FW
Our interpretation is that the affirmative should instrumentally defend topical
action – that means saying an example of the resolution would be a good idea
First -- definitions
1NC
Legalize means to confirm by law – and make lawful
McGRAW-HILL LEGAL 07 [Burton's Legal Thesaurus, William C. Burton. Used with
permission of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., http://legaldictionary.thefreedictionary.com/legalize]
legalize verb approve, authorize, bring into conformity with law, confirm, confirm by law, decree by law,
enact by law, ferre, legislate, legitimate, legitimatize, make lawful, make legal, order by law, permit by law,
pronounce legal, sanction, sanction by law, validate
Should indicates obligation or duty
Compact Oxford English Dictionary, 8 (“should”, 2008,
http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/should?view=uk)
should
modal verb (3rd sing. should) 1 used to indicate obligation, duty, or correctness. 2 used to indicate what is probable. 3
formal expressing the conditional mood. 4 used in a clause with ‘that’ after a main clause describing feelings. 5 used in a clause with
‘that’ expressing purpose. 6 (in the first person) expressing a polite request or acceptance. 7 (in the first person) expressing a
conjecture or hope. USAGE Strictly speaking should is used with I and we, as in I should be grateful if you would let me know, while
would is used with you, he, she, it, and they, as in you didn’t say you would be late; in practice would is normally used instead of
should in reported speech and conditional clauses, such as I said I would be late. In speech the distinction tends to be obscured,
through the use of the contracted forms I’d, we’d, etc.
That’s key to limits -- negative strategy is based on the “should” question of the
resolution---there are an infinite number of reasons that the scholarship of their
advocacy could be a reason to vote affirmative--- these all obviate the only
predictable strategies based on topical action---they overstretch our research
burden and undermine preparedness for all debates. That also justifies Aff
conditionality – without the plan text as a stable source of the offense the aff can
shift their advocacy to get out of offense which discourages research and clash
Next is offense –
Sub-point A is skills -Debate over a controversial point of action creates argumentative stasis—that’s
key to avoid a devolution of debate into competing truth claims, which destroys the
decision-making benefits of the activity
Steinberg and Freeley ‘13
David Director of Debate at U Miami, Former President of CEDA, officer, American Forensic Association and National Communication Association.
Lecturer in Communication studies and rhetoric. Advisor to Miami Urban Debate League, Masters in Communication, and Austin, JD, Suffolk
University, attorney who focuses on criminal, personal injury and civil rights law, Argumentation and Debate
Critical Thinking for Reasoned Decision Making, Thirteen Edition
Debate is a means of settling differences, so there must be a controversy, a difference of opinion or a conflict
of interest before there can be a debate. If everyone is in agreement on a feet or value or policy, there is no need or opportunity for
debate; the matter can be settled by unanimous consent. Thus, for example, it would be pointless to attempt to debate
"Resolved: That two plus two equals four,” because there is simply no controversy about this statement. Controversy
is an essential prerequisite of debate. Where there is no clash of ideas, proposals, interests, or expressed positions of
issues, there is no debate. Controversy
invites decisive choice between competing positions. Debate
cannot produce effective decisions without clear identification of a question or questions to be
answered. For example, general argument may occur about the broad topic of illegal immigration. How many
illegal immigrants live in the United States? What is the impact of illegal immigration and immigrants on our economy? What is their impact on
our communities? Do they commit crimes? Do they take jobs from American workers? Do they pay taxes? Do they require social services? Is it a
problem that some do not speak English? Is it the responsibility of employers to discourage illegal immigration by not hiring undocumented
workers? Should they have the opportunity to gain citizenship? Does illegal immigration pose a security threat to our country? Do illegal
immigrants do work that American workers are unwilling to do? Are their rights as workers and as human beings at risk due to their status? Are
they abused by employers, law enforcement, housing, and businesses? How are their families impacted by their status? What is the moral and
philosophical obligation of a nation state to maintain its borders? Should we build a wall on the Mexican border, establish a national
identification card, or enforce existing laws against employers? Should we invite immigrants to become U.S. citizens? Surely you can think of
many more concerns to be addressed by a conversation about the topic area of illegal immigration. Participation
in this “debate”
is likely to be emotional and intense. However, it is not likely to be productive or useful without
focus on a particular question and identification of a line demarcating sides in the
controversy. To be discussed and resolved effectively, controversies are best understood when seated clearly such that
all parties to the debate share an understanding about the objective of the debate. This enables focus
on substantive and objectively identifiable issues facilitating comparison of competing argumentation leading to
effective decisions. Vague understanding results in unfocused deliberation and poor decisions,
general feelings of tension without opportunity for resolution, frustration, and emotional distress, as
evidenced by the failure of the U.S. Congress to make substantial progress on the immigration debate. Of course, arguments may be presented
without disagreement. For example, claims are presented and supported within speeches, editorials, and advertisements even without opposing or
refutational response. Argumentation occurs in a range of settings from informal to formal, and may not call upon an audience or judge to make a
forced choice among competing claims. Informal discourse occurs as conversation or panel discussion without demanding a decision about a
dichotomous or yes/no question. However, by
definition, debate requires "reasoned judgment on a proposition.
The proposition is a statement about which competing advocates will offer alternative (pro or con)
argumentation calling upon their audience or adjudicator to decide. The proposition provides
focus for the discourse and guides the decision process. Even when a decision will be made
through a process of compromise, it is important to identify the beginning positions of competing
advocates to begin negotiation and movement toward a center, or consensus position. It is frustrating and
usually unproductive to attempt to make a decision when deciders are unclear as to what the
decision is about. The proposition may be implicit in some applied debates (“Vote for me!”); however, when a vote or consequential
decision is called for (as in the courtroom or in applied parliamentary debate) it is essential that the proposition be explicitly expressed (“the
defendant is guilty!”). In
academic debate, the proposition provides essential guidance for the
preparation of the debaters prior to the debate, the case building and discourse presented
during the debate, and the decision to be made by the debate judge after the debate. Someone disturbed
by the problem of a growing underclass of poorly educated, socially disenfranchised youths might observe,
“Public schools are doing a terrible job! They' are overcrowded, and many teachers are poorly qualified in their subject areas.
Even the best teachers can do little more than struggle to maintain order in their classrooms." That same concerned citizen, facing a
complex range of issues, might arrive at an unhelpful decision, such as "We ought to do something about
this” or, worse, “It’s too complicated a problem to deal with." Groups of concerned citizens worried about the state of public education could
join together to express their frustrations, anger, disillusionment, and emotions regarding the schools, but without a focus for their discussions,
they could easily agree about the sorry state of education without finding points of clarity or potential solutions. A
gripe session would
follow. But if a precise question is posed—such as “What can be done to improve public education?”—then a more
profitable area of discussion is opened up simply by placing a focus on the search for a concrete
solution step. One or more judgments can be phrased in the form of debate propositions, motions for parliamentary debate, or bills for
legislative assemblies, The statements "Resolved: That the federal government should implement a program
of charter schools in at-risk communities” and “Resolved; That the state of Florida should adopt a school voucher program"
more clearly identify specific ways of dealing with educational problems in a manageable form,
suitable for debate. They provide specific policies to be investigated and aid discussants in identifying points of difference. This
focus contributes to better and more informed decision making with the potential for better results.
In academic debate, it provides better depth of argumentation and enhanced opportunity for
reaping the educational benefits of participation. In the next section, we will consider the challenge of framing the proposition
for debate, and its role in the debate. To have a productive debate, which facilitates effective decision making
by directing and placing limits on the decision to be made, the basis for argument
should be clearly defined. If we merely talk about a topic, such as ‘"homelessness,” or “abortion,” Or
“crime,” or “global warming,” we are likely to have an interesting discussion but not to establish a
profitable basis for argument. For example, the statement “Resolved: That the pen is mightier than the sword” is debatable, yet by
itself fails to provide much basis for dear argumentation. If we take this statement to mean Iliad the written word is more effective than physical
force for some purposes, we can identify a problem area: the comparative effectiveness of writing or physical force for a specific purpose,
perhaps promoting positive social change. (Note that “loose” propositions, such as the example above, may be defined by their advocates in such
a way as to facilitate a clear contrast of competing sides; through definitions and debate they “become” clearly understood statements even
though they may not begin as such. There are formats for debate that often begin with this sort of proposition. However, in
any debate, at
some point, effective and meaningful discussion relies on identification of a clearly stated or
understood proposition.) Back to the example of the written word versus physical force. Although we now have a general
subject, we have not yet stated a problem. It is still too broad, too loosely worded to promote weII-organized argument.
What sort of writing are we concerned with—poems, novels, government documents, website development, advertising, cyber-warfare,
disinformation, or what? What does it mean to be “mightier" in this context? What kind of physical force is being compared—fists, dueling
swords, bazookas, nuclear weapons, or what? A more specific question might be, “Would a mutual defense treaty or a visit by our fleet be more
effective in assuring Laurania of our support in a certain crisis?” The basis for argument could be phrased in a debate proposition such as
“Resolved: That the United States should enter into a mutual defense treaty with Laurania.” Negative advocates might oppose this proposition by
arguing that fleet maneuvers would be a better solution. This is not to say that debates should completely avoid creative interpretation of
the controversy by advocates, or that good debates cannot occur over competing interpretations of the controversy; in fact, these sorts of
debates may be very engaging.
The point is that debate is best facilitated by the guidance provided
by focus on a particular point of difference, which will be outlined in the following discussion.
Debate should be about the process, not the product – a discussion of the details is
a more beneficial strategy
Paroske 11 - Assistant professor of communication, Department of Communication and Visual Arts, University of Michigan (
Argumentation and Federal Rulemaking. Controversia; Fall2011, Vol. 7 Issue 2, p34-53, 20p ebsco)
The process
of democratic governance is more than a means to an end. Often, how we deliberate
as important or even more important to the outcome of the debate than the
underlying issue itself. Recent history is rife with examples of laws that rose and fell on the
mechanics of voting in the legislative body or the parliamentary vehicles in which the legislation
was offered. There is a normative element to deliberation in a democracy, and failure to vet an issue sufficiently is
often seen as grounds for rejecting the legislation itself (Paroske, 2009). For example, it is routine for
legislators of a minority party in Congress to denounce a pending bill because there were not
enough hearings on the issue, or that a sufficient number or kind of amendments was not
allowed, or even that the time devoted to debate on the floor was insufficient. These questions of
process in legislation dominate headlines. Less studied, but perhaps even more interesting, are questions of
process in a regulatory framework. Given its complexity, rulemaking is especially prone to processoriented questions. Far more than legislation, rules must navigate a number of prescribed
argumentative hurdles on their way to adoption. This raises the stakes for following proper
procedure both logically and practically, as violating protocols makes it likely the rule will be
rejected. In addition, the authority of agencies in the federal government is nebulous. Agency power
to make rules is delegated by Congress, but there is little consensus on the degree of latitude that
those designees hold. Since rulemakers lack constitu- tional warrants for coercing citizen
behavior, they are highly susceptible to criticism of their authority and jurisdiction. Asked to act
both independently and under the watch of the constitutional branches, rulemakers must pay
careful attention to process.
a policy is
Using the starting point in debate specifically is bad ----- it simultaneously fails to
inculcate more diversity in debate and inherently privileges the non-traditional
style of debate that devolves into a series of shell-games, trading off with efforts
for social-change while providing more ammo for conservative power-grabs
ZOMPETTI 2004 - Assistant Professor, School of Communication, Illinois State University (is
he still there?) (Joseph P. Zompetti, “PERSONALIZING DEBATING: DIVERSITY AND
TOLERANCE IN THE DEBATE COMMUNITY” September 2004 Contemporary
Argumentation and Debate volume 25)
posts to eDebate (e.g., April 2004),1 the electronic listserv for intercollegiate policy debate, have described a controversial
phenomenon in debate, namely the use of personalized discourse to articulate a specific position
of progressive social change in the debate community. More specifically, the discussion centered in April 2004 on
the arguments advanced by University of Louisville debaters who have essentially claimed that rap, instead of "traditional" forms of
evidence,2 ( In another eDebate post, Ede Warner (2005), the coach of the University of Louisville, described how their project does not forbid
"traditional" forms of evidence. Their project, nevertheless, privileges "nontraditional" types of evidence and criticizes "traditional" debate practices. In another post, Warner
(2004b) goes so far as to indict traditional evidence as "crappy.") along with personal narratives should be used to support the
position that the debate community is exclusionary against people of color. Their position continues to claim
that they have made real advances to change the community, including their "project" of
rejecting "traditional" forms of debate (privilege, evidence, flowing, styles of argument, etc.),
recruiting marginalized student populations, providing scholarships to targeted high school groups, advancing a campaign of inclusion of different
voices, etc. Such advances are difficult to counter since they are in large part unverifiable and do
not justify by themselves the insertion of personalized arguments within the debate round. When
Frequently
opponents try to question their own privilege and advance ideas of changing the community, Louisville has responded with a series of arguments, including tokenism, insincerity, divide-and-conquer, and so on.
Are the concerns and voices of individuals who feel
slighted in the debate community appropriate for actual debate rounds? Should issues of racism, marginalization, sexism, and
The question then becomes, at what point should the personal intercede into the debate round?
the like which occur in the debate community be subject to actual debates within the debate community, or should they be discussed in venues and forums that are more appropriate to discussing structural issues
of the community? These questions, among others, have become highlighted in the discussions on eDebate. The purpose of this essay is to outline what I strongly believe is a fundamental problem with recent
The intent is not to isolate or overly criticize the arguments advanced by the University of
specifically, but rather to locate their arguments as a case study for how debate rounds have
become highly personalized. Even before Louisville’s project (and certainly Louisville is not the only team that currently engages in this type of
debating), individuals and groups alike were personalizing debate arguments, making it difficult for
opponents and judges to decipher, understand, analyze and come to grips with such
arguments in a forum meant for hypothetical policy-making. In essence, the personalizing of debating has emerged wrought with
frustrations, anxiety, resistance and backlash. To be sure, many have embraced the idea to gain a strategic edge in
competitive debate rounds as well as to be self-reflexive of their own participation in an activity
that probably does need restructuring. However, the central problem of this new phenomenon the
personalizing of debating is twofold: it victimizes debate, and it ignores deeper, perhaps
more important structural problems within the debate community. There is no question
that intercollegiate policy debate is at a crossroads. It suffers from a severe lack of diversity, in terms of female debaters as well as debaters of color.
debate techniques the personalizing of debating.
