in Gertrude’s friend Clare passing as white insofar as it is motivated by
luxury. Straightforward social climbing is not politically justified and reflects only a mainstream perspective. Apparent
similarities
between oppositional secrets and other forms of secrecy need not confound people who use
standpoint epistemology.
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Impact Calc/AT: Case OWs
The K outweighs—there’s no risk that the political efficacy of the aff outweighs its epistemic harms—
default to EXPLICIT impact comparison
Hundleby 5 (Catherine, U of Windsor, The Epistemological Evaluation of Oppositional Secrets, Hypatia,
20(4), Fall 2005, p. 44-58)//LA
Can cognitive advantage to the general community be sufficient to outweigh the political
disadvantage of marginalized people losing a strategic secret? Does it make sense to think this way? On
the one hand, weighing cognitive against political values seems like comparing apples with oranges. On the other hand, speaking as if
cognition can be wholly separated from and contrasted with political or ethical values not only sounds crass
but can only be a heuristic for identifying conflicting interests. Such dichotomies are denied by feminist philosophers of science (Longino 1997; Nelson and Nelson 1995), and particularly by standpoint theorists (Hartsock 1983; Rose 1983),
who maintain that the cognitive value to accrue from obtaining an oppositional standpoint is always
politically dependent. If the secrets are used to resist oppression, the political interests clearly take
priority, but it is not clear just how much priority relative to the epistemological interests. Yet an
account of the intersection between political and epistemological interests can aid responsible
inquiry, both personal and scientific. Distinguishing epistemological concerns may be artificial, but still
informative, if only because people tend to divide up human interests by separating cognitive from
ethical and political values. The epistemological value of a standpoint depends on there being a political center and contrasting social
margins. Without the existence of oppression, no perspective provides a special epistemological
advantage. A certain cognitive value derives from a particular form of oppression up until the point at which we eradicate it. With the
achievement of social justice comes the elimination of what made that perspective demand special political and cognitive atten- tion.
Without oppression, understanding from a particular social perspective is no longer underdeveloped
or suppressed, and so it brings no special cognitive advantage (Figure 1). Epistemological Value I suggest that just as
for both suppressed and underdeveloped knowledge, politi- cal conditions can be portrayed in epistemological terms
in the case of opposi- tional secrecy. There are both cognitive and political reasons for respecting the
authority of those experiencing oppression. This means that decisions about investigating or revealing
secrets can be covered in the terms of a standpoint epistemology, and are not simply a matter of the
political values outweighing the epistemological. What appears to be an ethical trumping of
cognitive interests is simply a nonstarter in cognitive terms that cannot motivate the revelation of
politically necessitated secrets. Little potential for gaining understanding about the world can arise
from perspectives that are extremely vulnerable because of political circumstances. Admittedly, secrecy
restricts access to certain information and cognitive skills, detracting from the flow of information that makes multiple perspectives available,
and which benefits a community in general. For
those who don’t share the secret, and especially for those whom
are pointedly deceived—the slaveholders, batterers, and homophobes—the withheld wisdom could
be very valuable .
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2NC Link
Revealing the secrets of the oppressed destroys the value to life and turns the case—any risk of a link
outweighs since minor revelations snowball
Hundleby 5 (Catherine, U of Windsor, The Epistemological Evaluation of Oppositional Secrets, Hypatia,
20(4), Fall 2005, p. 44-58)//LA
The benefit for an outsider’s understanding of the world diminishes with the preciousness of the
secret. Such understandings are not merely suppressed or underdeveloped, but valuable because of
and therefore contingent on the possibility of social change. If an understanding is extremely
vulnerable in the current political climate, there is only a small chance that it will bear out. The project
served by the secret is likely to fail. For instance, sharing knowledge of the existence of a secret may
encourage others to seek out further details, and endanger the plans and corresponding projection of
the world, as Douglass worried. Whatever aspect of a secret is revealed, revelation of the information tends
to change the political nature of the world and can undermine the secret’s cognitive potential if that
potential is fragile. Fresh scrutiny will face the sabo- taging wife should others become aware that there is some secret regarding her
behavior. Their watchful eyes will make it difficult for her to continue to act out, and so will amplify the
oppression she experiences. The extreme case of genocide demonstrates vividly how political necessity
mitigates epistemological values. There approaches nothing to learn of the future world from the
understandings of peoples who do not survive. Although there is much to learn from them about their
oppression, that oppression stops being part of the world as those oppressed people stop being part
of the world. The world becomes less the world those people lived in and understood, and 7 their
perspectives decline in relevance and epistemological value.
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*AFF—Case OWs
Case comes first—secrets are only relevant if the oppressed have value, and only the aff can maintain
that
Hundleby 5 (Catherine, U of Windsor, The Epistemological Evaluation of Oppositional Secrets, Hypatia,
20(4), Fall 2005, p. 44-58)//LA
Whatever motivation there is for secret understandings, their cognitive value largely depends on how
the world is shaped by politics now and in the possible future. The more access abusers have to their victims, the less
difference the victims’ meager secrets can make, even to the victims themselves, and the less real is the content of those secrets, in both a
literal and a psychological sense. It is less possible for gays and lesbians to pass, and so less informative that they do, so long as they are
persecuted. The more thoroughgoing and accepted is slavery, the less the Underground Railroad can work to develop and preserve African
Americans’ culture, self-esteem, and individual lives. The
knowledge kept secret by people who suffer these forms of
oppression is useful and true only to the extent that the world might support the value and the
legitimacy of those people’s lives, a possibility that is threatened and undermined by oppression.
Secrets of the oppressed are meaningful views of the world and have cognitively important
consequences especially to the extent that those secrets support an otherwise endangered moral
status and provide for political emancipation, which is to say, to the extent that they have morally
desirable consequences. Likewise, to the extent that oppositional politics require secrecy on moral
grounds, the cognitive returns of revealing those secrets diminish and little is told of the present
world.
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Nuclear Racism
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Cards
The “acceptable risk” mentality of the affirmative is a tacit endorsement of this racism
Green 99 (Jim Green is the national anti-nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth Australia and
Australian coordinator of the Beyond Nuclear Initiative.[1] Green is a regular media commentator on
nuclear waste issues.[2] He has an honors degree in public health and was awarded a PhD in science and
technology studies for his analysis of the Lucas Heights research reactor debate “Radioactive racism”
http://www.reocities.com/jimgreen3/racism.html)//BK
"Racism makes the continuing production of nuclear waste possible. If the white people who make decisions
about nuclear waste felt that the people of color in poor areas are as valuable as the decision makers' own
mothers and fathers and sons and daughters, would they continue to dump nuclear waste in those areas? If
tailings from uranium mining were located next to the homes of investment bankers instead of the homes of
indigenous people, would uranium mining continue? The continuation of the nuclear fuel cycle depends ...
on the practice of human sacrifice. It depends on affluent whites deciding to risk the health and lives of
people who are not affluent or white. This is what 'acceptable risk' often means in practice."
Racism must be rejected in every instance
Barndt 91 (Joseph R. Barndt co-director of Ministry Working to Dismantle Racism "Dismantling Racism"
p. 155)//BK
To study racism is to study walls. We have looked at barriers and fences, restraints and limitations, ghettos and prisons. The
prison of racism confines us all, people of color and white people alike. It shackles the victimizer as well as
the victim. The walls forcibly keep people of color and white people separate from each other; in our separate prisons we are all
prevented from achieving the human potential God intends for us. The limitations imposed on people of color by poverty,
subservience, and powerlessness are cruel, inhuman, and unjust; the effects of uncontrolled power,
privilage, and greed, whicha are the marks of our white prison, will inevitably destroy us as well. But we have
also seen that the walls of racism can be dismantled. We are not condemned to an inexorable fate, but are
offered the vision and the possibility of freedom. Brick by brick, stone by stone, the prison of individual,
institutional, and cultural racism can be destroyed. You and I are urgently called to joing the efforst of those
who know it is time to tear down, once and for all, the walls of racism. The danger point of self-destruction
seems to be drawing even more near. The results of centuries of national and worldwide conquest and
colonialism, of military buildups and violent aggression, of overconsumption and environmental destruction
may be reaching a point of no return. A small and predominantly white minority of the global population
derives its power and privelage from the sufferings of vast majority of peoples of all color. For the sake of the
world and ourselves, we dare not allow it to continue.
It is no accident that Nuclear plants are located in minority communities NY Times 97 (“Power Plant Is Rejected Over Racism Concerns”
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/05/04/us/power-plant-is-rejected-over-racism-concerns.html)//BK
The commission's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, in a decision issued on Friday, said its own staff must more
thoroughly examine accusations that Louisiana Energy Services purposely chose to locate the plant close to
poor, black neighborhoods in northern Louisiana. ''Certainly the possibility that racial considerations played a
part in the site selection cannot be passed off as mere coincidence,'' the board wrote. Three years ago, President
Clinton ordered Federal agencies to protect minorities from disproportionately large exposure to pollution. If
Mr. Clinton's order is to have any weight, the board said, ''the staff must lift some rocks and look under them.'' The
consortium chose in 1989 to build the plant about 40 miles northeast of Shreveport, between Forest Grove,
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population 150, founded by freed slaves, and Center Springs, population 100, founded around the turn of the
century.
These waste sites will inevitably create health problems for future generations – all the result of
attempts to increase profits.
Brook 98 [Daniel, “Environmental Genocide: Native Americans and Toxic Waste,” American Journal of
Economics and Sociology, Vol. 57, No. 1, Jan., pp. 105-113,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3487423.pdf]
Unfortunately, it
is a sad but true fact that "virtually every landfill leaks, and every incinerator emits hundreds
of toxic chemicals into the air, land and water" (Angel 1991, 3). The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency concedes that
"[e]ven if the . . . protective systems work according to plan, the landfills will eventually leak poisons into the
environment" (ibid.). Therefore, even if these toxic waste sites are safe for the present generation -a rather dubious
proposition at best-they will pose an increasingly greater health and safety risk for all future generations. Native
people (and others) will eventually pay the costs of these toxic pollutants with their lives, "costs to which
[corporate] executives are conveniently immune" (Parker 1983, 59). In this way, private corporations are able to
externalize their costs onto the commons, thereby subsidizing their earnings at the expense of health, safety,
and the environment.
