1AC
Marijuana legalization is coming now but for colorblind economic reasons and will reentrench institutional racism—now is key to hijack legalization for the right reasons
Alexander 14
[03/10/14, Michelle Alexander, is an associate professor of law at Ohio State University, a civil rights advocate and
a writer Interviewed by Phillip Smith, “"The New Jim Crow" Author Michelle Alexander Talks Race and Drug
War”, http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/2014/mar/10/new_jim_crow_michelle_alexander_tal]
Michelle Alexander:
The landscape absolutely has changed in profound ways.
When writing this book, I was feeling incredibly frustrated by the failure of many civil rights
organizations and leaders to make the war on drugs a critical priority in their organization and also by the failure of many of my progressive friends and allies to awaken to the magnitude of the harm caused by the war on drugs and
mass incarceration. At the same time, not so long ago, I didn't understand the horror of the drug war myself, I failed to connect the dots and understand the ways these systems of racial and social control are born and reborn. But over
last few years, I couldn't be more pleased with reception. Many people warned me that civil rights organizations could be defensive or angered by criticisms in the book, but they've done nothing but respond with enthusiasm and some
real self-reflection.
There is absolutely an awakening taking place . It's important to understand that this didn't start with my book -- Angela Davis coined the term "prison industrial
complex" years ago; Mumia Abu-Jamal was writing from prison about mass incarceration and our racialized prison state. Many, many advocates have been doing this work and connecting the dots for far longer than I have. I wanted
I am optimistic, but at the same time, I see real reasons for
concern. There are important victories in legalizing marijuana in Colorado and Washington, in Holder speaking out against mandatory minimums and felon
to lend more credibility and support for the work that so many have been doing for some, but that has been marginalized.
disenfranchisement, in politicians across the country raising concerns about the size of the prison state for the first time in 40 years,
but much of the dialog is still driven by fiscal
concerns rather than genuine concern for the people and communities most impacted, the families destroyed. We haven't
yet really had the kind of conversation we must have as a nation if we are going to do more than tinker with
the machine and break our habit of creating mass incarceration in America. Asha Bandele: Obama has his My Brother's Keeper initiative
directed at black boys falling behind. A lot of this is driven by having families and communities disrupted by the drug war. Obama nodded at the structural racism that dismembers communities, but he said it was a moral failing. He's
I'm glad that Obama is shining a spotlight on the real crisis
facing black communities today, in particular black boys and young men, and he's right to draw attention to it and elevate it, but I worry that the initiative is
based more in rhetoric than in a meaningful commitment to addressing the structures and institutions that
addressed race the least of any modern American president. Your thoughts? Michelle Alexander:
have created these conditions in our communities . There is a commitment to studying the problem and identifying programs that work to keep black kids in school and out of
there is nothing in the initiative that offers any kind of policy change
from the government or any government funding of any kind to support these desperately needed programs. There is an implicit assumption that we just need to find what works to lift people up by their
jail, and there is an aspect that seeks to engage foundations and corporations, but
bootstraps, without acknowledging that we're waging a war on these communities we claim to be so concerned about. The initiative itself reflects this common narrative that suggests the reasons why there are so many poor people of
color trapped at the bottom -- bad schools, poverty, broken homes. And if we encourage people to stay in school and get and stay married, then the whole problem of mass incarceration will no longer be of any real concern. But I've
come to believe we have it backwards. These communities are poor and have failing schools and broken homes not because of their personal failings, but because we've declared war on them, spent billions building prisons while
allowing schools to fail, targeted children in these communities, stopping, searching, frisking them -- and the first arrest is typically for some nonviolent minor drug offense, which occurs with equal frequency in middle class white
neighborhoods but typically goes ignored. We saddle them with criminal records, jail them, then release them to a parallel universe where they are discriminated against for the rest of their lives, locked into permanent second-class
status. We've done this in the communities most in need our support and economic investment. Rather than providing meaningful support to these families and communities where the jobs have gone overseas and they are struggling to
move from an industrial-based economy to a global one, we have declared war on them. We have stood back and said "What is wrong with them?" The more pressing question is "What is wrong with us?" Asha Bandele: During the
Great Depression, FDR had the New Deal, but now it seem like there is no social commitment at the highest levels of government. And we see things like Eric Holder and Rand Paul standing together to end mandatory minimums. Is
We have to be very clear that so much of the progress being made on drug policy
reflects the fact that we are at a time when politicians are highly motivated to downsize prisons because we
can't afford the massive prison state without raising taxes on the predominantly white middle class. This is the first time in 40 years
we've been willing to have a serious conversation about prison downsizing . But I'm deeply concerned about us
doing the right things for the wrong reasons . This movement to end mass incarceration and the war on drugs
this an unholy alliance? Michelle Alexander:
is about breaking the habit of forming caste-like systems and creating a new ethic of care and concern for
each of us , this idea that each of us has basic human rights. That is the ultimate goal of this movement. The real issue that lies at the
core of every caste system ever created is the devaluing of human beings. If we're going to do this just to save
some cash, we haven't woken up to the magnitude of the harm . If we are not willing to have a searching
conversation about how we got to this place, how we are able to lock up millions of people, we will find
ourselves either still having a slightly downsized mass incarceration system or some new system of racial
control because we will have not learned the core lesson our racial history is trying to teach us. We have to
learn to care for them, the Other, the ghetto dwellers we demonize. Temporary, fleeting political alliances with
politicians who may have no real interest in communities of color is problematic. We need to stay focused on
doing the right things for the right reasons, and not count as victories battles won when the real lessons have
not been learned . Asha Bandele: Portugal decriminalized all drugs and drug use has remained flat, overdoses been cut by a third, HIV cut by two-thirds. What can we learn from taking a public health approach
and its fundamental rejection of stigma? Michelle Alexander: Portugal is an excellent example of how it is possible to reduce addiction and abuse and drug related crime in a non-punitive manner without filling prisons and jails.
we criminalize drugs because we are so concerned about the harm they cause people, but we wind up
inflicting far more pain and suffering than the substances themselves. What are we doing really when we
Supposedly,
criminalize drugs is not criminalizing substances, but people. I support a wholesale shift to a public health model for dealing with drug addiction and abuse.
How would we treat people abusing if we really cared about them? Would we put them in a cage, saddle them
with criminal records that will force them into legal discrimination the rest of their lives? I support the
decriminalization of all drugs for personal use. If you possess a substance, we should help you get education
and support, not demonize, shame, and punish you for the rest of your life . I'm thrilled that Colorado and
Washington have legalized marijuana and DC has decriminalized it -- these are critically important steps in
shifting from a purely punitive approach . But there are warning flags. I flick on the news, and I see images of people using
marijuana and trying to run legitimate businesses, and they're almost all white . When we thought of them as
black or brown, we had a purely punitive approach. Also, it seems like its exclusively white men being
interviewed as wanting to start marijuana businesses and make a lot of money selling marijuana . I have to say the
image doesn't sit right . Here are white men poised to run big marijuana businesses after 40 years of
impoverished black kids getting prison time for doing the same thing. As we talk about legalization, we have
to also be willing to talk about reparations for the war on drugs , as in how do we repair the harm caused. With
we haven't learned that basic lesson from our own racial history. We set the
slaves free with nothing, and after Reconstruction, a new caste system arose, Jim Crow. A movement arose
and we stopped Jim Crow, but we got no reparations after the waging of a brutal war on poor communities of
color that decimated families and fanned the violence it was supposed to addres s. Do we simply say "We're
done now, let's move on" and white men can make money? This time, we have to get it right; we have to tell the
regard to Iraq, Colin Powell said "If you break it, you own it," but
whole truth, we have to repair the harm done. It's not enough to just stop. Enormous harm had been done;
we have to repair those communities.