Louisville
Stating the obvious, McRee and Cote declare that "twenty years of data have begun to cement an agreement among forensics educators that there exists a serious lack of diversity in debate" (2002, p. 29). This
problem is especially acute when one looks at the teams clearing into elimination rounds and which debaters receive speaker awards at both regional and national tournaments. Very few would argue, I suspect,
that diversity is not a problem In fact, the opposite is true (Bartenan, 1995, 1998; Bile, 1999; Bruschke & Johnson, 1994; Crenshaw, 1993a, 1993b; Hunt & Simerly, 1999; Loge, 1991; McRee & Cote, 2002; Rogers et
al., 2003; Rowland, 1993; Sowards, 1999a, 1999b; Tuman, 1993; Wilkins & Hobbs, 1997; Williams, McGee & McGee, 1999; Zompetti, 1999). However, the real debate occurs as to the core causes of this problem
In the past five years or so, some debaters and debate teams have introduced the
diversity problem into actual debate rounds, arguing that "traditional" debate is exclusionary
and problematic. Their arguments focus on several core issues: traditional debate excludes
certain types of evidence (i.e., narratives, music, etc.), traditional debate privileges affluent
individuals (i.e., the cost of summer institutes, travel budgets, etc.), traditional debate ignores
the reality of many individuals who are already at a disadvantage in the activity (i.e., debaters of
color and women). These teams then use these types of arguments, coupled with a patchwork of
hip- hop music clips and personal testimony, along with soliloquies on how the current
and how to address them.
resolution precludes their perspectives. The result is a highly effective and advanced amalgamation
of ad hominem attacks, fallacies of composition (the part represents the whole), guilt appeals and, to
use Kenneth Burke’s (1962) term, victimage. In essence, many debates on college campuses have become venues for complaints about how the current order of things
(aka "status quo," or as Rogers et al. (2003) call it, the "ISM") in intercollegiate debate is occurring. Before addressing specifically the issue of personalizing debate, I want to pause to address another, separate
argument lodged by teams like Louisville. Such teams often critique "traditional" pedagogy for its reliance on banking, top-down forms of education. Stemming from the perspective of critical pedagogy (Freire,
this critique argues that traditional pedagogy includes instruments of alienation which
require personal attention to overcome the marginalization and oppressive conditions
associated with traditional pedagogy. While I generally agree with the tenets of Freirian critical pedagogy, I am unconvinced that the
personalized nature of debate falls within its purview. As a matter of fact, the dialogic nature of
debate can actually foster the organic learning process of critical pedagogy, absent personalizing
it (Wade, 1998; Warner, 2001). Furthermore, as I will argue below, even if traditional debate practices have
problems, personalizing debate within the specific debate round is not the most effective means
for creating change. Finally, one can also dispute that personalizing debate is actually a bone fide element to critical pedagogy. Given the therapeutic
nature of personalized debate, such argumentative transactions almost become like disputes on
a playground where one debater essentially says "my daddy can beat up your daddy," or
translated it becomes "my oppression is worse than your oppression." And, because these arguments
occur in a debate round, they are articulated precisely in this way. As I will argue below, a much
more effective strategy is to engage, in the spirit of critical pedagogy, in a community-based
discussion of structural issues regarding privilege, as opposed to competitive, albeit strategic,
arguments in specific debates. Many, if not most, of the complaints heard in debate rounds have merit. As a community, we must address the issues of exclusivity, tolerance,
respect and diversity. However, when debaters make arguments about these issues in debate rounds, the
arguments become personalized, often seen as attacks against specific individuals, namely the
"other" team (in arguments such as "you don’t address your privilege," or "you don’t do anything
or aren’t doing enough for diversity"). The so-called "Other" that debaters refer to as being
marginalized becomes transferred onto "other" individuals and teams as the competitive
structure of a debate necessitates. The point, then, is not that these complaints and concerns should not be discussed, but that they should not be discussed in actual debate
rounds. I should also add that since diversity is still an on-going concern, we must question
the efficacy of personalized debating at generally improving diversity in our community. Even if
other solutions fall short as well, they at least avoid the pitfalls of personalized
debating that I now begin to explore. Interjecting the personalized into debate rounds has become highly problematic. As discussions on eDebate demonstrate and
my own discussions with folks who have judged teams like Louisville suggest, these arguments have increased anxiety, frustration, anger
and resentment. To be fair, these arguments have also facilitated much soul-searching and selfreflexivity in the community. However, except for the Urban Debate League (UDL) movement2 little, if anything, is
being done to correct for inadequacies and inequities in the community, contrary to the appeal
of the personalized arguments. In fact, any benefits from the personalization of debate can be
accrued from enhancing other strategies: larger community discussions (as evidenced by some messages on eDebate),3
discussion fora at national tournaments,4 special high school debate institutes,5 clear directives
and discussion during the CEDA and NDT business and roundtable meetings,6 more sensitive
topic selection,7 etc. The drawbacks to personalizing debate, however, are, in my opinion,
enormous. I will elaborate on two significant problems of engaging the personal in actual debate rounds: victimhood and therapy rhetoric. The first major problem
with this new form of debating is its appeal to victimage. Through victimage and scapegoating, a
rhetor uses a purification ritual as a means of identifying and blaming the guilt onto an
appropriate other. This commonality helps form identification among people when such blaming
is in common (Burke, 1962, p. 22). In other words, victimage necessarily implies the understanding that one is in a position of marginalization. In debate, marginalized
groups gain credit for being victims by arguing their plight among the community. There is no shame in that.
However, many so-called "victims" deploy these arguments in actual debate rounds. I have no
problem with discussions of exclusivity and underrepresentation in our community, but let me
be clear: Such arguments should not be the focus of debate competition. On one level, we clearly have a problem in our
1993),
community, namely the marginalization of diverse groups. On the other level, we have arguments about problem "x" occurring in debate rounds where debate teams may not have access to knowledge concerning
the problem of the community-at-large or they may not be prepared to debate such issues (after all, one is reminded of the importance of clash in individual debates). Clearly, we have a mismatch concerning a
The concomitant positions advanced by a team in favor of changing the community are essentially "debate-proof."
For how can one debate against the claim that one "feels" or
"perceives" marginalization? Such claims are unverifiable and dependent on the person who is
advancing the argument, not on the one answering it. In essence, then, victimage arguments "stack-the-deck" in favor of those advocating such
positions. One may also insert the role of the judge into this equation. Judging debates is
hard enough, particularly when debaters already personalize judge’s comments. After
topic and its venue.
We may initially want to congratulate such debaters for their strategic prowess:
all, when debaters make arguments, they put forward part of themselves and are vulnerable to criticism. But for many years debaters have claimed that judges are too subjective in their assessments, particularly
When debaters engage in a more explicit form of
personalized debating, the role of the judge is even more difficult. In addition, any critical comment from
a judge runs the risk of being misperceived. The result is a more frustrating and anxiety- prone
activity precisely because the arguments become personalized, as opposed to placing them within the larger community context.1 My
position, then, is not that such arguments are untrue (yes, marginalization exists), but rather that such claims are not debatable. Hence, no clash can occur when
such arguments are made. This destroys the nature of debate because it not only nullifies any ground the other team may have, but it
also sets a very dangerous precedent where some team personally argues "x" where no alternate
team may respond with "y." This is dangerous, of course, because debate as we know it ceases to exist the fundamental element of clash (i.e., the different affirmative and negative
when forms of racism and sexism emerge, subtly or not so subtly, in some judge’s comments.
burdens) becomes moot and irrelevant. Victimhood, as is true with society as a whole, becomes the ultimate trump card where someone’s personal feelings, beliefs, or journeys supercede any attempts at verifying
What’s more, an even more dangerous impulse occurs that
people in positions of power may appropriate the arguments and rhetoric of the
marginalized for their own ends (Dubber, 2002). The second major problem with this turn in
contemporary policy debate is its deflection, if not downright rejection, of more fundamental or
core problems which are the cause of marginalization. Dana Cloud (1998) poignantly argues that
when focusing on the personalizing of "debating," society stifles dissent, which is probably more
important and powerful at ushering-in social change than particularized attention to
therapeutic, albeit victimized, perspectives. The will to engage in discourse about transgression is
one of individualized therapy, as if the individual’s psychological condition is at stake (e.g.,
arguments about "discursive violence" are often deployed to this end). Her argument is primarily one about key progressive
change should we focus on individual notions of psychological distress or the larger group’s problem of resource-based scarcity and exploitation? If one is compelled by the
argument that we should look self-reflexively 2 and comprehensively at the nature of
excluding debaters of color and other marginalized groups, then we might be tempted to agree
with the outcome of piecemeal solutions and incoherent policies. On the other hand, we may want to analyze how such relationships
or locating expert testimonial evidence to the contrary.
occurred and grew when other relationships and situations were not as obvious. In fact, we may want to even broaden our interpretation of such relationships exactly how are students of color marginalized? Why
Not only is
the limited time in a round an impediment at answering these complex questions, but both debaters
of a single team may advance different personalized arguments, creating a moving target of
advocacy that the opposing team and judges have difficulty in specifically pinning down for
thorough and productive examination. Or, as Cloud suggests, such therapeutic arguments "deflect [sic] the
energy and radicalism of activists," essentially creating a shell-game during private
discussions of much larger societal problems (1998, p. 34). In addition, these questions are often skirted in debate rounds because there is a drive for
competition. While some critical self-reflection has undoubtedly occurred as a result of personalizing
debate, the overwhelming majority of debaters and coaches spend less time thinking about the
core problems of marginalization (and their solutions) than they do locating debate strategies to
beat personalization arguments at the next tournament. During squad meetings and coaching sessions, one does not hear an opposing team
do folks believe they have nothing to contribute? Why do students of color feel excluded? It is very difficult, if not impossible, to get at these questions during a collegiate debate round.
sincerely talk about their privilege or the exclusion of women or people of color in the debate community. Instead, one hears about what topicality argument, framework argument, or counter-narrative will be
The problem of therapeutic rhetoric underscores how personalized debating
prevents examination of more important factors such as resource disparity. Thus, the underlying
therapeutic nature of personalized debate, coupled with the competitive component of trying to
win debate rounds nullifies any chance at a fruitful and productive discussion about
the problems of marginalization and their potential solutions. A focus on the personal my experience, my narrative, my feelings, how I
learn, how I can engage the community is quite seductive; we all want to know how we fit into the larger structure of the community. And, given the intense nature of our
deployed to win the judge’s ballot.
activity, it is easy to get lost in how our feelings of hard work, emotional attachment, anxiety,
despair, excitement, success, and so on become interfaced with larger community trends.
Ultimately, however, a focus on the personal is a dead-end. The community’s composition of
multiple persons, who become focused on themselves, ignores the community at large. This can be seen with
the move toward personalizing debating. Instead of examining problems of resource disparity (high costs of travel,
scholarships, lack of novice tournaments, disparate coaching staffs, etc.) which plague debaters
and debate programs throughout the country, 1 the personalization arguments focus on different
styles of debating (slow vs. fast, hip-hop vs. traditional evidence), individual identity (black vs.
white, privileged vs. marginalized), and praxis (I’m doing something about the problem vs.
you’re not). Indeed, as Cloud argues, the "privatizing, normalizing, and marginalizing discourses of the therapeutic are incompatible with a public-, policy-, and change-oriented definition of politics"
(1998, p. 7). There is no question that individualized and personalized questions of debate style are
important to examine some debaters learn better through different styles and some styles are
more exciting than others. And, if those are the questions the community wants to ask and deal with, then so be it. However, if we are serious about
creating a climate of tolerance, respect and diversity, then much deeper, structural (i.e., not
personalized) issues must be addressed first. We would do well to note Rogers et al., who argue: The forensic community has made significant progress over
the past few years towards understanding the complexities of the differing presentational styles, argument forms and analysis of subdominant cultural groups hoping to bridge the gap between understanding,
tolerance and both significant representation and participation in debate. None would argue against the goal of significant inclusiveness and its overall contribution to the pedagogy of a complete forensic
As
such, the problems of diversity and privilege in the debate community cannot be addressed in
individual debate rounds, particularly through arguments about "non- traditional" evidence,
argumentative style and cultural forms of learning. The highly personalized nature of such
arguments creates feelings of victimhood. The competitive aspect of a debate round makes the
therapeutic rhetoric of argumentative style displace the larger, structural impediments to a
diverse and tolerant community. Again, if we refer to Cloud, we can translate her use of "private" for a "debate round," particularly if we juxtapose the private debate round to
the community writ large: . . . the therapeutic is a rhetoric that encourages a reformist rather than revolutionary
political stance . . . . It is dangerous . . . to allow the therapeutic to set the bounds of our political
imagination to the extent that it becomes difficult even to conceive of revolutionary change . . . the
therapeutic asks activists to retreat from the public struggle for even modest reforms in favor of
private wound-licking (1998, pp. 159-160). And this is what personalizing debating does. While projects such as Louisville’s declare ambitions of "community change" and radical social
transformation, what they are really doing is keeping such arguments in the closet by performing their therapeutic rhetoric of victimhood in private debate rounds. If revolutionary
change is the intent, then revolutionary action should occur to change the structural and
institutional barriers to more diverse involvement and success in debate (Cloud, 1998, p. 166). Personalizing
debating, as competitive arguments, in a private debate round does nothing except breed
frustration, victimage, and displacement of more lofty efforts. Debate should remain a simulated activity where students gather together to
clash about issues of social controversy related to a resolution. During the simulation, debaters learn to engage each other with
civility, obtain vital skills,1 and engage about a common societal problem, rather than personalized
problems that may or may not be a reflection of larger community issues. If there are problems
about who gets to participate, what topic gets debated, or what styles of debate get introduced,
then those are issues the community as a whole needs to address, not the individual debaters.
experience resulting in education. In spite of our efforts, the participation and success rates for women and minorities within intercollegiate, competitive debate remain disparagingly low (2003, p. 2).
Sub-point B is Switch Side –
Switching sides allows for a dialogical change in perspectives that resolve the affs
impacts and foster sympathy
Bohlin 8 - Dr. Phil. in theoretical philosophy (Stockholm University, 1997) ¶ Senior lecturer
(docent) in philosophy, lecturer in history of ideas ¶ Member of the faculty board, chair of the
faculty committee for teacher education and educational research (Henrik Bohlin Perspectivedependence and Critical Thinking EBSCO)
Suppose that we are trying to understand and morally assess the customs of a people with a very
different culture. In the case of some of their practices and beliefs, we find that the others react just
the way we ourselves would find it reasonable to react in the same circumstances; they are hungry, and they eat;
they are insulted, and they get angry, etc. Thus, we can make perfect sense of what they do and say from within our own perspective,
or so it seems. (Such impressions can of course be deceptive if the others do what we would, but for quite incompatible reasons.) In
other cases, however,
we find that the others do and say things that seem clearly unjustified
according to our norms of speech and behaviour. For example, we find that they have the custom of instructing
their children to play war games where stones are thrown at the opponents, that children are occasionally killed in these games, and
that the adults, although they mourn those killed in this way, continue to encourage the games. Here,
it seems impossible to
understand and agree with the others while remaining within the perspective of our own culture;
given our moral standards and what we know of the circumstances, it seems that nothing can
justify such a practice. To assess it, it seems, a critic must shift perspective, or at least somehow
take the difference in perspectives into account. What can this mean? First, it is conceivable that by
learning more about the people we are trying to understand, we find that the particular
circumstances under which they live in fact makes the practice justifiable, even according to our
moral standards—say, because they inhabit an overpopulated area with constant wars over
territory going on between rival tribes, where it is of crucial importance for the survival of each
tribe that their young ones develop fearlessness and insensitivity to pain from an early age, and
where the practice of encouraging realistic war games among children is, to everyone’s regret,
the only means to achieve this. Seeing things from the other’s perspective in this case means
taking time, place, and other relevant facts of the matter into account. This could be called conservative perspective
shift, since it does not require us, as critics, to change or in any way abandon our own moral
principles or standards of extra-moral rationality. Suppose now instead that taking all relevant facts into account
is not sufficient to make the custom we are trying to understand justifiable according to the moral standards of our own culture, but
that the
attempt to interpret the other culture and the careful weighing of arguments for and
against it has the effect of making us question and revise some of our own general moral
standards and factual beliefs that made the custom unacceptable to us. We thus recognise a
genuine conflict between our own culture and that of the others, and admit that the others are
right. Hence, we may say that we learn from the others. Let us call this dialogical change of
perspective, since what happens resembles a conversation or dialogue where one of
the parties, or both, revise their beliefs as a result of the dialogue. A genuine conflict
is found to exist between the cultures of the interpreter and the other, and as a consequence, the critic
changes his own perspective (in this case, his moral background assumptions). (It may be difficult to distinguish dialogical and
conservative perspective shifts since the demarcation line between beliefs on particular facts on the one hand and more general and
fundamental moral principles and factual beliefs on the other is not sharp.)
