1AC
Drug war mass incarceration represents the predominant mode of racist social control—
prison expansion maintain racial hierarchies and prevent black self determination
Alexander 6
[2006, Michelle Alexander is an Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Civil Rights Clinic at Stanford Law
School, “Federalism, Race, and Criminal Justice”, Chapter 16 in “Awakening from the Dream Civil Rights Under
Siege and the New Struggle for Equal justice”, pp. 219-228]
Most Americans today can look back and see slavery and Jim Crow laws for what they were- extraordinary
and immoral forms of social control used to oppress black and brown people. However, few believe that a similar
form of social control exists today. What I have come to recognize is that, contrary to popular belief, a new form of social
control does exist, as disastrous and morally indefensible as Jim Crow -the mass incarceration of people of
color. There is an important story to be told that helps explain the role of the criminal justice system in
resurrecting, in a new guise, the same policies of racial segregation, political disenfranchisement, and social
stigmatization that have long oppressed and controlled all people of color, particularly African Americans. The story begins
with federalism and its evolving methods of maintaining white supremacy . A recent twist has been added; one that the civil rights
community has failed to explain to those who do not read reports issued by the Bureau of Justice Statistics or Supreme Court decisions. In 1980, 330,000 people were incarcerated in
federal and state prisons7 - the vast majority of whom were people of color. 8 Since then, the number has more than quadrupled to over 1.3 million.9 When prison and jail populations
Although African American men comprise less than seven percent of the
population, they comprise half of the prison and jail population.11 Today, one out of three African American men
is either in prison, on probation, or on parole.l2 Latinos are not far behind. They are the fastest growing racial group being
imprisoned, comprising 10.9 percent of all state and federal inmates in 1985, and nineteen percent in 2003.13 We know how this happened. In 1980, the Reagan
administration ushered in the War on Drugs, another major backlash against civil rights . Although we typically think of the
Reagan era backlash as attacking affirmative action and civil rights laws, the War on Drugs is perhaps the most sweeping and damaging
manifestation of deliberate indifference-or downright hostility-to communities of color. This war, which continues
today, has nothing to do with solving drug abuse, and everything to do with creating a political environment in
which communities of color can be lawfully targeted for mass incarceration.l4 Not unlike slavery and Jim Crow, mass
incarceration provides the white elite with social benefits . By segregating, incarcerating, and rendering
are combined, the number jumps to over two million. 10
unemployable huge segments of the black and brown population , the racial hierarchy remains intact . By
denying blacks an equal and adequate education, barring them from certain forms of employment , and
relegating them to the worst neighborhoods, the white elite has ensured that whites will never occupy the
bottom rung of that hierarchy. Today, slavery and Jim Crow laws no longer exist, and affirmative action has opened doors to some, upsetting the racial caste
Mass incarceration, however, has emerged as a new, and arguably more durable, form of social controL's In
addition to protecting their social position, mass incarceration provides white elites with clear economic and political benefits.
system.
The prison industry is hugely profitable. Marc Mauer's excellent book Race to Incarcerate documents the unprecedented expansion of our criminal justice system and the ways that
the race to incarcerate has devastated communities of color .16 He cites promotional literature from the prison industry, one piece of which
stated: "While arrests and convictions are steadily on the rise, profits are to be made-profits from crime. Get in on the ground floor of this booming industry now." I? Prisons
have become central to the development of many small, predominately white, rural communities , not unlike
the economic base formerly provided by plantations in the rural South .18 Moreover, the Thirteenth Amendment,
provides an exception for forced labor in prisons.'9 Corporations like Victoria's Secret, therefore, commonly use
prison labor, paying prisoners sweatshop wages.20 On the political front, felon disenfranchisement laws in many states, especially
those with large black populations, have tilted the scales of power in favor of the·white electorate . 21 In fourteen states, a
felon permanently loses the right to vote; in seven states, one in four black men has been permanently
disenfranchised.22 A total of 1.4 million black men, or thirteen percent of the black male adult population, are either temporarily or permanently disen-franchised.23 The
2000 presidential election illustrated the dramatic effects of felon disenfranchisement. Florida disenfranchises
the most, including six hundred thousand who have served their sentences and have been discharged from the
criminal justice system. Had those people been allowed to vote, Al Gore could have won Florida by more than
thirty-one thousand votes.24 To make matters worse, mass incarceration results in fewer legislative seats for
which bars slavery,
communities of color .25 Because the Census Bureau counts inmates as living where they are incarcerated, rural
communities that house large prisons gain a disproportionate number of elected officials representing them in
their state legislature and Congress.26 Meanwhile, no one is representing the people of color behind bars, and the
communities from which they came lose representatives because their population has declined.27 Quickly, quietly, and
with virtually no political opposition, this new form of social control has become entrenched in the social, political, and
economic structure. Like slavery and Jim Crow, mass incarceration is predicated on the inferiority of a certain class of
people, defined largely by race. The genius of the new system is that it successfully blames the victim ; black
and brown people are segregated, stripped of political rights, and used for the economic benefit of propertied
whites because they chose to engage in criminal behavior. That the overwhelming majority of inmates lack a
basic education and only ever earned monthly incomes ofless than one thousand dollars goes unreported .28
Similarly, scant attention is given to the recent resegregation of schools , and how staggering proportions of black
youth graduating from their segregated, under-funded schools can barely read (discussed in chapters 3 and 12).29 The
school-to-prison track for black and brown youth reflects no racial bias, we are told; rather, these kids have
chosen a life of crime. We should not be confused or distracted by such rhetoric. While the strategies and mechanisms of
control have changed,
the goals and beneficiaries remain the same. The backlash against the Civil Rights Movement
has produced a new method of control on a scale that was unimaginable just twenty years ago. And this
system is built to last.
You should prioritize this form of violence—traditional impact calculus works disparately
along color lines—deprioritize spectacular impacts in favor of working against
accumulating institutional holocausts
Omolade 89
[1989, Barbara Omolade is a historian of black women for the past twenty years and an organizer in both the
women’s and civil rights/black power movements, “We Speak for the Planet” in “Rocking the ship of state : toward
a feminist peace politics”, pp. 172-176]
efforts by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan to limit nuclear testing, stockpiling, and weaponry, while still
demonstrate how "peace" can become an
abstract concept within a culture of war. Many peace activists are similarly blind to the constant wars and
Recent
protecting their own arsenals and selling arms to countries and factions around the world, vividly
threats of war being waged against people of color and the planet by those who march for "peace" and by
those they march against. These pacifists , like Gorbachev and Reagan, frequently want people of color to fear
what they fear and define peace as they define it. They are unmindful that our lands and peoples have
already been and are being destroyed as part of the "final solution" of the "color line." It is difficult to
persuade the remnants of Native American tribes , the starving of African deserts , and the victims of the
Cambodian "killing fields" that nuclear war is the major danger to human life on the planet and that only a
nuclear "winter" embodies fear and futurelessness for humanity . The peace movement suffers greatly from its
lack of a historical and holistic perspective, practice, and vision that include the voices and experiences of
people of color; the movement's goals and messages have therefore been easily coopted and expropriated by
world leaders who share the same culture of racial dominance and arrogance . The peace movement's racist
blinders have divorced peace from freedom, from feminism, from education reform, from legal rights, from
human rights, from international alliances and friendships, from national liberation, from the particular
(for
and the general (human being). Nevertheless, social movements such as the civil rights-black power
movement in the United States have always demanded peace with justice, with liberation, and with social and
economic reconstruction and cultural freedom at home and abroad. The integration of our past and our present holocausts and
our struggle to define our own lives and have our basic needs met are at the core of the inseparable struggles
example, black female, Native American male)
for world peace and social betterment.
The Achilles heel of the organized peace movement in this country has always been its whiteness. In this multi-racial
and racist society, no allwhite movement can have the strength to bring about basic changes. It is axiomatic that basic changes do not occur in any society unless the people who are
oppressed move to make them occur. In our society it is people of color who are the most oppressed. Indeed our entire history teaches us that when people of color have organized
and struggled-most especially, because of their particular history, Black people-have moved in a more humane direction as a society, toward a better life for all people.1 Western
man's whiteness, imagination, enlightened science, and
movements toward peace have developed from a culture and history
mobilized against women of color . The political advancements of white men have grown directly from the
devastation and holocaust of people of color and our lands . This technological and material progress has been in direct proportion to the
undevelopment of women of color. Yet the dayto- day survival, political struggles, and rising up of women of color, especially black
women in the United States, reveal both complex resistance to holocaust and undevelopment and often conflicted
responses to the military and war. The Holocausts Women of color are survivors of and remain casualties of
holocausts , and we are direct victims of war -that is, of open armed conflict between countries or between factions within the same country. But
women of color were not soldiers, nor did we trade animal pelts or slaves to the white man for guns, nor did we
sell or lease our lands to the white man for wealth. Most men and women of color resisted and fought back ,
were slaughtered , enslaved , and force marched into plantation labor camps to serve the white masters of
war and to build their empires and war machines. People of color were and are victims of holocausts-that is, of
great and widespread destruction, usually by fire. The world as we knew and created it was destroyed in a
continual scorched earth policy of the white man. The experience of Jews and other Europeans under the Nazis can teach us the value of understanding the
totality of destructive intent, the extensiveness of torture, and the demonical apparatus of war aimed at the human spirit. A Jewish father pushed his daughter from the lines of certain
death at Auschwitz and said, "You will be a remembrance-You tell the story. You survive." She lived. He died. Many have criticized the Jews for forcing non-Jews to remember the 6
women of color, we, too, are
"remembrances" of all the holocausts against the people of the world. We must remember the names of
concentration camps such as Jesus, Justice, Brotherhood, and Integrity , ships that carried millions of
million Jews who died under the Nazis and for etching the names Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Terezin and Warsaw in our minds. Yet as
African men, women, and children chained and brutalized across the ocean to the "New World." We must
remember the Arawaks, the Taino, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, the Narragansett, the Montauk, the
Delaware, and the other Native American names of thousands of U.S. towns that stand for tribes of people
who are no more. We must remember the holocausts visited against the Hawaiians, the aboriginal peoples of
Australia, the Pacific Island peoples, and the women and children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki . We must
remember the slaughter of men and women at Sharpeville, the children of Soweto, and the men of Attica. We
must never, ever, forget the children disfigured, the men maimed, and the women broken in our holocaustswe must remember the names, the numbers, the faces, and the stories and teach them to our children and our
children's children so the world can never forget our suffering and our courage. Whereas the particularity of the Jewish holocaust under the
Nazis is over, our holocausts continue . We are the madres locos (crazy mothers) in the Argentinian square silently
demanding news of our missing kin from the fascists who rule. We are the children of El Salvador who see
our mothers and fathers shot in front of our eyes . We are the Palestinian and Lebanese women and children
overrun by Israeli, Lebanese, and U.S. soldiers . We are the women and children of the bantustans and
refugee camps and the prisoners of Robbin Island. We are the starving in the Sahel , the poor in Brazil , the
sterilized in Puerto Rico.
We are the brothers and sisters of Grenada who carry the seeds of the New Jewel Movement in our hearts, not daring to speak of it with our
lipsyet. Our holocaust is South Africa ruled by men who loved Adolf Hitler, who have developed the Nazi techniques of terror to more sophisticated levels. Passes replace the Nazi
badges and stars. Skin color is the ultimate badge of persecution. Forced removals of women, children, and the elderly-the "useless appendages of South Africa"-into barren, arid
bantustans without resources for survival have replaced the need for concentration camps. Black sex-segregated barracks and cells attached to work sites achieve two objectives: The
work camps destroy black family and community life, a presumed source of resistance, and attempt to create human automatons whose purpose is to serve the South African state's
drive toward wealth and hegemony. Like other fascist regimes, South Africa disallows any democratic rights to black people; they are denied the right to vote, to dissent, to peaceful
assembly, to free speech, and to political representation. The regime has all the typical Nazi-like political apparatus: house arrests of dissenters such as Winnie Mandela; prison
murder of protestors such as Stephen Biko; penal colonies such as Robbin Island. Black people, especially children, are routinely arrested without cause, detained without limits, and
confronted with the economic and social disparities of a nation built around racial separation. Legally and economically, South African apartheid is structural and institutionalized
racial war. The Organization of African Unity's regional intergovernmental meeting in 1984 in Tanzania was called to review and appraise the achievements of the United Nations
Decade for Women. The meeting considered South Africa's racist apartheid regime a peace issue. The "regime is an affront to the dignity of all Africans on the continent and a stark
reminder of the absence of equality and peace, representing the worst form of institutionalized oppression and strife." Pacifists such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi
who have used nonviolent resistance charged that those who used violence to obtain justice were just as evil as their oppressors. Yet all successful revolutionary movements have
used organized violence. This is especially true of national liberation movements that have obtained state power and reorganized the institutions of their nations for the benefit of the
people. If men and women in South Africa do not use organized violence, they could remain in the permanent violent state of the slave. Could it be that pacifism and nonviolence
cannot become a way of life for the oppressed? Are they only tactics with specific and limited use for protecting people from further violence? For most people in the developing
communities and the developing world consistent nonviolence is a luxury; it presumes that those who have and use nonviolent weapons will refrain from using them long enough for
nonviolent resisters to win political battles. To survive, peoples in developing countries must use a varied repertoire of issues, tactics, and approaches. Sometimes arms are needed to
defeat apartheid and defend freedom in South Africa; sometimes nonviolent demonstrations for justice are the appropriate strategy for protesting the shooting of black teenagers by a
white man, such as happened in New York City.
Peace is not merely an absence of 'conflict that enables white middleclass
comfort , nor is it simply resistance to nuclear war and war machinery . The litany of "you will be blown up,
too" directed by a white man to a black woman obscures the permanency and institutionalization of war,
the violence and holocaust that people of color face daily . Unfortunately, the holocaust does not only refer to the
mass murder of Jews, Christians, and atheists during the Nazi regime; it also refers to the permanent
institutionalization of war that is part of every fascist and racist regime. The holocaust lives. It is a threat to
world peace as pervasive and thorough as nuclear war.