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 are combined, the number jumps to over
two million. 10 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 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 system. 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. 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, which bars slavery, 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 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.
Mass incarceration is the cardinal scourge of black masses debilitates resistance
movements—we must use every tactic to challenge it including legal reform
Williams 68
[March 1968, Robert F. Williams was a civil rights leader and author, best known for serving as president of the
Monroe, North Carolina chapter of the NAACP in the 1950s and early 1960s. Black Panther Party founder Huey
Newton cited Williams’s Negroes with Guns as a major inspiration. “Reaction Without Positive Change”, The
Crusader, Volume 9, Number 4,
http://freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC513_scans/Robert_F_Williams/513.RobertFWilliams.Crusader.
March.1968.pdf]
Next to naked violence and unmitigated terror, racist
America's bigoted court system is the cardinal scourge of the powerless
Black and white masses. The constitutional myth about "trial by one's peers" is a cardinal sacrilege against the sacredness of truth. When a Black
man is a defendant in Americanism's dock of Anglo-Saxon law he is pretty much in the same position as an
humble lamb on an altar of sacrifice. White America's savage culture erects a pious facade of devotion to
the rule of law
rather than of man and
hypocritically attempts to project the ritualistic victimization of the Black
man to some remote and spiritual realm of divinity above and beyond the tawdry arena of satanic man. To
proclaim Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence to be a rule of law; and to allow its application to be left to the whim of insensate brigands is tantamount to casting pearls before
swine. The
kangaroo court system in racist America is the most archaic of reactionary institutionalized
injustice.
Some phases of society modernizes and advances. Certain aspects of culture are in a constant state of transition, but to and behold Anglo-Saxon law
doggedly clings to a Magna Charta steeped in the traditions of a Middle Ages mentality. Why does this so-called rule of law so readily invoke the heritage of ancient
vanity in justifying modern injustice predicated on feudalistic logic and morality? Why is it so inclined to look backwards instead of forward? Why is it a quilted
patchwork of sham reform rather than a bold new uniformed structure created out of sociology's up-to-date discoveries and premises? It is because it is an
instrument of social reaction in the employ of reactionaries hell-bent on preserving an ante-bellum and
vulturous power structure frenetically trying to maintain its encircled and battered position . Tyrants do not change of
themselves. The pressure of the people stimulated by the enlightenment derived from their social being is the
driving wheel that propels the vehicle of change. The Black and the powerless, who face the wrath of so-called Anglo-Saxon
jurisprudence, must come to realize the futility of leaving their fate to the rule of law as implemented by puppet
judges who pander to the savage emotions of a cold blooded aristocracy. The true power of the state derives from the people. The weakness of the people in a
confrontation with state tyranny evolves from the apathy, confusion, demoralization, disunity and ignorance of their own power. All over degenerate and
fascist America today the most complimentary citizens of a civilized society are being railroaded to prison,
are being removed from a decadent and sheepish society that is in dire need of highly moral and resistant
fiber. These courageous and upright citizens constitute the last thin line between regression and progression .
They are the sparse in numbers but firm pillars that so precariously prevent the society from plunging into
the tragic and chaotic depth of despotic fascism. America's jails are teaming with principled Black
Nationalists, freedom fighters, war resisters, peace advocates, resisters of false arrest, those forced into crime
as a means of survival, the penniless and powerless guilty of minor infractions, but unable to pay the court's
tribute money and the state's bribery. America's racist courts have assumed the despotic posture of institutionalized lynch mobs enjoying the
sanctimonious solicitude of the state's ritualistic buffoonery. This inhumane and oppressive situation can only be rectified by an
aroused, united and determined citizenry . The power of the enraged masses must be arrayed against this
Anglo=Saxon kangarooism. We must strive to create more favorable legal conditions to disrupt the orderly
and uninhibited process of perennial racist kangaroo justice. A life-and-death struggle must be waged to
break this antiquated first line of the reactionary power structure's defense of its fast eroding position. Science changes,
medicine changes, education changes, customs change, styles change but the archaic courts still arrogantly pride themselves on the
fact that they are the true and noble hermits from the dark ages . In our life-and-death struggle, we must
convert everything possible into a weapon of defense and survival . We must not be narrowminded and
sectarian in our scope. When possible we must use the ballot , we must use the school, the church, the arts and
even the evil legal system that we know to be stacked against us. We must fight in the assemblies, we must fight in the streets. We
must make war on all fronts. We must use the word as well as the bullet. We must not only master the techniques of our
enemy, but we must surpass him in a technique that will serve our cause of liberation rather than his cause of
slavery. A liberation struggle cannot afford to hamper its possibilities of success by straddling itself with
narrow limitations, by limiting itself to only one method of struggle . While the gun is essential and basic, it
must be supplemented by actions, sometimes less dramatic, less decisive .
Marijuana criminalization has a uniquely debilitating effect by introducing people of color
into the cycle of recidivism—targeting it for reform doesn’t tradeoff
Jarecki 14
[08/02/14, Eugene Jarecki is a New York-based writer and film-maker. His Grierson, Emmy and Sundance-winning works include Why
We Fight, The Trials of Henry Kissinger and The House I Live In, “As the marijuana economy takes off, let's not forget the casualties of the
US war on drugs”, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/03/marijuana-economy-casualties-us-war-on-drugseugene-jarecki]
Throughout America's history, official
and unofficial systems of racial oppression have arisen, been challenged,
and then gone underground, shape-shifting themselves to return another day . In the modern era, as lawyer Michelle
Alexander has argued in her book The New Jim Crow, the
drug war stepped in to become the latest system . In 1971, as the
gains of the civil rights movement for black Americans and other minorities might have seemed to usher
America into a post-racial age, the drug war renewed the nation's commitment , however subtly, to the
obstruction of black progress. Today as the marijuana economies in Colorado and Washington begin to take
flight, Alexander noted the inescapable undertow of race that continues to haunt this moment of apparent
progress at play: "Forty years of impoverished black kids getting prison time for selling weed, and their families and
futures destroyed … Now, white men are planning to get rich doing precisely the same thing ." Over those four decades,
the war on drugs has failed abjectly in its stated mission – addressing a legitimate concern about rates of US addiction – but succeeded
overwhelmingly in what would appear its de facto goals – making drug crime the primary preoccupation of law enforcement, flooding
the courts with drug cases and overcrowding prisons with the world's largest population of inmates, more than 50% on drug-related
charges. Taken together, these accomplishments have produced a system of mass incarceration that costs taxpayers an estimated $51bn
a year, becoming one of the nation's leading employers. Within its walls, black Americans represent more than 50% of those
sentenced for drug crimes, despite the fact that black people represent only 13% of the population and do not
use drugs more or less than white people. A decade ago, when I began investigating the drug war in what would become my
documentary The House I Live In, acquaintances were intrigued. They knew I was neither a drug user nor a dealer. They also knew that I
was a comfortable white American, and thus highly unlikely to have been affected by the drug war personally. Inevitably, the question
would arise about whether I was an advocate of marijuana legalisation, which had then become a primary
focus for most reformers. I responded always with indignation, saying that I did not support legalising
marijuana if that meant simply giving dreadlocked white snowboarders easier access to weed. Rather, I was
concerned with the drug war's implications for poor and minority Americans, whose communities had been
ravaged by the war's destructive machinery. I also saw a philosophic error in separating marijuana from
other drugs. Part of what is assumed by advocates of the drug war is that the government has a legitimate role determining what
substance an adult can choose to put in his or her body in the exercise of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Arguing
that one drug should be legalised while others not seems to elide this question of public policy . And this elision
is dangerous, first because it enables the country to avoid a deeper dialogue about the illegality of drugs per
se and, second, because I feared it could let steam out of the debate about the drug war more broadly, reducing
public pressure for its overhaul. Worse, I even feared that by going easy on weed we would tighten the screws
on the rest, keeping the system and its predations intact . I've since changed my mind on the importance of
marijuana as a target for reformers , owing to what I've learned about the role it plays in driving the cycle
of personal, family and community destruction on which the war thrives . "Gateway drug" has been the term often
used by drug warriors to suggest that, with one puff of a joint, a young person may find himself hurtling down a road to hard drugs.