Sub-point C is the law
Failure to engage the state means the aff fails, coalitions break down, and hawks
seize the political – only engagement solves
Mouffe 2009 (Chantal Mouffe is Professor of Political Theory at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of
Westminster, “The Importance of Engaging the State”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, pp. 233-7)
In both Hardt and Negri, and Virno, there is therefore emphasis upon ‘critique as withdrawal’. They all call for
the development of a non-state public sphere. They call for self-organisation, experimentation, non-representative and extraparliamentary politics. They
see forms of traditional representative politics as inherently oppressive.
So they do not seek to engage with them, in order to challenge them. They seek to get rid of
them altogether. This disengagement is, for such influential personalities in radical politics today, the key to every political
position in the world. The Multitude must recognise imperial sovereignty itself as the enemy and discover adequate means of
subverting its power. Whereas in the disciplinary era I spoke about earlier, sabotage was the fundamental form of political
resistance, these authors claim that, today, it should be desertion. It is indeed through desertion, through the evacuation of the
places of power, that they think that battles against Empire might be won. Desertion and exodus are, for these important
thinkers, a powerful form of class struggle against imperial postmodernity. According to Hardt and Negri, and Virno, radical
politics in the past was dominated by the notion of ‘the people’. This was, according to them, a unity, acting with one will. And
this unity is linked to the existence of the state. The Multitude, on the contrary, shuns political unity. It is not representable
because it is an active self-organising agent that can never achieve the status of a juridical personage. It can never converge in a
general will, because the present globalisation of capital and workers’ struggles will not permit this. It is anti-state and antipopular. Hardt and Negri claim that the Multitude cannot be conceived any more in terms of a sovereign authority that is
representative of the people. They therefore argue that new forms of politics, which are non-representative, are needed. They
advocate a withdrawal from existing institutions. This is something which characterises much of
radical politics today. The emphasis is not upon challenging the state. Radical
politics today is often characterised by a mood, a sense and a feeling, that the state itself is
inherently the problem. Critique as engagement I will now turn to presenting the way I envisage the
form of social criticism best suited to radical politics today. I agree with Hardt and Negri that it is
important to understand the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. But I consider that the dynamics of this transition is
better apprehended within the framework of the approach outlined in the book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a
Radical Democratic Politics (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001). What I want to stress is that many factors have contributed to this
transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, and that it is necessary to recognise its complex nature. My problem with Hardt and
Negri’s view is that, by putting so much emphasis on the workers’ struggles, they tend to see this transition as if it was driven by
one single logic: the workers’ resistance to the forces of capitalism in the post-Fordist era. They put too much emphasis upon
immaterial labour. In their view, capitalism can only be reactive and they refuse to accept the creative role played both by capital
and by labour. To put it another way, they
deny the positive role of political struggle. In Hegemony and
use the word ‘hegemony’ to describe the way in
which meaning is given to institutions or practices: for example, the way in which a given
institution or practice is defined as ‘oppressive to women’, ‘racist’ or ‘environmentally
destructive’. We also point out that every hegemonic order is therefore susceptible to being
challenged by counter-hegemonic practices – feminist, anti-racist, environmentalist, for
example. This is illustrated by the plethora of new social movements which presently exist in radical
politics today (Christian, anti-war, counter-globalisation, Muslim, and so on). Clearly not all of these are workers’
struggles. In their various ways they have nevertheless attempted to influence and have influenced
a new hegemonic order. This means that when we talk about ‘the political’, we do not lose
sight of the ever present possibility of heterogeneity and antagonism within society. There are
Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics we
many different ways of being antagonistic to a dominant order in a heterogeneous society – it need not only refer to the workers’
struggles. I submit that it
is necessary to introduce this hegemonic dimension when one envisages
the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. This means abandoning the view that a single logic (workers’
struggles) is at work in the evolution of the work process; as well as acknowledging the pro-active role played by capital. In order
to do this we can find interesting insights in the work of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello who, in their book The New Spirit of
Capitalism (2005), bring to light the way in which capitalists
manage to use the demands for autonomy of
the new movements that developed in the 1960s, harnessing them in the development of the
post-Fordist networked economy and transforming them into new forms of control. They use
the term ‘artistic critique’ to refer to how the strategies of the counter-culture (the search for
authenticity, the ideal of selfmanagement and the anti-hierarchical exigency) were used to
promote the conditions required by the new mode of capitalist regulation, replacing the disciplinary
framework characteristic of the Fordist period. From my point of view, what is interesting in this approach is that it shows how
an important dimension of the transition from Fordism to post- Fordism involves rearticulating existing discourses and
practices in new ways. It allows us to visualise the transition from Fordism to post- Fordism in terms of a hegemonic
intervention. To be sure, Boltanski and Chiapello never use this vocabulary, but their analysis is a clear example of what Gramsci
called ‘hegemony through neutralisation’ or ‘passive revolution’. This refers to a situation where demands
which
challenge the hegemonic order are recuperated by the existing system, which is achieved by
satisfying them in a way that neutralises their subversive potential. When we apprehend the
transition from Fordism to post- Fordism within such a framework, we can understand it as a
hegemonic move by capital to re-establish its leading role and restore its challenged
legitimacy. We did not witness a revolution, in Marx’s sense of the term. Rather, there have been many
different interventions, challenging dominant hegemonic practices. It is clear that, once we envisage social
reality in terms of ‘hegemonic’ and ‘counter-hegemonic’ practices, radical
politics is not about withdrawing completely from existing institutions. Rather, we have
no other choice but to engage with hegemonic practices, in order to challenge
them. This is crucial; otherwise we will be faced with a chaotic situation. Moreover, if we do not engage with and
challenge the existing order, if we instead choose to simply escape the state completely, we leave
the door open for others to take control of systems of authority and regulation. Indeed there are
many historical (and not so historical) examples of this. When the Left shows little interest, Rightwing and authoritarian groups are only too happy to take over the state . The strategy
of exodus could be seen as the reformulation of the idea of communism, as it was found in Marx. There are many points in
common between the two perspectives. To be sure, for Hardt and Negri it is no longer the proletariat, but the Multitude which is
the privileged political subject. But in both cases the
state is seen as a monolithic apparatus of domination
that cannot be transformed. It has to ‘wither away’ in order to leave room for a reconciled society beyond law,
power and sovereignty. In reality, as I’ve already noted, others are often perfectly willing to take control. If
my approach – supporting new social movements and counterhegemonic practices – has been called ‘post-Marxist’ by many, it
is precisely because I have challenged the very possibility of such a reconciled society. To acknowledge the ever present
possibility of antagonism to the existing order implies recognising that heterogeneity cannot be eliminated. As
far as
politics is concerned, this means the need to envisage it in terms of a hegemonic struggle
between conflicting hegemonic projects attempting to incarnate the universal and to define the symbolic
parameters of social life. A successful hegemony fixes the meaning of institutions and social
practices and defines the ‘common sense’ through which a given conception of reality is
established. However, such a result is always contingent, precarious and susceptible to being
challenged by counter-hegemonic interventions. Politics always takes place in a field crisscrossed by antagonisms. A properly political intervention is always one that
engages with a certain aspect of the existing hegemony. It can never be merely
oppositional or conceived as desertion, because it aims to challenge the existing order, so that
it may reidentify and feel more comfortable with that order. Another important aspect of a hegemonic politics
lies in establishing linkages between various demands (such as environmentalists, feminists,
anti-racist groups), so as to transform them into claims that will challenge the existing
structure of power relations. This is a further reason why critique involves engagement,
rather than disengagement. It is clear that the different demands that exist in our societies are
often in conflict with each other. This is why they need to be articulated politically, which
obviously involves the creation of a collective will, a ‘we’. This, in turn, requires the determination of a
‘them’. This obvious and simple point is missed by the various advocates of the Multitude. For they seem to believe that the
Multitude possesses a natural unity which does not need political articulation. Hardt and Negri see ‘the People’ as homogeneous
and expressed in a unitary general will, rather than divided by different political conflicts. Counter-hegemonic
practices, by contrast, do not eliminate differences. Rather, they are what could be called an ‘ensemble
of differences’, all coming together, only at a given moment, against a common adversary. Such
as when different groups from many backgrounds come together to protest against a war perpetuated by a state, or when
environmentalists, feminists, anti-racists and others come together to challenge dominant models of development and progress.
In these cases, the adversary cannot be defined in broad general terms like ‘Empire’, or
for that matter ‘Capitalism’. It is instead contingent upon the particular circumstances in question
– the specific states, international institutions or governmental practices that are to be challenged.
Put another way, the construction of political demands is dependent upon the specific relations of
power that need to be targeted and transformed, in order to create the conditions for a new hegemony. This
is clearly not an exodus from politics. It is not ‘critique as withdrawal’, but ‘critique as
engagement’. It is a ‘war of position’ that needs to be launched, often across a range of sites, involving
the coming together of a range of interests. This can only be done by establishing links
between social movements, political parties and trade unions, for example. The aim is to create
a common bond and collective will, engaging with a wide range of sites, and often institutions,
with the aim of transforming them. This, in my view, is how we should conceive the nature of
radical politics.
Critical Theory destroys the ability to engage in productive debates and political
solutions. It is wishful thinking that produces only “me-search” and not
“research”.
Chandler 2009 (David Chandler is Professor of International Relations at the University of Westminster, “Questioning
Global Political Activism”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, pp. 81-2)
Today more and more people are ‘doing politics’ in their academic work. This is the reason for the boom in International
Relations (IR) study and the attraction of other social sciences to the global sphere. I would argue that the
attraction of IR
for many people has not been IR theory but the desire to practise global ethics. The boom in
the IR discipline has coincided with a rejection of Realist theoretical frameworks of power
and interests and the sovereignty/anarchy problematic. However, I would argue that this rejection has not
been a product of theoretical engagement with Realism but an ethical act of rejection of
Realism’s ontological focus. It seems that our ideas and our theories say much more about us
than the world we live in. Normative theorists and Constructivists tend to support the global ethical turn arguing that
we should not be as concerned with ‘what is’ as with the potential for the emergence of a global ethical community.
Constructivists, in particular, focus upon the ethical language which political elites espouse rather than the practices of power.
But the
most dangerous trends in the discipline today are those frameworks which have taken
up Critical Theory and argue that focusing on the world as it exists is conservative problemsolving while the task for critical theorists is to focus on emancipatory alternative forms of
living or of thinking about the world. Critical thought then becomes a process of wishful thinking
rather than one of engagement, with its advocates arguing that we need to focus on clarifying
our own ethical frameworks and biases and positionality, before thinking about or teaching on world
affairs. This becomes ‘me-search’ rather than research. We have moved a long way from Hedley
Bull’s (1995) perspective that, for academic research to be truly radical, we had to put our values to the side to follow where the
question or inquiry might lead. The
inward-looking and narcissistic trends in academia, where we are
more concerned with our reflectivity – the awareness of our own ethics and values – than with engaging
with the world, was brought home to me when I asked my IR students which theoretical
frameworks they agreed with most. They mostly replied Critical Theory and Constructivism.
This is despite the fact that the students thought that states operated on the basis of power
and self-interest in a world of anarchy. Their theoretical preferences were based more on
what their choices said about them as ethical individuals, than about how theory might be
used to understand and engage with the world. Conclusion I have attempted to argue that there is a lot at
stake in the radical understanding of engagement in global politics. Politics has become a
religious activity, an activity which is no longer socially mediated; it is less and less an activity
based on social engagement and the testing of ideas in public debate or in the academy. Doing
politics today, whether in radical activism, government policy-making or in academia, seems to bring people into a one-to-one
relationship with global issues in the same way religious people have a one-to-one relationship with their God. Politics
is
increasingly like religion because when we look for meaning we find it inside ourselves rather
than in the external consequences of our ‘political’ acts. What matters is the conviction or the
act in itself: its connection to the global sphere is one that we increasingly tend to provide
idealistically. Another way of expressing this limited sense of our subjectivity is in the popularity of
globalisation theory – the idea that instrumentality is no longer possible today because the world is
such a complex and interconnected place and therefore there is no way of knowing the
consequences of our actions. The more we engage in the new politics where there is an
unmediated relationship between us as individuals and global issues, the less we engage
instrumentally with the outside world, and the less we engage with our peers and colleagues at the
level of political or intellectual debate and organisation.
through discussing paths of government action, debate teaches us to be better
organizational decision makers. Learning about the uniquely different
considerations of organizations is necessary to affecting change in a world
overwhelmingly dominated by institutions.
Algoso 2011 – Masters in Public Administration (May 31, Dave, “Why I got an MPA: Because
organizations matter” http://findwhatworks.wordpress.com/2011/05/31/why-i-got-an-mpabecause-organizations-matter/)
Because organizations
matter. Forget the stories of heroic individuals written in your middle school civics textbook.