Challenging institutional racism is a prior ethical question— it makes violence structurally
inevitable and foundationally negates morality making their utilitarianism arguments
incoherent
Albert Memmi 2k, Professor Emeritus of Sociology @ U of Paris, Naiteire, Racism, Translated by Steve
Martinot, p. 163-165
The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without remission, probably never
achieved. Yet, for this very reason, it is a struggle to be undertaken without surcease and without
concessions. One cannot be indulgent toward racism; one must not even let the monster in the house,
especially not in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means to augment the bestial part in us and in other
people, which is to diminish what is human. To accept the racist universe to the slightest degree is to endorse
fear, injustice, and violence. It is to accept the persistence of the dark history in which we still largely live. it
is to agree that the outsider will always be a possible victim (and which man is not himself an outsider
relative to someone else?. Racism illustrates, in sum, the inevitable negativity of the condition of the dominated
that is, it illuminates in a certain sense the entire human condition. The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it
is, and always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to the ultimate passage from animosity to
humanity . In that sense, we cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge. However, it remains true that one’s moral
conduit only emerges from a choice: one has to want it. It is a choice among other choices, and always
debatable in its foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking, that the choice to conduct oneself
morally is the condition for the establishment of a human order, for which racism is the very negation . This
is almost a redundancy. One cannot found a moral order, let alone a legislative order, on racism, because
racism signifies the exclusion of the other, and his or her subjection to violence and domination. From an ethical
point of view, if one can deploy a little religious language, racism is ‘the truly capital sin. It is not an accident that almost all
of humanity’s spiritual traditions counsels respect for the weak, for orphans, widows, or strangers. It is not just a
question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments. Such unanimity in the safeguarding of the other suggests
the real utility of such sentiments. All things considered, we have an interest in banishing injustice, because injustice engenders
violence and death . Of course, this is debatable. There are those who think that if one is strong enough, the
assault on and oppression of others is permissible. Bur no one is ever sure of remaining the strongest. One day, perhaps,
the roles will be reversed. All unjust society contains within itself the seeds of its own death. It is probably smarter
to treat others with respect so that they treat you with respect. “Recall.” says the Bible, “that you were once a stranger in Egypt,” which means
both that you ought to respect the stranger because you were a stranger yourself and that you risk becoming one again someday. It is an ethical
and a practical appeal—indeed, it is a contract, however implicit it might be. In short, the refusal of racism is the condition for
all theoretical and practical morality because, in the end, the ethical choice commands the political choice, a
just society must be a society accepted by all. If this contractual principle is not accepted, then only conflict,
violence, and destruction will be our lot. If it is accepted, we can hope someday to live in peace. True, it is a
wager, but the stakes are irresistible.
The world has already ended for people of color—a death culture focused on extinction
masks the oppression and exploitation of white supremacy
OMOLADE 84 City College Center for Worker Education in New York City
Barbara-a historian of black women for the past twenty years and an organizer in both the women’s and civil rights/black power
movements; Women of Color and the Nuclear Holocaust; WOMEN’S STUDIES QUARTERLY, Vol. 12., No. 2, Teaching about Peace, War,
and Women in the Military, Summer, p. 12; http://www.jstor.org/stable/4004305
In April, 1979, the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency released a report on the effects of nuclear
war that concludes that, in a general nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, 25 to 100
million people would be killed. This is approximately the same number of African people who died between
1492 and 1890 as a result of the African slave trade to the New World. The same federal report also
comments on the destruction of urban housing that would cause massive shortages after a nuclear war, as
well as on the crops that would be lost, causing massive food shortages. Of course, for people of color the
world over, starvation is already a common problem, when, for example, a nation’s crops are grown for
export rather than to feed its own people. And the housing of people of color throughout the world’s urban
areas is already blighted and inhumane: families live in shacks, shanty towns, or on the streets; even in the
urban areas of North America, the poor may live without heat or running water. For people of color, the
world as we knew it ended centuries ago. Our world, with its own languages, customs and ways, ended. And
we are only now beginning to see with increasing clarity that our task is to reclaim that world, struggle for it,
and rebuild it in our own image. The “death culture” we live in has convinced many to be more concerned
with death than with life, more willing to demonstrate for “survival at any cost” than to struggle for liberty
and peace with dignity. Nuclear disarmament becomes a safe issue when it is not linked to the daily and
historic issues of racism, to the ways in which people of color continue to be murdered. Acts of war, nuclear
holocausts, and genocide have already been declared on our jobs, our housing, our schools, our families, and
our lands. As women of color, we are warriors, not pacifists. We must fight as a people on all fronts, or we will continue
to die as a people. We have fought in people’s wars in China, in Cuba, in Guinea-Bissau, and in such struggles as the civil
rights movement, the women’s movement, and in countless daily encounters with landlords, welfare departments, and
schools. These struggles are not abstractions, but the only means by which we have gained the ability to eat
and to provide for the future of our people. We wonder who will lead the battle for nuclear disarmament with
the vigor and clarity that women of color have learned from participating in other struggles. Who will make the political links
among racism, sexism, imperialism, cultural integrity, and nuclear arsenals and housing? Who will stand
up?
Marijuana criminality is at the center of this system of control—the specter of “crack”
cocaine arrests has ignored that it was marijuana that foregrounded the war on drugs and
that marijuana criminality starts the cycle of criminal justice racism
Taylor
13
[2013, James Taylor is an associate professor and Chair of the Department of Politics at the University of San
Francisco, “Chapter 7: Building Minority Community Power Through Legalization” Something’s in the Air: Race,
Crime, and the Legalization of Marijuana” edited by, Katherine Tate, James Lance Taylor and Mark Q. Sawyer]
Legalization, or at least decriminalization, of personal-use marijuana is a vital alternative to draconian laws drawn up in the War on
Drugs regime of the past three decades. It is well established that concern and paranoia over petty “crack” cocaine
arrests for sales, possession, and use drove the mass warehousing of the state of California’s prisons and jails populations to become the largest in the United
States (Lusane 1991; Weatherspoon 1998; Reinarman and Levine 1997; Provine 2007). What is less appreciated in light of the fierce reaction to the
emergence of crack cocaine in the middle 1980s is that marijuana use and related arrests foregrounded the
official war on drugs
announced by the Reagan administration in October of 1982 (Alexander 2010, 49).
The Nixon administration ran on a
platform of law and order social control of African Americans in 1968; he implemented his war on drugs. Policing petty drugs would be
the means to that end . White House Chief of Staff H. R. Halderman once noted,“(President NixonJ emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really
The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to” (Baum 1996, 13).The War on Drugs
system’s primary target was what political operatives and bureaucratic appointees collapsed into the
procrustean category, “the young the poor the black” (Baum 1996, 21). Between the Nixon and Reagan administrations’ focus on street-level drug
trafficking, sales, possession, and use, marijuana remained at the center .¶ For instance, the pro-legalization policy group, National
Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), reports that marijuana arrests per hour began a steady increase between 1965
and 1968. Marijuana-related arrests per hour during this period went from a low of two arrests per hour, resulting in roughly 90,000 annual arrests in the country, to more than doubling at
the Blacks.
200,000 per year by 1971. By 1973, annual arrests reached 400,000 per year and remained roughly at this level until the early to middle 1980s, when the Reagan administration declared a “war
Where marijuana arrests (at about 300,000 per year) took a sharp, temporary decline as the “crack epidemic”
became the center of attention, beginning in 1992, marijuana arrests, at 33 per hour, increased every year over the next decade, peaking at 700,000 per year in 2000. By
2007, the number of arrests per year rose to more than 850,000 per year, or 99.6 per hour. Noting that marijuana possession constituted nearly 8 of
on drugs.”
10 drug-related arrests in the 1990s , Michelle Alexander insists that this period of “unprecedented punitiveness”
resulted “in prison sentences (rather than dismissal, community service, or probation)” to the degree “in two short decades, between 1980 and 2000, the number of people
incarcerated in our nation’s prisons and jails soared from roughly 300,000 to more than 2 million. By the end of 2007, more than 7 million Americans—or one in every 31 adults—were behind
bars, on probation, or parole” (2010, 59). Thus, marijuana anteceded crack—not in terms of its pharmacological potency or even in fostering the violent, nihilistic crisis associated with crack—
There is widespread consensus in
reported government statistics, advocacy studies, and policy think tanks that African Americans bear the brunt of law-and- order
but more in how state, local, and national law enforcement has targeted Black and Latino communities for scapegoating and punishment.
management of marijuana laws in the United States . How national and local media chose to present the use and abuse of both drugs in racial terms that
were woefully different from the facts of use, sales, and possession is confirmed in academic and critical legal studies literature. One study focusing on marijuana initiants found that “among
Blacks, the annual incidence rate (per 1,000 potential new users) increased from 8.0 in 1966 to 16.7 in 1968, reached a peak at about the same time as Whites (19.4 in 1976), then remained high
throughout the late 1970s. Following the low rates in the 1980s, rates among Blacks rose again in the early 1990s, reached a peak in 1997 and 1998 (19.2 and 19.1, respectively), then dropped to
14.0 in 1999. Similar to the general pattern for Whites and Blacks, Hispanics’ annual incidence rate rose during late 1970s and 1990s, with a peak in 1998 (17.8)” (“Initiation of Marijuana Use”
2008). During the late 1990s, habitual street-level marijuana use was buttressed in pop culture by West Coast hip-hop rap, especially as associated with rapper Calvin “Snoop Dogg” Broadus.
Broadus became so associated with illegal marijuana use and culture that during the 2010 midterm elections, media reports claimed that pre-election polling, which showed the pro-legalization
Proposition 19 losing in a tight campaign, may have been suffering from the “Broadus effect,” equating it to the “[Tom] Bradley effect” in California politics and might nevertheless pass when
likely voters, who otherwise supported legalization, actually showed up at voting booths.¶ Surveys confirm that White Californians (and Americans) participate in the sales and consumption of
marijuana at rates exceeding those of African Americans, Latinos, and Asians in the state. The true face of marijuana in California is not mainly African American or Latino; it is widely
understood to be White. In none of the top California counties with the highest marijuana arrest rates per 100,000 citizens (Alpine, Calaveras, Mono, Humboldt, or Inyo) do African Americans
comprise more than 1.3 percent of the respective county populations/’ Arrests in these counties and those that have traditionally ranked high, such as Plumas, Trinity, and Sierra, largely reflect
the “supply-side” approach to marijuana interdiction, targeting industrial production." For instance, as felony juvenile and adult drug arrests declined throughout the 1990s, only among White
males and females did these arrests increase; marijuana was the main source of both felony and misdemeanor arrest rate increases in the state (Lockyear 2000). On the “demand side,” however, a
starkly different picture emerges, most devastatingly for African Americans arrested for petty possession.8 Macallair and Males (2009) suggest that the variation in marijuana arrests at the county
level in California makes very little sense. In their study, they include simple marijuana arrests in five of the least and most harsh major counties. Where San Francisco County, Mendocino
County, and Alameda County (Berkeley, Oakland) align predictably with the least-harsh arresting counties for petty marijuana possession, given their liberal and progressive political
orientations, the alignment of Mendocino County, Santa Cruz County, and Humboldt County with the five harshest is surprising. What is most perplexing, but largely attributed to race in their
study, is that a virtual “bait and switch" occurred over the period, where some more liberal counties like San Francisco, moderate Marin County, and Contra Costa County went soft on adult
marijuana arrests rates, but focused more severely on young African Americans.¶ While arrests for all major California demographic groups increased significantly between 1990 and 2008, the
arrests for no group out of adult Whites, Asians, Latinos, or women ends in 2008 as high as Africa Americans began in 1990; where African American rates were 225.6 in 1990, the highest arrest
rates per 100,000 in 2008 were among Latinos/Hispamcs at 212.2. By then, for African Americans, the rate had exploded to 604 per 100,000, representing a rate increase of 168 percent
Dramatic changes have occurred in the demography of
marijuana arrestees....¶ In 1990, half of all marijuana possession arrests were European American (White), 60% were 21 or older, and 90% were male; in 2008, 56% were African
(Macallair and Males 2009, 4). Based on this data, Macallair and Males conclude: “
American or Hispanic, just half were 21 or older, and 88% were male” (2009, 3). While other groups, such as Latinos/Hispanics, females, males of all races, nuddle-aged to older individuals (for
all groups except Asians), and juveniles show dramatic increases, young adult African Americans (20-29 years) and those 40 years and older respectively represent the highest arrest rates over
three decades (1,316.7) and the highest rate-change increase of 345 percent. Comparing arrest patterns of African Americans in the 20-29 age category (4,761) to those of Whites between 40-69
years of age (2,757), the authors quip, “Do 360,000 African Americans age 20-29 really smoke more pot than 7.2 million European Americans age 40-69?” (Macallair and Males, 2009,8.
Emphasis in original text).¶ Nearly half of California’s African American population resides in its largest, most policed counties and represent the bulk of the resulting disproportionately between
their population and marijuana possession arrests. African Americans heavily populate California cities that constitute nearly 30 percent of the state’s population.The pro-legalization advocacy
group NORML found that, in 2002, “African Americans as compared to Wliites in California were arrested at a 5:1 (per capita) ratio on marijuana sales charges.”1 A 2010 Drug Policy Alliance
study,“Targeting Blacks: Possession Arrests of African Americans in California, 2004—2008,” found disproportionate arrest patterns in each of the state’s 25 largest counties (Levine, Gettman,
the percentage of African American possession arrests was higher than the Black
percentage of the total county population. Most surprising was San Francisco. During this period, this liberal Democratic. Party bastion, which had an African
and Siegel 2010, 6-8, 12). In each county,
American woman district attorney, Kamala Harris, who rejected “Tough on Crime” ideology in preference for what she identifies as “Smart on Crime,” nonetheless was near the very bottom. Of
in none
of the counties does the African American marijuana arrest rate outpace that of their White counterparts ; in
most, the gaps in possession arrest rates were extreme. Disproportionate minority contact is the rule; there
are few exceptions. A related 2010 study, commissioned by the California NAACP, “Arresting Blacks for Marijuana in California: Possession Arrests in 25 Cities, 2006—
the 25 counties, only Sacramento and Solano Counties, which both had higher percentages of Black population, arrested a higher percentage of its Black population."1 Moreover,
2008,’’found that in 25 select California cities, African Americans were arrested up to 12 times the rate of Whites (Levine, Gettman, and Siegel 2010). The study also found that Los Angeles
arrested African Americans for low-level marijuana possession at seven times the rate of Whites. Similar disparities were found in other cities where arrest patterns were wildly disproportionate
for African Americans; in Pasadena (African Americans are 11 percent of the population and 49 percent of those arrested), African Americans were arrested at 12 times the rate of Whites; San
Diego arrested African Americans for marijuana possession at six times the rate of Whites; and in Sacramento (African Americans 14 percent of the population), African Americans were 51
percent of those arrested for possession. In each of the 25 major cities, the rate of African American to White marijuana possession arrests per 100,00 was, at a minimum, two times more
(Compton) where the Black population was 31 percent, to a liigh of 14 times lugher in Torrance, which has a Black population of 2 percent, roughly 2,500 African American residents.Torrance
also holds the highest Black rate of marijuana arrests per 100,000 at an extreme, 3,227. But it does not stand alone. Burbank, which has an African American population of less than 3 percent, has
a 2,077 rate of marijuana arrests per 100,000. Similarly, Glendale, with a Black population of 2.9 percent, has a rate of 1,843 arrests per 100,000. Merced has a Black rate of marijuana arrests of
1,448 per 100,000 citizens. Even the more moderate cases of arrests per 100,000 and Black percentage of marijuana possession arrests are grossly disproportionate. Of the 1,515 persons in
These out-of-balance arrest patterns persist
despite there being roughly a 3.4 percent adult African American population in the state from which to
draw." In fact, it might be more useful to describe the racial double standard in the experiences of average non-Whites and Whites in California and other states as constituting a face of “biraciality.” Researchers studying inequality within and among industrialized countries have found that within every state in the United States, the risk of
being incarcerated differs by race, with African American youth and adults for nonviolent or violent crimes
having the greatest risk (Wilkinson and Pickett 2009). Rejecting the premise that imprisonment reflects incidence of criminal offenses between races, the study affirms, “....