Despite this notion's popularity, it has
little or no basis in science. Yet marijuana is a gateway drug for countless
young Americans into a lifetime of involvement with the criminal justice system. For many, an arrest for
possession at a young age can start a chain reaction that leads first to drastically reduced employability and
then to a higher likelihood of becoming engaged in the underground economy of drug distribution, often the
only job available. Once this happens, it becomes almost a fait accompli that that person will spend a serious
portion of his life rotating in and out of the system. The numbers speak volumes . Of the 2.2 million prisoners
serving in the US, nearly 25% were convicted of marijuana possession . Legalisation, were it retroactive, would
dramatically reduce prisoner numbers while profoundly stemming the tide .
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.
The aff is different than traditional policy debate – it centers our discussion on how change
happens, rather than what specific changes occur – this change of focus enables debate as a
site of movement-building that is harmonious with reform work
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 jail),
but he 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 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 ab-sence 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).
standing alone, Brown accomplished for African Americans little more than Abraham Lincoln’s
Emancipation Proclamation. A civil war had to be waged to end slavery; a mass movement was necessary to bring a formal end to Jim
Crow. Those 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
26 But
building to the exclusion of reform work . To the 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 . T he 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.
The 1AC combines radical critique with non-reformist reforms to balance the two in
productive tension – this strategy creates medium-term steps towards the larger goal of
abolition and reworks public consciousness to facilitate work against mass incarceration
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
20
,
members is an important step toward challenging the racialized dehumanization that undergirds the logic of
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 h er 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 privat e. 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, combined 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.
The distinction between pragmatism and radicalism is falsely constructed and the
affirmative holds the two in creative tension—decarceration strategies enable us to take
advantage of current conditions without sacrificing political vision
Berger 13
[2013, Dan Berger is an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington Bothell, “Social Movements and Mass
Incarceration: What is To Be Done?”, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, Volume 15,
Issue 1-2, 2013, pages 3-18]
The strategy of decarceration combines radical critique, direct action, and tangible goals for reducing the
reach of the carceral state. It is a coalitional strategy that works to shrink the prison system through a
combination of pragmatic demands and far-reaching, open-ended critique . It is reform in pursuit of
abolition . Indeed, decarceration allows a strategic launch pad for the politics of abolition , providing what has
been an exciting but abstract framework with a course of action . 32 Rather than juxtapose pragmatism and
radicalism, as has so often happened in the realm of radical activism, the strategy of decarceration seeks to hold them in
creative tension . It is a strategy in the best tradition of the black freedom struggle . It is a strategy that seeks
to take advantage of political conditions without sacrificing its political vision . Today we are in a moment
where it is possible, in the words of an organizer whose work successfully closed Illinois's infamous supermax prison Tamms in January
2013, to confront prisons as both an economic and a moral necessity. 33 Prisons bring together diverse forms of oppression
across race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship status, HIV status and beyond. The movements against them, therefore, will need to
bring together diverse communities of resistance. They will need to unite people across a range of issues, identities, and sectors.
That is the coalition underlying groups such as Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB), the Nation Inside initiative, and
Decarcerate PA. The
fight against prisons is both a targeted campaign and a broad-based struggle for social
justice . These movements must include the leadership by those directly affected while at the same work to understand that prisons affect us
all. This message is the legacy of prison rebellions from Attica in 1971 to Pelican Bay in 2012. The
challenge is to maintain the
aspirational elements of that message while at the same time translating it into a political program .
Decarceration, therefore, works not only to shrink the prison system but to expand community cohesion and
maximize what can only be called freedom . Political repression and mass incarceration are joined at the hip.
The struggles against austerity, carcerality, and social oppression, the struggles for restorative and
transformative justice, for grassroots empowerment and social justice must be equally interconnected . For it
is only when the movement against prisons is as interwoven in the social fabric of popular resistance as the
expansion of prisons has been stitched into the wider framework of society that we might hope to supplant the
carceral state. There are many obstacles on the path toward decarceration; the existence of a strategy hardly guarantees its success. Until
now, I have focused largely on the challenges internal to the movement, but there are even taller hurdles to jump in encountering (much less
transforming) the deeply entrenched carceral state. Perhaps the biggest challenge, paradoxically, comes from the growing consensus, rooted in the
collective fiscal troubles of individual states, that there is a need for prison reform. In that context, a range of politicians, think tanks, and
nonprofit organizations—from Right on Crime to the Council on State Governments and the Pew Charitable Trusts—have offered a spate of
neoliberal reforms that trumpet free market solutions, privatization, or shifting the emphasis away from prisons but still within the power of the
carceral state. Examples include the “Justice Reinvestment” processes utilized by states such as Texas and Pennsylvania that have called for
greater funding to police and conservative victim's rights advocates while leaving untouched some of the worst elements of excessive
punishment. These neoliberal reforms can also be found in the sudden burst of attention paid to “reentry services”
that are not community-led and may be operated by private, conservative entities. 34 Perhaps the grandest example
can be found in California, where a Supreme Court ruling that overcrowding in the state's prisons constituted cruel and unusual punishment has
been met with a proposal for “realignment,” that shifts the burden from state prisons to county jails. 35 A combination of institutional
intransigence and ideological commitment to punish makes the road ahead steep. Even as many states move to shrink their prison
populations, they have done so in ways that have left in place the deepest markings of the carceral state, such
as the use of life sentences and solitary confinement, and the criminalization of immigrants . Social movements
will need to confront the underlying ideologies that hold that there is an “acceptable” level of widespread
imprisonment , that there is a specter of villainy out there—be they “illegal immigrants,” “cop killers,” “sex criminals”—waiting in the
wings to destroy the American way of life. 36 There is a risk , inherent in the sordid history of prison reform,
that the current reform impulse will be bifurcated along poorly defined notions of “deservingness” that will
continue to uphold the carceral logic that separates “good people” from “bad people” and which decides that
no fate is too harsh for those deemed unworthy of social inclusion. This, then, is a movement that needs to
make nuanced yet straightforward arguments that take seriously questions of accountability while showing
that more cops and more (whether bigger or smaller) cages only takes us further from that goal . 37 At stake is the
kind of world we want to live in, and the terms could not be more clear: the choice, to paraphrase Martin Luther King,
is either carceral chaos or liberatory community. The framework of community—as expressed Decarcerate PA slogan “build
communities not prisons” and the CURB “budget for humanity” campaign—allows for a robust imagination of the institutions and mechanisms
that foster community versus those that weaken it. It focuses our attention on activities, slogans, programs, and demands that maximize
communities. In short, it allows for unity. If the state wants to crush dissent through isolation, our movements must rely
on togetherness to win. Solidarity is the difference between life and death . State repression expands in the
absence of solidarity . Solidarity is a lifeline against the logic of criminalization and its devastating
consequences. For the most successful challenges to imprisonment come from intergenerational movements:
movements where people raise each other's consciousness and raise each other's children, movements that
fight for the future because they know their history . Here, in this pragmatic but militant radicalism, is a
chance to end mass incarceration and begin the process of shrinking the carceral state out of existence.