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Yancy
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1NC (unfinished)
(Frantz Fanon, philosopher, revolutionary, all around cool dude, 1952, “Black Skin, White Masks,”
translated by Charles Lam Markmann, p 84) gz
“Look, a Negro!” It was an external stimulus that flicked over me as I passed by. I made a tight smile.
“Look, a Negro!” It was true. It amused me.
“Look, a Negro!” The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of my amusement.
“Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!” Frightened! Frightened!
Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter
had become impossible
If you think this story is rooted solely in the past you’ve got another thing coming – this
accusation is an act of performative policing by white civil society – the lived experience of
the black subject becomes simultaneously dangerous and fungible – this reality is not
contingent but rather a structural ontology imposed on black experience that unlocks
gratuitous violence
Yancy 12 (George Yancy, PhD in philosophy from Dusquesne University, professor of philosophy at
Dusquesne University, 2012, “Look a White!” pp 2-5) gz
Note the iterative “Look, a Negro!” It is repetitive and effectively communicates something of a
spectacle to behold. Yes. It’s a Negro! Be careful! Negroes steal, they cheat, they are hypersexual,
mesmerizingly so, and the quintessence of evil and danger. The tight smile on Fanon’s face is a forced smile,
uncomfortable, tolerant. Fanon feels the impact of the collective white gaze. He is, as it were, “strangled” by
the attention. He has become a peculiar thing. He becomes a dreaded object, a thing of fear, a
frightening and ominous presence. The turned heads and twisted bodies that move suddenly to catch
a glimpse of the object of the white boy’s alarm function as confirmation that something has gone
awry. Their abruptly turned white bodies help to “materialize” the threat through white collusion. The
white boy has triggered something of an optical frenzy. Everyone is now looking, bracing for
something to happen, something that the Negro will do. And given his “cannibal” nature, perhaps the
Negro is hungry. Fanon writes, “The little white boy throws himself into his mother’s arms: Mama, the nigger’s going to eat me up.”2
Fanon has done nothing save be a Negro. Yet this is sufficient. The Negro has always already done
something by virtue of being a Negro. It is an anterior guilt that always haunts the Negro and his or
her present and future actions. After all, this is what it means to be a Negro—to have done something
wrong. The little white boy’s utterance is felicitous against a backdrop of white lies and myths about the black body. As Robert GoodingWilliams writes, “The [white] boy’s expression of fear posits a typified image of the Negro as behaving in threatening ways. This image has a
narrative significance, Fanon implies, as it portrays the Negro as acting precisely as historically received legends and stories about Negros
generally portray them as acting.”3 One can imagine the “innocent” white index finger pointing to the black body. “Here the
‘pointing’ is
not only an indicative, but the schematic foreshadowing of an accusation, one which carries the
performative force to constitute that danger which it fears and defends against.”4 The act of pointing
is by no means benign; it takes its phenomenological or lived toll on the black body. As Fanon writes, “My
body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that white winter
day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly; look, a nigger.”5
Fanon is clear that the white boy, while not fully realizing the complex historical, psychological, and
phenomenological implications, has actually distorted his (Fanon’s) body. “Look, a Negro!” is rendered
intelligible vis-à-vis an entire play of white racist signifiers that ontologically truncate the black body;
it is an expression that calls forth an entire white racist worldview. The white boy, though, is not a
mere innocent proxy for whiteness. Rather, he is learning, at that very moment, the power of racial
speech, the power of racial gesturing. He is learning how to think about and feel toward the so-called
dark Other. He is undergoing white subject formation, a formation that is fundamentally linked to the
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object that he fears and dreads. To invoke Fanon, “the [white] collective unconscious is not dependent on cerebral heredity; it is
the result of what I shall call the unreflected imposition of a culture.”6 Or, as I would argue, the white boy’s racial practices are
learned effortlessly, practices that are always already in process. In short, the white boy’s performance
of whiteness is not simply the successful result of a superimposed superstructural grid of racist
ideology. Rather, the white boy’s performance points to fundamental ways in which many white
children are oriented, at the level of everyday practices, within the world, where their bodily
orientations are unreflected expressions of the background lived orientations of whiteness, white
ways of being, white modes of racial and racist practice.7 It is a process, though, where the white embodied subject is
intimately linked to the black embodied subject. “Therefore,” as Mike Hill argues in reference to Toni Morrison’s insightful concept of American
Africanism, “the
distance implicit in presumptive white purity is false, and covers an occluded racial
proximity.”8 “Look, a Negro!” draws its force from collective fear and misrecognition. Although Fanon does
grant that, within the field of culturally available racial descriptors, it is true that he is a “Negro,” he recognizes how the term is fundamentally
linked to various racist myths. This is why Fanon also writes, “‘Dirty
nigger!’ Or simply, ‘Look, a Negro!’”9 There is no
distinction here within the context of the white gaze. To “see” a Negro is to “see” a nigger; it is to
“see” a problem—a problem that is deemed, from the perspectives of whites, ontological. In the face
of so many white gazes, one desires to “slip into corners.”10 Yet as Fanon makes clear, it is not easy to hide.
Metaphorically, he describes how his “long antennae pick up the catch-phrases strewn over the surface of things—nigger underwear smells of
nigger— nigger teeth are white—nigger feet are big—the nigger’s barrel chest.”11 He
cannot live a life of anonymity,
etymologically, “without a name” or “nameless.” Apparently, only whites have that wonderful
capacity to live anonymously, thoughtlessly, to be ordinary qua human, to go unmarked and
unnamed—in essence, to be white.12 They are like Clint Eastwood’s white stock characters in his Western shoot-’em-up movies
who come into town nameless and mysterious. Indeed, Eastwood’s central character is the man with no name. This is
the portrayal of white liberalism perhaps at its best. The black lone figure already has a name. Indeed,
he has multiple names: “nigger,” “rapist,” “savage.” The white townspeople become fearful as he
moves through the street; they know that even as a man of the law, as shown in the comedy Blazing Saddles (1974), he is on the
verge of “whipping it out.” Fanon writes, “The Negro is the incarnation of a genital potency beyond all moralities
and prohibitions.” 13 To be the black or the Negro, then, is to be immediately recognized and
recognizable. One is in clear view: “Look, a Negro-nigger!” There is no escape; there are no
exceptions; it is a Sisyphean mode of existence. Fanon writes, “When [white] people like me, they tell me
it is in spite of my color. When they dislike me, they point out that it is not because of my color. Either
way, I am locked into the infernal circle.”14 Yet this infernal circle is not of Fanon’s doing. It is the social world of
white normativity and white meaning making that creates the conditions under which black people
are always already marked as different/deviant/ dangerous. “Look, a Negro!” (or perhaps, simply, “Look, the
wretched and forlorn nigger!”) has the perlocutionary power to incite violence, violence filled with white
desire and bloodlust. Call: “Look, a Negro!” Response: “Rape the black bitch!” Call: “Look, a Negro!”
Response: “Get a rope!” Call: “Rape!” Response: “Castrate the nigger!” The black body is deemed a
threat vis-à-vis the “virgin sanctity of whiteness,”15 something to be marked, sequestered, and in many
cases killed—just for fun. In fact, in 2011 in Jackson, Mississippi, a forty-nine-year-old black man, James Craig Anderson, was targeted
primarily by a white eighteen-year-old male, who, according to law enforcement officials, said to his white friends, “Let’s go fuck with some
niggers.” On seeing a black man standing in a parking lot (“Look, a Negro!”), the group first repeatedly beat him. It is alleged that the expression
“White Power!” was also yelled out by one of the white youth. As Anderson staggered, he was then brutally run over by a truck driven by the
white eighteen-year-old, an event captured on surveillance tape. After driving over and killing Anderson, the white male, who since has been
indicted on charges of capital murder and a hate crime, allegedly said to his friends, “I ran that nigger over.”16 While many of the details of this
crime are still unknown as of this writing, the racist narrative is certainly consistent with the historical legacy of whiteness in North America as it
relates to black people. As I write about this incident, I hear the words of many of my white students: “But our generation has changed when it
comes to racism.” Call: “Look, a Negro!” Response: “Run the nigger over!”
It’s time to flip the script – vote aff/neg to affirm a counter-gift that reveals the invisible
practices of whiteness
Yancy 12 (George Yancy, PhD in philosophy from Dusquesne University, professor of philosophy at
Dusquesne University, 2012, “Look a White!” pp 5-12) gz
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“Look, a Negro!” is a form of racist interpellation that, when examined closely, reveals whites to
themselves. One might say that the “Negro” is that which whites create as the specter/phantom of
their own fear.17 Thus, I would argue that the whites who engage in a surveillance of Fanon’s body
don’t really “see” him; they see themselves. James Baldwin, speaking to white North America with
eloquence and incredible psychological insight, says, “But you still think, I gather, that the ‘nigger’ is
necessary. But he’s unnecessary to me, so he must be necessary to you. I give you your problem back.
You’re the ‘nigger’, baby; it isn’t me.”18 What is so powerful here is the profound act of transposition.