California prisons actually incarcerated on marijuana charges in 2010, nearly half—750—were Black Americans.¶
African American youth commit fewer drug crimes. But African American youth are overwhelmingly more likely to be arrested, to be detained, to be charged, to be charged as if an adult, and to
be imprisoned. The same pattern is true for African American and Hispanic adults, who are treated more harshly than Whites at every stage of judicial proceedings. Facing the same charges,
White defendants are far more likely to have the charges against them reduced, or to be offered ‘diversion’—a deferment or suspension of prosecution if the offender agrees to certain conditions,
Consistent with most aspects of punishment in the United States, from
arrest to sentencing, there remain unofficial “Black codes” that effectively apply to African Americans and
those that apply to others.¶ Beyond research, one need look no further than the NBC cable news networks, MSNBC and CNBC, and their respective crime-and-punishment
such as completing a drug rehabilitation progranune” (150).
and drug series. A key feature of the former is a host of “reality” prison series shows produced by 44 Blue Productions, such as Pitbulls and Parolees, Lockup: Extended Stay, and Behind Bars,
which tend routinely to provide viewers with a foreboding look behind the scenes of U.S. and international prison cultures. Individual inmates, corrections officers, family members, wardens, and
health workers are typically cast around notorious Part 1 Index offenses such as homicide, arson, armed robbery, larceny- theft, forcible rape, burglary, and vehicle theft. African Americans,
Latinos, and Whites of lower socioeconomic status and education levels are preponderant in this casting. CNBC’s primetime shows Marijuana, Inc., and Marijuana, USA, present sympathetic
market-focused segments such as “The Confused State of Pot Law Enforcement,” “How Big is the Marijuana Market?” “State by State Guide to Laws, Consumption, and Costs,” and “Marijuana
in America: History and Culture.” The focus is often places like Mendocino County, California, where estimates suggest that as much as 60 percent of its 86,000 residents cultivate, distribute, or
consume high-grade marijuana; its White population is 88 percent, compared to Latinos at roughly 20 percent, Native Americans at 5.8 percent, and African Americans at 0.9 percent.
Nevertheless, arrest patterns and conviction rates do not reflect who cultivates, uses, or sells marijuana most in the state or country.¶ A 2007 National Survey on Drug Use and Health report for
the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found that among racial groups, drug use tends to be lowest in nonmetropolitan counties, (except for individuals claiming two or more racial
identities and Native Americans and Alaska Natives) and highest in metropolitan counties.13 The same pattern among these groups holds specifically for marijuana use, including African
American respondents at 7.3 percent reporting past-month use,Whites at 6.2 percent, Latinos at 5.0 percent, and Asians at 1.8 percent. But, this provides only a snapshot of reported use among
groups in the country, further highlights the disparity in arrests among African Americans when compared to the reported use of other groups, and is not generalizable as an explanation of
marijuana use. For instance, a 2001 iteration of the same survey of reported lifetime use (as opposed to past month) showed that Whites reported significantly higher use than African Americans
(41.5 to 35.5 percent, respectively) in 2000 and (44.5 to 38.6 percent, respectively) in 2001. The same holds true for reported past-year usage respectively, with Whites at 11.2 percent in 2000 to
African Americans at 10.9 percent, and again in 2001 respectively, with Whites at 12.9 and African Americans at 12.2 percent. Nevertheless, African Americans are arrested more than the
several groups who report higher usage and at rates that far exceed their reported use relative to Whites.¶ For Blacks throughout the United States,
marijuana is more a
“gateway drug” for granting local, state, and national law enforcement the capacity to greater mass
incarceration of African Americans and other groups than it is for exposure to more serious drug use. Comparing
arrest rates for select offenses'4 in 1990 and 2008, research shows marijuana possession to be an extreme outlier (Macallair and Males 2009, 3).
As arrests declined for every available category, arrest rates for possession of small quantities of marijuana
moved in a positive direction at 127 percent . Small-scale, personal-use marijuana possession arrests far
exceeded property crimes, violent crimes, and all other drug possession and sales . As pop culture (e.g., the TV Guide
Network series Weeds), voters, and public opinion show signs of greater tolerance for some form of regulation,
decriminalization, and normalization, law enforcement has been unrelenting . Harry G. Levine and his colleagues (2010) insist: “In
the last 20 years, California made 850,000 arrests for possession of small amounts of marijuana, and half a million arrests in the last ten years. The people arrested were disproportionately
African Americans and Latinos, overwhelmingly young people, especially young men” (Levine, Gettman, and Siegel 2010). The patterns of disparity, especially between African Americans and
Whites, in California’s counties and cities are consistent with patterns in cities and states across the United States. For instance, in Syracuse, in Onondaga County, New York, the arrest rate for
minor marijuana possession is 1,795 per 100,000, compared to 169 per 100,000 for Whites; the Black population in Syracuse is 10.61, according to NORML. In Cincinnati, Ohio, in Hamilton
County, the marijuana arrest gap between African Americans and Whites is 1,292 per 100,000 to 341. Kansas City, Missouri, in Jackson County similarly arrests African Americans for
possession at 1,093 per 100,000 to 292 per 100,000 for Whites. Hartford, Connecticut, in Hartford County, yields similar disparities, with African Americans being arrested at a rate 938 per
100,000 and Whites at 206 arrests. Communities like Cleveland, Ohio; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Duluth, Minnesota; Saginaw, Michigan; Omaha, Nebraska; and Albany, New York, African
American per-capita arrests for possession of small quantities of marijuana, when compared to Whites and others, is similarly reflective of the reality that African Americans are treated with a
double standard under marijuana laws in the United States. New York City aggressively arrests African American offenders at a ratio of 9:1 when compared to White offenders. According to the
author of the Marijuana Policy Project,”... 1998 and 2007 the New York police arrested 374,900 people whose most serious crime was the lowest-level misdemeanor marijuana offense. That
number is eight times higher than the number of arrests (45,300) from 1988 to 1997. Nearly 90 percent arrested between 1998 and 2007 were male, despite the fact that national studies show
marijuana use roughly equal between men and women. And while national surveys show Whites are more likely to use marijuana than Blacks and Latinos, the New York study reported that 83
percent of those arrested were Black or Latino. Blacks accounted for 52 percent of the arrests, Latinos and other people of color accounted for 33 percent, while Whites accounted for only 15
percent” (Mirken 2007). According to NORML, for four years in a row during the previous decade, U.S. marijuana arrests set an all-time record. Marijuana arrests of all groups are currently
approaching 850,000 arrests per year.¶ The plight of African Americans and the extreme disparities they experience in California and other states have become routine. No group of adults in the
state or country would benefit more from a reasoned policy of decriminalization. They have become the canary in the mine of the unrelenting War on Drugs that has engulfed members of nearly
every major population in the state. Alarmist reaction to “crack” in the 1980s and 1990s at least signaled the emergence of a crisis in rural and urban African American communities to which
they could organize and respond.
Yet seeping under the radar, marijuana has facilitated the mass criminalization of
ordinary African Americans for at least the past three decades . Religious organizations and leaders who decry the human waste and community
dissolution associated with mass incarceration and criminalization are mostly hostile to the idea of decriminalization. Marijuana, like homosexuality, has seemingly
always been taboo in the African American church, even as members’ and parishioners’ families and lives
are deeply affected. This may be largely due to the social stigma attached to marijuana and the reality that tins population has been targeted for all sorts of adverse policies from the
undoing of affirmative action, social welfare, education, housing, and public health, including widespread gun violence among their young.
Marijuana policies are a unique outlet for police violence—connecting legalization and the
issue of policing to a civil rights movement is key—decriminalization fails
Levine 13
[10/13/13, Harry, a sociology professor at Queens College, CUNY, is co-author of Marijuana Arrest Crusade and
co-editor of Crack in America, The Nation, "The Scandal of Racist Marijuana Arrests—and What To Do About It,"
http://www.thenation.com/article/176915/scandal-racist-marijuana-arrests-and-what-do-about-it]
So the question again becomes:
Why ? Why have these millions of arrests happened? Why is it so hard to stop them?
While federal funding and drug war propaganda have helped drive marijuana arrests, police and sheriffs’ departments have had
their own reasons to embrace and fiercely defend the practice . Central to understanding the national marijuana arrest crusade
is the fact that significant constituencies
within police departments benefit from marijuana arrests , find them
useful for internal departmental purposes , and want them to continue . For ordinary patrol officers, marijuana
arrests are relatively safe and easy work. Policing can be dangerous, but officers are unlikely to get shot or stabbed
while searching and arresting teenagers for marijuana possession . All police departments have formal and
informal activity quotas; in many departments, officers can show productivity and earn overtime pay by stopping
and searching ten or so young people near the end of a shift and making a marijuana arrest. Police officers in New York have long
used the term “collars for dollars” to refer to the practice of making misdemeanor arrests to earn overtime pay. Also, from the officers’ point of
possessing marijuana are highly desirable arrestees . As one veteran lieutenant put it, they are “clean”;
unlike drunks and heroin addicts, young marijuana users rarely have HIV, hepatitis, tuberculosis or even
body lice. They are unlikely to throw up on the officer, in the patrol car or at the station. Marijuana arrests are
view, people
indeed a quality-of-life issue—for the police . Most important, police department supervisors at all levels find that
marijuana possession arrests are very useful. They are proof of productivity to their superiors; some supervisors also receive
overtime pay for the extra work by officers under their command. Making
many searches and arrests for minor offenses is also
excellent training for rookie police . If a new officer screws up the paperwork, it doesn’t matter because, as one
sergeant explained, “it’s just a pot arrest.” And if a crisis or emergency comes up, police commanders can temporarily reassign officers
making arrests for marijuana without hindering an ongoing investigation. This “reserve army” of police focusing on petty
offenses keeps officers busy, provides records of their whereabouts and productivity, and gives commanders
staffing flexibility. Marijuana arrests also enable police department managers to obtain fingerprints,
photographs and other data on young people who would not otherwise end up in their databases . There is
nothing else the police can do that gets so many new people into their system as the broad net of marijuana
possession arrests . Police officials and managers have become so dependent on marijuana arrests that one
could reasonably conclude that their departments are addicted to them. And they don’t want to give up their
habit. In recent years, police agencies, prosecutors’ offices, and their influential network of political and lobbying
organizations have emerged as the chief opponents of drug-law reform. It is not the religious right, or anti-drug groups, or
even the drug treatment industry that lobbies and campaigns against marijuana ballot initiatives and legislative drug-law reforms. Rather, law
enforcement organizations are leading the charge as well as providing the troops to defend the drug war. * * * The ACLU’s report
emphatically calls for an end to marijuana possession arrests, noting that the only way to accomplish this is by
legalizing the possession and use of marijuana, and ultimately by regulating its production and sale.
Although the decriminalization of marijuana possession has been implemented in countries with a national police
system, in the U nited S tates this has turned out to be a false solution . When possession becomes a
“noncriminal” offense but still an illegal one, local law enforcement agencies often continue many of the
same practices as before —but now without public defenders to represent the young people charged with a
“drug offense,” and without public data to document what police, prosecutors and courts are doing . Some
police departments simply ignore the decriminalization laws, as the NYPD has done for over fifteen years. However, as
Colorado and Washington have proved in just the last year, there is a very good alternative: even without instituting
commercial sale, the legalization of marijuana can stop most of these possession arrests . The larger goal of
ending punitive and biased drug arrests requires seismic changes in law enforcement : it will mean creating policing
for a post–drug war America. One reform that makes others possible is guaranteeing public access to much more aggregate criminal justice data,
both historical and current. With it, researchers and journalists can reveal routine police, prosecutor and court practices, as some of us have been
doing for marijuana arrests and stop-and-frisks. The Nation is facing a crippling postal rate hike—donate by October 31 to help us foot this
$120,272 bill.
One way of conceptualizing these changes is to view them as bringing the civil rights movement to
policing policies. In the last two decades, police department staff have become increasingly racially integrated. But in many cities
and counties, the day-to-day practices of police and sheriffs’ departments are still determined by the race,
class and ethnicity of a neighborhood’s residents. Despite the many successes of the civil rights movement,
we continue to live within two worlds of policing , separate and unequal: one for middle-class and wealthier people, the other for
poorer Americans and, especially, people of color. It is time for America to fully embrace equal policing for all.
Unfortunately, like all
humane, just and progressive change, this will not be granted. It must be won.
Vote affirmative to endorse the 1AC as a tactic for mass mobilization to legalize marijuana
in opposition to racial oppression and the use of incarceration to maintain a racial caste
system.
Our specific tactic is the combination of radical critique and policy advocacy.
Marijuana legalization is inevitable, but it alone does not ensure justice – only our
advocacy ends the cycle of reform and cooption—connecting the dots between legalization
and racial violence ensures that legalization happens through justice oriented outcomes
and avoids the dangers of a legal market
Hayes 14
[08/21/14, Jelani Hayes is a Media Intern at the Drug Policy Alliance, "Ending Marijuana Prohibition Must Take a
Historical Perspective”, www.huffingtonpost.com/jelani-hayes/marijuana-prohibition-history_b_5697152.html]
Underlying marijuana prohibition is a familiar philosophy : to preserve social order and white supremacy
and secure profits for an influential few , it is permissible, even advisable, to construct profit-bearing
institutions of social control. Historically, this philosophy has been advanced by governmental action, guided by
special interests. The traditional tactics: manufacturing mass fear, criminalizing the target or demoting them
to a sub-citizen status, and profiting from their subjugation. Cannabis prohibition did all three. The Times
editorial board dedicated an entire article to explaining this phenomenon. Part 3 of the series begins, " The federal law that makes possession
of marijuana a crime has its origins in legislation that was passed in an atmosphere of hysteria in the 1930s and that was firmly rooted in
prejudices against Mexican immigrants and African-Americans, who were associated with marijuana use at
the time. This racially freighted history lives on in current federal policy , which is so driven by myth and
propaganda that it is almost impervious to reason." This limited analysis refers to the refer madness hysteria
and xenophobia that infiltrated President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration . Additionally, business
companies, drug-prevention nonprofits, law
enforcement agencies, and the private prison industry have an economic interest in criminalization, what is
interests play a part in keeping cannabis illegal. Some pharmaceutical
known as the drug control industrial complex. It pays big to help fight the war on drugs, and marijuana prohibition is a
crucial facet of that effort. The Nation has recently called these interests "The Real Reason Pot is Still Illegal." The United States
should legalize marijuana . It should also end the drug war, which would be a tremendous and beautiful accomplishment, but it would
not be enough. The
war on drugs is a mechanism of social control -- not unlike African slavery, Jim Crow,
alcohol Prohibition, or the systematic relegation of immigrants to an illegal status or substandard existence .