an advocacy of the legalization of marijuana uniquely provides a training ground for
coalitional movement building
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.
Accessibility arguments don’t address the tactical advantages of the affirmative—the
affirmative is a strategy of slipping in quietly through the backdoor
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]
Mass incarceration has, therefore, emerged as the white elite's new form of extraordinary social control over
black and brown people: Federalism, as articulated by states' rights advocates, has been used to avoid the federal
scrutiny of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and now mass incarceration. Throughout history, the crude federalist
argument that states, localities, and government officials should be free to oppress and control people of color
has played a key role in immunizing some of society's most racist and destructive institutions , beginning with
slavery. Consistent with its historical pattern, the Supreme Court has made it virtually impossible to challenge mass
incarceration on the grounds of racial bias at all stages of the criminal justice process except the point of
entry. Viewed in this way, it is an act of defiance when civil rights advocates file litigation challenging racial bias
in the criminal justice system . When we make it into the courtroom, it is only because we slipped in quietly
through a back door , defying the sign that reads: Access to the Judicial System Denied . We should ignore
that sign. Too often, I hear fellow civil rights advocates say, "There is nothing that we can do to challenge mass
incarceration or racial bias in the criminal justice system, particularly given cases like McCleskey v. Kemp:' Imagine if
Thurgood Marshall had said, "There is nothing that we can do to challenge racial segregation, given Plessy v.
Ferguson." We cannot be so easily deterred. At the same time , however, we must begin to plant the seeds for a
broader movement. If we, as advocates, are to be anything more than a flea on the elephant's back, we must
describe the criminal justice system in language that makes clear our interest in challenging more than
isolated criminal justice policie s or discrete violations of individuals' constitutional rights. We must build a
movement that seeks the eradication of the latest manifestation of a fundamentally racist ideology , an
ideology rooted in American history and adaptable to changing times . The necessity of a movement-building
approach becomes clear once the emergence of the mass incarceration policy, and the Court's role in
protecting it, is put in its proper historical and political context. Looking back, it is clear that piecemeal policy
reform or litigation alone would have been a futile approach to dismantling Jim Crow segregation . While
those strategies certainly have their place , the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the concomitant cultural shift
would never have occurred without the cultivation of political consciousness in the African American
community and the resulting widespread activism. We have defeated enemies of racial justice before , and we
can do it again . It will take persistence, creativity, and the courage to reinvent ourselves as advocates. The
freedom fighters who came before us would expect no less.
Consciousness raising maters in this context—the argument that “everyone already knows
its racist” ignores the nuances of colorblindness and passive stereotyping
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. 211-213]
Dealing with this system on its own terms is complicated by the problem of denial . Few Americans today recognize
mass incarceration for what it is: a new caste system thinly veiled by the cloak of colorblindness . Hundreds
of thousands of people of color are swept into this system and released every year, yet we rationalize the
systematic discrimination and exclusion and turn a blind eye to the suffering . Our collective denial is not
merely an inconvenient fact; it is
a major stumbling block to public understanding of the role of race in our society,
and it sharply limits the opportunities for truly transformative collective action . The general public’s collective denial
is fairly easy to forgive— if not excuse— for all the reasons discussed in chapter 5. The awkward silence of the civil rights
community , however, is more problematic . If something akin to a racial caste system truly exists, why has the civil rights
community been so slow to acknowledge it? Indeed, how could civil rights organizations, some of which are larger and better funded than at any
point in American history, have allowed this human rights nightmare to occur on their watch? The answer is not that civil rights
advocates are indifferent to racial bias in the criminal justice system. To the contrary, we care quite a lot. Nor have we
been entirely ignorant of the realities of the new caste system. In recent years, civil rights advocates have launched important
reform efforts, most notably the campaigns challenging felon disenfranchisement laws, cracksentencing policies, and racial profiling by law
enforcement. Civil rights groups have also developed litigation and important coalitions related to the school-toprison pipeline, inadequate indigent defense, and juvenile justice reform, to name a few. Despite these important efforts,
what is most striking about the civil rights community’s response to the mass incarceration of people of color is the
relative quiet. Given the magnitude— the sheer scale— of the New Jim Crow, one would expect that the War on Drugs
would be the top priority of every civil rights organization in the country . Conferences, strategy sessions, and
debates regarding how best to build a movement to dismantle the new caste system would be occurring on a
regular basis. Major grassroots organizing efforts would be under way in nearly every state and city
nationwide. Foundations would be lobbied to prioritize criminal justice reform. Media campaigns would be unleashed
in an effort to overturn the punitive public consensus on race. The rhetoric associated with specific reform efforts would
stress the need to end mass incarceration, not merely tinker with it , and efforts would be made to build
multiracial coalitions based on the understanding that the racial politics that gave birth to the War on Drugs have harmed poor and
working-class whites as well as people of color. All of that could have happened, but it didn’t. Why not? Part of the answer is that civil rights
organizations—like all institutions— are comprised of fallible human beings. The prevailing public consensus affects everyone,
including civil rights advocates. Those
of us in the civil rights community are not immune to the racial stereotypes
that pervade media imagery and political rhetoric; nor do we operate outside of the political context . Like most
people, we tend to resist believing that we might be part of the problem . One day, civil rights organizations may be
embarrassed by how long it took them to move out of denial and do the hard work necessary to end mass incarceration. Rather than blaming civil
rights groups, however, it is far more productive to understand the reasons why the response to mass incarceration
has been so constrained. Again, it’s not that civil rights advocates don’t care; we do . And it’s not just that we are
afflicted by unconscious racial bias and stereotypes about those behind bars. Civil rights organizations have
reasons for their constraint— reasons that no longer make good sense , even if they once did.
Grassroots tactics have opened up political possibilities for dismantling the prison
industrial complex—generating new social understandings through radical critique
combined with specific demands jumpstarts mass mobilization
Sudbury 9, Professor of Ethnic Studies
[2009, 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.