Nothing of great importance is ever accomplished by a single person. Thomas Edison had
lab assistants, George Washington’s army had thousands of troops, and Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity had over a million
staff and volunteers when she passed away. Even Jesus had a 12-man posse. In different ways and in vastly different contexts, these
were all organizations. Pick
your favorite historical figure or contemporary hero, and I can almost
guarantee that their greatest successes occurred as part of an organization. Even the most charismatic,
visionary and inspiring leaders have to be able to manage people, or find someone who can do it for them. International
development work is no different. Regardless of your issue of interest — whether private sector investment, rural
development, basic health care, government capacity, girls’ education, or democracy promotion — your work will almost always
involve operating within an organization. How well or poorly that organization functions will have dramatic implications for the
results of your work. A
well-run organization makes better decisions about staffing and
operations; learns more from its mistakes; generates resources and commitment from external
stakeholders; and structures itself to better promote its goals. None of this is easy or straightforward. We
screw it up fairly often. Complaints about NGO management and government bureaucracy are not
new. We all recognize the need for improvement. In my mind, the greatest challenges and constraints
facing international development are managerial and organizational, rather than
technical. Put another way: the greatest opportunities and leverage points lie in how we run our
organizations. Yet our discourse about the international development industry focuses largely on how much money donors
should commit to development and what technical solutions (e.g. deworming, elections, roads, whatever) deserve the funds. We
give short shrift to the questions around how organizations can actually turn those funds into
the technical solutions. The closest we come is to discuss the incentives facing organizations due to donor or political
requirements. I think we can go deeper in addressing the management and organizational issues mentioned above. This thinking led
me to an MPA degree because it straddles that space between organizations and issues. A
degree in economics or
international affairs could teach you all about the problems in the world, and you may even learn how to
address them. But if you don’t learn how to operate in an organization, you may not be
able to channel the resources needed to implement solutions. On the flip side, a typical degree
in management offers relevant skills, but without the content knowledge necessary to understand the context and the issues. I think
the MPA, if you choose the right program for you and use your time well, can do both.
It is best to discuss legal solutions while still taking a disenchanted view of the law
- we recognize the futulity of the legal system; but we also know our words alone
cannot solve structural problems – there are day to day struggles and suffering
that require legal change
Harris 94 -- Angela P Harris, self described race and feminist scholar who teaches law at UC Davis in 1994 (Angela P. Harris (born c. 1959) is
a legal scholar at UC Davis School of Law, in the fields of critical race theory, feminist legal scholarship, and criminal law. She held the position of
Professor of Law at UC Berkeley School of Law, joining the faculty in 1988. In 2009, Professor Harris joined the faculty of the State University of New
York at Buffalo Law School as a Visiting Professor. In 2010, she also assumed the role of Acting Vice Dean for Research & Faculty Development.[1] In
2011, she accepted an offer to join the faculty at the UC Davis School of Law, and began teaching as a Professor of Law in the 2011-2012 academic
year.[2]California Law Review¶ July, 1994¶ 82 Calif. L. Rev. 741¶ LENGTH: 21949 words Foreword: The Jurisprudence of Reconstruction NAME:
Angela P. Harris BIO: Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law. My thanks to Sheila Foster, Ed Rubin, Marjorie
Shultz, and Jan Vetter for their helpful comments on previous versions of this essay. Thanks also to the editors at the California Law Review for their
patience and persistence. Last, but not least, thanks to Jorge Sanchez for exemplary research assistance and thoughtful, searching commentary. All
mistakes, misunderstandings, and misjudgments, of course, are mine. A picture of her can be found here http://law.scu.edu/socialjustice/women-lawstories-book-chapter-one/)
B. Jurisprudence and Disenchantment ¶ In the previous Section, I identified the development of a theory of the racialized subject as
one way in which a jurisprudence of reconstruction might aspire toward a more sophisticated modernism. Another message of the
clash between modernism and its discontents, however, is that a jurisprudence of reconstruction should aspire to disenchantment.
Both the postmodern critique and the history of "race relations" cast doubt on the ability of newer and more enlightening theories to
vanquish racism. In
their commitment to anti-subordination, race-crits should not abandon
rationalist reason; but rationalism may come to represent just one among many tools of social change.¶
Disenchantment also entails giving up a certain romanticism about the rhetorical apparatus of modernism:
the belief in liberation, in the efficacy of "revolution," n184 and in racial communities as unproblematic, harmonious "homes." A
disenchanted jurisprudence of reconstruction focuses instead on the moment to moment
struggles to alleviate suffering and alienation.¶ 1. The Disenchanted Intellectual ¶ One response to the
postmodernist reduction of knowledge to power is a new - and disenchanted - attention to the function of professional intel [*779]
lectuals as a class. The post-colonialist theorist Gayatri Spivak, for example, is careful to examine the double effects of her own
intellectual practices. Writing about a conference of humanist scholars that she attended, Spivak comments, "I thought the desire to
explain might be a symptom of the desire to have a self that can control knowledge and a world that can be known." n185 The scholar's
zeal for providing explanations is itself a modernist symptom: "the possibility of explanation carries the presupposition of an
explainable (even if not fully) universe and an explaining (even if imperfectly) subject. These presuppositions assure our being." n186
In this way, Spivak calls attention to the conflict between postmodernist intellectual theories and modernist intellectual practices.¶
Spivak goes on to argue that the
academic humanist project of providing explanations for everything
serves a particular function in contemporary capitalist society: "Our role is to produce and be produced by
the official explanations in terms of the powers that police the entire society, emphasizing a continuity or a discontinuity with past
explanations, depending on a seemingly judicious choice permitted by the play of this power." n187 Spivak's response is to propose
that the pedagogy of the humanities become self-critical and enter "the arena of cultural explanations that questions the
explanations of culture." n188¶ This awareness of the role of universities and professional academics in keeping a particular set of
political and economic relations in place is one effect of postmodernist disenchantment, and it brings us back to the critique of
normativity. As Gerald Wetlaufer has noted, the pressure of legal normativity - the demand that legal academics propose solutions
that can be implemented within the existing legal system - impels legal scholars to take the law as their client. n189 A
disenchanted jurisprudence of reconstruction would not conclude that providing legal answers
to legal questions is therefore futile or "counterrevolutionary"; but as Spivak suggests, it would put on the
agenda the need to keep in mind the larger political and economic context of law professing as
race-crits continue their theory-building.¶ One consequence might be a reconsideration of the "race for theory" itself.
If the price for admission to the academy (say, the admission by Richard Posner that CRT really does have an idea or two to offer,
after all) n190 is a hyperabstract theorizing that makes a public debate about race and racism impossible, race-crits may want to hold
assimilation into the [*780] bureaucracy of the university at arm's length. Here CRT's engagement in the politics of difference may
help keep it suspended in creative balance. A jurisprudence of reconstruction cannot afford to become enchanted with either
"theory" or "practice"; its work instead is to refuse that dichotomy.¶ 2. The Politics of Joy ¶ Another symptom of disenchantment
might be a healthy recognition of rationalism's limitations in anti-racist struggle. One consequence of this recognition is an
appreciation of scholarship as an aesthetic practice, and the positive role that emotion, joined with reason, can play in intellectual
work. A second consequence of recognizing rationalism's limitations is a greater focus on empowerment as a goal in itself, rather
than simply a step toward emancipation. The third and broadest consequence of greater attention to the limitations of rationalism
might be a greater acknowledgement of the importance of spirituality in human life generally and in racial struggle in particular.
Cornel West has argued that despite the conflicts between modernism and postmodernism, both the "bourgeois" and the
"Foucaultian" models of intellectual life keep intellectuals safely away from insurgent change. n191 West
urges black
intellectuals to reject this self-image, and instead to articulate "a new "regime of truth' linked to, yet not
confined by, indigenous institutional practices permeated by the kinetic orality and emotional physicality, the
rhythmic syncopation, the protean improvisation and the religious, rhetorical and antiphonal repetition of African
American life." n192¶ One way to unpack this statement is to read West as blurring the traditional line between mind and body:
between intellectuals, who work only "in the head," and artists, who are sensitive to the needs of emotions, the body, and the spirit.
A serious disenchantment with rationalism might mean an expansion of what it means to be
an "intellectual," to embrace music, art, dance, and preaching as equally honorable as traditional
"theorizing."¶ Legal storytelling contains possibilities for this kind of expansion. Part of the power of
n193
storytelling lies in its capacity to create pleasure and other emotions. Stories can be told that do more than inform the reader of
"what really happened," or challenge the reader's assumptions about truth [*781] and objectivity. As Martha Nussbaum has argued,
literature is prized not only because of the rational information it imparts, but because it speaks to the emotions and to the soul. n194
Legal storytelling thus has the capacity not just to engage the rational faculty, but other faculties as well. n195¶ The concept of
empowerment is a second avenue to disenchantment with reason. A key word within the politics of difference has been
"empowerment": a shift of focus away from conceptions of "power" as power over someone toward power as ability or capacity, the
power to do something. n196 Barbara Christian argues that "one must distinguish the desire for power from the need to become
Empowerment is crucial
within the politics of difference because of its function in resisting what Cornel West calls nihilism: "the lived experience
of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness." n198 Legal concepts such
as rights "empower" at least in part by creating and reinforcing a collective subject, an action through which
subordinated groups resist their subordination. n199 Through collective action in the name of the
law and through literature, individuals who are members of subordinated groups can come to
understand that they are not crazy, that they are not alone, that they have the capacity to act in the world.
empowered - that is, seeing oneself as capable of and having the right to determine one's life." n197
Empowerment in this context is an end in itself, not a way station on the path to modernist emancipation. The search [*782] for
empowerment thus draws not only on the capacity for reason, but also on the capacity for joy. n200¶ A third possible outcome of a
disenchanted jurisprudence of reconstruction is an acknowledgement of the role of spirituality in human life. Anthony Cook argues
that CRT can avoid "the charybdis of postmodern nihilism and the scylla of modern universalism" by drawing on the legacy of Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. n201 Cook calls for theory that is inspired by "prophetic vision" and that in particular draws on humility and
love, arguing that these qualities enable intellectuals to draw on postmodernist critique without being overwhelmed by it, and to
draw on modernist conceptions while still being aware of their flaws. n202¶ Cook argues that humility is a postmodernist value: "The
arrogance and potential dominance associated with knowing the right answer and knowing what is best for the oppressed must be
tempered with the postmodern contingency, relativity and potential deconstruction of our own foundations of knowledge." n203 Love,
however, is a value that transcends both modernism and postmodernism. Love in the sense of the Greek term agape, "the
responsibility that accompanies being our brother's keeper," n204 is the necessary ingredient for reconstructive transformation.¶ CRT
for Cook, and for West, is part of a larger movement toward spiritual wholeness for the self and for the beloved community, a
movement that cannot be ultimately achieved by human effort and struggle alone. This movement toward wholeness, however, is
not a conventionally religious one reserved for Christians. Rather, as Cook explains:¶ Spirituality is the sincere striving for
unalienated and unfractured human connection. Spirituality is understanding the limits of our knowledge and allowing the humility
fostered by such understanding to open us to the possibilities of knowledge once impeded by the arrogance of our self-contained
worlds. The spirituality that flows from a critical and open engagement with the hyphenated space is one that focuses our attention
and concern on those less fortunate - [*783] the least of these, the wretched of the earth, the despised, dejected, and downtrodden.
In understanding our own marginality, we are prompted to understand the marginality of others who, because they are not forgotten
in our critiques, are not forgotten in our visions of a better tomorrow. n205 ¶ Here both the promise and the peril of "disenchantment"
are stark. The history of religious intolerance reminds us that the arrogance of modernism in presuming that rationalist reason is
superior to every other human faculty can easily reappear in an arrogance that presumes one's actions to be sanctified by one's
spirituality. Mindful of this danger, Cook insists that King's humility and willingness to revise his own beliefs demonstrates that
spirituality need not entail demagoguery or tyranny. n206 It remains to be seen, however, whether race-crits will adopt Dr. King's
particular Christian spirituality along with his concern for social justice.¶ 3. The End of the Innocence? ¶ Finally, one aspect of a
disenchanted jurisprudence of reconstruction is a disenchantment with the romance of "race" itself. One of the comforts of
belonging to a racially subordinated community has often been the sense of being "home," the sense that everyone in the community
shares a unified perspective on the world. Modernist narratives that speak of "people of color" or subgroups thereof as a unified
force draw on this powerful yearning for home. In a postmodern world, however, it is clear that no such unity exists. How, then, can
race-crits and others speak of racial communities in ways that acknowledge this disunity?¶ Regina Austin's disenchanted vision of
the black community provides one glimpse. Austin consistently places the phrase "the black community" in quotes, in a
postmodernist acknowledgement that to speak of one unified community is problematic. As she points out, "though the ubiquitous
experience of racism provides the basis for group solidarity, differences of gender, class, geography, and political affiliations keep
blacks apart." n207¶ Nevertheless, Austin does not reject the concept of the black community altogether. Rather, she asserts that
though there may not be one black community, there are black communities, consisting of "blacks who are bound by shared
economic, social, and political constraints, and who pursue their freedom through affective engagement with each other." n208 Even
these bonds do not create an automatic utopia of racial harmony. Rather, the members of black communities must practice a
"politics of identification." Quoting Stuart Hall, Austin describes the politics of identification as [*784] ¶ [a] politics ... which works
with and through difference, which is able to build those forms of solidarity and identification which make common struggle and
resistance possible but without suppressing the real heterogeneity of interests and identities, and which can effectively draw the
political boundary lines without which political contestation is impossible, without fixing those boundaries for eternity. n209 ¶
Practicing a politics of identification recognizes that the dream of perfect unity is only a dream. It also emphasizes that racial
communities, like other human communities, are the products of invention, not discovery. There are no "people of color" waiting to
be found; we must give up our romance with racial community. n210 Abandoning romance, however, does not mean ending
commitment. If any lesson of the politics of difference can yet be identified, it is that solidarity is the product of struggle, not wishful
thinking; and struggle means not only political struggle, but moral and ethical struggle as well.¶ Conclusion ¶ In Derrick Bell's book,
Faces at the Bottom of the Well, Bell adopts the position that "racism is a permanent component of American life." n211 Surprisingly,
however, Bell does not intend to counsel despair to anti-racist activists. Rather, he looks to African American slavery as a model for
the attitude he wishes us to adopt. "Knowing there was no escape, no way out, the slaves nonetheless continued to engage
themselves. To carve out a humanity. To defy the murder of selfhood. Their lives were brutally shackled, certainly - but not without
meaning despite being imprisoned." n212¶ Similarly, Bell urges contemporary anti-racists to struggle against racism in order to
make their lives meaningful rather than in the hope of someday magically sweeping racism away. The logic Bell uses in this
argument is not the familiar "either/or" logic, but a "both and" logic:¶ It
is not a matter of choosing between the
pragmatic recognition that racism is permanent no matter what we do, or an idealism based on
the long-held dream of attaining a society free of racism. Rather, it is a question of both, and. Both
the recognition of the futility of action - where action is more civil rights strategies destined to
fail - and the unalterable conviction that something must be done, that action must be taken. n213
[*785] ¶ Bell's urgings fit with the religious orientation of Anthony Cook and Cornel West. They also fit with the reconstruction
jurisprudence I have been imagining in this Foreword. Reconstructing modernism requires both sophistication and disenchantment
- both a commitment to building intellectual structures that are strong, complex, capacious, and sound, and a knowledge that reason
and logic alone will never end racism, that words
and those we set out to persuade.
meaning - neither magic nor the abyss.
n214
alone can never break down the barrier between ourselves
The jurisprudence of reconstruction, like the world the slaves made, is only one of
2NC
Yes the government has flawed components but challenging our understanding of
government is important and valuable through discussion of federal policies--Learning that language allows us to confront and challenge those institutions
outside of this round and resolves a lot of the impacts they discuss
Hoppe 99 Robert Hoppe is Professor of Policy and knowledge in the Faculty of Management and Governance at Twente
University, the Netherlands. "Argumentative Turn" Science and Public Policy, volume 26, number 3, June 1999, pages 201–210
works.bepress.com
ACCORDING TO LASSWELL (1971), policy science
is about the production and application of knowledge of and in
policy. Policy-makers who desire to tackle problems on the political agenda successfully, should be able to mobilise
the best available knowledge. This requires high-quality knowledge in policy. Policy-makers and, in a
democracy, citizens, also need to know how policy processes really evolve. This demands
precise knowledge of policy. There is an obvious link between the two: the more and better the knowledge of
policy, the easier it is to mobilise knowledge in policy. Lasswell expresses this interdependence by defining the policy
scientist's operational task as eliciting the maximum rational judgement of all those involved in policy-making. For the applied policy
scientist or policy analyst this implies the development of two skills. First, for the sake of mobilising the best available knowledge in policy,
he/she should be able to mediate between different scientific disciplines. Second, to optimise
the interdependence between science in and of policy, she/he should be able to mediate between science and
politics. Hence Dunn's (1994, page 84) formal definition of policy analysis as an applied social science discipline
that uses multiple research methods in a context of argumentation, public debate [and political struggle] to create,
evaluate critically, and communicate policy-relevant knowledge.