Different in their nature and severity, all of these institutions were tools used to control and profit from the
criminalization, regulation, and dehumanization of minority communities. Legalizing marijuana will not
alone rid society of the tendency to turn fear into hatred, hatred into regulation, and regulation into profit.
To address this cycle, we must put cannabis prohibition (and the drug war) in its historical context and
connect the dots where appropriate . Already we have seen that the reality of legalization does not alone
ensure justice or equality. As law professor and best selling author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness Michelle Alexander points out, thousands of black men remain in jail or prison in Colorado
(where licit weed has been on the market since January) while white men make money from the now legal
marijuana market -- selling the drug just as the incarcerated men had done. She warns that legalization without
reparation is not sufficient, drawing the parallel to what happened to black Americans post-Reconstruction .
"And after a brief period of reconstruction a new caste system was imposed -- Jim Crow -- and another extraordinary movement arose and
brought the old Jim Crow to its knees...Americans said, OK, we'll stop now. We'll take down the whites-only signs, we'll stop doing that," she
said. "But there were not reparations for slavery, not for Jim Crow, and scarcely an acknowledgement of the harm done except for Martin Luther
King Day, one day out of the year. And I feel like, here we go again." Alexander's historical perspective is warranted because
despite the size and intensity of marijuana prohibition, of the drug war in its entirety , its purpose is not
unlike that of Jim Crow or other structural forms of social control and oppression . The drug war was never
about drugs. Therefore, our solution to it can't be either. We must frame the campaigns for cannabis
legalization across the states as civil rights movements -- as institutional reform efforts -- so that the public might
demand justice oriented outcomes from the campaigns. We must also make the public aware of the
dangerous relationship between profit and criminalization so that they can identity the potential dangerous
within the relationship between profit and legalization . We must make legalization about more than raising tax revenue,
increasing civil liberties, and lowering arrests rates for possession (all of which are important and positive outcomes of legalization, nonetheless).
In order to undue the damage -- to the extent that that is possible -- that the criminalization of marijuana
specifically and the war on drugs more broadly have caused, we must pay reparations and retroactively
apply reformed drug laws . More importantly, we must undermine the philosophies that allow for the construction
of institutional harm, and we must be able to identity them when they creep up again and be ready to take
action against them, to arm our minds and our bodies against the next wave of social oppression -- whatever and
wherever it may be and to whomever it may be applied.
This is my plea to make history matter so that it doesn't repeat
itself -- again, and again, and again.
This type of advocacy is the only way to bring an end to the system of institution racism—
the reason reforms have failed is because they haven’t challenged the underlying racial
ideology—it’s a flawed public consensus not a flawed public policy that lies at the heart of
this system of control—as a result, solvency for this debate should be measured not in what
reforms we utilize, but how reforms come into existence
Alexander 10, Associate Professor of Law
[2010, Michelle Alexander, is an associate professor of law at Ohio State University, a civil rights advocate and a
writer. “New Jim Crow : Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” ProQuest ebrary, pp. 221-224]
The list could go on, of course, but the point has been made. The
central question for racial justice advocates is this: are
we serious about ending this system of control , or not? If we are, there is a tremendous amount of work to be
done . The notion that all of these reforms can be accomplished piecemeal— one at a time, through disconnected
advocacy strategies— seems deeply misguided. All of the needed reforms have less to do with failed policies than
a deeply flawed public consensus , one that is indifferent, at best , to the experience of poor people of color. As
Martin Luther King Jr. explained back in 1965, when describing why it was far more important to engage in mass
mobilizations than file lawsuits, “We’re trying to win the right to vote and we have to focus the attention of
the world on that. We can’t do that making legal cases. We have to make the case in the court of public
opinion.” 21 King certainly appreciated the contributions of civil rights lawyers (he relied on them to get him out of
opposed the tendency of civil rights lawyers to identify a handful of individuals who could make
great plaintiffs in a court of law, then file isolated cases . He believed what was necessary was to mobilize
jail), but he
thousands to make their case in the court of public opinion. In his view, it was a flawed public consensus —
not merely flawed policy— that was at the root of racial oppression. Today, no less than fifty years ago, a flawed
public consensus lies at the core of the prevailing caste system. When people think about crime, especially drug
crime, they do not think about suburban housewives violating laws regulating prescription drugs or white frat
boys using ecstasy. Drug crime in this country is understood to be black and brown , and it is because drug crime
is racially defined in the public consciousness that the electorate has not cared much what happens to drug
criminals— at least not the way they would have cared if the criminals were understood to be white. It is this
failure to care, really care across color lines, that lies at the core of this system of control and every racial caste
system that has existed in the United States or anywhere else in the world . Those who believe that advocacy
challenging mass incarceration can be successful without overturning the public consensus that gave rise to it are
engaging in fanciful thinking, a form of denial . Isolated victories can be won— even a string of victories— but in
the absence of a fundamental shift in public consciousness, the system as a whole will remain intact . To the
extent that major changes are achieved without a complete shift, the system will rebound. The caste system
will reemerge in a new form , just as convict leasing replaced slavery, or it will be reborn, just as mass
incarceration replaced Jim Crow. Sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant make a similar point in their book Racial
Formation in the United States. They attribute the cyclical nature of racial progress to the “ unstable equilibrium ”
that characterizes the United States’ racial order. 22 Under “normal” conditions, they argue, state institutions
are able to normalize the organization and enforcement of the prevailing racial order , and the system
functions relatively automatically. Challenges to the racial order during these periods are easily marginalized
or suppressed, and the prevailing system of racial meanings, identity, and ideology seems “natural.” These
conditions clearly prevailed during slavery and Jim Crow. When the equilibrium is disrupted, however, as in Reconstruction and
the Civil Rights Movement, the state initially resists, then attempts to absorb the challenge through a series of
reforms “that are, if not entirely symbolic, at least not critical to the operation of the racial order .” In the absence of a truly egalitarian racial consensus, these predictable cycles inevitably give rise to new,
extraordinarily comprehensive systems of racialized social control . One example of the way in which a well
established racial order easily absorbs legal challenges is the infamous aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education
decision. After the Supreme Court declared separate schools inherently unequal in 1954, segregation persisted unabated. One
commentator notes: “The statistics from the Southern states are truly amazing. For ten years, 1954– 1964,
virtually nothing happened.” 23 Not a single black child attended an integrated public grade school in South Carolina, Alabama, or
Mississippi as of the 1962– 1963 school year. Across the South as a whole, a mere 1 percent of black school children
were attending school with whites in 1964— a full decade after Brown was decided. 24 Brown did not end Jim Crow; a
mass movement had to emerge first — one that aimed to create a new public consensus opposed to the evils
of Jim Crow . This does not mean Brown v. Board was meaningless, as some commentators have claimed. 25 Brown gave
critical legitimacy to the demands of civil rights activists who risked their lives to end Jim Crow , and it
helped to inspire the movement (as well as a fierce backlash). 26 But standing alone, Brown accomplished for
African Americans little more than Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. A civil war had to be waged
who imagine that far less is required
to dismantle mass incarceration and build a new, egalitarian racial consensus reflecting a compassionate
rather than punitive impulse toward poor people of color fail to appreciate the distance between Martin Luther
King Jr.’s dream and the ongoing racial nightmare for those locked up and locked out of American society .
The foregoing should not be read as a call for movement building to the exclusion of reform work . To the
to end slavery; a mass movement was necessary to bring a formal end to Jim Crow. Those
contrary,
reform work is the work of movement building , provided that it is done consciously as movement-
building work. If all the reforms mentioned above were actually adopted, a radical transformation in our
society would have taken place. The relevant question is not whether to engage in reform work, but how.
There is no shortage of worthy reform efforts and goals. Differences of opinion are inevitable about which reforms are most
important and in what order of priority they should be pursued. These debates are worthwhile, but it is critical to keep in mind
that the question of how we do reform work is even more important than the specific reforms we seek. If the
way we pursue reforms does not contribute to the building of a movement to dismantle the system of mass
incarceration , and if our advocacy does not upset the prevailing public consensus that supports the new caste
system, none of the reforms, even if won, will successfully disrupt the nation’s racial equilibrium.
Challenges to the system will be easily absorbed or deflected, and the accommodations made will serve
primarily to legitimate the system, not undermine it. We run the risk of winning isolated battles but losing
the larger war.
A radical critique in favor of drug law reform is a key site to establish a decarcerative
strategy resulting in policy changes that challenge the legitimacy of the carceral regime and
lead to prison abolition
Sudbury 8, Professor of Ethnic Studies
[2008, Julia Sudbury is Metz Professor of Ethnic Studies at Mills College. She is a leading activist scholar in the
prison abolitionist movement. She was a co-founder of Critical Resistance, a national abolitionist organization.
“Rethinking Global Justice: Black Women Resist the Transnational Prison-Industrial Complex”, Souls: A Critical
Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, Volume 10, Issue 4]
Chronic overcrowding has led to worsening conditions for prisoners. As a result of the unprecedented growth in sentenced populations, prison authorities have packed three or four prisoners into cells designed for two, and have taken over recreation rooms, gyms, and rooms
designed for programming and turned them into cells, housing prisoners on bunk beds or on the floor. These new conditions have created challenges for activists, who have found themselves expending time and resources in pressuring prison authorities to provide every
anti-prison activists are faced with the limitations of reformist
strategies. Gains temporarily won are swiftly undermined
Of even greater concern is the well-documented tendency of prison
regimes to co-opt reforms and respond to demands for changes in conditions by further expanding prison
budgets. The vulnerability of prison reform efforts to cooption has led Angela Y. Davis to call for “nonprisoner a bed, or to provide access to basic education programs. As prison populations continue to swell,
, new “women-centered” prison regimes are replaced with a focus on cost-efficiency and minimal programming and even changes
enforced by legal cases like Shumate vs. Wilson are subject to backlash and resistance. 19
reformist reforms,” reforms that do not lead to bigger and “better” prisons. Despite the limited long-term
impact of human rights advocacy and reforms building bridges between prisoners, activists, and family
members is an important step toward challenging the racialized dehumanization that undergirds the logic of
20
,
incarceration
. In this way,
human rights advocacy carried out in solidarity with prisoner activists is an important
component of a radical anti-prison agenda
. Ultimately, however,
anti-prison activists aim
not to create more humane, culturally sensitive, women-centered prisons, but
to dismantle prisons and enable formerly criminalized people to access services and resources outside the
penal system
. After three decades of prison expansion, more and more people are living with criminal convictions and histories of incarceration. In the U.S., nearly 650,000 people are released from state and federal prisons to the community each year. 21
Organizations of formerly incarcerated people focus on creating opportunities for former prisoners to survive after release, and on eliminating barriers to reentry, including extensive discrimination against former felons. The wide array of “post-incarceration sentences” that
felons are subjected to has led activists to declare a “new civil rights movement.” 22 As a class, former prisoners can legally be disenfranchised and denied rights available to other citizens. While reentry has garnered official attention, with President Bush proposing a $300
million reentry initiative in his 2004 State of the Union address, anti-prison activists have critiqued this initiative for focusing on faith-based mentoring, job training, and housing without addressing the endemic discrimination against former prisoners or addressing the
conditions in the communities which receive former prisoners, including racism, poverty, and gender violence. Organizations of ex-prisoners working to oppose discrimination against former prisoners and felons include All of Us Or None, the Nu Policy Leadership Group,
Sister Outsider and the National Network for Women Prisoners in the U.S., and Justice 4 Women in Canada. All of Us Or None is described by members as “a national organizing initiative of prisoners, former prisoners and felons, to combat the many forms of discrimination
that we face as the result of felony convictions.” 23 Founded by anti-imperialist and former political prisoner Linda Evans, and former prisoner and anti-prison activist Dorsey Nunn, and sponsored by the Northern California–based Legal Services for Prisoners with Children,
All of Us Or None works to mobilize former prisoners nationwide and in Toronto, Canada. The organization's name, from a poem by Marxist playwright Bertold Brecht, invokes the need for solidarity across racial, class, and gender lines in creating a unified movement of
former prisoners. Black women play a leading role in the organization, alongside other people of color. All of Us Or None focuses its lobbying and campaign work at city, county, and state levels, calling on local authorities to end discrimination based on felony convictions in
public housing, benefits, and employment, to opt out of lifetime welfare and food stamp bans for felons, and to “ban the box” requiring disclosure of past convictions on applications for public employment. In addition, the organization calls for guaranteed housing, job training,
drug and alcohol treatment, and public assistance for all newly released prisoners. 24 In the context of the war on drugs, many people with felony convictions also struggle with addictions. The recovery movement, which is made up of 12-step programs, treatment programs,
community recovery centers, and indigenous healing programs run by and for people in recovery from addiction, offers an alter native response to problem drug use through programs focusing on spirituality, healing, and fellowship. However, the recovery movement's focus
on individual transformation and accountability for past acts diverges from many anti-prison activists' focus on the harms done to criminalized communities by interlocking systems of dominance. As a result, anti-prison spaces seldom engage with the recovery movement, or
tap the radical potential of its membership. Breaking with this trend, All of Us Or None has initiated a grassroots organizing effort to reach out to people in 12-step programs with felony convictions. This work is part of their wider organizing efforts that aim to mobilize
former prisoners as agents of social change. Building on the strengths of identity politics, these organizations suggest that those who have experienced the prison-industrial complex first-hand may be best placed to provide leadership in dismantling it. As former prisoners
have taken on a wide range of leadership positions across the movement, there has been a shift away from leadership by white middle-class progressives, and a move to promote the voices of those directly affected by the prison-industrial complex. Politicians who promote
punitive “tough-on-crime” policies rely on racialized controlling images of “the criminal” to inspire fear and induce compliance among voters. Once dehumanized and depicted as dangerous and beyond rehabilitation, removing people from communities appears the only
Activists who pursue decarceration challenge stereotypical images of the “criminal” by making
visible the human stories of prisoners, with the goal of demonstrating the inadequacy of incarceration as a
logical means of creating safety.
response to the complex interaction of factors that produce harmful acts Decarceration usually involves
.
targeting a specific prison population that the public sees as low-risk and arguing for an end to the use of
imprisonment for this population. Decarcerative strategies often involve the promotion of alternatives to
incarceration that are less expensive and more effective than prison and jail
Drug law
. For example, Proposition 36, the Substance Abuse and Crime Prevention Act, which
passed in California in 2000 and allowed first- and second-time non-violent drug offenders charged with possession to receive substance abuse treatment instead of prison, channels approximately 35,000 people into treatment annually. 25
reform is a key area of decarcerative work Organizations and campaigns that promote drug law reform
.