“Reform or abolition? Using popular mobilisations to dismantle the ‘prison-industrial complex'”, Criminal Justice
Matters, volume: 77 issue: 1 page: 26-28]
In April 2009, California
officials unveiled historic plans to cut $400 million from the state's $9.8 billion corrections budget
by reducing the prison population by 8,000 . With half the reductions coming from changes in parole policy that would reduce the
revolving door of parolees being returned on technical violations, and the other half from changes in the treatment of property crimes and
enhanced credits for prisoners attending education programmes, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation effectively adopted
part of a larger plan created by Californians United for a Responsible Budget, a lobby group made up of 43 prison abolitionist, reform and social
justice organisations. This temporary alignment between anti-prison activists and one of the nation's largest and
most powerful correctional departments is a dramatic shift from a political terrain in which activists have
relied on direct action, mass protests and lawsuits to block state officials bent on inexorable prison expansion .
I want to argue that the grassroots tactics used by the anti-prison movement over the past decade to transform
popular understandings of mass incarceration have opened up the door to new political possibilities at a time
of economic crisis. Where prisons were once seen as a recession-proof inevitability, the anti-prison movement has created a
chink in the armour that may be the first step in ending America's over-reliance on imprisonment as a
solution to deep-rooted social problems . The US anti-prison movement is made up of a plethora of grassroots
organisations, lobby groups, activist collectives, prisoner associations and student groups (Sudbury, 2008). While
the organisations that make up the movement are diverse in their organising strategies , they share the
common goal of ending the use of imprisonment to respond to harm. The anti-prison movement differs from voluntary
organisations working for criminal justice reform in two key ways. First, rather than viewing imprisonment as a necessary sanction that should
perhaps be used with less frequency or made more effective and humane, anti-prison
activists view prisons and jails as a form
of racialised state violence that must be dismantled as part of a wider social justice agenda. Second, while
voluntary organisations provide important research, policy work, lobbying and direct services, their remit seldom includes community organising
or mass mobilisation. As a result, the non-profit model of organising is ill-equipped to bring about radical social
change (Incite!, 2007). Voluntary organisations can and do influence government policy, but they cannot generate the peoplepower necessary to create the kind of fundamental social and economic re-organisation necessary to
dismantle what has become a multibillion-dollar industry. In addition, the non-profit model of social change may actually
undermine grassroots mobilising because it produces paid experts who are seen as having more legitimacy than directly affected communities,
and tends to eschew popular protest that may lead to conflict with the state. In contrast, as anti-globalisation activist Arundhati
Roy has stated : ‘Real resistance has real consequences. And no salary’ . To confront mass incarceration and its corollaries
– the overpolicing and criminalisation of poor and racialised communities – anti-prison activists in the US have come to believe
that a mass movement similar to the civil rights and anti-war movements is necessary . This movement must involve
the active participation and leadership of those from directly affected communities, including low-income racialised youth. Like other new
social movement actors, anti-prison activists have focused much of our attention on rearticulating popular
understandings and generating new social meanings . Central to this intellectual project has been the
creation and popularisation of a new language to talk about imprisonment. In 1998, when Critical Resistance (CR), the
leading abolitionist organisation, organised a conference called ‘CR: Beyond the Prison-Industrial Complex’, the prison-industrial
complex (PIC) was a little known concept. The groundbreaking conference attracted approximately 3,000 students, educators,
activists, lawyers, former prisoners and their families for three days of workshops, panels, cultural performances and direct action, and garnered
significant media attention. As a result of the gathering, groups opposing prisons began to spring up across the country,
and the rubric of the prison-industrial complex emerged as a popular explanation and organising tool . Eleven
years later, the concept is widely used in both progressive and mainstream media, wielded by Democrats critical of bloated
corrections budgets and examined in criminology textbooks and classrooms. Critical Resistance has grown from its Oakland roots to encompass
chapters in nine cities and most recently hosted a conference to celebrate its 10th anniversary that was attended by over 3,500 people. The term
‘prison-industrial complex’ was first used by urban theorist Mike Davis to describe a prison building boom that, he argued ‘rivals agribusiness as
the dominant force in the life of rural California and competes with land developers as the chief seducer of legislators in Sacramento’ (Davis,
1995). Angela Y Davis, a co-founder of CR, describes the prison-industrial complex as a symbiotic relationship between state criminal
punishment agencies, politicians, corporations and other interest groups, manifested most obviously in the transformation of prisoners into profits
(Davis, 2003). Private prisons, for example, transform the warehousing of prisoners and immigrant detainees into a transaction that is traded on
the stock market. Prison expansion in the US, UK and internationally has also generated profit-making opportunities for construction and
architecture firms, manufacturers of security and telecommunications equipment, and for service industries including real estate agencies, banks
and restaurants (Sudbury, 2000). As a result, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore documents, small towns and entire regions have become economically
dependent on prisons to absorb surplus land and labour displaced by decades of global economic restructuring (Gilmore, 2007). Using the term
prison-industrial complex turns our attention to the enormous and growing cost of imprisonment, reveals the dependencies that influence criminal
justice policy, and demonstrates who profits from a continued over-reliance on policing and imprisonment. Anti-prison activists also
work to erode popular support for the ‘tough-on- crime’ philosophy underpinning US criminal justice
policy . In the context of drug-related violence and despair in urban centres, even members of communities negatively impacted by racial
profiling and police brutality may see harsher sentences as the only ‘solution’. In contrast to the claim that prisons work, CR
refutes the belief that ‘caging and controlling people makes us safe’ . CR reminds us that both ‘perpetrators’
and ‘victims’ coexist in a social context devastated by a combination of social exclusion, poverty, racism,
addiction and government neglect . This analysis shifts our focus from the commonsense assumption that
policing and prisons create security, to the possibility of creating safety by redirecting resources to provide
for the basic human rights of all community members . On their website, CR asserts: We work for PIC abolition because we do
not believe that any amount of imprisonment, policing, or surveillance will ultimately make our communities safer or more self-determined,
prevent ‘crime’, or help repair the damage that happens when one person hurts another. We believe, instead, that access to basic necessities like
food, shelter, meaningful work and freedom as well as alternative systems of accountability create the conditions for healthier, more stable
neighbourhoods, families, and our wider communities. Contrary to popular understandings, CR argues that prisons undermine safety by
absorbing scarce public resources that might otherwise pay for social services that address the root causes of survival crimes – from education,
youth and drug treatment programmes, to housing and employment. For this reason, an anti-prison agenda that includes ‘alternatives to cagebased punishment’ as a response to harm, as well as investment in community infrastructure has become popular in urban communities as a
pathway to genuine security. Popularising the concept of ‘abolition’ is also central to the anti-prison movement's
radical critique of imprisonment. By adopting this term, activists make deliberate links between dismantling
prisons and the abolition of slavery. Taking the analogy further, these ‘new abolitionists’ identify the abolition of
prisons as the logical completion of the unfinished liberation marked by the 13th Amendment to the US
Constitution, which regulated, rather than ended slavery. In this sense, abolition of the prison-industrial complex
is seen as central to contemporary struggles for racial justice. Abolition exists in productive tension with
efforts to reform the penal system . While abolitionists point out that reform in isolation of a broader
decarcerative strategy serves to legitimate and even expand the prison-industrial complex, we also work in
solidarity with prisoners to challenge inhumane conditions inside. Described by Angela Y. Davis as ‘ nonreformist reforms’ , these efforts are assessed first in terms of whether they contribute toward decreasing or
increasing prison budgets and the reach of the criminal justice system . For anti-prison activists, however, reform
is not the primary objective . Rather we work toward dual priorities. First, we aim to transform popular
consciousnes s, so that people can believe that a world without prisons is possible. Second, we take practical
steps toward dismantling the prison-industrial complex. These steps include campaigns for a moratorium on
prison expansion, mobilising community power to prevent the construction of proposed new prisons, shrinking the system
through decarcerative efforts and creating community-based alternatives to imprisonment . By helping the
public to imagine the possibility of shrinking the prison-industrial complex and ending their reliance on
imprisonment, the anti-prison movement has created a new political climate in which closing prisons is a
viable solution to the current economic crisis . For a nation in which being ‘tough-on-crime’ has been a prerequisite for election,
this is a significant achievement . Given the success of the US anti-prison movement in mobilising popular
support to confront mass incarceration, academics and nonprofits should pay more attention to the role of
popular movements in shaping criminal justice policy and consider how they might use their own resources
to facilitate and support grassroots popular protest.