Historically, the differentiation and successful institutionalisation of policy science can be
interpreted as the spread of the functions of knowledge organisation, storage, dissemination and application in the knowledge system (Dunn and Holzner, 1988; van de Graaf and Hoppe, 1989, page 29). Moreover, this scientification of hitherto 'unscientised' functions, by including
science of policy explicitly, aimed to gear them to the political system. In that sense, Lerner and Lasswell's (1951) call for policy sciences anticipated, and probably helped bring about, the scientification of politics. Peter Weingart (1999) sees the development of the science-policy
nexus as a dialectical process of the scientification of politics/policy and the politicisation of science. Numerous studies of political controversies indeed show that science advisors behave like any other self-interested actor (Nelkin, 1995). Yet science somehow managed to maintain
its functional cognitive authority in politics. This may be because of its changing shape, which has been characterised as the emergence of a post-parliamentary and post-national network democracy (Andersen and Burns, 1996, pages 227-251). National political developments are put
in the background by ideas about uncontrollable, but apparently inevitable, international developments; in Europe, national state authority and power in public policy-making is leaking away to a new political and administrative elite, situated in the institutional ensemble of the
The authority and policy-making power of national governments
is also leaking away towards increasingly powerful policy-issue networks, dominated by functional representation
by interest groups and practical experts.
European Union. National representation is in the hands of political parties which no longer control ideological debate.
In this situation, public debate has become even more fragile than it was. It has become diluted by the predominance of purely pragmatic, managerial and administrative argument,
and under-articulated as a result of an explosion of new political schemata that crowd out the more conventional ideologies. The new schemata do feed on the ideologies; but in larger part they consist of a random and unarticulated 'mish-mash' of attitudes and images derived from
The market-place of political ideas and arguments is thriving; but on the
and citizens are at a loss to judge its nature and quality. Neither political
parties, nor public officials, interest groups, nor social movements and citizen groups, nor even the public media
show any inclination, let alone competency, in ordering this inchoate field. In such
conditions, scientific debate provides a much needed minimal amount of order and
articulation of concepts, arguments and ideas. Although frequently more in rhetoric than substance, reference to scientific
'validation' does provide politicians, public officials and citizens alike with some sort of compass in
an ideological universe in disarray. For policy analysis to have any political impact under such
conditions, it should be able somehow to continue 'speaking truth' to political elites
who are ideologically uprooted, but cling to power; to the elites of administrators, managers, professionals and
experts who vie for power in the jungle of organisations populating the functional policy domains of postparliamentary democracy; and to a broader audience of an ideologically disoriented and politically disenchanted
citizenry.
ethnic, local-cultural, professional, religious, social movement and personal political experiences.
other hand, politicians
A topical version of the aff would solve most of their offense—it’s capable of radical
change
Orly Lobel, University of San Diego Assistant Professor of Law, 2007, The Paradox of
Extralegal Activism: Critical Legal Consciousness and Transformative Politics,” 120 HARV. L.
REV. 937, http://www.harva
V. RESTORING CRITICAL OPTIMISM IN THE LEGAL FIELD “La critique est aisée; l’art
difficile.” rdlawreview.org/media/pdf/lobel.pdfA critique of cooptation often takes an uneasy path. Critique has
always been and remains not simply an intellectual exercise but a political and moral act. The question
we must
constantly pose is how critical accounts of social reform models contribute to our ability to
produce scholarship and action that will be constructive. To critique the ability of law to produce
social change is inevitably to raise the question of alternatives. In and of itself, the exploration of the limits of
law and the search for new possibilities is an insightful field of inquiry. However, the contemporary message that emerges from
critical legal consciousness analysis has often resulted in the distortion of the critical arguments themselves. This distortion denies
the potential of legal change in order to illuminate what has yet to be achieved or even imagined. Most importantly, cooptation
analysis is not unique to legal reform but can be extended to any process of social action and engagement. When
claims of
legal cooptation are compared to possible alternative forms of activism, the false necessity
embedded in the contemporary story emerges — a story that privileges informal extralegal forms
as transformative while assuming that a conservative tilt exists in formal legal paths. In the
triangular conundrum of “law and social change,” law is regularly the first to be questioned, deconstructed,
and then critically dismissed. The other two components of the equation — social and change — are often presumed to be
immutable and unambiguous. Understanding the limits of legal change reveals the dangers of absolute reliance on one system and
the need, in any effort for social reform, to contextualize the discourse, to avoid evasive, open-ended slogans, and to develop greater
sensitivity to indirect effects and multiple courses of action. Despite
its weaknesses, however, law is an optimistic
discipline. It operates both in the present and in the future. Order without law is often the privilege of the
strong. Marginalized groups have used legal reform precisely because they lacked power.
Despite limitations, these groups have often successfully secured their interests through
legislative and judicial victories. Rather than experiencing a disabling disenchantment with
the legal system, we can learn from both the successes and failures of past models, with the aim
of constantly redefining the boundaries of legal reform and making visible law’s broad
reach.
Ableism
1NC
They have conceded that the way the affirmative criminalizes the law is bad
because in certain instances it is good!
There are a few impacts
1.) Ableism – the affirmative props up a culture that is afraid of disability and
difference – this method is unproductive and exclusionary - Physicianassisted suicide is an ableist policy that favors killing based on an arbitrary
quality of life that isn’t determined by people with disability. – Finish the
card
Andre 3 - American psychiatric survivor activist and writer and writer for disability studies
quarterly (Linda Andre Summer/Fall 2003, Volume 23, No. ¾ Disability Culture meets
Euthanasia Culture: Lessons from my cat http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/435/612)
The second lesson of disability is that when you're disabled, there's always a price on your
head. The value of your life is always being weighed: not only against what you produce, but
against what it costs to maintain you--accessible streets and buildings, attendant care,
health care, whatever. And always there is someone to say you're not worth it.
CUT
Ultimately, the idea that different lives, or the same lives at different times and under different
conditions, have varying degrees of "quality", and that this "quality" should be evaluated
according to the dominant values of a society, leads to a discussion about what should happen
when quality becomes unacceptably low. When killing people for their own good
becomes imaginable, acceptable, and/or legal, the discussion of euthanasia in and
of itself can have a chilling effect on the will to live and on societal estimates of the value of
the life of the seriously ill and disabled.
No one spontaneously wishes to die in a society in which her life is valued; nor does suffering
necessarily equal a wish to die in a society which does not turn its face away from pain and
death.
The disability rights movement as a whole opposes euthanasia in any guise it may take--"right to
die", "physician-assisted suicide", do-not-resuscitate orders in advance directives. Our reasons?
The past, the present, and the future.
1NR
Believing that Physician assisted suicide creates a logic of extermination and
hierarchies that pathalogize, stigmatize and exclude people with disabilities
- This has implications for the debate space – they called for the exclusion of
people with disabilities by saying that law should be criminalized – if debate
has any value then voting affirmative is voting for the marginalization of
another group.
Garland-Thomson 4 – Professor of Women's Studies and English at Emory University, PhD in English from Brandeis
University, has been the recipient of several fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Deutscher
Akademischer Austausch Dienst (The Cultural Logic of Euthanasia: ‘‘Sad Fancyings’’ in Herman Melville’s ‘‘Bartleby’’ American
Literature, Volume 76, Number 4, December 2004.)
I am positing the cultural logic of euthanasia broadly, not simply as ending a life for reasons of
‘‘mercy’’ or eliminating a group targeted as inferior or flawed—such as people with spina bifida
or ‘‘mental retardation’’—but as an umbrella concept, a mode of thought manifest in
particular notions of choice, control, happiness, and suffering that underpin a
wide range of practices and perceptions. Our culture encodes the logic of euthanasia in its
celebration of concepts such as curing, repairing, or improving disabled bodies through
procedures as diverse as reconstructive and aesthetic surgery, medication, tech-nology, gene
therapy, and faith healing. At the same time, this logic supports eradicating disabled bodies
through practices directed at individuals—such as assisted suicide, mercy killing, and
withholding nourishment—and those directed at certain groups deemed inferior— such
as selective abortion, sterilization, euthanasia, eugenics, and institutionalization.9
The rationale for why Reeve should live and Dawson should die reflects our culture’s
ambivalence about disability. The need for wideranging civil-rights legislation such as the
Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, which protects against discrimination and mandates
inclusion, suggests that the United States recognizes the principle of equality for disabled people
as individuals and as a group but at the same time must enforce that equality with laws. We
agree to accommodate disability, but we prefer to eliminate it.10 Because the
human variations and limitations we consider to be disabling are integral aspects
of actual bodies that often cannot be pried away through cure from the person who
has them, eliminating disability sometimes means eliminating people, or whole
classes of people, with disabilities. Dawson’s choice was deemed acceptable to himself and
others on the basis of this necessity. The refusal of disability that undergirds Dawson’s and
Reeve’s choices ineluctably slides into prejudicial justifications posited variously as progress,
improving the race, humanitarianism, relief of suffering, eugenic cleansing, economic
pragmatism, and health management. Such ideologies authorize the logic of euthanasia,
or what disability-rights activists have called the cure-or kill principle.11 Preferences are
expressed, choices made, procedures established, and consent given within the framework of
this set of assumptions.
I use the term disability to name the cultural system of representation that imagines and creates
the large and variegated, socially constructed category of people whose bodily forms, functions,
limitations, ambiguities, or appearances are considered to be abnormal, defective, degenerate,
debilitated, deformed, ill, unfit, unhealthy, sick, obese, crippled, mad, ugly, retarded, or flawed.
All these designations serve to pathologize, stigmatize, devalue, and exclude.
Although the functional experience, corporeal form, and material circumstances of people in
these broad disability categories differ significantly from one another, the social, political,
and economic consequences of being judged as inferior and the exclusionary
attitudes and practices directed against these people are analogous
Such a logic produces an interpretation of the bodily variations we call disability as
somehow separable from an abstract healthy or standard body to which such traits
are simply attached and can be excised through treatment or curing. The goal then
becomes eliminating the ‘‘problem’’ in order to restore the body to a supposedly natural,
unmarked state of normalcy. Whereas religious miracles were imagined to eradicate disability in
premodern times, medical-scientific cures are the modern era’s solution to the social dilemma of
the disabled body. So urgent is the cultural mandate to solve the problem, to cure disabled
bodies through normalizing the devalued variations we think of as disabilities, that the incurable
body becomes an affront to the power of modern medical science and technology. So seductive is
this fantasy of embodied self-determination that elimination comes to be the ultimate solution
to the problem of the body that refuses to be normalized. The cultural logic of euthanasia is
thus directed against what is often unproblematically seen as the unfit body—the body that does
not meet certain aesthetic, formal, or functional expectations, the body that flies in the face of
the sacred cultural ideologies of progress, self-determination, improvement, reform, and
perfectibility—in other words, the very essence of what we take to be American.13 Disability is
one of the adversaries over which modernity strives to triumph. The notion of progress, in its
requirement for the constant change that propels it forward, gets its teeth in part from this
fantasy of wiping out disability. Purging disability has become one emblem of the
achievement of progress and its twin, improvement. Eliminating disabled bodies is the
consummate rhetorical mission of many religious, benevolent, and pathological discourses.
Disability is the social threat, whether metaphorical or actual, against which these
discourses align their energies to drive change. Whether manifest in a singularly
disabled body or in whole classes of people, disability is imagined to compromise the collective
social order. Those who are supposedly incurable frustrate modernity’s will to change the world.
Disabled groups ostensibly drain communal resources, prompt suffering, or pollute the social
body.
Viewing disability as something that needs to be eliminated causes genocidal
politics and genocidal policy makers
Hughes 2002 (Bill Hughes, social policy at University of Glasgow, 2002, Disability Studies Today, p. 60-2)
The dominant framework for understanding disability in the modern period has been the medical
model. From the early nineteenth century onwards, biomedicine legitimated the view that biophysical
‘abnormality’ or ‘maladaptation’ leads to, or is the cause of, social ‘abnormality’ or
‘maladaptation.’ In other words, to be defined as a ‘flawed body’ is simultaneously to be defined as
incapable of adequate social participation. The corporealization of disability meant, in practical terms, the
segregation of those so labeled. The logic of the medical model runs from diagnosis to social response. In causal terms, there seem to
be three linked elements in the chain: impairment leads to disability, which in turn leads to confinement or ‘institutionalization’.
The social respond to the ‘flawed’ body particularly in the nineteenth century – was
anthropoemic. This concept refers to the expulsion or exile of alien persons. The Victorian penchant for
excluding people from social participation on the ground of what today might be called ‘difference’ was summed up by Foucault’s
(1969) notion of the ‘great confinement.’ The segregation
associated with confinement was not only
equivalent to a custodial sentence – often for life – but was also the sentence of a ‘social death,’
which was – in itself a sort of tacit legitimation for the denial of human rights and the application of
oppressive practices of care (Barnes 1990). These institutional spaces of exclusion, into which disabled people were cast, were,
after all, ‘civilized’ by medical jurisdiction. The very authority that had objectified disabled people by reducing them to their
impairments now had the opportunity to define disabled people’s needs and, in many cases, act in locl parentis. [continues] The
medical model of disability is, and has been, strongly associated with the potentially reactionary,
theme that ‘biology is destiny,’ and is embedded in popular culture by the ‘naturalization’ of the view that natural
aptitudes determine life chances. Nurture is causally impotent in the social world, it is natural endowment that is the most
efficacious variable. At its worst, in the nineteenth century, the medicalization
of disability dovetailed with what
Foucault called the ‘racisms of the state’ (1979: 54), with the Darwinist and eugenicist perspectives
which promised to cleanse the social body of impunity, imperfection, degeneracy and effectiveness. The concept
of ‘fitness’ was used, in such contexts, as a criterion for making ‘humanity’ – defined in terms of aesthetic ideals of
embodiment – into a relative term. Modernity is riddled with such eugenic conceptions of social hygiene. They are
based on the view that disabled people are either ‘unfit’ to be in society or to reproduce. The eugenic
gaze proposes collective solutions to the contaminant that disabled bodies represent, but does not propose collectivist explanations.