Drop the Rock, a coalition of youth, former prisoners, criminal justice reformers, artists, civil and labor leaders working to repeal New York's Rockefeller Drug Laws. The campaign
include
combines racial justice, economic,
and public safety arguments by demonstrating that the laws have created a pipeline of prisoners of color
from New
York City to newly built prisons in rural, mainly white areas represented Republican senators, resulting in a transfer of funding and electoral influence from communities of color to upstate rural communities. 26 Ultimately, the campaign calls for an end to mandatory
minimum sentencing and the reinstatement of judges' sentencing discretion, a reduction in sentence lengths for drug-related offenses and the expansion of alternatives, including drug treatment, job training, and education. Former drug war prisoners play a leadership role in
decarcerative efforts in the field of drug policy reform. Kemba Smith, an African–American woman who was sentenced to serve 24.5 years as a result of her relationship with an abusive partner who was involved in the drug industry, is one potent voice in opposition to the
war on drugs. While she was incarcerated, Smith became an active advocate for herself and other victims of the war on drugs, securing interviews and feature articles in national media. Ultimately, Smith's case came to represent the failure of mandatory minimums, and in
2000, following a nation-wide campaign, she and fellow drug war prisoner Dorothy Gaines were granted clemency by outgoing President Clinton. After her release, Smith founded the Justice for People of Color Project (JPCP), which aims to empower young people of color to
participate in drug policy reform and to promote a reallocation of public expenditures from incarceration to education. While women like Kemba Smith and Dorothy Gaines have become the human face of the drug war, prison invisibilizes and renders anonymous hundreds of
thousands of drug war prisoners. The organization Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM) challenges this process of erasure and dehumanization through its “Faces of FAMM” project. The project invites people in federal and state prisons serving mandatory
FAMM
dismantles popular representations of the war on drugs as a necessary protection against
dangerous drug dealers and traffickers, demonstrating that most drug war prisoners are serving long
sentences for low-level, non-violent drug-related activities
minimum sentences to submit their cases to a database and provides online access to their stories and photographs. 27 The “Faces of
” project highlights cases where sentencing injustices are particularly visible in order to galvanize public support for
sentencing reform. At the same time, it
or for being intimately connected to someone involved in these activities. Decarcerative work is not limited to drug law reform.
Free Battered Women's (FBW) campaign for the release of incarcerated survivors is another example of decarcerative work. The organization supports women and transgender prisoners incarcerated for killing or assaulting an abuser in challenging their convictions by
demonstrating that they acted in self-defense. Most recently, FBW secured the release of Flozelle Woodmore, an African–American woman serving a life sentence at CCWF for shooting her violent partner as an 18 year old. Released in August 2007, after five parole board
recommendations for her release were rejected by Governors Davis and then Schwarzenegger, Woodmore's determined pursuit of justice made visible and ultimately challenged the racialized politics of gubernatorial parole releases. 28 While the number of women
imprisoned for killing or assaulting an abuser is small—FBW submitted 34 petitions for clemency at its inception in 1991, and continues to fight 23 cases—FBW's campaign for the release of all incarcerated survivors challenges the mass incarceration of gender-oppressed
prisoners on a far larger scale. FBW argues that experiences of intimate partner violence and abuse contribute to the criminalized activities that lead many women and transgender people into conflict with the law, including those imprisoned on drug or property charges, and
calls for the release of all incarcerated survivors. Starting with a population generally viewed with sympathy —survivors of intimate partner violence—FBW generates a radical critique of both state and interpersonal violence, arguing that “the violence and control used by
In theorizing the intersections of
racialized state violence and gendered interpersonal violence, FBW lays the groundwork for a broader
the state against people in prison mirrors the dynamics of battering that many incarcerated survivors have experienced in their intimate relationships and/or as children.” 29
abolitionist agenda that refutes the legitimacy of incarceration as a response to deep-rooted social
inequalities based on interlocking systems of oppression By gradually shrinking the prison system,
.
Black women
activists involved in decarcerative work hope to erode the public's reliance on the idea of imprisonment as a
commonsense response to a wide range of social ills.
At the other end of anti-expansionist work are activists who take a more confrontational approach. By starving correctional budgets of funds
to continue building more prisons and jails, they hope to force politicians to embrace less expensive and more effective alternatives to incarceration. Prison moratorium organizing aims to stop construction of new prisons and jails. Unlike campaigns against prison
privatization, which oppose prison-profiteering by private corporations, and seek to return imprisonment to the public sector, prison moratorium work opposes all new prison construction, public or private. In New York, the Brooklyn-based Prison Moratorium Project
(PMP), co-founded by former prisoner Eddie Ellis and led by young women and gender non-conforming people of color, does this work through popular education and mass campaigns against prison expansion. Focusing on youth as a force for social change, New York's PMP
uses compilations of progressive hip hop and rap artists to spread a critical analysis of the prison-industrial complex and its impact on people of color. PMP's strategies have been effective; for example, in 2002 the organization, as part of the Justice 4 Youth Coalition,
succeeded in lobbying the New York Department of Juvenile Justice to redirect $53 million designated for expansion in Brooklyn and the Bronx. 30 PMP has also worked to make visible the connections between underfunding, policing of schools, and youth incarceration
through their campaign “Stop the School-to-Prison Pipeline.” By demonstrating how zero tolerance policies and increased policing and use of surveillance technology in schools, combi ned with underfunded classrooms and overstretched teachers, has led to the
criminalization of young people of color and the production of adult prisoners, PMP argues for a reprioritization of public spending from the criminal justice system to schools and alternatives to incarceration. 31 Moratorium work often involves campaigns to prevent the
the Prisoner Justice Action Committee formed the “81 Reasons” campaign, a
multiracial collaboration of experienced anti-prison activists, youth and student organizers , in response to
proposals to build a youth “superjail
The campaign combined popular education on injustices
in the juvenile system
with an exercise in popular democracy that invited young
people to decide themselves how they would spend the $81 million slated for the jail. Campaigners mobilized
construction of a specific prison or jail. In Toronto, for example,
” in Brampton, a suburb of Toronto. 32
, including the disproportionate incarceration of Black and Aboriginal youth,
public concerns about spending cuts in other areas
to create pressure on the provincial
government to look into less expensive and less punitive alternatives to incarceration for youth.
the campaign built a grassroots multiracial antiprison youth
, including health care and education,
While this campaign did not
ultimately prevent the construction of the youth jail, the size of the proposed facility was reduced. More importantly,
movement and raised public awareness of the social and economic costs of incarceration.
Moratorium campaigns face tough opposition
from advocates who believe that building prisons stimulates economic development for struggling rural towns. Prisons are “sold” to rural towns that have suffered economic decline in the face of global competition, closures of local factories, and decline of small farms. In the
context of economic stagnation, prisons are touted as providing stable, well-paying, unionized jobs, providing property and sales taxes and boosting real estate markets. The California Prison Moratorium Project has worked to challenge these assertions by documenting the
actual economic, environmental, and social impact of prison construction in California's Central Valley prison towns. According to California PMP: We consider prisons to be a form of environmental injustice. They are normally built in economically depressed communities
that eagerly anticipate economic prosperity. Like any toxic industry, prisons affect the quality of local schools, roads, water, air, land, and natural habitats. 33 California PMP opposes prison construction at a local level by building multiracial coalitions of local residents, farm
workers, labor organizers, anti-prison activists, and former prisoners and their families to reject the visions of prison as a panacea for economic decline. 34 In the Californian context, where most new prisons are built in predominantly Latino/a communities and absorb land
and water previously used for agriculture, PMP facilitates communication and solidarity between Latino/a farm worker communities, and urban Black and Latino/a prisoners in promoting alternative forms of economic development that do not rely on mass incarceration.
Scholar-activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore's research on the political economy of prisons in California has been critical in providing evidence of the detrimental impact of prisons on local residents and the environment. 35 As an active member of CPMP, Gilmore's work is deeply
Many anti-prison activists
view campaigns for decarceration or moratorium as building blocks toward the ultimate goal of abolition.
rooted in anti-prison activism and in turn informs the work of other activists, demonstrating the important relationship between Black women's activist scholarship and the anti-prison movement. 36
These practical actions promise short and medium-term successes that are essential markers on the road to
long-term transformation.
contemporary prison
abolitionist movement in the U.S. and Canada dates to the 1970s, when political prisoners like Angela Y.
Davis and Assata Shakur, in conjunction with other radical activists and scholars in the U.S., Canada, and
Europe, began to call for the dismantling of prisons.
However, abolitionists believe that like slavery, the prison-industrial complex is a system of racialized state violence that cannot be “fixed.” The
38 The explosion in political prisoners, fuelled by the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) and targeting of Black liberation,
American Indian and Puerto Rican independence movements in the U.S. and First Nations resistance in Canada as “threats” to national security, fed into an understanding of the role of the prison in perpetuating state repression against insurgent communities. 39 The new
These “common” prisoners
challenged the state's legitimacy by declaring imprisonment a form of cruel and unusual
punishment and confronting the brute force of state power
activists drew deliberate links
between the dismantling of prisons and the abolition of slavery.
anti-prison politics were also shaped by a decade of prisoner litigation and radical prison uprisings, including the brutally crushed Attica Rebellion.
, predominantly working-class people of color imprisoned
for everyday acts of survival,
. 40 By adopting the term “abolition”
Through historical excavations, the “new abolitionists” identified the abolition of prisons as the logical completion
of the unfinished liberation marked by the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which regulated, rather than ended, slavery. 41 Organizations that actively promote dialogue about what abolition means and how it can translate into concrete action include
Critical Resistance (CR), New York's Prison Moratorium Project, Justice Now, California Coalition for Women Prisoners, Free Battered Women, and the Prison Activist Resource Center in the U.S. and the Prisoner Justice Action Committee (Toronto), the Prisoners' Justice Day
Committee (Vancouver) and Joint Action in Canada. CR was founded in 1998 by a group of Bay Area activists including former political prisoner and scholar-activist Angela Y. Davis. Initially, CR focused on popular education and movement building, coordinating large
conferences where diverse organizations could generate collective alternatives to the prison-industrial complex. Later work has included campaigns against prison construction in California's Central Valley and solidarity work with imprisoned Katrina survivors. CR describes
abolition as: [A] political vision that seeks to eliminate the need for prisons, policing, and surveillance by creating sustainable alternatives to punishment and imprisonment … .
An abolitionist vision means that we
must build models today that can represent how we want to live in the future It means developing practical
.
strategies for taking small steps that move us toward making our dreams real and that lead the average
person to believe that things really could be different It means living this vision in our daily lives .
prison abolitionists are tasked with a dual burden: first, transforming people's consciousness so that they can
believe that a world without prisons is possible , and second, taking practical steps to oppose the prison.
42 In this sense,
industrial complex. Making abolition more than a utopian vision requires practical steps toward this longterm goal CR describes four steps that activists can get involved in shrinking the system creating
.
alternatives, shifting public opinion and public policy
:
,
, and building leadership among those directly impacted by the prison-industrial complex. 43 Since its inception in the San Francisco Bay
Area, Critical Resistance has become a national organization with chapters in Baltimore, Chicago, Gainesville, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Tampa/St. Petersburg, and Washington, D.C. As such, CR has played a critical role in re-invigorating abolitionist politics in the
U.S. This work is rooted in the radical praxis of Black women and transgender activists.
Focusing on marijuana legalization is key to grassroots organizing—galvanizes and trains
collaboration that spills over to other issues
Tate 2014, Professor of Political Science at UC Irvine
(Katherine, Something's in the Air: Race, Crime, and the Legalization of Marijuana, pg. 9)
For increasing numbers of Americans,
legalization of personal- use marijuana is the only alternative to draconian laws
drawn up in the "war on drugs" regime of the past three decades. It is well established that concern and paranoia over
petty "crack" cocaine arrests for sales, possession, and use drove the mass warehousing of California's prisons and jail populations to
become the largest in the United States (Lusane 1991: Provine 2007: Reinerman and Levine 1997: Weatherspoon 1998: Weaver 2007).
Miller (2008) contends that the U.S. federal system of crime control has left minority citizens less able to challenge
unfair sentencing laws. Noting that marijuana possession constituted nearly 8 of 10 drug- related arrests in the
1990s. Michelle Alexander (2010) insists that this period of "unprecedented punitiveness" resulted "in prison
sentences (rather than dismissal, community service, or probation)" to the degree that "in two short decades, between
1980 and 2000 the number of people incarcerated in our nation's prisons and jails soared from roughly
300.000 to more than 2 million. By the end of 2007. more than 7 million Americans—or one in every 31
adults— were behind bars, on probation, or parole" (Alexander 2010. 59). Pushed by drug prosecutions, the rising
rate of incarceration reached unprecedented levels in the 1990s. Today's movement toward more prisons, mandatory
minimums and reinstatement of the death penalty logically followed the racially exploitative "law and order" campaigns of the 1960s and
1970s (Murakawa 2008). Conservative American politicians use the mythical Black or Hispanic male drug dealer, like the Black female
welfare queen, to drum up votes. A widespread consensus in reported government statistics, advocacy studies, and policy think tanks
suggests that African Americans bear the brunt of law-and-order management of U.S. marijuana laws because
of how marijuana use is racialized. Political scientist Doris Provine contends that the U.S. government increased its
punitive response toward drug use as a response to racial fears and stereotypes. She writes: "[d]rugs remain,
symbolically, a menace to white, middle-class values" (2007. 89). Both politicians and media have used this issue to
construct a crisis and sustain punitive state drug laws. The war on drugs, she concludes, has greatly harmed minority
citizens through their imprisonment, contributing to deep inequalities in education, housing, health care, and
equal opportunities to advance economically. The facts of use. sales, and possession, confirmed by academic and critical legal
studies literature, are strikingly different from how the national and local media choose to present them. One study focusing on
marijuana initiate found "among Blacks, the annual incidence rate (per 1.000 potential new users) increased from 8.0 in 1966 to 16.7 in
1968. reached a peak at about the same time as "Whites" (19.4 in 1976). then remained high throughout the late 1970s. Following the
low rates in the 1980s, rates among Blacks rose again in the early 1990s, reached a peak in 1997 and 1998 (19.2 and 19.1. respectively),
then dropped to 14.0 in 1999. Similar to the general pattern for Whites and Blacks. Hispanics' annual incidence rate rose during late
1970s and 1990s, with a peak in 1998 (17.8)" (National Survey on Drug Use 1999). Individuals and groups in civil society,
advocacy communities, and state legislatures must put forth a serious struggle among activists and potential
coalition partners who can understand the need for reform as a matter of civil rights and justice, and not the
morality of marijuana consumption. Supporting decriminalization potentially can be the training ground for
a new generation of leadership in addressing the larger problem of mass incarceration and social and
political isolation associated with it. For Black people and their allies who long for the days— against all odds—
of political education, voter mobilization, legal reform, group solidarity, challenge to the political parties, and
political empowerment, expressed in the modern civil rights movement, the matter of decriminalization is
ripe for galvanizing a collaboration at the grassroots . Too many Blacks have assumed that the "War on Drugs" ended with
the dissipation of the "crack" emergency, when, in sum, marijuana's criminalization—rather than incarceration—of Black people has
been more perennial. If Michelle Alexander (2010) is correct in arguing that mass incarceration has effectively reasserted
Jim Crow second-class citizenship (or no citizenship) rights on African American people, then they must get off the
sidelines of the legalization of cannabis or decriminalization struggle and stop allowing others to fight what is essentially their battle.