2AC Themba Nixon
This debate should center around institutions—the role of the ballot is for the team that
best provides a strategy for changing the institutions that constitute violence as opposed to
changing the knowledge production the neg falsely believes constitutes those institutions
Themba Nixon 2000
In essence, policies
are the codification of power relationships and resource allocation . Policies are the rules of the world
Changing the world means changing the rules . So, if organizing is about changing the rules and
building power, how can organizing be separated from policies? Can we really speak truth to power, fight the
right, stop corporate abuses, or win racial justice without contesting the rules and the rulers, the policies and
the policymakers? The answer is no-and double no for people of color. Today, racism subtly dominates nearly every aspect
of policymaking. From ballot propositions to city funding priorities, policy is increasingly about the control, de-funding, and
we live in.
disfranchisement of communities of color. What Do We Stand For? Take the public conversation about welfare reform, for example. Most of us
know it isn't really about putting people to work. The right's message was framed around racial stereotypes of lazy, cheating "welfare queens"
whose poverty was "cultural." But the new welfare policy was about moving billions of dollars in individual cash payments and direct services
from welfare recipients to other, more powerful, social actors.
Many of us were too busy to tune into the welfare policy
drama in Washington, only to find it washed up right on our doorsteps . Our members are suffering from
workfare policies, new regulations, and cutoffs. Families who were barely getting by under the old rules are
being pushed over the edge by the new policies. Policy doesn't get more relevant than this. And so we got
involved in policy-as defense. Yet we have to do more than block their punches. We have to start the fight
with initiatives of our own . Those who do are finding offense a bit more fun than defense alone. Living wage ordinances, youth
development initiatives, even gun control and alcohol and tobacco policies are finding their way onto the public agenda, thanks to focused
community organizing that leverages power for community-driven initiatives. - Over 600 local policies have been passed to
regulate the tobacco industry. Local coalitions have taken the lead by writing ordinances that address local problems and organizing
broad support for them. - Nearly 100 gun control and violence prevention policies have been enacted since 1991 . Milwaukee, Boston, and Oakland are among the cities that have passed living wage ordinances: local laws that guarantee higher than minimum
wages for workers, usually set as the minimum needed to keep a family of four above poverty. These are just a few of the examples
that demonstrate how organizing for local policy advocacy has made inroads in areas where positive
national policy had been stalled by conservatives. Increasingly, the local policy arena is where the action is and
where activists are finding success. Of course, corporate interests-which are usually the target of these policies-are gearing up in
defense. Tactics include front groups, economic pressure, and the tried and true: cold, hard cash. Despite these barriers, grassroots
organizing can be very effective at the smaller scale of local politics . At the local level, we have greater access to
elected officials and officials have a greater reliance on their constituents for reelection. For example, getting 400
people to show up at city hall in just about any city in the U.S. is quite impressive. On the other hand, 400 people at the state house or the
Congress would have a less significant impact. Add to that the fact that all 400 people at city hall are usually constituents, and the impact is even
greater. Recent trends in government underscore the importance of local policy. Congress has enacted a series of measures devolving significant
power to state and local government. Welfare, health care, and the regulation of food and drinking water safety are among the areas where states
and localities now have greater rule. Devolution has some negative consequences to be sure. History has taught us that, for social services and
civil rights in particular, the lack of clear federal standards and mechanisms for accountability lead to uneven enforcement and even
discriminatory implementation of policies. Still, there are real opportunities for advancing progressive initiatives in this
more localized environment. Greater local control can mean greater community power to shape and
implement important social policies that were heretofore out of reach. To do so will require careful attention
to the mechanics of local policymaking and a clear blueprint of what we stand for . Getting It in Writing Much of the
work of framing what we stand for takes place in the shaping of demands. By getting into the policy arena in a proactive
manner, we can take our demands to the next level. Our demands can become law, with real consequences if
the agreement is broken. After all the organizing, press work, and effort, a group should leave a decisionmaker with more
than a handshake and his or her word. Of course, this work requires a certain amount of interaction with "the
suits," as well as struggles with the bureaucracy, the technical language, and the all-too-common resistance
by decisionmakers . Still, if it's worth demanding, it's worth having in writing -whether as law, regulation, or internal
policy. From ballot initiatives on rent control to laws requiring worker protections, organizers are leveraging their power into written policies that
are making a real difference in their communities. Of course, policy work is just one tool in our organizing arsenal, but it is a tool we simply can't
afford to ignore. Making policy work an integral part of organizing will require a certain amount of retrofittin g.
We will need to develop the capacity to translate our information, data, and experience into stories that are designed to affect the public
conversation. Perhaps most important, we will
need to move beyond fighting problems and on to framing solutions that
bring us closer to our vision of how things should be. And then we must be committed to making it so.
2AC Perm v. Radicalism
Struggles for black self-determination must happen in conjunction with challenges to the
racist criminal justice system—even though the chance of success is small, we must do
everything possible to lighten the burden of racism
Williams 69
[Summer 1969, Robert F. Williams was a civil rights leader and author, best known for serving as president of the
Monroe, North Carolina chapter of the NAACP in the 1950s and early 1960s. Black Panther Party founder Huey
Newton cited Williams’s Negroes with Guns as a major inspiration. “The Deprived: Rebellion in the Streets”, The
Crusader, Volume 10, Number 02,
http://freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC513_scans/Robert_F_Williams/513.Crusader.Vol.10.2.Summer.
1969.pdf]
Our struggle for self-determination and nationhood does not mean that we relinquish our struggle for
human rights in the slave territory of racist America . We have no intention of abdicating our demands for
legal justice in the kangaroo courts of lawless America, even though our chance of success may be as slim as
one in a million. This type of struggle has its advantages despite the absence of justice . The Republic of New
Africa must be a long- range project while currently
we must do everything possible to lighten the burden of our
oppressed people who daily face the scourge of savage racism . While the hypocritical power structure and
racist savages in general are ranting and prating about "law and order in the streets", aside from a campaign of law
and order with justice, Black people should press a vigorous and relentless drive for the equitable application of
law and a democratic process of order in racist Americas kangaroo courts . The solution to police brutality rests with the
oppressed’s willing capacity to meet violence with violence. A national concerted effort should be made to press for the
release of all political prisoners. Contrary to American propaganda and what the man says, the number of political prisoners
in the citadel of the "free world" is steadily on the increase. Our people must be brought to realize that every
Black person in America is a potential victim of police mob violence, legal lynching, mob lynching or
gangsterism. Every Black person is a target of a campaign subtle in appearance but as cruel and vicious in
ifs genocidal intent as the one that decimated the American Indian.