One might ask, “Will the real ‘nigger’ please stand up?” Ah, yes, “Look, a white!” Such naming and
marking function to flip the script. Flipping the script, which is a way of changing an outcome by
reversing the terms or, in this case, recasting the script19 of those who reap the benefits of white
privilege says, “I see you for what and who you are!” Flipping the script is, one might say, a gift
offering: an opportunity, a call to responsibility—perhaps even to greater maturity. “Look, a white!” is
disruptive and clears a space for new forms of recognition. Public repetition of this expression and the
realities of whiteness that are so identified and marked is one way of installing the legitimacy that
there is something even seeable when it comes to whiteness. Moreover, public repetition functions to
further an antiracist authority over a visual field20 historically dominated by whites. It is important to
note, though, that the subject of the utterance, “Look, a white!” is not a sovereign, ahistorical, neutral
subject that has absolute control over the impact of the utterance. “Look, a Negro!” is already
embedded within citationality conditions that involve larger racist assumptions and accusations as
they relate to the black body that shape the intelligibility, and the meaningful declaration, of the
utterance. “Look, a Negro!” presupposes a white subject who is historically embedded within racist
social relations and a racist discursive field that preexists the speaker. As a form of repetition, one
that would be cited often and by many, “Look, a white!” has the potential to create conditions that
work to install an intersubjective intelligibility and social force that effectively counter the direction of
the gaze, a site traditionally monopolized by whites, and perhaps create a moment of uptake that
induces a form of white identity crisis, a jolt that awakens a sudden and startling sense of having been
seen. In response, one might hear, “You talkin’ to me?” But unlike the scenario played out in Taxi Driver
(1976), where Robert De Niro poses this question, in this case the mirror speaks back: “You’re damn
right. Indeed, I am!” “Look, a white!” returns to white people the problem of whiteness. While I see it
as a gift, I know that not all gifts are free of discomfort.21 Indeed, some are heavy laden with great
responsibility. Yet it is a gift that ought to engender a sense of gratitude, a sense of humility, and an
opportunity to give thanks—not the sort of attitude that reinscribes white entitlement. As bell hooks
writes, “Those white people who want to continue the dominant subordinate relationship so endemic
to racist exploitation by insisting that we ‘serve’ them—that we do the work of challenging and
changing their consciousness—are acting in bad faith.”22 The gift is not all about you. As white, you are
used to everything always being about you. We have heard, as Du Bois writes, your “mighty cry
reverberating through the world, ‘I am white!’ Well and good, O Prometheus, divine thief.”23 But your
cry to the world was followed by exploitation, dehumanization, and death. “I am white!” was
egomaniacal and thanatological; it was a process of self-naming that functioned to “justify,” through
racial myth making, the actions of whites in their quest to dominate those “backward” and “inferior”
others. This process of self-naming was not a gift but a manifestation of white messianic imperialism.
In this case, it was a deathdealing superimposition of white power. As Steve Martinot notes, “As a
‘gift,’ it must see the world as other, against which it demands of its own citizens (the white members
of the white nation) that they stand in allegiance and solidarity, and that the other on whom the ‘gift’
is bestowed (imposed) be grateful.”24 Flipping the script, within the context of this book, however, is
about us—collectively. Sara Ahmed writes, “It has become commonplace for whiteness to be
represented as invisible, as the unseen or the unmarked, as non-colour, the absent presence or
hidden referent, against which all other colours are measured as forms of deviance.”25 According to
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George Lipsitz, “Whiteness is everywhere in U.S. culture, but it is very hard to see.”26 He goes on to
say, “As the unmarked category against which difference is constructed, whiteness never has to speak
its name, never has to acknowledge its rule as an organizing principle in social and cultural
relations.”27 Richard Dyer writes, “In fact, for most of the time white people speak about nothing but
white people, it’s just that we couch it in terms of ‘people’ in general.”28 Finally, as Terrance MacMullan
sees it, “White people remain ignorant of white privilege because of the fact that all aspects of our
lives—our institutions, practices, ideals, and laws—were defined and tailored to fit the needs, wants,
and concerns of white folk.”29 But to whom is whiteness invisible? Ahmed is clear that whiteness is
invisible to those who inhabit it,30 to those who have come to see whiteness and what it means to be
human as isomorphic. For them, it has become a “mythical norm.”31 This does not mean, however,
that whites who choose to give their attention to thinking critically about whiteness are incapable of
doing so, though it does mean that there will be white structural blinkers that occlude specific and
complex insights by virtue of being white. Therefore, people of color are necessary to the project of
critically thinking through whiteness, especially as examining whiteness has the potential of becoming
a narcissistic project that elides its dialectical relationship with people of color—that is, those who
continue to suffer under the regime of white power and privilege. Pointing to the importance of Audre
Lorde’s work, which emphasizes the importance of studying whiteness and its significance to antiracism,
Ahmed argues that if the examination of whiteness “is to be more than ‘about’ whiteness, [it must
begin] with the Black critique of how whiteness works as a form of racial privilege, as well as the
effects of that privilege on the bodies of those who are recognized as black.”32 The fact of the matter
is that, for white people, whiteness is the transcendental norm in terms of which they live their lives
as persons, individuals. People of color, however, confront whiteness in their everyday lives, not as an
abstract concept but in the form of embodied whites who engage in racist practices that negatively
affect their lives. Black people and people of color thus strive to disarticulate the link between
whiteness and the assumption of just being human, to create a critical slippage. By marking
whiteness, black people can locate whiteness as a specific historical and ideological configuration,
revealing it as “an identity created and continued with all-too-real consequences for the distribution
of wealth, prestige, and opportunity.”33 The act of marking whiteness, then, is itself an act of
historicizing whiteness, an act of situating whiteness within the context of material forces and raced
interest-laden values that reinforce whiteness as a site of privilege and hegemony. Marking whiteness
is about exposing the ways in which whites have created a form of “humanism” that obfuscates their
hegemonic efforts to treat their experiences as universal and representative. According to bell hooks,
“Many [whites] are shocked that black people think critically about whiteness because racist thinking
perpetuates the fantasy that the Other who is subjugated, who is subhuman, lacks the ability to
comprehend, to understand, to see the working of the powerful.”34 On this score, then, black
subjectivity poses a threat to the invisibility of whiteness. Yet this is a specific type of threat. Because
of the profound relational reality of whiteness to the nonwhite Other, whites are not the targets of
their own whiteness, so the reality of the invisibility of whiteness, its status as normative, does not
affect them in the same way. In fact, this is impossible, for as whites continue to strive to make
whiteness visible, they do so from their perspective (which is precisely embedded within the context
of white power and privilege), not from the perspective of those who constitute the embodied
subjectivities that undergo the existential traumas due to whiteness (the terror of whiteness, the
colonial desires of whiteness, the possessive investments in whiteness that perpetuate problematic
race-based economic orders, residential orders, judicial orders, somatic orders, etc.). Speaking directly
to the ramifications of this specific threat, Crispin Sartwell writes, “One of the major strategies for
preserving white invisibility to ourselves is the silencing, segregation, or delegitimation of voices that
speak about whiteness from a nonwhite location.”35 While it is true that not all people of color have the
same understanding of the operations of whiteness, at all levels of its complex expression, this does not
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negate the fact that people of color undergo raced experiences vis-à-vis whiteness that lead to specific
insights that render whiteness visible. Being “a wise Latina woman,”36 for example, is one mode of
expression of such raced experiences, experiences that have deep socio-ontological and epistemic
implications. Yet how can people of color not have this epistemic advantage? After all, black people and
people of color, when it comes to white people, are “bone of their thought and flesh of their
language.”37 As Du Bois writes, “I see these souls [that is, white souls] undressed and from the back and
side. I see the working of their entrails. I know their thoughts and they know that I know. This
knowledge makes them now embarrassed, now furious!”38 Ahmed, hooks, and Du Bois emphasize the
necessity of a black countergaze, a gaze that recognizes the ways of whiteness, sees beyond its
“invisibility,” from the perspective of a form of raced positional knowledge. The black counter-gaze is a
species of flipping the script. Indeed, the expression, “Look, a white!” presupposes this counter-gaze. I
encourage my white students to mark whiteness everywhere they recognize it. Of course, thinking
critically with them about whiteness enables these students to become more cognizant of the
obfuscatory ways in which whiteness conceals its own visibility. The critical process creates a more
complex epistemic field, as it were, in terms of which whiteness becomes more recognizable in its daily
manifestations. After taking my courses, many white students say, “I can’t stop seeing the workings of
race. It’s everywhere.” One often gets the impression that they would rather return to a more
“innocent” time, before taking my course, before they learned how to see so much more. The reality is
that the “workings of race” are precisely what people of color see/experience most of the time.
Important to this learning process, though, is reminding my white students that they are white, that
they are part of the very “workings of race” that they are beginning to recognize.39 For most of my
white students, before taking my course their own whiteness is just a benign phenotypic marker.
Indeed, for most of them, whiteness has not really been marked as a raced category to begin with. They
do not recognize the normative status of whiteness that the marking is designed to expose. For them,
“to be white” means “I am not like you guys”—those people of color. Whiteness as normative and their
whiteness as unremarkable thus remain in place, uninterrogated, unblemished. Sara Ahmed writes,
“There must be white bodies (it must be possible to see such bodies as white bodies), and yet the power
of whiteness is that we don’t see those bodies as white bodies. We just see them as bodies.”40 In short,
the process of disentangling the sight of white bodies from the sight of such bodies as just bodies is not
easy, but it is necessary. For many whites, the process of marking the white body (“Look, a white!”) is
not just difficult but threatening. The process dares to mark whites as racists, as perpetuators and
sustainers of racism. Furthermore, the process dares to mark whites as raced beings, as inextricably
bound to the historical legacy of the “workings of race.” Hence, the process encourages a slippage not
only at the site of seeing themselves as innocent of racism but also at the site of seeing themselves as
unraced.41 As Zeus Leonardo and Ronald K. Porter write, “Hiding behind the veil of color-blindness
means that lifting it would force whites to confront their self-image, with people of color acting as the
mirror. This act is not frightening for people of color but for whites.”42 It is frightening because whites
must begin to see themselves through gazes that are not prone to lie/obfuscate when it comes to the
“workings of race” qua whiteness. Indeed, there is no real need to lie about whiteness. People of color
have nothing to lose; whites have so much to protect. Yet what do they have to protect? As Richard
Wright notes, “Their constant outward-looking, their mania for radios, cars, and a thousand other
trinkets, made them dream and fix their eyes upon the trash of life, made it impossible for them to learn
a language that could have taught them to speak of what was in theirs or others’ hearts. The words of
their souls were the syllables of popular songs.”43 The use of the mirror is effective as a metaphor.