It is imprisoned in the repertoire of socio-biology and social Darwinism, and treats disability as an error of nature that should be
righted. When wedded to a rigid concept of heredity, biological
politics of genocide.
reductionism may at its worst translate into a
Prostitution
1NC
Legalization fosters sex tourism- increases demand and explodes the industry
Leidholdt 04 (Dorchen, JD, MA, is Director of the Center for Battered Women's Legal Services
at Sanctuary for Families, 2004, “Prostitution and Trafficking in Women: An Intimate
Relationship”,
http://www.prostitutionresearch.com/Leidholdt%20Prostitution%20and%20Trafficking%20in
%20Women.pdf///TS)
If sex trafficking and prostitution were distinct and separate phenomena, and if prostitution were as innocuous as trafficking is
injurious, a logical response would be to direct criminal sanctions against sex traffickers and legalize and regulate prostitution. This
is the position that the Netherlands, Germany, and others following the "Dutch" example have embraced. But
the Dutch and
German experience-along with those of other jurisdictions that have legalized prostitution-have
demonstrated just what happens when prostitution is legitimized and protected by law: the
number of sex businesses grows, as does the demand for prostitution. Legalized prostitution
brings sex tourists and heightens the demand among local men. Local women
constitute an inadequate supply so foreign girls and women are trafficked in to meet the
demand. The trafficked women are cheaper, younger, more exciting to customers, and easier to control. More trafficked
women means more local demand and more sex tourism. The end·result looks a lot like Amsterdam. Sheila
Jeffreys, a professor of women's studies at the University of Melbourne, documents this phenomenon in Victoria, Australia. In
]994, prostitution was legalized in Victoria. The hope was that legalized prostitution would
decrease street prostitution, diminish the health risks for prostitutes and clients, and decrease
organized crime's hold over the sex industry. What happened instead was just the opposite: a
massive expansion of Victoria's sex industry and an increase in sex trafficking into
Victoria. The number of legal brothels escalated from 40 to 64, the "escort agencies"
proliferated. A Melbourne businessman was arrested for bringing into Victoria 40 Thai women
as contract workers and then confiscating their passports until they worked off their debt. A
legal brothel was busted for holding 25 Asian woman in indentured servitude. Sullivan and Jeffreys
(2000) observed., "Legalization was intended to eliminate organized crime from the sex industry. In
fact, the reverse has happened. Legalization has brought with it an explosion in the trafficking of
women ..."
1NR
Net increases the amount of sexual violence – Legal Prostitutes face high levels of
violence
Mackay, 2013 [Finn, feminist activist and researcher, founder in 2004 of London Feminist
Network & revived London Reclaim the Night, “Arguing Against the Industry of Prostitution –
Beyond the Abolitionist Versus Sex-Worker Binary”, June 24,
http://feministcurrent.com/7758/arguing-against-the-industry-of-prostitution-beyond-theabolitionist-versus-sex-worker-binary/]
Wouldn’t legal brothels make everyone safer? It
can be enlightening to study the local newspapers of towns
and cities in countries where brothels have been legalised, to see what is happening on the ground.
In Queensland for example, local papers recently reported on complaints from legal brothels regarding
being undercut by the illegal sector, resulting in the closure of three legal brothels[16]. There
are also concerns about trafficking and links to organised crime and about safety in both sectors[17]. The
legal sector is not a panacea, it does not guarantee women’s safety; for example, a woman is
reportedly suing a legal brothel in Victoria, Australia after being threatened with a gun for refusing to
have unprotected sex[18]. A survey in Australia found physical safety still the highest concern for women in legal
brothels[19]. Women are still raped, assaulted and attacked in legal brothels and tolerance zones[20].
And, in countries which have legalised, this happens behind the closed doors of legal, profitmaking brothels paying a licence fee to the state, therefore making the state a pimp. There have
also been suggestions that the numbers of young people exploited in prostitution increases under
legalisation. The charity ChildRight in Amsterdam reported an increase following legalisation, and ECPAT also documented an
increase in Australian states that had established legal brothelisation[21]. Legalising prostitution turns it into
a business, turns it into a career option and turns pimps and traffickers into legitimate
businessmen overnight. Legalising prostitution removes any obligations to provide exit
services from what becomes a profession like any other, it can give a green light to
organised crime and it formally defines women as commodities, as objects of
exchange for men’s presumed natural needs.
Case biz
1NC
Refuse the characterization of blackness as ontological death – by asserting life in
the face of structures of domination, blackness exceeds its own objectification –
their framework is totalizing and historically incorrect.
Brar 12 – (2012, Dhanveer Singh, PhD candidate, commnications,“Blackness, radicalism,
sound: Black Consciousness and Black Popular Music in the U.S.A (1955-1971),” A thesis
submitted for the degree of PhD in Media and Communications 2012, Goldsmiths College,
University of London, http://eprints.gold.ac.uk/7806/1/MED_thesis_Brar_2012.pdf)
Paying attention to phonic materiality allowed the enquiry into the blackness of the Black Consciousness
movement and Black popular music between 1955 and 1971 to remain open. It allowed for an attentiveness to the
ways in which blackness and radicalism were always under contestation, and always being
produced, even if that meant radically breaking up black production. There seemed to be an internalised
resistance at work within the phonic materiality of the movement and the music which never let
them settle . The refusal to settle acted as a persistent questioning of the phonic materiality produced as
the blackness and radicalism of the movement and the music. It is for this reason that; James Brown and Amiri Baraka's respective
black communal programs were defined but also taken apart by a rhythmic psycho-sexuality; Sam Cooke and Martin Luther King's
attempts to generalise the intense spirituality of black freedom began to sound like atemporality and death; and neither Motown or
the League could engender the discipline they felt a revolutionary project or mass black music required because that discipline was
about gendered labour. This thesis has not been about identifying the apparent “failures” of the Black Consciousness movement or
Black popular music. Instead it has been an attempt to amplify the sound of the blackness that instigated those events, sustained
them, but which could not be called to a halt. It is by privileging the phonic materiality of the archive that I have been able to attend
to both the formation of and the strain against the blackness of black radicalism and black music. Phonic
substance was
necessary to the modalities of the music and the radicalism but it was never simply the basis for
opposition to racial oppression. The phonic substance which was blackness was constantly used
to work out radically different ways blackness could be. The phonic substance structures the relationship
between black music and black radicalism as blackness, but it is also a blackness which strains against them. This is the
paraontological relation; blackness in constant escape, pressurising its own ontological ground,
its own phenomenological features, its own basis as an epistemology. Each time the music and the
radicalism do this, they do it as a black sonic operation.
Returning to the wider field of Black studies, in this thesis I assembled an archive of sound recordings, television
footage, documentaries, interviews, personal testimonies, criticism, cultural analysis and a range of other materials to constitute the
historical juncture of Black Consciousness and Black popular music in the U.S. The phonic
materiality marked across all of
these materials is a realisation of the ways in which blackness is testament to the fact objects can
and do resist . The black object resists by rendering itself audible and black radicalism is a
tradition in which objects have made themselves heard. It is a tradition of objects which have
recorded their strain against their designation as objects. In this instance blackness does not
operate as a total outside, it is not non-ontological, it is not without analog and is
not social death . No matter how much intellectual, psychic and material energy is
invested in rendering these claims true. Instead blackness is the immanent critique which
lives in the life of the object, which may not be recognised as life, even when it strains to do so,
but cannot be denied as life . Neither can it be denied the strain against its own affirmation of
life. It is a life, and a strain against it, which lives in the phonic substance the black object produces. The life of the black
object lives in the sound it makes and that sound stands as a common project of blackness,
which may be dismissed as inchoate noise, as excessive feeling, as lacking in revolutionary
discipline, but this dismissal occurs because when the object resists, it rubs up against the divide
between noise and music, excessive and proper feeling, discipline and unruliness . The blackness of
black radicalism, like the blackness of black music, lives in that break, and constantly breaks, away.
The debate within Black studies over what blackness is and what blackness does is still being
contested. With new work on the way from Fred Moten, Nahum Chandler and Jared Sexton, this only
offers possibilities for continued speculation. To repeat, the discussion over what blackness means within Black
studies is not a minor dispute 234within a relative sub-discipline of Cultural studies and Critical theory. It is, as Chandler has
pointed out, necessary to thought, because blackness is a necessary problem for what is deemed to be thought. But Chandler
is
very careful to remind us that this means blackness is also, paraontologically, a possibility for
thought. In light of this coming work, I believe it is necessary to continue thinking about how this
debate is informed by the phonic substance which is blackness, and which blackness escapes
from, even whilst that phonic substance escapes from it. In short, it remains vital for me to continue to be a
student of Black studies. S
1NR
Blackness is not ontological - blackness is the immanent critique which lives in the
life of the object, which may not be recognised as life, even when it strains to do so,
but cannot be denied as life
Their theoretical defense of their impacts fall apart when you conceptualize the
ontological opposition that they create ---- reifies the status quo
WELCOME 2004 – completing his PhD at the sociology department of the City University of
New York's Graduate Center (H. Alexander, "White Is Right": The Utilization of an Improper
Ontological Perspective in Analyses of Black Experiences, Journal of African American Studies,
Summer-Fall 2004, Vol. 8, No. 1 & 2, pp. 59-73)
During the twentieth century, many scholars explored the racial dynamics of the United States and, specifically, the inequalities that define being black as a social problem in America. The attempts to address this problem have varied. During the 1990s Cornel West
(1990) declared "race matters." This statement was made as a direct response to the anti-affirmative action position of scholars such as Shelby Steele (1990) and William Julius Wilson's (1978) assertions about the "declining significance of race." During the 1960s,
there were discussions about the need for a Black Power movement (Ture & Hamilton, 1967). At the beginning of the 1960s civil rights movement, th ere were discussions about the need to unite both blacks and whites in the pursuit of racial justice (King, 1955). Black
self-hate was a prominent topic during the 1940s (Wright, 1940), as was the possible elimination of racial disparities through the eradication of racist ideology (Myrdal, 1944). In 1934, Charles S. Johnson published Shadow of the Plantation, which suggested th at the
urban- ization of the black population would promote racial equality, and, during the 1920s, scholars believed that the New Negro Movement would elevate the social status of blacks (Locke, 1925). As these varied perspectives suggest, there is not now, nor has there
ever been, consensus on how the social in- equality faced by blacks can be ended. This lack of consensus reflects the perplexing nature of the problem. In the background of almost all discussions of black experiences is the question of why earlier efforts at
ameliorating the dilemmas that blacks face have failed. Many people believed that the Union victory in the Civil War would produce social equality for blacks (Steinberg, 1955). Yet a little more than a hundred years after the passage of the Emancipation
Proclamation, with the civil rights movement having just recently receded into the wake of time, scholars were inquiring as to how and why the efforts and gains of Martin Luther King had still failed to end America's race problem. While this last topic has been popu-
When one examines the dominant themes in the study
of blacks in the United States, one sees a disturbing trend. The expe- riences of blacks are
erroneously analyzed using whiteness as an ontological frame of reference.
lar for some time now, the manner in which it has been investigated continues to have serious shortcomings.
W. E. B. Du Bois stated, "the problem of the twentieth
century is the prob- lem of the color-line--the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea" (1903, p. 12). Argu- ably, the problem of the twenty-first century is still the color line, but now in terms of the
fallacious use of whiteness as an ontological frame of analysis for the experiences of blacks and other people of color. This error can be traced to the elision of the roles that power and the specific experiences of blacks play in shaping the social interactions of blacks.
While there is sufficient rea- son to suspect that studies of Asians and Latinos suffer from the same prob- lem, an explanation of how this occurs with respect to their unique social situations is beyond the scope of this article. Th is article will examine some instances
where whiteness has been employed as an ontological frame of refer- ence in analyses of black experiences. By looking at these situations, one can get a sense for how causal factors and important dynamics that shape black experi- ences have been neglected. In
addition, attempts, both implicit and explicit, at moving away from the use of whiteness as an ontological frame of reference will be examined, with the hope of establishing more effective and more ac- curate means of describing and explaining black experiences.
ONTOLOGY IN STUDIES OF RACIAL DYNAMICS Every instance of social analysis is framed by an ontology, which, as it is used in this article, refers to "a specification of a conceptualization. That is, an ontology is a description (like a formal specification of a
program) of the concepts and relationships that can exist for an agent or a community of agents" (Gruber, 2004, p. 1). More generally, an ontology frames our understanding of what exists and the relationships between those things that exist. Serving as the warrant
for those claims that stem from specific instances of social analysis, an ontology provides a frame of analysis. When a claim is put forth, evidence that supports the claim is provided. The link between evidence and claim is supported by the warrant, a rule which
In many of the studies of
blacks, the experiences of whites, not blacks, are used as the backing for the
construction of the warrants/rules that are employed to evaluate black
experiences
The life histories of whites are used as the standard
against which black experiences are measured and as the goals to which blacks are encouraged
to strive. The employment of this ontology fallaciously limits the range of black agency,
producing deceitful narratives where the navigation of the social environment by blacks is
dictated by either a passive response to, or a passive adoption of, white scripts.
The utilization of whiteness
to determine and/or evaluate blackness begins when whiteness and white life histories come to
represent what is "right."
permits movement from the evidence to the claim. The warrant is grounded in a set of experiences, the backing, that is general- ized to make the warrant/rule (Toulmin, Rieke & Janik, 1979).
, delimiting the "concepts and relationships that can exist" in the black community.
This ontology erroneously limits
descriptions and evaluations of black experiences, excluding viable causal determinants of the socio-economic status of blacks and constructing restricted descriptions of black agency.
"White is right" is a sarcastic phrase that was an extremely popular slur during the Black Power movement in the mid-1960s to the early 1970s; the utilization of this phrase represents a form of
social critique that takes exception to both the privileging of white biographies as accurate descriptions of history and the reconstitution of these histories as a template that blacks and other people of color should follow for navigating social environments and
achieving positive social mobility. Part of the prominence of the "white is right" perspective comes from the numerical superiority of whites. As a group, whites have been in the majority throughout the history of the United States and the prominence of the white
experience has been used to argue that white experiences should be used as a social template. It has been used as such in the works of Robert Park (1939) and Gunnar Myrdal (1944), both of whom suggested that by copying the patterns of whites, blacks would
achieve positive social mobility. However, use of the numerical superiority of whites to support claims about the "rightness" of white experiences relies on the equation of quantitative dominance with qualitative dominance and the employment of the fallacious
The actual source of the dominance of the "white is right" perspective lies in the
dynamics of power. The location of the origins of the dominant ideology in power relations is
conceptualized in the work of Michel Foucault (1980), who theorized that power is imbricated
with discourse:
Key to the deployment of
discourses is an underlying strategy.
privileging of white experiences and the use of these experiences as an
ontological framework for the analyses of black experiences is an effect of power imbalances.
argumentum ad populum.