Infltration/Reform K2 Revolution
The affirmative is a project of infiltration—universalist prescriptions that isolate ourselves
from the institutions that exercise power militates against revolutionary movements—
becoming acquainted with the methods of American racist Kangaroo justice is specifically
key to develop tactics and strategies for bringing about the end of the world
Williams 69
[Summer 1969, Robert F. Williams was a civil rights leader and author, best known for serving as president of the
Monroe, North Carolina chapter of the NAACP in the 1950s and early 1960s. Black Panther Party founder Huey
Newton cited Williams’s Negroes with Guns as a major inspiration. “The Deprived: Rebellion in the Streets”, The
Crusader, Volume 10, Number 02,
http://freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC513_scans/Robert_F_Williams/513.Crusader.Vol.10.2.Summer.
1969.pdf]
INFILTRATE THE MANS INSTITUTIONS : Black youth should not commit the catastrophic error of
seeing things simply in black and white . That is, of seeing things as all good or all bad. It is erroneous to
think that one can isolate oneself completely from the institutions of a social and political system that
exercises power over the environment in which he resides. Self-imposed and pre- mature isolation, initiated
by the oppressed against the organs of a tyrannical establishment, militates against revolutionary movements dedicated to radical change . It is a grave error for militant and just-minded youth to reject struggleserving opportunities to join the mans government services, police forces, armed forces, peace corps and vital
organs of the power structure. Militants should become acquainted with the methods of the oppressor.
Meaningful change can be more thoroughly effectuated by militant pressure from within as well as without. We
can obtain invaluable know-how from the oppressor . Struggle is not all violence . Effective struggle requires
tactics, plans, analysis and a highly sophisti- cated application of mental aptness . The forces of oppression
and tyranny have perfected a highly articulate system of infiltration for undermining and frustrating the
efforts of the oppressed in trying to upset the unjust status quo. To a great extent, the power structure keeps itself informed
as to the revolutionary activity of freedom fighters. With the threat of extermination looming menacingly
before Black Americans, it is pressingly imperative that our people enter the vital organs of the
establishment . FIGHT KANGAROOISM: Inasmuch as the kangaroo court system constitutes a powerful defense
arm of tyranny, extensive and vigorous educational work must be done among our people so that when they serve
on jury duty they will not become tools of a legal system dedicated to railroading our people to concentration
camps disguised as prisons. The kangaroo court system is being widely used to rid racist America of black
militants, non-conformists and effective ghetto leadership . These so-called courts are not protecting the
human and civil rights of our people ; they are not dis- pensing even-handed justice, but are long-standing
instruments of terror and intimidation. Black Americans must be inspired to display the same determination
in safeguarding the human and civil rights of our oppressed people as white racists are to legally lynch us. No matter how
much rigmarole is dished out about black capitalism and minority enterprise, the hard cold fact remains that it is as difficult for
a Black American militant to receive justice in America's tyrannical courts as it is for a camel to pass through the eye of
a needle. Black people must be brought to see their duty as jurors as an opportunity to right legal wrongs not
to perpetrate shameful obeisance to tyranny and racism . Youth should mount a campaign relative to this
social evil that will by far ex- ceed the campaign of voter registration.
2AC
Afropessimism’s dogmatism reifies the failures of defining static identities—Blackness is
reduced to incapacity and the black is thus forced to embody such abjection—the result is a
recreation of the violence of universality by actively refusing to define blackness as
contingent
Marriott 12
[David Mariott, “Black Cultural Studies”, Years Work Crit Cult Theory (2012) 20 (1): 37-66]
However, this is also not the entire story of Red, White, and Black, as I hope to show. For example, in Chapter One (‘The Structure of
Antagonisms’), written as a theoretical introduction, and which opens explicitly on the Fanonian question of why ontology cannot understand the
being of the Black, Wilderson is prepared to say that black suffering is not only beyond analogy, it also refigures
the whole of being: ‘the essence of being for the White and non-Black position’ is non-niggerness, consequently, ‘[b]eing can thus be
thought of, in the first ontological instance, as non-niggerness, and slavery then as niggerness’ (p. 37). It is not hard when reading such
sentences to suspect a kind of absolutism at work here, and one that manages to be peculiarly and
dispiritingly dogmatic : throughout Red, White, and Black, despite variations in tone and emphasis, there is always the desire to
have black lived experience named as the worst , and the politics of such a desire inevitably collapses into a
kind of sentimental moralism : for the claim that ‘Blackness is incapacity in its most pure and unadulterated form’
means merely that the black has to embody this abjection without reserve (p. 38). This logic—and the denial of
any kind of ‘ontological integrity’ to the Black/Slave due to its endless traversal by force does seem to reduce
ontology to logic , namely, a logic of non-recuperability —moves through the following points: (1) Black non-being is not capable
of symbolic resistance and, as such, falls outside of any language of authenticity or reparation; (2) for such a subject, which Wilderson persists in
calling ‘death’, the symbolic remains foreclosed (p. 43); (3) as such, Blackness is the record of an occlusion which remains ever present: ‘White
(Human) capacity, in advance of the event of discrimination or oppression, is parasitic on Black incapacity’ (p. 45); (4) and, as an example of the
institutions or discourses involving ‘violence’, ‘antagonisms’ and ‘parasitism’, Wilderson describes White (or non-Black) film theory
and cultural studies as incapable of understanding the ‘suffering of the Black—the Slave’ (they cannot do so
because they are erroneously wedded to humanism and to the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, which Wilderson takes as two examples of what
the Afro-pessimist should avoid) (p. 56); as a corrective, Wilderson calls for a new language of abstraction, and one
centrally concerned with exposing ‘the structure of antagonisms between Blacks and Humans’ (p. 68). Reading
seems to stop here, at a critique of Lacanian full speech: Wilderson wants to say that Lacan’s notion of the originary (imaginary) alienation of the
subject is still wedded to relationality as implied by the contrast between ‘empty’ and ‘full’ speech, and so apparently cannot grasp the trauma of
‘absolute Otherness’ that is the Black’s relation to Whites, because psychoanalysis cannot fathom the ‘structural, or absolute, violence’ of Black
life (pp. 74; 75). ‘Whereas Lacan was aware of how language ‘‘precedes and exceeds us’’, he did not have Fanon’s awareness of how violence
also precedes and exceeds Blacks’ (p. 76). The violence of such abjection—or incapacity—is therefore that it cannot be communicated or
avowed, and is always already delimited by desubjectification and dereliction (p. 77). Whence the suspicion of an ontology reduced to a logic (of
abjection). Leaving aside the fact that it is quite mistaken to limit Lacan’s notion of full speech to the search for communication (the unconscious
cannot be confined to parole), it is clear that, according to Wilderson’s own ‘logic’, his description of the Black is
working, via analogy, to Lacan’s notion of the real but, in his insistence on the Black as an absolute outside
Wilderson can only duly reify this void at the heart of universality . The Black is ‘beyond the limit of
contingency’—but it is worth saying immediately that this ‘beyond’ is indeed a foreclosure that defines a violence
whose traces can only be thought violently (that is, analogically), and whose nonbeing returns as the theme for
Wilderson’s political thinking of a non-recuperable abjection. The Black is nonbeing and, as such, is more real
and primary than being per se: given how much is at stake, this insistence on a racial metaphysics of injury implies a
fundamental irreconcilability between Blacks and Humans (there is really no debate to be had here: irreconcilability is the
condition and possibility of what it means to be Black).