White people see themselves through epistemic and axiological orders that reflect back to them their
own normative status and importance. Indeed, the script has already been written in their favor. It is
time for the mirror to speak through a different script, from the perspective of lived experiences of
those bodies of color that encounter white people on a daily basis as a problem or perhaps even as a
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site of terror. The mirror will tell the truth: “No, damn it! Snow White is not the ‘ fairest’ of them all. She
is precisely the problem!” This returns us to the issue of the gift. Seeing whiteness from the perspective
of, in this case, black people functions as an invitation to see more, to see things differently. It is a
special call that reframes, that results in a form of unveiling, of seeing, and of recognizing a different
side. It is a gift that invites an opening, perhaps having a Hubble telescope–like impact: “I had no idea
that there was so much more to see, and with such clarity!” I have had this experience while reading
works by feminist theorists. I have dared to see the world and my identity through their critical analyses,
from their experiences of male dominant culture, from their mirror. “Damn, what a sexist! I overlooked
that one.” Yet I am thankful for their gift. And while it is true that I always fail to comprehend the sheer
complexity of what it is like to be a woman in a world that is based on male patriarchy, and the multiple
forms of male violence toward women, I can use that mirror to make a difference. I can see me
differently; I can see the operations of male hegemony differently, in ways that implicate me. And as a
gift, I treat it as such. I am humbled by it. Whites must also be humbled by the gift of seeing more of
themselves, more of the complex manifestations of their whiteness, as seen through black experiences
of whiteness. As whites use the mirror to see and name whiteness, they do not magically become black.
Indeed, accepting the gift ought to involve the recognition of important boundaries. There is no room
for white territorialization or white appropriation, features that are symptomatic of whiteness itself. To
go it alone implies that whites themselves can solve the problems of whiteness. It would be like men
getting together by themselves to solve the historical problem of male hegemony and sexism without
the critical voices of women. Within the context of whiteness, after the gift has been given, one still
remains white, ensconced within a white social structure that not only continues to confer privileges but
also militates against one even knowing “that [whiteness] is there to be shown.”44 As stated previously,
“Look, a white!” presupposes a black counter-gaze. Moreover, it is this black gaze that I encourage my
white students to cultivate. “Look, a white!” is a way of engaging the white world, calling it forth from a
different perspective, a perspective critically cultivated by black people and others of color. It is a
perspective gained through pain and suffering, through critical thought and daring action. Seeing the
world from the perspective of a flipped script (“Look, a white!”) does not, however, reinscribe a form of
race essentialism. In Fanon’s case, “Look, a Negro!” was never intended as a gift; it functioned as a
penalty. For the “object” so identified, this phrase meant that there was a price to be paid. The public
declaration was designed to fix the black body racially, to forewarn those whites within earshot that a
“beastly” threat was near. “Look, a white!” is not meant to seal white bodies “into that crushing
objecthood”45 that Fanon speaks of vis-à-vis the white gaze. There is no desire to fix white people “in
the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye.”46 Instead, “Look, a white!” has the goal of
complicating white identity. It has the goal of fissuring white identity, not stabilizing it according to racist
myths and legends. To say, “Look, a white!” is an act of ostension, a form of showing, but it is not limited
to phenotype, though this necessarily shows up in the act of ostension. “Look, a white!” points to what
has been deemed invisible, unremarkable, normative. As children, some of us liked counting anything at
all, chairs, passing cars, birds on a rooftop. And we counted them partly because we just loved to count.
But we also had this ability to notice so many things that adults had relegated to the background. As
adults, we count our money, we count the days of the week—the things that apparently “really” matter.
“Look, a white!” tells us to be attentive to what has become the background. As a powerful act of
pointing, “Look, a white!” brings whiteness to the foreground. Whiteness as a site of privilege and
power is named and identified. Whiteness as an embedded set of social practices that render white
people complicit in larger social practices of white racism is nominated. It is about turning our bodies
(and our attention) in the direction of white discourse and white social performances that attempt to
pass themselves off as racially neutral, and it is about finding the courage to say, “Look, a white!” As
Christine E. Sleeter writes, “While in an abstract sense white people may not like the ideas of
reproducing white racism, and in a personal sense, do not see themselves as racist, in their talk and
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actions, they are.”47 “Look, a white!” also points to the historical white regulatory, antimiscegenation
norms that produced white bodies. “Look, a white!” points to “the [white racist] discursive rules and
regulations that dictated the biological chain that produced these hands, these eyes, and skin tone”48
that have become privileged as beautiful, normative, white. “Look, a white!” assiduously nominates
white bodies within the context of a stream of history dominated by white racism. “Look, a white!”
unveils the ways in which white bodies are linked to white discursive practices and racist power
relations that define those white bodies. “Look, a white!” signifies “compulsory repetitions [that]
construct illusory origins of [whiteness] that function as regulatory regimes to keep [whites] within a
particular grid of intelligibility by governing and punishing nonnormative behavior, interpellating
[whites] back into the normative discourse [and back into normative spaces].” 49 “Look, a white!” dares
to mark those whites who deem themselves “ethically superior” because they have a “better” grasp of
the operations of white racism than those other complacent whites. “Look, a white!” marks those
whites who see themselves as radically “progressive” now that they are able to confess their racism
publicly or because they publicly demonstrate intellectual savvy in how they engage whiteness with
sophistication. As intimated previously, “Look, a white!” militates against its reduction to identifying
singular, individual, intentional acts of racism only. Instead, “Look, a white!” also identifies “what one is
in a social framework or system of social categorizations.”50 In this way, “Look, a white!” does not open
the door to facile claims about symmetrically hurtful racial stereotypes, “reverse discrimination,” and
the rhetoric of a so-called color-blind, perpetrator perspective. “Look, a white!” marks such moves as
sites of obfuscation, revealing them as forms of “mystificatory digression from the clearly asymmetrical
and enduring system of white power itself.”51 “Look, a white!” flags whiteness in the form of
colonialism and imperialism, which function as forms of gluttony and fanaticism that would dare to
consume the entire earth. Du Bois asks, “‘But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?’
Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the
ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!”52 I want my white students to shout, “Look, a white!”
on a daily basis, to call whiteness out, publicly. I encourage them to develop a form of “double
consciousness,” one that enables them to see the world differently and to see themselves differently
through the experiences of black people and people of color. On this score, “Look, a white!” becomes a
shared perspective, a shared dynamic naming process, buttressed and informed by the insights
regarding whiteness that black people and people of color have acquired. The strategy is to have my
white students see the white world through our eyes, a perspective that will challenge whiteness, not
deteriorate into white guilt or take new forms of white pity to help the so-called helpless. “Look, a
white!” is meant to be unsafe, indeed, to be dangerous to whites themselves. By “dangerous” I mean
threatening to a white self and a white social system predicated on a vicious lie that white is right—
morally, epistemologically, and otherwise.
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1NC
[AT: Yancy] The judge’s perspective will inevitably intervene into the aff’s project—that perpetuates
racism and whiteness. White guilt and shame only recreate the systems of domination that created
racism in the first place.
Sullivan 12 (Shannon, Penn State U, On the Need for a New Ethos of White Antiracism, philoSOPHIA
vol. 2 Issue 1, project MUSE)//LA
Today, however, guilt and especially shame, rather than fear, hatred, and greed, tend to be the recommended affects
for white people who care about racial justice. As Alexis Shotwell (2010, 73) claims, “A certain kind of feeling bad can be
important for producing meaningful solidarity across difference, particularly for individuals who benefit from racist social/political structures.”
Some of those bad feelings might include “guilt, anger, sadness, panic, shame, embarrassment, and other emotions not easy to name” (2010,
74; see also Bartky 1999, Macmullan 2009, Morgan 2008, and Sedgwick 2003). In my view, however, affects
of white guilt and
shame ultimately tend to be counterproductive for antiracist movements. This is for two reasons.
First, in the case of white people’s contributions to racial justice movements, I am skeptical that guilt
and shame can sustain the ongoing, difficult political work of changing institutional structures and
practices that perpetuate white privilege and domination. The personal, here in the form of affect and ontology, is
related to the political, and negative affects generally are insufficient for motivating and sustaining
meaningful efforts on the part of dominant groups to make political change. Guilt and shame about white racism
might lead, and sometimes have led white people to do something to fight white racism. But I am doubtful that guilt and shame
can support much more than a brief gesture that ultimately serves more to relieve white people of
their racially affective burdens than to further racial justice. White guilt and shame about white racism are not a radical
difference in kind from the negative affects that historically have constituted white people: white hatred and fear of people of color. Guilt and
shame represent merely a difference of degree of the negative affects with which white people are racially constituted.4 Whether the negative
affects in question are white guilt and shame or white hatred and fear, however, the
issue of negative versus positive affects
is not one of personal feelings at the expense of political action. The question of which affects
constitute white people is intimately connected, not antithetical to the issue of white people’s ability
to help bring about institutional and political change regarding race. In my view, positive affects, such as bestowing
self-love, tend to provide the affective soil in which the roots of effective white action for racial justice best grow. The second reason
that I think promoting white guilt and shame generally is counterproductive to racial justice
movements is that these affects tend to turn white antiracist efforts into a narrow quest for white
moral salvation. Rather than the achievement of racial justice, relief from racial guilt and shame
seems to be what is at stake for many white people in their dealings with people of color. This is an
inappropriate and unfair burden for white people to ask them to bear. As Thurgood Marshall once said, “You know, sometimes I
get awfully tired of trying to save the white man’s soul” (quoted in Hobson 1999, 17). [End Page 25] White people’s souls may indeed need
saving, but to demand that black and other nonwhite people be the vehicle for white salvation merely replicates the racial inequalities and
abuses that led to their damnation. As feminist sociologist Sarita Srivastava has documented in her research on white feminists in antiracist
organizations, white women in particular tend to “become mired in self-examination and stuck in deliberations on morality and salvation. Not
surprisingly, this ethical self-transformation is still framed by the poles of good versus evil, newly interpreted as the fraudulent nonracist versus
the authentic antiracist” (Srivastava 2005, 50). I’ll return later to the point about the ethical framing of good versus evil in the context of white
antiracism. Here I want to point out that self-examination can take many different forms, not all of which result in a mired or stuck self. The
turn to oneself (“self-examination”) that I wish to encourage here is a process through which a white person would reconstitute and transform
herself, not a self-examination undertaken to reassure her existing self by satisfying her “desire for innocence” (2005, 45). Instead
of
being constituted primarily by white guilt and shame, white people who want to work toward racial
justice need to be fueled by a bestowing love for or affirmation of themselves and other white people.