We must make allowance for the complex and unstable process whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an
opposing strategy. Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it (p. 101).
As such, the prominence of the "white is right" perspective can be traced to attempts to create an "order," or a way of thinking. Foucault's theoretical lens
supports the hypothesis that the
When
whiteness is falsely imbued with the attribute of "rightness," any problem associated with blacks is attributed to the failure of blacks to con- form to the parameters of white methods of navigating the social world. This point finds its basis in Robert K. Merton's (1968)
conceptualization of goals and means. To be sure, any evaluation of what constitutes a "problem" is value laden, relying on a specific ontology. For the purposes of this investiga- tion, a "problem" will be defined as any failure to achieve the "typical group experiences"
(the manner by which what is "typical" is determined will be addressed later in this article). More specifically, problems are any deviations from the "typical" white experience that do not produce the benefits that are associated with the rel- evant white mode of
behavior. In terms of child-rearing and household struc- ture, one can be different without being a problem, as in the case of some individuals of Asian descent (Steinberg, Dornbusch , & Brown, 1992), so long as the results (in this case educational attainment) are the
same or better than those achieved by whites. When you are different and the results are worse, then you have a "problem," and the question of why a specific deviation produces a different response often goes unexamined (Liebow 1967). Thus, for example, black
differences from whites in terms of child-rearing and household structure are seen as problems. When such problems are iden- tified, blacks are stigmatized as deviant. With this stigmatization, bringing the biography of blacks in line with the biogra phy of whites
becomes primary, and the goal of describing black experiences and meeting the needs of blacks is ignored. This process occurs because the cause of the status of whites is falsely attributed to the white methods of navigating the social world, while the paramount
influences of the privilege and power of whiteness are ob- scured. The fallacious conception of white experiences and the utilization of white experiences as an ontological basis for analyses of black experiences has occurred throughout the twentieth century. By
looking at some instances of this phenomenon, one can see how important aspects of black lives were concealed, undermining society's understanding of black experiences. THE HISTORICAL AND THEORETICAL BASIS OF WHITENESS AS ONTOLOGY Midtwentieth-century work on immigration and cultural adaptation, Charles S. Johnson's analysis of African American's cultural deprivation, the "culture of poverty" argument, and the "acting white" version of oppositional culture are all theories that attempt to explain
one can get a good sense of how the employment of whiteness
as ontology in analyses of the experiences of blacks can produce distorted narratives
the status of blacks through references to normative whiteness. By looking at these theories,
. One of the first major academic
instances of the imposition of whiteness as an ontological basis of the analysis of blackness involved European immi- grants during the beginning of the twentieth century. Robert Park (1939), in his analysis of the dynamics of race in the United States, asserted that
Framing whiteness as the inevitable eradicator of blackness,
this perspective conceptualizes whiteness as both overpowering and superior
blacks would eventually become assimilated into American culture.
. In terms of
twentieth-century scholarship, evidence of the superiority of the white experience and the theo- retical backing for the utilization of whiteness as an ontology can be found in the work of Robert K. Merton. Merton (1949), in his description of the possible ways in
which an indi- vidual can adapt to society, emphasized the role of cultural goals, those "pur- poses and interests, held out as legitimate objectives for all or for diversely located members of society" (p. 186), and institutional means, "[the] regu- lations, rooted in the
mores or institutions, of allowable procedures for moving toward these objectives" (p. 187). Only those who embraced both the cultural goals and the institutional means could be considered normal. Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Claude Passeron (1970), in their studies
of le- gitimacy and institutions, found that power, not effectiveness, bestows le- gitimacy and dictates the structure and dynamics of institutions. Those experiences and markers that reflect high status in a society are arbitrary indicators, which have gained their place
in the social hierarchy through the exploitation of power as a means of maintaining the social hierarchy. The question of whether the dominant ways are the best goes unanswered, but one can be sure that a major purpose of the dominant experiences is to reinforce
social stratification. Another early instance of the use of whiteness as an ontology occurs with the work of Charles S. Johnson. An intellectual precursor to Orlando Patterson's (1999) work on cultural deprivation among blacks, Charles S. Johnson in Shadow of the
Plantation (1934) presents a portrait of a rural black population that emphasizes their restricted agency: Many of the naive traits and customs of the 'folk Negro' are out of line with the prac- tices of the larger society, but were at times in the past essential to group
survival in cultural isolation. Stripped of their basic African culture by the exigencies of life in America, they evolved a social life and a culture of their own which was adequate for survival in their peculiar status in America .... In a sense, they have been repositories of
this character- ization of
the black experience having been "borrowed from whites" presents blacks as a tabula rasa,
wherein the similarities between the "customs, be- liefs, and values" of blacks and whites is
implicitly attributed to gross plagiarism on the part of blacks
certain folkways now outgrown by those groups which were more rapidly absorbed into the larger currents of American life (p. 6). Despite statements about the "evolution" of black social life,
.
Even in the South that John son wa s refe rrin g to, rural whites and rura l blacks navigate sim ila r, but n on-identica l, socia l environment s, w ith both group s encountering the same in stitutions, dealin g with sim ila r obst acles, and em- ploying c omparable re source s. One c ould think of this social nav igation a s two students writing fina l papers for a c lass that they both took. Du ring the seme ster,
the two students read the same books, hea r the sa me lecture s, do the same a ssignment s, and ta ke the same exam s. When called upon to w rite their final papers, there are bound to be sim ila ritie s in the content, topics, and struc- ture s. The se sim ila ritie s a re not due to any plagia rism on the part of students, but ba sed in their e xposu re to the same setting. Similaritie s in experiences produce similaritie s in outcomes and the failure to factor this inf ormat ion in t o analy se s pre sents a picture whe rein blac ks ex ercise no a gency. Yet the charge of "cultural p lagiarism" is not the m ost speciou s comp onent of John son' s work. John son's statement a bout "those groups which were more rap idly a bsorbed into the larger current s of American life" (19 34, p. 6) priv i- le ges wh ite experience s, cre ating an ontology that is in applica ble to the expe- rienc es of blacks. The integrat ion of many ru ral wh ite Southerners into the "la rger currents of Ame rican life" wa s m ade possi ble by the econ omic pros- perity that accompanied the Industrial Rev olution, W orld Wa r I, and World War
II. Underlying this prospe rity wa s the cheap la bor prov ided by Southern blac ks and many Southern white s ( Stein berg 1995). J ohnson's chidin g of ru - ral blac ks is ba sed on an ev aluation of these pe ople grounded in the experi- ence s of white s. As rura l blacks do and did not have c ontrol of the mean s of production and access to exploita ble sources of la bor, they could not ach ieve positiv e social mobility u sing the same m ethods a s Southern white s: John son' s use of whiteness a s an ontological f rame of analy sis lead s to an implau sible scenario for black p ositive social m obility. The influence of Charles D arw in's ev olutionary the orie s on the field of sociology i s proba bly most clea r in Herbert Spencer's "socia l Da rwin ist" ph i- losophy. Howeve r, the application of the ev olutionary principle a s a lens through which the social world is evalua ted can also be observed in Ma x We ber's (1946) theory of rationality. In hi s desc ription of the increa sin g rat iona lity of We stern soc iety, We ber empha size s the move ment away from enchanted and my stic method s of decisionmakin g (Giddens, 197 1). We ber' s description of Weste rn society's t ransition from the prim itive to the industrial stage ha s a decisive ly evolutiona ry tint. This "bigge r and better"/"onwa rds and upward s" m anner of thin king is a perva sive aspect of the sociological lite rature. Wh ile "better" is often a su bjective te rm, fa lse a ssumption s a bout improvements in society ca n produce misleading n arrative s. In the ca se of the orig inal "culture of pove rty" a rgument, the employment of whiteness a s an ont ology and the utilization of an inapprop riate ev olutionary persp ective, which focuse s on a bsolute change wh ile failing t o take into account re lative chang e, produces a narrative whe re the relation ship between disadvantaged g roups and the socia l space t hat they occupy is obscured. While Osca r Lewis's La Vida (1963) w as a study of Puert o Rica ns, the "culture of poverty " argu ment th at it contain s has been repeatedly applied to blacks, a s evidenced by the w orks of Shelby Steele ( 1990) and John McWhorter ( 2000). A basic prem ise of La Vida is that past experiences of
livin g in an impove rished environment produced ways of nav igat ing variou s socia l con- text s that are pa ssed down and utilized even when the socia l context has changed and/or ha s improved. Using whitene ss as an ontolog ical perspective, this ana lysis improperly priv ilege s a bsolute change (differences over a period of time ) ove r re lative change (d ifference in relation t o anothe r group). Lewis correctly observes that the situation of Puerto R icans ha s improved from some earlie r point in time (a bsolute change). Howeve r, there is n ot sufficient cause t o use t his observat ion t o warrant the claim that the inability of a sign ificant port ion of the Puerto Rican populat ion t o escape from pove rty is rooted in this g roup's attachment t o outm oded methods of navig ating their socia l environ- ment. Lewis's ba sic prem ise p resupposes that the a bsolute change Puerto R icans have e xperienced has p roduced relat ive change --that historical improvement s in the posit ion some Puerto Rican s occupy has led to a decrea se in the gap separating this g roup from those who do n ot
live in p overty. This formu lation produces a n arrative whe rein the hierarchica l nature of pove rty is ignored. Pove rty is a re lative , and not an a bsolute, phenomenon. Control of a specific level of resource s reflects p overty if a su bstant ial proportion of the population c ontrols a highe r level of re source s and if the re source s under control cannot be used t o procure a decent standard of livin g. A pe rson can live in pove rty and then have her/his re source s incre ase by tenfold. If a su bstant ial p ortion of the population that wa s not in p overty ha s their resource s incre ase by a hun- dred-fold, then the aforementioned indiv idual will still be living in relative pove rty. Pe rhaps the best refutation of the cultural t ransmission the ory inhe rent in "culture of poverty " a rguments c ome s from Eliot L ieb ow. When discussing the e mploy ment of cultural t ra nsmission the ories a s a fra me for analyzin g the black experience in Ta lly' s Corner, L ie bow ( 1967) state s that: "Many sim ila ri- tie s between the lower-cla ss Neg ro father and son ... do n ot re sult from 'cul- tural t ransmission' but
from the fact that the son g oes out and independently experience s the sa me failu res, in the sa me are as, and for much the sa me rea- sons a s his father" (p . 223). Poverty a s an indicat or of social strat ification reflect s the ina bility on the part of the impove rished group to ma rsha l re- source s on a level c omparative to more well-off groups (T illy, 1998). Th is bein g the case, an increa se in the re sou rces under the control of a group (absolute change) is not necessa rily enough to produc e an escape from pove rty (re lative change ). Only a compa rative increa se in the ability of a group to ma rsha l re source s, where the distance between the ability of impoverished G roup A t o utilize resources c ome s closer t o that of the ability of non - impov- erished Group B to utilize re sou rces, w ill signal a m ove away from p overty. Le wis's theory employ s whiten ess a s an ontology a s it u ses the a bsolute in- crea se in the standard of living of white s and some Puert o Rican s as cau se to suppose that a ll Puert o Rican s are free from th e structural cau ses of poverty . The specific expe riences of
this group, and this group's ability to mu ster re- sources f or their navigation of the social world, is ignored. Signithia Fordham and John O gbu' s (1986) "act ing white " conceptu alization of opposit iona l culture theory is extre mely influential. It re sts on three ma in point s. The first p oint state s that , because of oppression, blac ks disdain be- hav iors that they a ssociate w ith white s. This attitude towa rds wh ites is the ba sis of identity for a segment of the blac k pop ulation. The second point de scribe s how this opposit iona l identity leads t o opposit iona l culture, which involve s shunnin g "white behav iors. " Fina lly, the theory states that since one of the prima ry "white beha viors" is doing we ll in school, oppositional culture cau ses blac k students t o have negative attitudes a bout completing school w ork and attain ing academic success. The employment of whitene ss in the "actin g white" v ersion of oppositional cultu re is very strong in th at it is u sed both as an ontolog ical frame of ana ly sis and as a source of black identity. W ithin the "acting white" ve rsion of oppositional
culture, expressive char- acterist ics ( oppositional ident ities) develop a s blac ks adapt to structura l ba rri- ers and the failure of the white oppre ssor t o ackn owledge the a bilit ies of blacks. Fordham and Og bu (1986) trace the origin s of this phenomenon t o the hist ori- cal situation of blac ks in the United State s. Sla very, racism, and discrim ina- tion have exposed blacks to substandard schooling and curta iled their ability to compete on an e qual and effective basis for jobs, reward s, and serv ices.
This being the case, blacks have adopted
survival strategies, which in many ways "further limit their striving for
academic success Central to the expla- nation of the varying degrees of academic success
among blacks are the con- cepts of an oppositional collective identity and an oppositional
cultural frame of reference.
The oppositional identity of minorities also
."
An oppositional collective identity represents a: sense of peoplehood in opposition to the social identity of white Americans because of the way white Americans treat [African-Americans] in
economic, political, social and psychological domains, including white exclusion of these groups from true assimila- tion.
evolves because they
perceive and experience the treatment by whites as collective and enduring oppression (Fordham & Ogbu, 1986, p. 181). The negative experiences that blacks have had at the hands of whites puts them in a position where they are forced to adapt to the barriers that have been constructed. The key adaptation, which is a result of the oppositional identity, is
the oppositional cultural frame of reference, which is defined as: devices for protecting [black] identity and for maintaining boundaries between [Afri- can-Americans] and white Americans. Thus subordinate minorities regard certain forms of behavior and certain activities or events, symbols, and meanings as not appropriate for them because those
emphasize other forms of behavior and other events, symbols, and
meanings as more appropriate for them because they are not a part of 'white Americans' way of
life
The oppositional cultural frame of reference, a
by-product of the racism and discrimination imposed by whites, leads blacks to "target" behaviors
(e.g., "doing well in school") that run counter to black culture and black identity
Oppositional identity
is said
to be a rejection of all things "white," in terms of behavior and attitudes toward the
"white" perspective. This formulation creates a dichotomous structure of behaviors and
attitudes--some things are "white" and some things are "black." More specifically,
whatever is "white" is not and cannot be "black." In this situation, the question becomes
"who determines what is white?"
in this
black identity
simply reflects the passively determined inverse of white identity.
behaviors, events, and meanings are characteristic of white Americans. At the same time they
(Fordham & Ogbu, 1986, p. 181). These concepts emphasize the sharp and definitive divide separating black and white cultures.