This has long been the case in the challenge to the crushing "prison industrial complex." Whites and others, for the most part, have been
the leaders in reform efforts concerning such things as mandatory minimums, the old 100:1 gram of cocaine-to-crack formula, and health
care for geriatric or HIV AIDS patients in prisons, while we have seen Calvin "Snoop- Dogg"' Broadus become more influential than the
congressional Black Caucus to our young. When ordinary people change their thinking and consciousness and begin to
demystify small, personal- use marijuana, then the leaders will eventually come around without reticence or fear.
The marijuana debate needs to be reframed to remove all penalties against its use (Scherlen 2012). This is our
exit strategy: decriminalization reform is the only path to reversing the dismal trends minorities face in
America.
2AC CP
Perm: Do Both
Perm: CP
The CP destroys the movement and their net benefit is a lie from the blogosphere
Elliott 8
[06/30/11, Steve Elliott, “The Great ‘Marijuana’ Debate: What’s In A Word?”, http://newsjunkiepost.com/2011/01/30/the-great-marijuanadebate-whats-in-a-word/]
The challenge facing those who wish to re-legalize cannabis is difficult and daunting enough without those in
the movement inadvertently placing additional roadblocks in our own path . One of those has recently come
to my attention because it happens more and more often — and that’s arguing over word etymology and
usage, of all things, rather than working to legalize the plant . Yes, I’m talking about the great
“marijuana/cannabis” controversy. Some activists get quite worked up about it, but any pejorative baggage surrounding the term
“marijuana” is, at this point, really nothing more than an increasingly irrelevant historical footnote from the distant past. There are those
within the cannabis movement who will tell you with a straight face that the reason the plant is still illegal is
because it is called “marijuana.” That’s overreaching wildly. And you have to ask yourself: How much chance do we
stand of changing the minds of the general public about cannabis, when we spend most of our energy fighting
amongst ourselves about what to call the damn stuff? Yes, I personally know of activists that spend way more
time and energy attacking other activists — with whom they should be strategizing — for using the word
“marijuana”! This creates another problem , as well. When members of the public at large see some members
of the cannabis community shushing and shaming other members for using the word “marijuana,” that sure
makes the whole enterprise look iffy to an outsider . And to someone who has no particular emotional
investment either way, it can make it seem exactly as if the community is “hiding” something . “ If there’s
nothing wrong with marijuana, why can’t you just call it what it is?” is not an uncommon reaction. Yes,
“cannabis” is the proper scientific term. But in reality, t he word “marijuana” a more commonly used — and, to many ears,
less stuffy-sounding — synonym for cannabis. Persistent Misinformation Contrary to persistent
misinformation in the cannabis community, Harry Anslinger, Randolph Hearst et. al., didn’t “create” the
word marijuana . Yes, there are those who believe that — in fact, I saw it repeated as fact on Facebook
twice just this morning. Yet, distressingly, there are still websites like FunnyOrDie.com that keep the
misinformation going by flatly stating the word was created in the 1930s expressly to “tarnish the good
image… of the hemp plant.”
Their etymology is wrong—marijuana criminalization is primarily racist because of its
current effects
Thompson 13
[07/22/13, Matt Thompson, “The Mysterious History Of 'Marijuana'”,
http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/07/14/201981025/the-mysterious-history-of-marijuana]
Marijuana has been intertwined with race and ethnicity in America since well before the word "marijuana" was coined. The
drug, my colleague Gene Demby recently wrote, has a disturbing case of multiple personality disorder: It's a go-to pop culture punch line. It's the
foundation of a growing recreational and medicinal industry. Yet according to the ACLU, it's also the reason for more than half of
the drug arrests in the U.S. A deeply disproportionate number of marijuana arrests (the vast majority of which are for
befall African-Americans , despite similar rates of usage among whites and blacks, the ACLU says. Throughout the 19th
accounts say that
"marijuana" came into popular usage in the U.S. in the early 20th century because anti-cannabis factions
wanted to underscore the drug's "Mexican-ness." It was meant to play off of anti-immigrant sentiments. A common version of the
possession)
century, news reports and medical journal articles almost always use the plant's formal name, cannabis. Numerous
story of the criminalization of pot goes like this: Cannabis was outlawed because various powerful interests (some of which
have economic motives to suppress hemp production) were able to craft it into a bogeyman in the popular imagination, by
spreading tales of homicidal mania touched off by consumption of the dreaded Mexican "locoweed." Fear of
brown people combined with fear of nightmare drugs used by brown people to produce a wave of public action against the
"marijuana menace." That combo led to restrictions in state after state, ultimately resulting in federal prohibition. But this version of the
story starts to prompt more questions than answers when you take a close look at the history of the drug in
the U.S .: What role did race actually play in the perception of the drug? Are historical accounts of pot usage — including references to
Mexican "locoweed" — even talking about the same drug we know as marijuana today? How did the plant and its offshoots get so many darn
names (reefer, pot, weed, hashish, dope, ganja, bud, and on and on and on) anyway? And while we're on the subject, how did it come to be called
"marijuana"? Let's start with the race question. Eric Schlosser recounts some of the racially charged history of marijuana in his 1994 Atlantic
article "Reefer Madness" (some of the source material for the best-selling book): "The political upheaval in Mexico that culminated in the
Revolution of 1910 led to a wave of Mexican immigration to states throughout the American Southwest. The prejudices and fears that greeted
these peasant immigrants also extended to their traditional means of intoxication: smoking marijuana. Police officers in Texas claimed that
marijuana incited violent crimes, aroused a "lust for blood," and gave its users "superhuman strength." Rumors spread that Mexicans were
distributing this "killer weed" to unsuspecting American schoolchildren. Sailors and West Indian immigrants brought the practice of smoking
marijuana to port cities along the Gulf of Mexico. In New Orleans newspaper articles associated the drug with African-Americans, jazz
musicians, prostitutes, and underworld whites. "The Marijuana Menace," as sketched by anti-drug campaigners, was personified by inferior races
and social deviants." In 1937, U.S. Narcotics Commissioner Henry Anslinger testified before Congress in the hearings that would result in the
introduction of federal restrictions on marijuana. According to druglibrary.org, Anslinger's testimony included a letter from Floyd Baskette, the
city editor of the Alamosa (Colo.) Daily Courier, which said in part, "I wish I could show you what a small marihuana cigaret can do to one of
our degenerate Spanish-speaking residents. That's why our problem is so great; the greatest percentage of our population is composed of Spanishspeaking persons, most of who [sic! such an enthusiastic sic!] are low mentally, because of social and racial conditions." Folks weren't just
worrying about Mexicans and jazz musicians, either. "Within the last year we in California have been getting a large influx of Hindoos and they
have in turn started quite a demand for cannabis indica," wrote Henry J. Finger, a powerful member of California's State Board of Pharmacy, in a
1911 letter (page 18). "They are a very undesirable lot and the habit is growing in California very fast; the fear is now that it is not being confined
to the Hindoos alone but that they are initiating our whites into this habit." It
seems clear that much anti-cannabis animus had a
racial dimension. Here's the thing, though . The "pot was outlawed because MEXICANS" argument is
complicated by the fact that Mexico was also cracking down on the drug around the same time , as Isaac Campos
documents in his book Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico's War on Drugs. Mexico's prohibition of pot actually
came in 1920, a full 17 years before the U.S. federal government pot crackdown started (with the Marihuana Tax
Act of 1937). And while there may have been a class dimension to the movement against marijuana in Mexico,
Campos suggests, people were banning the drug because they were seriously freaked out about what it could
do.
CP fails – only by using the criticized language can we undermine it – necessary for
recognition and effectiveness.
Shirley Wilson Logan, Professor of English at the University of Maryland, 2001, JAC: A Journal of Rhetoric,
Culture and Politics, http://www.jaconlinejournal.com/archives/vol21.1/logan-amid.pdf
When Audre Lorde observed that the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house, she was arguing
that to work against various forms of oppression, we must not employ the tactics of the oppressors ; we must develop new ones.
Advancing a theory of emancipatory composition, Bradford Stull suggests in Amid the Fall that those who wish to write
a discourse of emancipation must use the oppressor's linguistic tools ("America's cultural vocabulary") but
that they must use them radically. Stull chooses the term composition over the term literacy to highlight intentionality and process. Composition
resonates, as well, with a sense of agency not heard in discourse, the term I find myself using synonymously throughout
this review. He borrows the term emancipatory from the literacy theories of Henry Giroux and others but expands its meaning to incorporate an explicit, theorized approach to the teaching of
emancipatory composition, one that takes into account a range of subjectivities. Acknowledging that racism is one of many forms of oppression in need of compositional liberation, Stull focuses
on the "problem" of race, he says, because it emerged out of American slavery, a foundational American institution. His examples suggest that this "race problem" is experienced primarily by
African Americans, who are "unique because no other oppressed group has been enslaved in America," implying that it is not a problem for those who are invisibly raced as white. Thus, to
demonstrate this "problem," he includes the oft-cited story of Cornel West trying to catch a taxicab in New York City and another in which a white policeman called him "nigger." The remaining
examples concern the reluctance of a midwestern university to hire an African American as chancellor; differences in the topics of conversation between residents of the University of Chicago's
Hyde Park community and the residents of Chicago's south side; and racist jokes told in Malcolm X's history class. Granted, these examples are meant to be representative of a larger problem,
but I could not help wishing that Stull had provided salient examples of racism's systemic and ongoing damage to ordinary black people rather than focusing on the plights of two middle-class
black men, Cornel West and a college chancellor. Or maybe the difficulty is that examples need to be provided in the first place. The author studies the emancipatory compositions of W.E.B. Du
Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X because he believes them to be "among the most important rhetoricians of the twentieth century" and because all three influenced the civil rights,
anti-war, and separatist social movements through their contributions to the discourse on these subjects. It would be difficult to argue with these choices, given the "twentieth century" qualifier;
still, it is hard to think of emancipatory compositions with respect to race in America without at least a footnote reference to such nineteenth-century intellectuals as Frederick Douglass on
abolition and human rights or Ida B. Wells on anti-lynching and suffrage. Stull identifies fourtheo-political tropes in theserhetors' emancipatory compositions: the Fall, the Orient, Africa, and
Eden. Alluding on one level to the biblical fall of Adam and Eve, the trope of the Fall also suggests various manifestations of societal evils. To demonstrate the prevalence of this trope in the
American context, Stull draws examples from theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, John Milton's Paradise Lost, poet Mary Fell, popular culture, and finally Kenneth Burke. From Burke, he derives
three subcategories-"Babel," "division of property," and "violence"upon which to develop his analysis. Exploring the theme of Babel in Malcolm X's autobiography and speeches, Stull points to
the writer's struggle to increase his own linguistic storehouse and his recognition that difference resides in world views as well as language. Stull suggests that Malcolm X appropriated Standard
American English (SAE) in order to overcome the limitations of Babel and speak to dominant culture. For support, he cites Malcolm X's oft-quoted statement, "You have to be able to speak a
man's language in order to make him get the point." Limiting his analysis ofDu Bois to his writings in the Crisis, the organ of the NAACP, Stull finds allusion to Babel in Du Bois' discussion of
meanings of the word negro, stating that he "appeals to the American rhetorical heritage." Perhaps Stull might have complicated the assumptions inherent in a phrase that reifies such a heritage.
Who can claim this heritage and who established it? Stull does later observe that Du Bois steps outside of this heritage in order to question it, but the solution seems to be to choose another
language: French. King, according to Stull, finds a solution to Babel in the Judeo-Christian tradition and in the belief that this tradition contains within it elements of a universal language
reaching a broad audience. Stull observes that all three writers cite economic deprivation and violence as further evidence offallen America. Given that most African peoples were brought to
America as property, it is not surprising that "division of property " emerges as a trope of emancipatory composition. Stull reiterates some of the economic inequities these writers' works address,
adding examples from Spike Lee's movie Do the Right Thing perhaps to convince contemporary readers that such inequities still exist. The second emancipatory trope, the Orient, manifests itself
in the ways in which Du Bois, King, and Malcolm X remind their audiences of the parallel and frequently intersecting incidents of oppression of African and Asian peoples; all three writers
acknowledge a close kinship of oppression among peoples of color worldwide. Stull defends his use of the term Orient-with its concurrent images of alien other, wise person, and backward
people-as being particularly comprehensive. He asserts that Orient can include Egypt as well as Japan and can serve to remind us of how the West reductively co mposed this vast territory.