I deliberately say “love themselves and other white people,” rather than “love other people, white and nonwhite” because I’m concerned about
cross-racial, universal love being used by white people as an evasion of the meaning and effects of their whiteness and thus as an extension of
their white privilege. Let
me be clear that I am not arguing that white people and people of color should
never love each other. What I am arguing is that white people need to stop overly focusing on people
of color when they consider how to combat racial injustice. More than anything, white people need to turn
to themselves and clean up their own house. I realize that this suggestion might seem to only
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exacerbate white domination, white racism, and the specific problem of the white quest for racial
salvation. Aren’t white people already too focused on themselves? Don’t they need to think more about the plight
and lives of people of color? Won’t loving or affirming themselves only increase the amount of white hubris,
white pride, white selfishness, and white supremacy that exists in the world today? The answer to
these questions is no, or at least, not necessarily. This is not because white people have nothing in their racial past or present to feel
ashamed about. They do. I am not claiming that white people should never feel guilty or ashamed about their whiteness or their white history.
What I am claiming is that guilt
and shame should not be the primary affects that constitute a white person’s
relationship to her racial identity. While white people myopically have engaged in what Adrienne Rich (1979, 306) calls “white
solipsism,” in which only white people and their interests are recognized or seen as important, the best corrective for white
solipsism is not necessarily for white people to do the opposite and “selflessly” focus only on people
of color. [End Page 26] White self-denial and self-hatred can be the flip side of the same coin of white
solipsism, after all. What is needed instead is for white people to develop a different kind of relationship
to their whiteness. In my view, an increase of white “selfishness” is needed to help prevent white involvement in antiracist movements
from becoming a disguised form of condescending charity toward people of color. As Nietzsche’s Zarathustra explains, the selflessness
of those who would try to help others first often is a covert form of self-hatred. Speaking to the weak,
Zarathustra charges “your love of your neighbors is your bad love of yourselves. You flee to your neighbor away from yourselves and would like
to make a virtue of it; but I see through your ‘selflessness’” (Nietzsche 1969, 86). Nietzsche’s harsh indictment of Christian forms of charity is
echoed by W. E. B. Du Bois’s scathing criticism of white philanthropists who think of themselves as uplifting poor, ignoble people of color across
the world. As Du Bois (1999, 18–19) bitingly charges, these “worthy souls in whom consciousness of high descent brings burning desire to
spread the gift abroad” receive a great deal of “mental peace and moral satisfaction” when “humble black folk, voluble with thanks, receive
barrels of old clothes from lordly and generous whites.” But when
black recipients of white charity begin to challenge
white authority and accept white “gifts” sullenly rather than gratefully, “then the spell is suddenly
broken” and the true, even if unconscious purpose of white charity is revealed (1999, 19). It has very
little to do with genuinely increasing the flourishing of black people, and everything to do with
covertly using black people to generate white people’s moral sense of goodness.
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Fanon Cards
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Psychology
The consciousness of the past shapes the consciousness of the future, therefore we must reject the
consciousness of the past and shape a new consciousness
Fanon 8 (Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and author, Black Skin; White Masks, p.
64 Written in 1952, new edition published in 2008)//BG
There are times when the black man (person) is locked into his (their) body. Now, “for a being who has acquired
consciousness of himself and of his body, Who has attained to the dialectic of subject and obj ect, the body is no longer a cause of
the structure of consciousness, it has become an object of consciousness.” The Negro, however sincere, is the
slave of the past. None the less I am a man, and in this sense the Peloponnesian War is as much mine as the invention of the compass.
Face to face with the White man, the Negro has a past to legitimate, a Vengeance to exact; face to face With the Negro, the
contemporary White man (person) feels the need to recall the times of cannibalism. A few years ago, the Lyon
branch of the Union of Students From Overseas France asked me to reply to an article that made jazz music literally an irruption of
cannibalism into the modern World. Knowing exactly what I Was doing, I rejected the premises on which the request was based, and I
suggested to the defender of European purity that he cure himself of a spasm that had nothing cultural in it. Some men Want to H11 the
World with their presence. A German philosopher described this mechanism as the pathology of freedom . In the
circumstances, I did not have to take up a position on behalf of Negro music against white music, but rather to help my brother to rid
himself of an attitude in which there was nothing healthful. The problem considered here is one of time. Those Negroes and White
men (people)Will be disalienated Who refuse to let themselves be sealed away in the materialized Tower of
the Past. For many other Negroes, in other Ways, disalienation will come into being through their refusal to
accept the present as dehnitive.
The black human carries the black man’s burden, a burden to prove themselves human
Fanon ‘8 (Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and author, Black Skin; White Masks,
p. 178-179 Written in 1952, new edition published in 2008)//BG
The black man Wants to be like the White man. For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is White. Long ago the
black man admitted the unarguable superiority of the White man, and all his efforts are aimed at achieving a
White existence. Have I no other purpose on earth, then, but to avenge the Negro of the seventeenth century? In this World, which is
already trying to disappear, do I have to pose the problem of black truth? Do I have to be limited to the justification of a facial
conformation? I as a man of color do not have the right to seek to know in what respect my race is superior or inferior to another race. I
as a man of color do not have the right to hope that in the White man there will be a crystallization of guilt
toward the past of my race. I as a man of color do not have the right to seek Ways of stamping down the pride of my former
master. I have neither the right nor the duty to claim reparation for the domestication of my ancestors. There is no Negro mission; there
is no White burden. I find myself suddenly in a World in which things do evil; a World in which I am
summoned into battle; a World in which it is always a question of annihilation or triumph. I find myself-I, a man-in
a World Where Words Wrap themselves in silence; in a World Where the other endlessly hardens himself. No, I do not have the right
to go and cry out my hatred at the White man. I do not have the duty to murmur my gratitude to the White
man. My life is caught in the lasso of existence. My freedom turns me back on myself . No, I do not have the right to
be a Negro. I do not have the duty to be this or that .... If the White man challenges my humanity, I Will impose my
Whole Weight as a man on his life and show him that I am not that “sho’ good eatin’” that he persists in imagining.
Solving the problem of racism does not mean to rewrite history, but rather to redraw the
image of the black being
Fanon 8 (Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and author, Black Skin; White Masks,
p.179 Written in 1952, new edition published in 2008)//BG
There is no White World, there is no White ethic, any more than there is a White intelligence. There are in every
part of the World men who search. I am not a prisoner of history. I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny. I should
constantly remind myself that the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence. In the World through which I travel, I
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am endlessly creating myself. I am a part of Being to the degree that I go beyond it. And, through a private problem,
We see the outline of the problem of Action. Placed in this World, in a situation, “embarked,” as Pascal would have it, am I
going to gather Weapons? Am I going to ask the contemporary White man to answer for the slave-ships of the seventeenth century? Am I
going to ask the contemporary white man to answer for the slave-ships of the seventeenth century? Am I going to try by every possible
means to cause Guilt to be born in minds? Moral anguish in the face of the massiveness of the Past? I am a Negro, and tons of chains,
storms of blows, rivers of expectoration flow down my shoulders.But I do not have the right to allow myself to bog down. I
do not have the right to allow the slightest fragment to remain in my existence. I do not have the right to
allow myself to be mired in what the past has determined .I am not the slave of the Slavery that
dehumanized my ancestors.
The black being has no home because their civilization has been ruined
Fanon ‘8 (Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and author, Black Skin; White Masks,
p. 180 Written in 1952, new edition published in 2008)//BG
To many colored intellectuals European culture has a quality of exteriority. What is more, in human relationships, the Negro may feel
himself a stranger to the Western World. Not Wanting to live the part of a poor relative, of an
adopted son, of a bastard child, shall he feverishly seek to discover a Negro civilization? Let us be clearly
understood. I am convinced that it Would be of the greatest interest to be able to have contact with a Negro literature or architecture of the
third century before Christ. I should be very happy to know that a correspondence had flourished between some Negro philosopher and Plato.
But I can absolutely not see how this fact would change anything in the lives of the eight-year-old children who labor in the cane fields of
Martinique or Guadeloupe.
We must free ourselves from the chains of history
Fanon ‘8 (Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and author, Black Skin; White Masks, p.
178-179 Written in 1952, new edition published in 2008)//BG
No attempt must be made to encase man (humans), for it is his (their) destiny to be set free. The body of
history does not determine a single one of my actions. I am my own foundation. And it is by going beyond the
historical, instrumental hypothesis that I Will initiate the cycle of my freedom. The disaster of the man of color lies in
the fact that he was enslaved. The disaster and the inhumanity of the White man lie in the fact that somewhere he
has killed man. And even today they subsist, to organize this dehumanization rationally. But I as a man of color, to
the extent that it becomes possible for me to exist absolutely, do not have the right to lock myself into a World of retroactive reparations.
I, the man of color, Want only this: That the tool never possess the man. That the enslavement of man by
man Cease forever. That is, of one by another. That it be possible for me to discover and to love man, Wherever he may be.