. Within this framework, the disdained behaviors are those
that blacks believe can only be performed successfully by whites. When addressing or investigating oppositional identity, roadblocks develop.
One really does not need to ask the question of "who determines what is black" because
within the black community
argument
While the preceding analysis suggests that there are
problems with Fordham and Ogbu's (1986) conceptualization of the genesis of black identity, other problems also occur with their presentation of what black identity reflects. In the sociological study of identity, and black identity in particular, personal identity has
often been conflated with reference group orientation (Cross, 1991). Personal identity reflects "variables, traits, or dynamics that appear in evidence in all human beings, regardless of social class, gender, race, or culture; in this sense [personal identity] studies examine the so-called universal components of behavior" (Cross, 1991, p. 43). Reference group orientation seeks to discover "those aspects of the 'self' that are culture, class, and gender specific .... It seeks
to discover differences in values, perspectives, group identifies, lifestyles and worldviews" (Cross, 1991, p. 45). Arguably, what Fordham and Ogbu label "identity" is actually reference group orientation. This paradox in the "acting white" version of oppositional culture is the result of the use of whiteness as an ontological frame. A theory of behavior wherein the agency of actors is limited is not necessarily unsound. However,
the inconsistency of the "acting white" version of oppositional culture is its obfuscation
presenting a narrative about the black self that is theoretically
untenable. Also, by locating the origin of black identity in the mostly passive
inversion of white identity, the individual agency of blacks is obscured, creating a
situation wherein white actors possess a freedom to determine and construct their
identity that is denied black actors.
of how
the nature of identity does not change from group to group,
ADDRESSING THE USE OF WHITENESS AS AN ONTOLOGICAL FRAME The works of Collins (2000), O'Connor (1997 & 1999), Willis (1977) and Bourdieu and Passeron (1970) provide some guidance
for how analyses of black experiences can be improved. An implicit argument against the use of whiteness as an ontological frame of reference in the analysis of black experiences can be found in the scholarship of Collins (2000). In her analysis of racial oppression, she highlights intersectionality: "analysis claiming that sys- tems of race, social class,
gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, and age form mutually connecting features of social organization, which shape Black women's experiences and, in turn are shaped by Black women" (p. 299). Each individual has unique experiences, which form the backing of the rules that underlie a frame of analysis. This suggests that the specific experiences of
blacks as "black"--in relation to their class, gender, sexuality, etc.--should underlie all analyses of black experiences. By
looking at works that focus on and employ specific elements of the lives of the subjects of study, a picture of the necessary qualities of an ontological framework for the study of
black experiences comes into view. Within the body of literature that addresses the "acting white" version of oppositional culture, one finds implicit attempts to move away from the use of whiteness as an ontological frame of analysis. Carla O'Connor (1997 & 1999)
has stated that acknowledgement of the unequal opportunity structure that blacks face does not always lead to negative conceptions of school and high academic achievement, countering a major premise of the "acting white" ver- sion of oppositional culture.
While studying black students in Chicago, O'Connor (1997) identified six students (three females
and three males out of an ethnographic project that included forty-two students) who performed
well in school and expected success at the post-secondary level and in the job market even
though they had an explicit and detailed knowledge of the lim- ited opportunities faced by
blacks. The status of this "resilient six"
is viewed as a direct consequence of their interactions with various significant others who, serving as role models, related their personal experiences and
knowl- edge of racism and gender and class bias to these students. Most important, however, was the fact that when faced with either racial, class-based or gen- der-based discrimination, these role models refused to back down and took actions to realize their rights.
While these findings (O'Connor, 1997) conform to the basic premise of the paradigm that associates meaning and understanding of struggle with achieve- ment orientation, they go against the majority of the conclusions that are reached when this argument is used.
employed the
dominant ideology about how people achieve success in America (i.e., "hard work" and
"individual effort").
All too often, an understanding of limited opportunity structures is hypothesized to have a negative effect on academic achievement (for example, Willis, 1977; Fordham & Ogbu, 1986; Fine, 1991). The "resilient six"
However, this group realized that a person's race, class, and/or, in the case of two of the three females, gender, can function as characteristics that abate opportunity. The group employed co-narratives
"incorporating mitigating factors and cir- cumstances which mediated the efficacy of the individual and effected his or her probability of realizing particular social outcomes" (O'Connor, 1997, p. 610). These students identified racial discrimination, class inequality,
and gen- der discrimination as things that must be confronted because they affect op- portunity. O'Connor's study did not address the complete "acting white" argument. However, it does suggest that knowledge of barriers to opportunity does not necessarily lead to
low academic achievement. With O'Connor's work (1996 & 1997), the underlying ontology privileges the experiences and needs of the participants in her study: the goals, resources, and experiences of these black students are used to interpret their efforts at
navigating their spe- cific social world. Interestingly, the most direct empirical refutation of the use of dominant and inappropriate concepts to analyze social situations comes from another version of the oppositional culture argument. Paul Willis in his study of male
working-class high school students in England produces a class-based oppo- sitional culture theory. In Learning to Labor (1977), Willis attempts to deter- mine "how working class kids get working class jobs [and why they let themselves end up in these jobs]" (p. 1).
Willis identifies working class cul- ture as the key determinant in the reproduction of the class structure. Within this formulation, labor power--"the human capacity to work on nature with the use of tools to produce things for the satisfaction of needs and the reproductive life" (Willis, 1977, p. 2)--is important because it represents the pri- mary way by which people maintain connections with the world. Through work, the self is connected to the external world. The working class has a specific understanding of what manual
While Willis acknowledges that this working-class
culture generates negative results, he points out that the process of accepting working class
status is experienced as "learning, affirmation, appropriation and as a form of resistance
labor is and what it means to engage in manual labor. This culture is the basis of the reproduction of the class system.
(1977)
" (p. 2). However, true
appropriation and resistance does not take place because members of the working class experience a partial penetration, whereby they fail to completely identify the nature of their status, instead accurately identifying some of the negative aspects of working class
exist- ence, while glorifying other negative aspects. Willis (1977) defines penetra- tion as "impulses within a cultural form towards the penetration of the conditions of existence of its members and their position within the social whole but in a way which is not
[centered], essentialist or individualist" (p. 119), while limi- tations refer to "those blocks, diversions and ideological effects which con- fuse and impede the full development and expression of these impulses" (p. 119). When penetration and limitations come to
interact in and through cul- ture, a partial penetration occurs. This situation is accurately reflected by the C. Wright Mills' (1959) conceptions of issues and troubles, with issues being the problems of the society and troubles being the problems of an individual.
Partial penetration occurs when issues are mistaken for troubles. According to this theory, the working classes identify the oppression that they face, but they also conceptualize it as an isolated lower-level phenomenon experienced by individuals and families. Willis
At the school level, resistance manifests
as "counter-school culture," which is based on an opposition to authority
studies the "lads," a group of working class male students set to leave school at the earliest legal time (age sixteen) without graduating.
. This form of oppositional
culture and/or resistance in Willis' formulation develops as the "lads"--members of the working class-- participate in the formal school system, a world where working class knowl- edge and culture are rejected as devoid of value. This situation in the formal school
system represents not only a rejection of the "lads'" class, but it also represents a rejection of their culture and their identity. This rejection causes the "lads" to resist and oppose the formal school system and formal (in the sense of bureaucratic) authority. With Willis'
method and analysis, one finds the most direct and purposeful attempt at using the goals, resources, and ex - periences of the participants of a study to interpret the participant's efforts at navigating their specific social world. This perspective can be directly traced
the theoretical influence of Bourdieu and Passeron (1970). In Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (1970), Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron provide a definition of symbolic violence, stating that it represents "every power which manages to
This conceptualization
provides both an explicit reason for the rejection of whiteness as an ontological frame of analysis
for the experi- ences of blacks and a suggestion as to the circumstances under which the analysis
of black experiences should take
impose meanings and to impose them as legitimate by concealing the power relations which are the basis of its force, [adding] its own specifically symbolic force to those power relations" (p. 5).
place. Using the concept of symbolic violence to evaluate Merton's notions of cultural goals and institutional means, one finds that the two latter concepts reflect the workings
and concentration of power rather than those "purposes and interests, held out as legitimate objectives for all or for diversely located members of society" (1949, p. 186) and "[the] regulations, rooted in the mo- res or institutions, of allowable procedures for moving
toward these objec- tives" (1949, p. 167). This indicates that an explication of the dynamics and residence of power should precede any investigation of the experiences and meaning making specific to a group. The failure to do so will produce a situ- ation where
arbitrary values and prescriptions for action are utilized and de- picted as legitimate. CONCLUSION The works of Johnson (1934), Lewis (1963), and Fordham and Ogbu (1986) have all had a huge influence on the study of black experiences. However, their use of
The
movements to establish Black Studies, Latino Studies, and Asian Studies programs reflect an
attempt to deal with this bias; however, when one looks at the majority of the sociological
scholarship, one finds that this ontology is still employed. This problem, if left unchecked, will
continue to plague the black community
whiteness as an ontological frame of analysis severely hinders the study of black experiences, just as whiteness as an ontology can have detri- mental effects in the study of the experiences of Latinos, Asians, and other ethnic groups.
. At its core, the social sciences represent an attempt to explain both the problems and the dynamics of our society. Attempts to produce
such explana- tions necessitate theories that are charged with the burden of explaining be- havior. Theories are claims; for a claim to hold, there must be a logical relation between the components of the theory, and the theory must be supported by evidence.
This means that the existence of the components must be proven true and then the causal
relationship between the components must be estab- lished. If either of these steps do not occur,
the veracity of the theory will be in question
. Only through the continual search for the factors that influence hu- man behavior and the manner in which these factors are employed can
schol- ars be in a position to construct the frameworks necessary to analyze human behavior. Yet, there is an even more important component of accurate social analysis: the employment of ontological frames that precisely reflect a subject's life experiences. With the
works of O'Connor (1997 and 1999), Willis (1977), and Bourdieu and Passeron (1970), one does not only witness the startling discovery of explanatory variables. To be sure "resiliency," "partial penetra- tion," and "symbolic violence" are important discoveries;
however, the great contribution that these concepts make to our understanding of human behav- ior comes from how they interact with and serve to elucidate race and class: key elements of the subject's everyday experiences. These works also take great pains to
focus on the meanings that their subjects attach to their actions and their social environment, while considering the agency that their subjects employ as they construct and navigate their social environments. There is no concrete solution to the problems addressed
The academic community must continually test and examine the concepts that are used in
the study of race
In addition, the
relationships between hypotheses must be established as accurately as possible.
in this article.
. As our society changes, we may need to adopt new concepts and revise old theories. There may even be a need to discard models that have proven useful in the past.
In responding to this challenge, the
aforementioned works are part of a general effort to focus on the everyday experiences of the subjects of study and account for the subject' s agency. Mine is not the first call for social scholarship to focus on the specific experiences of the individuals under study.
Many have done it before, and they have done it more elegantly (Garfinkel, 1967; Blumer, 1969). However, it is time to renew this call with regard to contemporary social sci- ence research on African Americans. Focusing on the specific social situation of the subject
of study will go far in correcting the tendency to use whiteness as an ontological frame of reference in the study of black experiences: one of the major problems to be faced by sociological analyses of black America in the twenty-first century.
The affirmative frames their struggle as a struggle against WHITE SUPREMACY –
this has several problems
You reify whiteness by making it a static, totalizing concept. Focusing the debate
on it only risks whites coming to love their whiteness.
Sara Ahmed 04 ("Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of AntiRacism," Borderlands, Vol 3 No 2,
http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no2_2004/ahmed_declarations.htm) Ahmed is a reader in
race and cultural studies at the University of London
3. Whiteness studies is after all deeply invested in producing anti-racist forms of knowledge and pedagogy. In other words, whiteness studies seeks to make whiteness visible
insofar as that visibility is seen as contesting the forms of white privilege, which rests on the unmarked and the unremarkable ‘fact’ of being white. But in reading the texts that
gather together in the emergence of a field, we can detect an anxiety about the status or function of this anti-racism. The anxiety is first an anxiety about what it means to
if
whiteness assumes integrity as an object of study, as being ‘something’ that we can track or follow across time and space, then
whiteness would become a fetish, cut off from histories of production and circulation. Richard Dyer for instance admits to being disturbed by the very
transform whiteness studies into a field. If whiteness becomes a field of study, then there is clearly a risk that whiteness itself will be transformed into an object. Or
idea of what he calls white studies: ‘My blood runs cold at the thought that talking about whiteness could lead to the development of something called ‘White Studies’ (1997, 10).
in our desire to create spaces to speak, intellectually or empirically, about
whiteness, we may have reified whiteness as a fixed category of experience; that we have allowed
it to be treated as a monolith, in the singular, as an "essential something"’ (1997, xi). 4. The risk of transforming
Or as Fine, Weis, Powell and Wong explain: ‘we worry that
whiteness into ‘an essential something’ might be a necessary risk, for sure. We have to choose whether it’s a risk worth taking. But the risk does not exist independently of other
risks. The anxiety about transforming whiteness into ‘an essential something’ gets stuck to other anxieties about what whiteness studies might do. One of these anxieties is that
whiteness studies will sustain whiteness at the centre of intellectual inquiry, however haunted by absence, lack and
emptiness. As Ruth Frankenburg asks ‘why talk about whiteness, given the risk that by undertaking intellectual
work on whiteness one might contribute to processes of recentering rather than decentering it, as
well as reifying the term, and its "inhabitants"’ (1997, 1). 5. Another risk is that in centering on whiteness,
whiteness studies might become a discourse of love, which would sustain the narcissism that
elevates whiteness into a social and bodily ideal
CUT
. The reading of whiteness as a form of narcissism is of course well established. The ‘whiteness’ of academic disciplines, including philosophy and anthropology has been subject
to devastating critiques (see, for examples, Mills 1998; Asad 1973). For example, a postcolonial critique of anthropology would argue that the anthropological desire to know the
other functioned as a form of narcissism: the other functioned as a mirror, a device to reflect the anthropological gaze back to itself, showing the white face of anthropology in
the very display of the colour of difference. So if disciplines are in a way already about whiteness, showing the face of the white subject, then it follows that whiteness studies
Whiteness studies could even
become a spectacle of pure self-reflection, augmented by an insistence that whiteness ‘is an identity too’. Does whiteness studies function as a
sustains the direction or orientation of this gaze, whilst removing the ‘detour’ provided by the reflection of the other.
narcissism in which the loved object returns us to the subject as the origin of love? We do after all get attached to our objects of study, which might mean that whiteness studies
paying attention
to whiteness might lead to white people saying they need to get in touch with their whiteness’
(1997, 10). Whiteness studies would here be about white people learning to love their own whiteness,
by transforming it into an object that could be loved.
could ‘get stuck’ on whiteness, as that which ‘gives itself’ to itself. Dyer talks about this risk when he admits to another fear: ‘I dread to think that