Having myself been trained out of using the descriptor Oriental, it was disconcerting to find it here. Using a phrase such as "Eastern culture(s)" may have been a more effective way to remind
readers of this tendency, especially since, at least in the examples provided, the three writers never use Orient and seem always to refer to specific geographical locations-Japan, China, India
(Calcutta and Bombay), and Vietnam-even ifstereotypically. As in his earlier demonstration of a racist America, Stull provides more than enough examples of stereotypical perceptions of the
Orient, including examples from the movies The Next Karate Kid and City of Hope, Isabel Allende's novel The Infinite Plan, and E.D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy. One wonders whether, by
offering so much wide-ranging evidence that Eastern culture is misunderstood, the author imagines a fairly naive audience. Stull seems particularly eager to account for his inclusion of Africa as
a trope of emancipatory rhetoric: "They [extremists] might wonder why I, who profess parochially American inclinations, who is a conservative, would include this term, would demand that
Americans who would be literate know Africa and its web of associations. Africa, after all, necessarily leads to a condemnation of the American republic." Unless the point of emancipatory
composition is to make those to whom it appeals feel comfortable, eliciting such a reaction would seem to be all the more reason why Africa should be included. Later in this chapter, Stull makes
the strong point that this national vocabulary isa site of contention, in opposition to E.D. Hirsch's assertion that it is rather "an instrument of communication among diverse cultures." This is a
point well worth remembering especially at places in the text where such terms as "American culture" are used unproblematically. In order to illustrate that Africa has dual images in America
(monstrous/noble and suffering), the author gives the example of a student enrolled in a writing class who, in spite of poor performance, received the admiration of his peers because he was
studying to become a Muslim and wore an African icon around his neck ("publicly composing Africa on his own body"). The author sees this dress and behavior as a way of demonizing America
and sanctifying Africa. Itmay in fact represent the student's attempt to construct a positive self-image, or, as Stull states, it could merely be an "aestheticized piece ofjewelry"-or a bit of both. At
any rate, Stull observes that given the student's gesture, this classroom might have served as a site of discussion of emancipatory composition. Fully elaborated examples from the film Legends of
the Fall are offered as evidence of the various ways in which America composes a savage Africa. Stull sees Spike Lee's film School Daze as another example of this opposition, with the fraternity
men on one side and the "young radicals" who protest South African apartheid on the other. My sense is that the film ismore complicated in that the frat brothers probably also oppose apartheid
and that the young radicals in African clothing also desire financial success. The movie has less to do with Africa than with ways of surviving in America. Stull also notes that in their
compositions of Africa, the three writers seem to appropriate the cause of a suffering Africa only as a means of pleading for suffering African America, rather than out of concern for African
liberation. He suggests that Malcolm X tries to offset in his later speeches a prior belief in the "myth" that blacks were the first humans from whom all other peoples were derived. In view of the
fact that for many, then and now, this is not considered myth, perhaps the author could have qualified this characterization. Even Du Bois, later quoted as claiming Ethiopia the "All-mother of
men," would himself seem to subscribe to this belief, one the author characterizes as a "radical vision." Malcolm X's speech "After the Bombing" provides ample evidence of this emancipatory
trope. In it, he highlights the ways in which negative images of Africa have affected African Americans, and in another speech he composes an Africa that Americans can model emancipation
after. Stull observes that King viewed blacks in America as having greater economic potential and that he concentrated, along with Du Bois, on only portraying Africa's positive images. Du Bois'
pan-Africanist writings are invoked to remind the reader that Du Bois' Africa would serve as a center for worldwide negotiations. Stull's chapter on Eden is his most astute. Eden, the last of the
carefully ordered tropes, marks desire. All three writers describe Eden as a nonexistent ideal. Stull suggests that the socioeconomic privilege ofDu Bois and King resulted in a more positive
perspective from which to envision Eden than did Malcolm X' s disruptive life experiences. Malcolm X's Eden took shape as a separatist black Africa of economic and political empowerment. In
the pages of the Crisis, Du Bois draws on his experience of parts of America to compose his Eden-Oberlin, Ohio, Seattle, and the American Northwest-but he ultimately argues for the "Edenic
potential" of Africa. King, however, never viewed Africa as an Edenic alternative. In his "I Have a Dream" speech, for example, he envisions an Eden firmly rooted in American principles but
growing beyond its walls and out into an unknown paradise resonating with images of the second coming. In short, Stull outlines these three writers' differing responses to an oppressive America
and in the process captures some of the essential differences in their worldviews, linking those differences to biography. Stull's final chapter reiterates the point made in the first-that
emancipatory composition must be crafted in the "familiar language of the community only to transform
it."
Thus, he positions his argument between the political right of William Bennett and E.D. Hirsch and the political left of Ray Browne, Henry Giroux, Arthur Neal, Barbara Hemstein
Smith, and others. According to Stull, the Right would frown upon this discourse because it is a discourse that condemns America as racist and looks to Africa for solutions; the Left would reject
we both receive and shape
literacy and culture and that even those who reject the notion of cultural literacy allude to common
knowledge in their writing. So here at the end, Stull pulls us back into the cultural literacy debate-or maybe we were in the midst of it all the time. The issue here, it
seems, is not that we allude to things "out there " in the construct called "culture" but that we recognize those referents, along
with their freighted meanings, and know them for the ways in which they have promoted the goals of
oppression. If the Fall, the Orient, Africa, and Eden are the theo-political tropes of emancipatory composition, we all helped to make them so. Now, as Audre Lorde understood, this is a
tricky rhetorical move: to appropriate the oppressor's tools-which are also our tools-ever mindful of the work they have
done in the past, and apply them to the task of emancipation. For Stull, to accomplish this is to "Be conservative.
Be extreme. Be radical," all at the same time.
the notion of a common set of theo-political tropes as an attempt to standardize a nonexistent common cultural knowledge. Stull counters that
2AC K
Perm do both
Refuse their fatalism—pedagogy is our only hope for the future—power is never
overwhelming enough to preclude resistance—you should take an optimistic view towards
the university
Giroux 13
[09/27/13, Henry Giroux, “Henry Giroux on the Militarization of Public Pedagogy”,
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/09/27/teaching-and-learning-with-henry-giroux/]
do you teach social change or resistance to authority within public schools –
institutions that many have criticized for being authoritarian and resistant to change? HG: You can’t do it if
you believe these institutions are so authoritarian that there’s simply no room for resistance. That’s a
SK: Here’s a paradox for you: How
mistake . Power is never so overwhelming that there’s no room for resistance . Power and the forms it takes
are always contradictory in different ways and there is always some room for resistance. What needs to be
understood is the intensity of dominant power in different contexts and how it can be named, understood, and
fought. The issue here is to seize upon the contradictions at work in these institutions and to develop them in
ways that make a difference. During the sixties, the term for this was the long march through institutions and the reference had little to
do with reform but with massive restructuring of the instruments of democracy. And we also need to impose a certain kind of
responsibility upon adults in the schools – whether they be social workers, university professors, or high school teachers. Clearly
it’s not enough to say they operate under terrible burdens that make them voiceless. I understand those structural
conditions but it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t resist either. That means they not only have to promote particular
kinds of pedagogies in their classrooms but they also have to join social movements that give them the force
of a collective voice that can bear down on these problems and create change . The greatest battle that we’re
facing in the U.S. today is around the question of consciousness . If people don’t have an understanding of the
nature of the problems they face they’re going to succumb to the right-wing educational populist machine.
This is a challenge that the Left has never taken seriously because it really doesn’t understand that at the
center of politics is the question of pedagogy . Pedagogy is not marginal , it is not something that can be
reduced to a method , limited to what happens in high schools, or to what college professors say in their
classes. Pedagogy is fundamental not only to the struggle over culture but also, if not more importantly, the struggle
over meaning and identity . It’s a struggle for consciousness, a struggle over the gist of agency, if not the
future itself – a struggle to convince people that society is more than what it is , that the future doesn’t simply
have to mimic the present. SK: What would this look like in practice? One encouraging experiment I had the privilege of observing up
close is taking place at the Emiliano Zapata Street Academy in Oakland. There, in an “alternative high school” within the Oakland Unified
School District, student interns working with a group called BAY-Peace lead youth in interactive workshops on topics relevant to their lives:
street violence, the school-to-prison pipeline, military recruiters in their schools, and so on. HG: I think two things have to go on here, and you
just mentioned one of them. We’ve got to talk about alternative institutions. There has to be some way to build institutions that provide a different
model of education. On the Left, we had this in the ‘20s and ‘30s: socialists had Sunday schools, they had camps; they found alternative ways to
educate a generation of young people to give them a different understanding of history, of struggle. We need to reclaim that legacy, update it for
the twenty-first century, and join the fight over the creation of new modes of thinking, acting, and engaging ourselves and our relations to others.
On the second level is what Rudi Dutschke called what I referred to earlier as the “long march through the institutions.” It’s a model that
makes a tactical claim to having one foot in and one foot out. You can’t turn these established institutions
over to the Right . You can’t simply dismiss them by saying they’re nothing more than hegemonic
institutions that oppress people . That’s a retreat from politics. You have to fight within these institutions.
have to create new public spheres. SK: Henry, we’ve covered a lot of territory. Is there anything we haven’t
addressed that you would like to bring up before closing? HG: We need both a language of critique and a language of hope .
Not only that, you
Critique is essential to what we do but it can never become so overwhelming that all we become are critics
and nothing else . It is counterproductive for the left to engage in declarations of powerlessness, without creating as Jacques Rancière
argues “new objects, forms, and spaces that thwart official expectations.” What we need to do is theorize, understand and fight
for a society that is very different from the one in which we now live. That means taking seriously the
question of pedagogy as central to any notion of viable progressive politics ; it means working collectively with
others to build social movements that address a broader language of our society – questions of inequality and power
(basically the two most important issues we can talk about now.) And I think that we need to find ways to support young
people because the most damage that’s going to be done is going to be heaped upon the next generations. So
what we’re really fighting for is not just democracy; we’re fighting for the future . And so critique is not
enough; we need a language of critique and we need a language of possibility to be able to go forward with
this.
Our use of empathy in conjunction with broader critique enables successful anti-racist
movements even if it remains in local spaces like debate—star this card
Chabot Davis 4
[12/05/2004, Kimberly Chabot Davis teaches twentieth-century U.S. literature and film at Bridgewater State
College. Used to teach 20th century American literature and culture in the History and Literature Program at
Harvard University. Chabot Davis's articles on contemporary culture have been published in Twentieth Century
Literature, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, South
Atlantic Review, Politics and Culture, and Modern Fiction Studies, “Oprah's Book Club and the politics of crossracial empathy”, International Journal of Cultural Studies 2004 7: 399]
Lauren Berlant is right to be skeptical that a reading of a single novel could be solely responsible for
producing such radical changes in individuals. However, sympathetic reading experiences can play an
important role in a larger chain of events , alongside other moments of critical thinking and encounters
with alternative viewpoints that might shift an individual’s perspective. As the white woman Audrey said in the
program on Beloved, ‘I understand something now that I didn’t understand before, and [the film] has made me want
to understand more’ (p. 13). Reading can clearly alter one’s sense of reality , as evidenced by a reader of Cane
River who noted on the web-board: ‘I don’t know if it is heightened awareness due to my reading the novel . . .
but it seems like there is so much more in the news about racism; just today I read two articles.’ Reading fiction
can help a person to develop an understanding of the plight of others and a sense of moral outrage, often seen as
important precursors for action. In her ethnographic study of white women’s reading groups, sociologist Elizabeth
Long argues that ‘reading, especially when combined with communal reflection and discussion, provides . . . in
some cases, motivation for taking individual or collective action beyond the world of books’ (Long, 2003: 24).
Several whites in the on-line and televised discussions were putting their anti-racist feelings to work in the
public sphere , in their jobs as teachers and social workers serving minority communities. Although it is unlikely
that fictionreading was the sole catalyst for their occupational choices, their testimony suggests that experiences of
empathy in cultural space help to sustain and fortify their ongoing political commitments . While Berlant
doubts that emotional shifts in the private sphere ever get converted into a larger politics of change,
Lawrence Grossberg argues persuasively that ‘affective relations are, at least potentially, the condition of
possibility for the optimism, invigoration, and passion which are necessary for any struggle to change the
world’ (Grossberg, 1992: 86). While the experience of sympathy may produce merely self-satisfied feelings of
benevolence that substitute for committed action, I contend that the larger impediment to radical change is
not sympathy itself, but conditions that weaken its effectivity – such as wide-spread public skepticism that
protest can actually accomplish social change in a world controlled by postmodern global capitalism. Like
Grossberg, I see affective culture as an underappreciated resource in combating the disenchantment that
threatens to nullify political resistance in the United States. My work on the politics of empathetic reading
contributes to a recent shift in American studies, calling for an end to the ‘separate spheres’ paradigm that divided
public from private, masculine from feminine, the world of political action from the world of feeling. The essays in
the recent collection No More Separate Spheres! suggest that the line between the public and the private is a blurry
one, and that these two ‘spheres’ are in fact largely imbricated (Davidson and Hatcher, 2002). With a similar goal, I
have highlighted the political importance of empathetic reading in fostering self-transformation and a
radical interrogation of white privilege . In this particular deployment of empathy, such moments of radical
understanding could be seen as an incipient form of political action, rather than its antithesis. This form of
self-transformation operates on a continuum with largerscale political actions in both ‘private’ and ‘public’
settings . Instead of equating the political only with the arena of elections, protest movements, and collective
organizing, scholars also need to consider the importance of local, interpersonal encounters in effecting
social change . Experiencing empathy for African Americans in cultural space may move someone to object to a
racist joke among colleagues or friends, or to persuade an older relative that mixed-race marriages can produce
healthy and happy families. One of the white participants in the televised discussion of The Bluest Eye adopted three
abused black girls and is passionately working to help them to develop self-esteem. Is her anti-racist action any
less political because it takes place within the ‘private sphere’ of the family? I argue that such local and
personal examples of taking a moral stand do work to undermine racism , and are probably necessary
stepping stones for individuals to move towards more public-oriented anti-racist acts that require greater
risk . The power of culture in fostering personal self-transformation should not be undervalued . Although
many of Oprah’s Book Club choices have been disparaged for their rampant emotionalism, I have argued that their
solicitation of sympathy is in fact central to their cultural power. As Larry Grossberg contends, emotive genres
are politically powerful because they provoke identification, belonging and investment, providing audiences
with ‘mattering maps’ which reveal ‘the places at which people can anchor themselves into the world, the
locations of the things that matter’ (1992: 82). At the end of the Oprah discussion of her book Song of Solomon,
Toni Morrison revealed her own dream to offer such mattering maps to readers: ‘It’s the dream of a writer . . . to
have something important, truly meaningful, happen to a person who’s ready for the happening and the key to it is
the experience of reading a book. . . . It’s not a lesson that said do this . . . and this is the solution, but to actually
engage in the emotions, the actions, and the company . . . of the characters’ (‘How’d They’, 1996). Oprah’s Book
Club selections do not provide solutions to social problems concerning race and gender, but they do offer
intense emotional engagement that is an essential ingredient of political engagement. Although sympathy has
often worked to legitimate the status quo, my analysis of Oprah’s Book Club demonstrates that affective
reading experiences can also disrupt ideologies of racial hierarchy . Conspicuously absent from most analyses
of cross-racial sympathy are reading experiences such as I have spotlighted here, in which white women’s
empathetic encounters with African American fictional characters led to an increased politicization and desire
to combat racism in public forums such as The Oprah Winfrey Show itself. For some white readers of African
American fiction, these testimonies of suffering offer merely a vicarious sensory experience that does little to alter
their own sense of privilege. These texts produce more radical reading effects when empathetic connections
are accompanied by critical reflection, when thought and feeling combine to result in a critique of racism
and a deeper respect for cultural difference . While Oprah’s utopian claims about the power of individual
texts to change the world may seem naively optimistic, she is right about one thing – reading literature and
watching films do shape the feelings and ideologies of individuals. This belief, after all, has been central to the
academic study of literature, and the motivation behind the move towards multicultural literacy in education. In this
academic climate of suspicion toward a politics rooted in affect, critics need to consider that such cross-racial
empathetic identifications in the private sphere could play a crucial role in galvanizing support for antiracist public policy in America.