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Economics
We must free ourselves from the chains of history
Fanon ‘8 (Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and author, Black Skin; White Masks,
p. 178-179 Written in 1952, new edition published in 2008)//BG
The major purpose of this manuscript has been to reconstruct the sociology of entrepreneurship by giving a special consideration to the
Afro-American experience. The sociology of entrepreneurship, which is concerned with the relationship between
ethnicity and business activity, has almost completely ignored the Afro-American experience. Thus, the
sociohistorical examples which interact with theoretical ideas have stressed the ethnic experience. Although
this is certainly fine, it is quite ironic that most of the major ideas developed in theories-such as middleman, ethnic enclave, and
collectivism-were already prevalent in old books and manuscripts written about the Afro-American experience. Thus, not only is the
Afro-American experience overlooked in the sociology of entrepreneurship, but scholarship-mostly by AfroAmericans-has also been overlooked. This, in itself; is an interesting comment on American societv, race. and
scholarship. This manuscript has also argued that, although all Afro-Americans have had to face racism, prejudice, and discrimination,
those of today who can trace their roots back to entrepreneurship and the self-help experience possess a set of values which are similar-if
not identical-to middleman ethnic groups. Such an approach means that we must reconstruct how we think about
race and economics in America, and about policy which relates to that experience.
Economics are rooted in race
Butler ‘5 (John Sibely Butler, Professor John Sibley Butler holds the Gale Chair in Entrepreneurship and
Small Business in the Graduate School of Business (Department of Management). He is the Director of
the Herb Kelleher Center for Entrepreneurship and the Director of the Institute for Innovation, Creativity
and Capital (IC²). His research is in the areas of organizational behavior and new venture development.
For the last eight summers Professor Butler has occupied the Distinguished Visiting Professor position at
Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo Japan, and this year holds the same status at Peking University in
China, Entrepreneurship and Self-Help among Black Americans A Reconsideration of Race and Ethics,
Volume II, p.328, Google Books)//BG
We have shown that business activity, in the form of economic enclaves, was part of the Afro-American
experience as early as the 1700s. Mainly because of scholarship done on Afro-American entrepreneurs bejinre the Civil War, we
were able to show the development of economic enclaves during that time period in such cities as Philadelphia and Cincinnati. ln
Philadelphia, Afro-Americans were instrumental in the development of service enterprises. This was also true in
Cincinnati, which was actually one of the stronger cities for enterprise before the Civil War. In New York City one ofthe best restaurants in
the Wall Street area was owned by Afro-Americans. Even in the South, the pattern of small business activity, for the
generation of economic activity, was very prevalent among free Afro-Americans before the Civil War. Their
clients were not limited to Afro-Americans, but included people of European descent, as well. One can say without a doubt and based on
available data, that they controlled service enterprises during this time period. As with other middleman groups who have
played this role throughout history, they operated under racial hostility. This pattern of business activity, especially as
regards clientele, changed due to the immigration of other ethnic groups in large numbers to the northeastern part of the United
States and the influences of increased racial discrimination.
Economic engagement is based off of the institution of slavery, entrenching racist ideals
Butler ‘5 (John Sibely Butler, Professor John Sibley Butler holds the Gale Chair in Entrepreneurship and
Small Business in the Graduate School of Business (Department of Management). He is the Director of
the Herb Kelleher Center for Entrepreneurship and the Director of the Institute for Innovation, Creativity
and Capital (IC²). His research is in the areas of organizational behavior and new venture development.
For the last eight summers Professor Butler has occupied the Distinguished Visiting Professor position at
Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo Japan, and this year holds the same status at Peking University in
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China, Entrepreneurship and Self-Help among Black Americans A Reconsideration of Race and Ethics,
Volume II, p.328, Google Books)//BG
Also discussed was the rich and interesting data on Afro-America entrepreneurship under the
institution of slavery. Even while in bondage, some Afro-Americans showed a propensity to enter
enterprise in order to generate income. Sometimes this income was used for the purchase of their
loved ones' freedom from slave masters, while at other times it was used to enhance their own
plantations. In addition, Afro-Americans were quite active in inventing new products which were-and still are-important in this country.
This activity in itself was a significant entrepreneurial one, representing adjustment under severe
conditions of racism and discrimination. After the Civil War, Afro-Americans were faced with the problem of adjusting
to hostility in both the North and the South. In the South, those who had fought so strongly against America during the Civil War developed
laws to exclude Afro-Americans from full participation in that society, although the latter clearly fought on the side of the Union. The
systematic conscious program of Jim Crow segregation was designed to re-create the analog of
slavery.
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Debate Key
The debate space is key to stopping racism- it begins with ending intellectual alienation
Fanon ‘8 (Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and author, Black Skin; White Masks,
p. 61 Written in 1952, new edition published in 2008)//BG
In this connection, I should like to say something that I have found in many other Writers: Intellectual alienation is a creation of
middle-class society. What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in
predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middleclass a closed
society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men (people) are corrupt. And I think that a man (person)
who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary.
The debate space has failed in breaking down the structures of race by excluding discussion-now is the
time for change to occur
Brinkley ’12 (Dr. Shanara Reed-Brinkley, An Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at
the University of Pittsburgh, where she also serves as the Director of Debate for the William Pitt
Debating Union. She is a national award winner for her published work on critical theory, black feminist
theory, gender, black culture and history, and hip hop culture and theory, Resistance and Debate, “An
Open Letter to Sarah Spring” http://resistanceanddebate.wordpress.com/2012/11/12/an-open-letterto-sarah-spring/)//BG
Lack of community discussion is neither random nor power-neutral. We have tried to have
discussions. These discussions have been regularly derailed—in “wrong forum” arguments, in the demand
for “evidence,” in the unfair burdens placed on the aggrieved as a pre-requisite for engagement. Read the last
ten years of these discussions on edebate archives: Ede Warner on edebate and move forward to Rashad Evans diversity discussion from
2010 to Deven Cooper to Amber Kelsie’s discussion on CEDA Forums and the NDT CEDA Traditions page. We have been talking for over a
decade, we have been reaching out for years, we have been listening to the liberal, moderate refrain of “we agree with your goals but not
with your method.” We will no longer wait for the community to respond, to relinquish privilege, to engage in
authentic discussion, since largely the community seems incapable of producing a consensus for responding
to what “we all agree” is blatant structural inequity. It seems that meta-debates/discussions about debate are generally met
with denial, hostility and—more often—silence. This silence is in fact a focused silence. It is not people in the Resistance Facebook group
that comprise these silent figures—it is (as has been described) “the old boys club.” We have been quite vocal—and we
believe that it is this very vocalness (and the development of a diversity of tactics in response to status quo
stalling tactics) that has provoked response when response was given. Sarah Spring’s cedadebate post is a case in
point. The decision to change our speaker point scale is not in order to produce a “judging doomsday apparatus” (this kind of
apocalyptic rhetoric might more aptly be applied to the current racist/sexist/classist state of affairs in this
community), though we must admit that we are flattered that our efforts have affected the community enough to result in such a
hyberbolic labeling. It indicates that civil disobedience is still an effective tactic; the debate community should take it as an
indication that our calls for change are serious. We will continue to innovate and collaborate on tactics of resistance. This
“crisis” in debate has no end in sight. The rationale for changing the point scale was not simply to “reward” people for preferring the
unpreferred critic. We recognize that MPJ produces effects, and we hoped that changing our point scale was a small but significant tactic
that was available to the disenfranchised in this community. MPJ: A) Limits judging opportunities for blacks, browns, and womyn
B) Limits opportunities for debaters who are (and are not) black, brown, and womyn to be judged by such critics. The effect is: A) That
the evaluations of these categorically marginalized critics are deemed not valuable or costly. B) That the debate efforts of categorically
marginalized debaters are deemed not valuable. We believe that debaters deserve to have black, brown, and womyn critics (in general
debaters should be judged by multiply situated critics across varying social locations). We think the community deserves to know what we
have to say. Therefore, it seemed appropriate in this context to play the discriminative logics at work against themselves by demonstrating
just what “value” or “cost” our evaluations could have. We worked with the limited options available to us. It seems this system
works as long as it is comfortable for the majority or the major powerbrokers. The community pays lip
service to, or simply ignores, the concerns of those for whom this system is not working. Now it is everyone’s
concern. To be clear: we did not alter our point scale because we believe we are not preferred for unjust reasons (we know we are not
preferred for unjust reasons), but because the system produces the effect of magnifying and enforcing on a social scale the delegitimation
of blacks, browns, and womyn. We think this is a question of ethics and a question of pedagogy; it is something that stunts the growth of
all members of this community regardless of identity or social positioning.
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There is a crisis in the community because of the self-segregation-only discussions can solve
Brinkley ’12 (Dr. Shanara Reed-Brinkley, An Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at
the University of Pittsburgh, where she also serves as the Director of Debate for the William Pitt
Debating Union. She is a national award winner for her published work on critical theory, black feminist
theory, gender, black culture and history, and hip hop culture and theory, Resistance and Debate, “An
Open Letter to Sarah Spring” http://resistanceanddebate.wordpress.com/2012/11/12/an-open-letterto-sarah-spring/)//BG
Stuart Hall said “crisis occur when the social formation can no longer be reproduced on the basis of the pre-
existing system of social relation.” This community is in crisis because the reality of debate has changed. The
backlash we have faced in response to this crisis (“breaking up with the K,” unethical engagements with arguments, resentment, refusing
to listen to certain arguments, and even refusing to listen to particular teams, etc.) is reactionary conservativism. Blacks, browns, and
womyn face micro-aggressions in this activity constantly. Sometimes it is outright hostility. We are always
already uncomfortable in this space that many so easily call a community. We are always already aware that this community would prefer
an empty celebration of diversity without the critical re-interrogation of the activity that our very presence demands. In these kinds of
hostile environments, self-segregation is a self-protective measure. We produce safe-spaces where we may
gather, discuss, regroup, lift spirits and figure out how to resist while maintaining sanity. We see nothing wrong
with this. In fact, any review of the history of social movements and activism would demonstrate the necessity of building spaces for the
disenfranchised to speak and plan resistance to a powerful majority. The Resistance Facebook group is such a forum. To even describe the
gathering of people in the group as a clique demonstrates the very invisibility and lack of concern that people of color face in this
community. Our experiences of discomfort and horror stories of blatant hostility are invisible in this framing. If our experiences were real
to the majority, rather than just what some students are using to win debate rounds, then the necessity for the Resistance Facebook group
would be clear. The group is a forum for ally building. Often it is a rare place where the K v K or Performance v Performance debate can be
considered in its practical and ethical implications. It is precisely the kind of place for open discussion that Sarah Spring calls for—the kind
of place where discussion that needs to take place often does. But those discussions also do not stop there. Discussions that begin
in the group are often taken to wider groups within the debate community to broaden the discussion and yet
they are often derailed and then we must retreat and regroup, review our strategies, discuss potential
options, and seek advice. Note that the example of the “active and lively debate” about the hotel architecture at the Clay
mentioned in Sarah’s post, was hashed out for months on the resistance page before many of us began to speak publicly about the issue. It
was through that vibrant debate in the Resistance Facebook group that produced the very conditions for the open discussion you
mention. The Resistance Facebook page is a response to the increasing ghettoization of some bodies and some
discursive forms in debate—not the other way around. The fact that the existence of the group was what
was critiqued rather than the necessity of the group is deeply troubling to us.
It is the job of the whites to solve for the social segregation
Brinkley ’12 (Dr. Shanara Reed-Brinkley, An Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at
the University of Pittsburgh, where she also serves as the Director of Debate for the William Pitt
Debating Union. She is a national award winner for her published work on critical theory, black feminist
theory, gender, black culture and history, and hip hop culture and theory, Resistance and Debate, “An
Open Letter to Sarah Spring” http://resistanceanddebate.wordpress.com/2012/11/12/an-open-letterto-sarah-spring/)//BG
It is unclear what the bright line is between “group discussions or backchannels or facebook groups” and a discussion group (articulated as
“closed backroom discussion” – which is by the way, homophobic) which produces disenfranchized discussion As far as we can tell, Sarah
Spring is upset that she has not been able to see what mischief the slaves are hatching “in the slave quarters on the plantation.” The
Resistance Facebook group has a wide range of members. It includes current debaters, former debaters, coaches, judges, high school
students, academics (with no relationship to debate), radical community activists. All members of the group are granted administrative
access once they are admitted, so people request admission through the relationships they have cultivated with already existing
members. If someone has not been invited to the group, it is because they lack authentic relationships with any of the members—perhaps
the perceived secrecy of the group could be better understood as a symptom of the lack of social relations you have with a wide group of
differently situated people. The argument here is likened to the question, “why are all the black kids sitting
together in the cafeteria?”—an argument meant to imply that it is the burden of the black students to make
friends with the whites, and that the whites cannot be faulted for choosing to maintain distance. There are a
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number of issues that marginalized members of the community simply do not know about. For example, many of us did not discover the
existence of Sarah’s post until the last round of the evening, although we have since learned that people have been talking about it (not to
us) throughout the day. If you are excluding yourself from us—via MPJ, on the quad, in the hallway, at the hotel—then you
should hold yourself accountable, not us. We are not secret. We are not hiding. We are just invisible to you
P.S. It is no longer called the Dixie Classic.
Tag
Johnson & Henerson ‘5 (E. Patrick Johnson, E. Patrick Johnson is the Carlos Montezuma Professor of Performance Studies and
African American Studies at Northwestern University. A scholar/artist, Johnson performs nationally and internationally and has published
widely in the areas of race, gender, sexuality and performance, Mae G. Henderson, professor of English at the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill. She is the author of numerous articles on pedagogy, diasporic writing and performance, cultural studies and cultural
criticism, as well as black feminist criticism and theory, including the widely anthologized essay, "Speaking In Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics,
and the Black Woman Writer's Literary Tradition." She is editor of Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology (2005), Borders, Boundaries
and Frames (1995), and co-editor (with John Blassingame) of the five-volume Antislavery Newspapers and Periodicals: An Annotated Index
of Letters, 1817-1871 (1980). Henderson has also published the Critical Foreword and Notes to the Modern Library edition of Nella
Larsen's Passing (2002).Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, 2005, p.4)//BG
Given the status of women (and class not lagging too far behind) within black studies, it is not surprising that sexuality, and especially
homosexuality, became not only a repressed site of study within the Held, but also one with which the discourse was paradoxically
preoccupied, if only to deny and disavow its place in the discursive sphere of black studies. On the one hand, the category of
(homo)sexuality, like those of gender and class, remained necessarily subordinated to that of race in the discourse of
black studies, due principally to an identitarian politics aimed at forging a unified front under racialized
blackness. On the other hand, the privileging of a racialist dis-course demanded the deployment of a sexist and
homophobic rhetoric in order to mark, by contrast, the priority of race. While black (heterosexual) women’s
intellectual and community work were marginalized, if not erased, homosexuality was effectively
“theorized” as a “White disease” that had “in-fected” the black community? In fact, sexuality as an object of
discourse circulated mainly by way of defensive disavowals of “sexual deviance,” fre-quently framed by outspoken
heterosexual black male intellectuals theoriz-ing the “black male phallus” in relation to “the black (w)hole” and other priapic riffs sounding
the legendary potency of the heterosexual black man or, alternatively, bewailing his historical emasculation at the hands of over-bearing
and domineering black women.4‘ It would be some time, as Audre Lorde discovered in the bars of New York during her sexual awakening,
before black studies would come “to realize that [its] place was the very house of difference rather than the security of any one particular
difference.”
Tag
Johnson & Henerson ‘5 (E. Patrick Johnson, E. Patrick Johnson is the Carlos Montezuma Professor of Performance Studies and
African American Studies at Northwestern University. A scholar/artist, Johnson performs nationally and internationally and has published
widely in the areas of race, gender, sexuality and performance, Mae G. Henderson, professor of English at the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill. She is the author of numerous articles on pedagogy, diasporic writing and performance, cultural studies and cultural
criticism, as well as black feminist criticism and theory, including the widely anthologized essay, "Speaking In Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics,
and the Black Woman Writer's Literary Tradition." She is editor of Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology (2005), Borders, Boundaries
and Frames (1995), and co-editor (with John Blassingame) of the five-volume Antislavery Newspapers and Periodicals: An Annotated Index
of Letters, 1817-1871 (1980). Henderson has also published the Critical Foreword and Notes to the Modern Library edition of Nella
Larsen's Passing (2002).Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, 2005, p.4)//BG
Despite its theoretical and political shortcomings, queer studies, like black studies, disrupts dominant and hegemonic
discourses by consistently destabilizing fixed notions of identity by deconstructing binaries such as
heterosexual/homosexual, gay/ lesbian, and masculine/ feminine as well as the concept of
heteronormativity in general. Given its currency in the academic marketplace, then, queer studies has the potential to transform
how We theorize sexuality in conjunction with other identity formations? Yet, as some theorists have noted, the deconstruction of
binaries and the explicit “unmarking” of difference (e.g., gender, race, class, region, able-bodiedness, etc.)
have serious implications for those for whom these other differences “matter.”9 Lesbians, gays, bisexuals,
and transgendered people of color who are committed to the demise of oppression in its various forms,
cannot afford to theorize their lives based on “single-variable” politics. As many of the essays in this volume
demonstrate, to ignore the multiple subjectivities of the minoritarian subject within and without political
movements and theo-retical paradigms is not only theoretically and politically naive, but also potentially
dangerous. In the context of an expansive American imperialism in which the separation of church and state (if
they ever really were separate) remains so only by the most tenuous membrane and in which a sitting
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president homophobically refers to as “sinners” certain U.S. citizens seeking the protection of marriage, the socalled axis of evil is likely to cut across every identity category that is not marked White, Anglo-Saxon,
Protestant, heterosexual, American, and male.
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FW Cards
Tag
Chase & Dowd ’12 (Megan M. Chase, Doctoral student at the Center for Urban Education, Rossier School of Education, University of
Southern California, Los Angeles Alicia C. Dowd, associate professor of education at the University of Southern California's Rossier School of
Education and co-director of the Center for Urban Education. Dr. Dowd's research focuses on political-economic issues of public college finance
equity, organizational effectiveness, and accountability and the factors affecting student attainment in higher education, Educational Policy
“Transfer Equity for "Minoritized" Students: A Critical Policy Analysis of Seven States”, p.5, 7 December 2012,
http://rossier.usc.edu/faculty/Educational%20Policy-2012-Chase-0895904812468227.pdf)//BG
Traditional methods of policy analysis, referred to as rational scientyic approaches, treat policy creation as a logical
step-by- step process in which facts are analyzed to arrive at the best policy solution (Bacchi, 1999). Proponents of
this approach assume that policy creation and analysis are value-neutral processes (Allan, Iverson, & Roper-Huilman, 2010; MartinezAleman, 2010). Until the mid- 1980s, the most influential approach for understanding the policy process was the “stages heuristic” or
“textbook approach” (J. Anderson, 1975; Nakamura, 1987). This approach divided the policy process into a series of stages-typically
“agenda setting, policy for-mulation and legitimation, implementation, and evaluation” (Sabatier, 2007, p. 6). Researchers working from
this perspective focused on the “technical properties” of the policy or the extent to which a policy is delivered to the targeted population in
the mamier intended by policy designers (O’Dom1ell, 2008; Plunty, 1985). This approach allowed for the examination of distinct
decision-making moments (Mulholland & Shakespeare, 2005), but often neglected the policy’s social or cultural context
(Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1988). More specifically, traditional policy approaches tended to view the actor from the
political economy perspective, which assumed the actor’s behavior was guided by weighing costs and
benefits and using information in a rational way to maximize material self-interest (Ostrom, 1999). Such an actor
used information as a tool to ensure beneficial economic outcomes tor the self Rarely had weight been given
to the actor’s values, beliefs, resources, information, information processing capabilities, or their external
environment (Ostrom, 1999). Although a thorough discussion is beyond the scope of this article; in the past 30 years, a number of new
theoretical frameworks of the policy process have either been developed or modified to address the criticisms of the textbook
approach to policy research (Baumgartner & Jones, 1993; Kingdon, 1984; Ostrom; 1999; Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith; 1988). These
frameworks have since moved away from the more functionalist views; adding more complexity to how actors
create and implement policy. For example multiple streams theory (Kingdon, 1984), views policy as being unpredictable and
complicated to manage, and suggests that policy streams come together during windows of opportunity. The punctuated equilibrium
theory (Baumgaltner & Jones, 1993) attempted to explain how policy domains are characterized by long periods of stability and
incremental change but still experience short periods of great change. Finally, the advocacy coalition framework (Sabatier &. Jenkins-Smith,
1988) focuses on the interaction of advocacy coalitionseach consisting of actors from a variety of institutions who share a set of policy
beliefs-within a policy subsystem. These, along with other contem-porary policy frameworks, still rely on several rationalist
undertones, fail to capture the full complexity of policy environments, and do not account for all the
components that influence policy creation and implementation over time. More specifically, these frameworks
have been critiqued for failing to account for the oppression and often marginalization of racialized
populations written into policies (Marshall, 1997; Spillane, Reiser, & Reimer, 2002; Stein, 2004).The more traditional
approaches assume that race and ethnicity are not rele-vant in policy, and thus camouflage the differential
impact of educational policy on minoritized and White students (Iverson, 2007; Parker, 2003; Rivas, Pérez, Alvarez, &
Solorzano, 2007; Young, 1999).