Chow is wrong—students in academic spaces can formulate responses to suffering are good
--- taking a particular stand is key
Kim Sawchuk 2, PhD, Social and Political Thought, York University, prof of comm at Concordia, editor of the Canadian Journal of
Communication, general book review of Distant Suffering by Luc Boltanski, Canadian journal of Communication Vol 27, No 1 (2002)
Inherent in the politics of pity in the modern period is the problem of dealing with suffering from a distance and the "massification of
a collection of unfortunates who are not there in person" (p. 13). Although contemporary media may have "dramatized" the spectacle of
distant suffering in the past 30 years, they neither invented nor caused this condition. Historical examples also bolster Boltanski's claim
that the media did not inaugurate the politics of pity - rather, its logic was set out more than 200 years ago. Boltanski carefully examines this logic and the paradoxes it creates in the book's
three sections. Part 1 lays out the argument. Part 2 relies heavily on literary sources to analyze the "topos," a term he borrows from rhetoric, of the idea of pity and suffering. The third
section deals with the question of pity and misfortune, drawing primarily on historical and contemporary examples, such as the work of Doctors Without Borders and the clash in the late
1950s between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Each chapter is replete with insight, making this a difficult book to summarize. Every word and every argument is so intricately intertwined with
the next that paraphrasing seems a travesty.¶ The third section should be of interest to those located in the disciplines of communications or media studies. Here it is important to recall the
Boltanski returns to the question of the spectator and the anxieties of those who
wish to do something about what they see unfolding on their screens . He asks: "[H]ow might the contemporary spectators' anxiety be reduced
subtitle of the book, Morality, the Media and Politics.
without averting their gaze from misfortune or by abandoning the project inherent in the modern definition of politics of facing up to unnecessary suffering and relieving it[?]" (p. 159).
What could political action be, given the fact that suffering does occur at a distance and that not every struggle
can be taken on with equal commitment? First, he argues that there is a political, technical, and moral necessity to
open up a discussion of commitment and ideology, although what he means by ideology is not adequately
explained.
Second, he contends that witnessing suffering means that morally we are asked to act.
Commitment is commitment to some kind of
action . Third, he promotes the idea that speech is action. "One can commit oneself through speech; by
taking a stance, even when alone, of someone who speaks to somebody else about what they have seen"
xv).
(p.
By speaking - to others and even to oneself - we recognize and acknowledge that speech must be understood as
a form of action
(p. 154).¶ One of the conditions of Boltanski's argument is a clear distinction between the world of representation and the world of action. He writes:
"Informed by representation, words must really be deployed in the world of action in order to be effective" (p. 154).
He is critical of
deconstructionist criticism, primarily
Baudrillard, which blurs this distinction to too great an extreme , thereby "holding the order
of action" at arm's length or making it illusionary (p. 154). He contends that this position makes the very intention to
act nothing but a naïve illusion creating an "empire of suspicion" (p. 158). Boltanski does not claim that we remain without an emotional
commitment to causes, but rather that "to prevent the unacceptable drift of emotions close towards the fictional we must maintain an orientation towards
meaning the writings of Jean
action, a disposition to act, even if this is only by speaking out in support of the unfortunate"
(p. 153).¶ What then
are the properties of effective speech? Boltanski turns to phenomenology and semantics, concluding that effective speech involves: (a) intentionality; (b) incorporation in bodily gestures
and movements; (c) sacrifice of other possible actions; (d) the presence of others; and, (e) a commitment (p. 185). Intentionality involves an intention to speak meaningfully, not just engage
in idle chatter. Action and intention are connected to each other in effective action realized in the world. Intention incorporated in action is "expression." This kind of expressive political
speech must involve risk for spectators - they may be chastized, they may be contested, or they may be at physical risk in authoritarian regimes. Boltanski goes on to classify different types
of action as strong and weak, collective and individual. He builds an argument for local chapters of groups supporting humanitarian movements, such as Amnesty International, for they
enable one to avoid the alternative of either on-the-spot involvement or distant spectacle. They are one way to breach the schism between abstract universalism and communitarian
withdrawal: "The humanitarian claim for more or less distant causes can thus avoid the alternative of abstract universalism - easily accused of being fired up for distant suffering the better
to avert its eyes from those close at hand - or of communitarian withdrawal into itself - which only attends to misfortune when it affects those nearest - by being rooted in groups and
thereby linked to preexisting solidarities and local interests" (p. 190). In other words, expression is most "authentic" for Boltanski when made manifest in actions, like participating in a
demonstration or protest, which incarnates our beliefs and displays our commitments. By incorporating an action, the person communicates an observable tendency.¶ But is this enough?
Boltanski is
concerned by apathy
attempt to be
and asks us to consider that we are doomed, inevitably, to imperfection in our politics. Despite this,
"moral subjects" - that is,
committed and engaged subjects.
Because he recognizes the difficulties of negotiating these contradictions,
he avoids moralizing. He is no Habermasian trying to outline the conditions for an ideal-speech situation. In Boltanski's book,
we must contend with this.
He
we must make the
we live in imperfect worlds and
asks that we resurrect compassion into our politics , which he says is always
particular and practical, as it is oriented toward doing something about a situation . Unlike pity, it engages with the person
suffering
.
But pity isn't always a bad thing in this analysis. Pity generalizes in order to deal with distance, and in so doing one may discover emotion and feeling for others that may
A spectacle of suffering may end with a commitment to involvement. ¶ Boltanski realizes the challenge, yet
remains optimistic that humans are capable of such a move. There are, as he notes, an "excess of unfortunates" in our world. The problem remains to
translate into speech or action.
whom we extend aid or pity, given their great numbers (p. 155). This is true both in the realm of action, but also in the realm of representation. So many people are suffering and there is not
enough media space for them all (p. 155). Boltanski does not prioritize causes or instances of grief. He does, however, suggest that the media represent any unfortunate groups taking action
to confront and escape their distress. It is unethical to only depict them in the passive act of suffering (p. 190). He acknowledges that the mediatization of suffering may incite action. For
example, it may protect populations against their own rulers, if only temporarily, for such depictions do not necessarily change the internal political situation. His analysis assumes that
spectators, who are
take action
democratic citizens, have a role to play in lobbying and pressuring their own governments to
(p. 184). Again, while aware that public opinion may be manipulated, he argues that public-opinion polls are powerful tools. Answering a poll is depicted as a
wavering
between selfish egoism and altruistic commitment to causes. Boltanski describes how we may, unfortunately, cultivate ourselves by becoming
potentially effective form of speech and an "adequate response to the call for action" (p. 185).¶ Distant Suffering thus describes, in sometimes painful detail, a
absorbed in our own pity when looking at the spectacle of someone else's suffering, a phenomenon that has been far too present since the September 11 bombing of the World Trade Center
in New York. Boltanski
tries to lead us out of this self-absorption into the world of effective political action by
offering a range of involvement.
While advocating commitment and debates about morality as part of the solution, this is no smug celebration of the "return to
kindness" or an easy denunciation of the perverse delight of spectacles of suffering. In considering distant suffering as the "logical consequence" of the introduction of pity into politics over
200 years ago, we are asked to concern ourselves with the present.¶ Boltanski ends his fine treatise by exhorting us to quit looking to past injustices, to stop anticipating future injustice, and
To be concerned with the present is no small matter. For over the past, ever gone by, and over the future, still nonthe present has an overwhelming privilege: that of being real" (p. 192). Naive? Perhaps. Boltanski does not provide simple or quick
answers to the dilemma, but leaves one with the hope that pity might lead to compassion, commitment, and social change - even if such
measures do not end all suffering once and for all. As such, this translation from the original French text is a welcome addition to contemporary debates in
to stay focused on the present. "
existent,
political communication.
Permutation: the affirmative and refuse using our narrative’s suffering for liberalism—
there is nothing intrinsically bad about our representations—don’t throw out the baby
with the bathwater
Chabot Davis 4
[12/05/2004, Kimberly Chabot Davis teaches twentieth-century U.S. literature and film at Bridgewater State
College. Used to teach 20th century American literature and culture in the History and Literature Program at
Harvard University. Chabot Davis's articles on contemporary culture have been published in Twentieth Century
Literature, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, South
Atlantic Review, Politics and Culture, and Modern Fiction Studies, “Oprah's Book Club and the politics of crossracial empathy”, International Journal of Cultural Studies 2004 7: 399]
While some object to the sympathetic emotions on the grounds that they substitute for political action, other cultural critics
and race
theorists treat sympathy as an inherently colonizing action, and they reduce empathy to an imperialistic drive
to incorporate the other into the self. While some of these critics are informed by postcolonial theories exposing the drive for
knowledge of the exotic other as a form of power, others are influenced by the Freudian view of identification as a hostile
erasure of the other, ‘in which the object that we long for and prize is assimilated by eating and is in that way
annihilated as such’ (Freud, 1955: 105; see also hooks, 1992). In critical race theory, studies of cross-racial sympathy take a decidedly
pessimistic tone about the possibilities of coalition, which has the unfortunate consequence of reifying the very racial categories that they seek to
undermine.10 For example, Robyn Wiegman despairs that integrationist novels and films are ultimately wedded to white authority, and concludes
that ‘the transformatory hope of identifying with the pain and suffering of others seems ever more bound to an imperialistic cast’ (1995: 200). In
researching her book Racechanges, Susan Gubar sadly concludes that crossracial masquerade and imitation ‘inevitably leads to the disappearance
of the other’s otherness’ (1997: 245). While these writers take a despairing tone, Doris Sommer aggressively condemns cross-racial sympathy
and empathy alike. Focusing on the narrative strategies that ethnic writers use to refuse access to white readers, Sommer dismisses the sympathy
of white liberals as an ‘appropriation in the guise of an embrace’ (1994: 543) and a facile form of connection that lasts ‘hardly longer than the
reading of a novel’ (p. 529). Arguing that ‘empathy is the egocentric energy that drives one subject to impersonate another’ (1999: 22), she
echoes Freud’s view of identification as a metaphoric substitution of the self for the other. These writers shed light on a problematic possibility of
sympathy and empathy – that the privileged sympathizer will ignore differences in his or her zeal to connect emotionally with the sufferer.
Erasing the subjective experience of people of color, the white empathizer falsely claims someone else’s particular pain as his own. While some
critics focus on this desire for sameness as an erasure, others are more critical of the hierarchy they believe is
implicit in sympathy’s operation. As Berlant puts it, ‘compassion is a term denoting privilege: the sufferer is over
there’ (2004: 4) and the observer has the power to either help or turn away . I agree that sympathy may involve power
relations between subject and object, and may keep hierarchies firmly in place by granting the sympathizer a feeling of benevolent largesse and
by denying agency to the sufferer. These
consequences, however, are not implicit to the operation of sympathetic
emotions . Empathetic experiences of seeing from the vantage point of another can lead to a recognition of
that person’s subjecthood and agency , and can lead the white empathizer to not only become critically
aware of racial hierarchy , but to desire to work against the structures of inequality wherein her own power
resides. My case study of Oprah’s Book Club addresses both the promise and limitations of empathy and sympathy, asserting that the
politics of these emotions depend upon how they are experienced and to what end they are employed . While
the possibility of appropriation is an important concern, critics
also have a responsibility to bring to light moments of
empathy or compassion with progressive political significance, lest we lose hope in the potential for change
in the racial order . It strikes me as particularly ironic that these despairing conclusions are voiced by white anti-racist scholars whose own
critical work attests to the radical potential of some acts of cross-racial affiliation. In our zeal to avoid celebratory analyses that
underestimate the power of white hegemony, we need to avoid throwing out the proverbial baby (empathy
and compassion) with the bathwater. As many social scientists have argued, empathy can inhibit aggression, and the
absence of empathy is a telling feature of inter-group violence, such as the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.11 In the context of an
alarming international rise in hate groups and terrorism, left-oriented scholars cannot afford to give up on empathy’s
promise of fostering cross-cultural understanding and desires for social justice and equality. Reception analysis
My reception study suggests that sympathy’s
colonizing functions and its ability to inhibit action are not intrinsic to
its structure , but merely one possible deployment thereof. By offering evidence here of the more radical possibilities of
empathy visible on The Oprah Winfrey Show, I do not claim that the critics of sympathy are categorically wrong, but merely that they are
diminishing the complexity of the sympathetic emotions. One could argue that a similarly one-sided argument is
put forth by Martha Nussbaum (2001), who optimistically implies that compassion is the cure for what ails modern
society. Predicated on the assumption that reading good books produces empathetic and moral people, Nussbaum’s philosophical reflections
ignore the considerable diversity of reader responses to texts. My reception study, however, exposes both negative and positive strains of
empathy and sympathy, while drawing attention to previously underappreciated progressive effects. While I do not claim that these radical
deployments are predominant, either on Oprah’s programs or in the reading public at large, I found enough recurrence to warrant attention.
Perm: endorse the 1AC as a tactic of desire centered research
This is what tuck and yang actually advocate for—we don’t include literal stories of pain,
but use them as part of a structural analysis
Tuck & Yang 14 – prof of nat am studies @ suny & prof of ethnic studies @ cal
(E. & K., R-words: Refusing research)
Alongside analyses of pain and damage-centered research, Eve (Tuck 2009, 2010) has
theorized desire-based research as not the
antonym but rather the antidote for damage-focused narratives. Pain narratives are always incomplete . They
bemoan the food deserts, but forget to see the food innovations; they lament the concrete jungles and miss the roses and the
tobacco from concrete. Desire-centered research does not deny the experience of tragedy, trauma, and pain, but
positions the knowing derived from such experiences as wise. This is not about seeing the bright side of
hard times, or even believing that everything happens for a reason. Utilizing a desire-based framework is about working inside a
more complex and dynamic understanding of what one, or a community, comes to know in (a) lived life.¶ Logics of pain
focus on events , sometimes hiding structure , always adhering to a teleological trajectory of pain, brokenness,
repair, or irreparability—from unbroken, to broken, and then to unbroken again. Logics of pain require time
to be organized as linear and rigid, in which the pained body (or community or people) is set back or delayed
on some kind of path of humanization, and now must catch up (but never can) to the settler/unpained/abled
body (or community or people or society or philosophy or knowledge system). In this way, the logics of pain has
superseded the now outmoded racism of an explicit racial hierarchy with a much more politically tolerable racism of a developmental hierarchy.2
Under a developmental hierarchy, in which some were undeterred by pain and oppression, and others were waylaid by their victimry and
subalternity, damage-centered
research reifies a settler temporality and helps suppress other understandings
of time.¶ Desire-based frameworks, by contrast, look to the past and the future to situate analyses.¶ Desire is
about longing , about a present that is enriched by both the past and the future; it is integral to our humanness . It is not only
the painful elements of social and psychic realities, but also the textured acumen and hope . (Tuck, 2010, p. 644)¶ In
this way, desire is time-warping . The logics of desire is asynchronous just as it is distemporal, living in the gaps between the ticking
machinery of discipli- nary institutions.¶ To
be clear, again, we are not making an argument against the existence of
pain, or for the erasure of memory, experience, and wisdom that comes with suffering. Rather, we see the
collecting of narratives of pain by social scientists to already be a double erasure, whereby pain is documented in order to be
erased, often by eradicating the communities that are supposedly injured and supplanting them with hopeful stories of progress into a better,
Whiter, world. Vizenor talks about such “the consumer notion of a ‘hopeful book,’” and we would add hopeful or feel-good research, as “a denial
of tragic wisdom” bent on imagining “a social science paradise of tribal victims” (1993, p. 14). Desire
of damaged communities and White progress.
interrupts this metanarrative