Tag
Chase & Dowd ’12 (Megan M. Chase, Doctoral student at the Center for Urban Education, Rossier School of Education, University of
Southern California, Los Angeles Alicia C. Dowd, associate professor of education at the University of Southern California's Rossier School of
Education and co-director of the Center for Urban Education. Dr. Dowd's research focuses on political-economic issues of public college finance
equity, organizational effectiveness, and accountability and the factors affecting student attainment in higher education, Educational Policy
“Transfer Equity for "Minoritized" Students: A Critical Policy Analysis of Seven States”, p.6, 7 December 2012,
http://rossier.usc.edu/faculty/Educational%20Policy-2012-Chase-0895904812468227.pdf)//BG
Alternative models, such as critical policy analysis (CPA), “have been advanced to acknowledge
policy as a political
and value-laden process”(Allan et al., 2010, p. 22). The critical approach to educational policy emerged in the 1980s as a critique
of social reproduction and discourse and detines policy as the practice of power (Levinson, Sutton, & Winstead, 2012). Critical
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researchers tend to view the process of knowledge generation as subjective, where truth is believed to
be socially constructed, usually in a manner that supports certain racial, classes, and gender groups ( Crotty,
2003; Dumas &Anyon, 2006). This policy approach has been used to study multiple issues pertaining to
education, such as social reproduction (Bowles & Gintis, 1976), welfare and other reform (Shaw, 2004), university diversity policy
(Iverson, 2007), school finance (Aleman, 2007), boys education policy (Weaver-Hightower, 2008), community college mission
statements (Ayers, 2005), tracking (Oakes, 1985), and cultural assumptions within the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of
1965 (Stein, 2004). Critical policy analysts work to “illuminate the ways in which power oper-ates through
policy by drawing attention to hidden assumptions or policy silences and unintended consequences of
policy practices” (Allan et al., 2010, p. 24). Pusser and Marginson (2012) argue that, to date, scholars have gener-ally failed to
understand postsecondary higher education due to a lack of attention “to theories that address the nature and sources of power” (p.
2). Rather than focusing policy analysis on how to create more effective policies, applying a critical
perspective requires analysts to assess policy by asking questions such as “Who benefits?,” “Who loses?,”
and “How do low-income and minoritized students fare as a result of the policy? ” (Bacchi, 1999; Marshall,
1997). Young (i 1999) demonstrates the limitations of the traditional rationalist approach to policy analysis in her bi-theoretical study
ofthe failure of a parental involvement policy. The rationalist approach did not reveal, as her critical analysis, how the
inequitable distribution of power and knowl-edge of parents at the school was implicated in the policy’s
failure.
Critical policy analysis exposes the
Chase & Dowd ’12 (Megan M. Chase, Doctoral student at the Center for Urban Education, Rossier
School of Education, University of Southern California, Los Angeles Alicia C. Dowd, associate professor of
education at the University of Southern California's Rossier School of Education and co-director of the
Center for Urban Education. Dr. Dowd's research focuses on political-economic issues of public college
finance equity, organizational effectiveness, and accountability and the factors affecting student
attainment in higher education, Educational Policy “Transfer Equity for "Minoritized" Students: A Critical
Policy Analysis of Seven States”, 7 December 2012, p.7,
http://rossier.usc.edu/faculty/Educational%20Policy-2012-Chase-0895904812468227.pdf)//BG
The work of Young (1999) and others demonstrates how using CPA is especially important in a highly stratified society
like the United States because otherwise the impact of status differentials such as race, class, and gender
remain hidden. For scholars concerned with exposing and ameliorating the ways in that educational policy and practice subordinate
racial and ethnic minority groups, CPA provides a lens to formulate research questions, interpret data, and propose changes to policies,
practices, and institutions (Heck, 2004). A critical analysis is useful because it provides a lens that helps us see the
ways in that everyday policies and practices, such as those having to do with transfer, perpetuate racial and
gender inequity (Harper, Patton, & Wooden, 2009). For example, Iverson (2007) conducted a study that exam-ined how university
diversity policies shape the reality of students of color on campus. She found that the dominant discourses in diversity plans
construct students of color as outsiders, concluding that such policies serve to (re)pro-duce the
subordination of students of color. In addition, Shaw (2004) ana-lyzed welfare reform legislation from a critical policy perspective,
where she found that welfare policy perpetuates social stratification by creating onerous barriers to education for
women on welfare. These examples highlight how utilizing a critical policy framework can aid researchers in
understanding how well-intentioned policy can potentially harm marginalized populations.
Only a critical approach to policy making can solve for racial equality
Chase & Dowd ’12 (Megan M. Chase, Doctoral student at the Center for Urban Education, Rossier
School of Education, University of Southern California, Los Angeles Alicia C. Dowd, associate professor of
education at the University of Southern California's Rossier School of Education and co-director of the
Center for Urban Education. Dr. Dowd's research focuses on political-economic issues of public college
finance equity, organizational effectiveness, and accountability and the factors affecting student
Race File 7wS BFJR 2013
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attainment in higher education, Educational Policy “Transfer Equity for "Minoritized" Students: A Critical
Policy Analysis of Seven States”, p. 7 December 2012,
http://rossier.usc.edu/faculty/Educational%20Policy-2012-Chase-0895904812468227.pdf)//BG
A critical approach to policy analysis emphasizes the need to counter the policies, structures, practices, and
allocation of resources that result in or reinforce racial inequity (Chesler & Crowfoot, 2000). As Chesler and Crowfoot
(2000) argue “our history of racial injustice is maintained through contemporary policies and practices, and is reflected in the dramatic differentials . . _ in opportunity and other outcomes that still exist between people of color and White persons” (ip. 436). From this view,
transfer poli-cies and practices can be discriminatory and function as a form of institutionalized racism,
where institutionalized racism is defined as racism that occurs in structures and operations at the
organizational level (Jones, 2000). This notion emphasizes how large-scale institutional structures and policies
“operate to pass on and reinforce historic patterns of privilege and disadvantage,” such as deciding which groups
gain access to the baccalaureate and which do not (Chesler & Crowfoot, 2000, p. 441). However, it is important to note that
institutionalized racism in the form of policy is most often uninten-tional. Referred to as indirect institutionalized discrimination,
this form of racism occurs with no prejudice or intent to harm, despite its negative and differential impacts
on minoritized populations (Chesler & Crowfoot, 2000). Chesler and Crowfoot (2000) note that,organizational procedures
can have discriminatory impact even if individual actors are unaware of such impacts or are nondiscriminatory in their personal beliefs, and even if their behavior appears to be a fair-minded application of
‘race-neutral’ or ‘color-blind’ rules (p. 442).
Policy making omits the fact that it is institutionalized and racist
Chase & Dowd ’12 (Megan M. Chase, Doctoral student at the Center for Urban Education, Rossier
School of Education, University of Southern California, Los Angeles Alicia C. Dowd, associate professor of
education at the University of Southern California's Rossier School of Education and co-director of the
Center for Urban Education. Dr. Dowd's research focuses on political-economic issues of public college
finance equity, organizational effectiveness, and accountability and the factors affecting student
attainment in higher education, Educational Policy “Transfer Equity for "Minoritized" Students: A Critical
Policy Analysis of Seven States”, 7 December 2012, p.8
http://rossier.usc.edu/faculty/Educational%20Policy-2012-Chase-0895904812468227.pdf)//BG
Racism in organizational policy can also include acts of omission, such as failing to recruit minority students or hiring
policies that exclude scholars of color. As an example, transfer policies can be enacted without conscious discriminatory intent, yet can
produce results with inequitable and negative effects on students of color. Demonstrating how to critically evaluate policies
in terms of their potential for discriminatory impact provides the basis for redesigning policies in a more
equitable manner. In this study, CPA includes the examination of state transfer policies with the goal of understanding if such policies
are a form of institutionalized rac-ism. CPA was chosen as the preferred method of analysis because, as other authors have indicated,
written texts contribute to the construction of social reality; thus, by analyzing texts (in the case of this study,
written policies), we were able to examine what is missing from enacted policy and who is privileged as a result
(Allan et al., 2010; Fairclough, 1989). In addition, CPA is used to identify indirect forms of institutional discrimination.
Knowing that policies do not fully drive behaviors, we recognize problem identification is a necessary but
insufficient step toward reducing structural barriers to transfer for minoritized students.