Their argument isn’t afropessimism, but absolutist despair—their facile antihumanism
doesn’t chart us a path towards the end of the world, but instead limits us to total
resignation
Marriott 12
[David Mariott, “Black Cultural Studies”, Years Work Crit Cult Theory (2012) 20 (1): 37-66]
In the concluding pages of Darker Than Blue, Gilroy restates why he finds the ongoing attachment to the idea of race in the US so very
unsatisfactory in comparison, say, to the anti-racism of Frantz Fanon: [Fanon’s] ‘audacious commitment to an alternative
conception of humanity reconstituted outside ‘‘race’’ [...] is something that does not endear Fanon’s work to
today’s practitioners of the facile antihumanism and ethnic absolutism so characteristic of life on US
college campuses, where class-based homogeneity combines smoothly with deference to racial and ethic
particularity and with resignation to the world as it appears . Fanon disappoints that scholastic constituency
by refusing to see culture as an insurmountable obstacle between groups, even if they have been racialized. He does
not accept the ‘‘strategic’’ award of an essential innocence to the oppressed and the wretched of the earth.
Their past and present sufferings confer no special nobility upon them and are not invested with redemptive insights.
Suffering is just
suffering , and Fanon has no patience with those who would invoke the armour of incorrigibility around
national liberation struggles or minority cultures’. (pp. 157–8, my emphasis) Whatever one might think of the cogency of these
remarks (if only because the notion of a non-racial life is predicated on the idea that the human can somehow reside ‘outside’ of race, a humanism
that would always then be constitutively compromised by the racism at its frontier), the question of whether US culture can ever
escape racial antagonism is the primary focus of Frank B. Wilderson III’s powerful Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the
Structure of US Antagonisms, as part of a more general reading of US film culture. And indeed Fanon’s anti-philosophical
philosophical critique of racial ontology (historically blacks were seen as part of existence but not, as yet, part of human being, a notyet that forces Fanon to rethink the teleological form of the human as already and essentially violent in its separation from the state of nature from
which it has come) forms a major part of Wilderson’s conception of anti-blackness as the major structural
antagonism of US history and culture. It is against the conception that racism could ever be simply contingent to
black experience that Wilderson protests, reflecting on the fact that racial slavery has no parallel to other
forms of suffering, and perhaps most strikingly social death is the constitutive essence of black existence in
the US. In brief, slavery remains so originary, in the sense of what he calls its ‘accumulation and fungibility’ (terms borrowed from
Saidiya Hartman), it not only has no ‘analogy’ to other forms of antagonism— Wilderson’s examples are the Holocaust and
Native American genocide— there is simply no process of getting over it, of recovering from the loss (as wound, or
trauma): as such, slavery remains the ultimate structure of antagonism in the US. Whether at a personal level or at the
level of historical process, if ‘black slavery is foundational to modern Humanism’, then any teleological appeal to a humanism beyond racism is
doomed from the start (p. 22). The
problem with Wilderson’s argument, however, is that it remains of a piece with the
manichean imperatives that beset it , and which by definition are structurally uppermost, which means that
he can only confirm those imperatives as absolutes rather than chart a dialectical path beyond them , insofar as,
structurally speaking, there is no ‘outside’ to black social death and alienation, or no outside to this outside, and all
that thought can do is mirror its own enslavement by race. This is not so much ‘afro-pessimism’— a term coined
by Wilderson—as thought wedded to its own despair .
2AC Culture
Their claims about the absolute destruction of African culture are factually incorrect,
contemporary African-American culture can be traced back to Central African Bantu
survivals that were retained during slavery.
Holloway 1990 [Joseph E., Professor of Pan-African Studies at CSU Northridge, “The Origins of African-American Culture,”
Africanisms in American Culture ed. by Joseph E. Holloway p. 17]
Many other enslaved Africans were employed as field slaves. This occupation, in fact, was engaged in by the majority of Africans, suggesting
that it was among the field slaves that much of African-American culture and language evolved. These field slaves
were mainly Central Africans who, unlike the Senegambians, brought a homogenous culture identifiable as Bantu. The
cultural homogeneity of the Bantu is indicated by a common language. Once the Bantu reached America they were able to retain
much of their cultural identity. Enforced isolation of these Africans by plantation owners allowed them to retain
their religion, philosophy, culture, folklore, folkways, folk beliefs, folk tales, storytelling, naming practices, home
economics, arts, kinship, and music. These Africanisms were shared and adopted by the various African ethnic
groups of the field slave community, and they gradually developed into African-American cooking (soul food), music
(jazz, blues, spirituals, gospels), language, religion, philosophy, customs, and arts.
Their assertion of the anthropological off-the-mapness of black subjectivity mirrors white
racist anthropologists and linguists who defended the idea that slavery represented an
absolute break with African culture.
Asante 1990 [Molefi Kete, Professor and Chair of the Department of African-American Studies at Temple University, “African Elements
in African-American English,” Africanisms in American Culture ed. by Joseph E. Holloway p. 19-20]
A considerable intellectual meanness had to be combated by the initial cadre of communicationists who examined
the continuity of black language behaviors from Africa to America. The racist assumption that black pidgin reflected
innate inability of Africans to learn English was current at one time. In fact, as Herskovits pointed out, the linguists who studied
pidgin often had no knowledge of African languages and therefore could not make informed interpretations. Lorenzo Turner augmented this
position by exposing inaccuracies in the work of linguists who were quick to give assurance that there were no African
survivals among black Americans. Only with the work of Mervyn Alleyne and other sociolinguists did we begin to get a clearer picture
of the African contribution to English. Alleyne particularly demonstrated continuity in the West Indies. Earlier, Ambros Gonzales, like many
white American linguists, misunderstood the Gullah language and arrived at the wrong conclusion. In 1922 he cited a list of words that were
purported to be of African origin. Most of the words are either English words misspelled or African words interpreted as English words that
blacks could not pronounce. Gonzales was thoroughly confused about what he was studying, as Turner pointed out: Many other words in
Gonzales’ glossary which, because of his lack of acquaintance with the vocabulary of certain African languages, he interprets as English, are in
reality African words. Among other Gullah words which he or other American writers have interpreted as English, but which are African, are the
Mende suwangc, to be proud (explained by Gonzales as a corruption of the English swagger): the Wolof lir, small (taken by Gonzales to be an
abbreviated form of the English little, in spite of the fact that the Gullah also uses little when he wishes to): the Wolof benj, tooth (explained by
the Americans as a corruption of bone): The Twi fa, to take (explained by Americans as a corruption of the English for)…. The point made by
Turner is that white American linguists refused to consider the possibility that blacks used African words in their
vocabularies. In fact, the evidence demonstrates that whites unfamiliar with either African languages or Gullah made
expansive generalizations that tended to support their preconceived motions about black speech habits. Writing in the
American Mercury in 1924, George Krapp said that “it is reasonably safe to say that not a single detail of Negro
pronunciation or Negro syntax can be proved to have other than English origins.” Other writers who voiced nearly
the same judgment regarding the presence of African survivals in black American speech supported the notion of an
absolute break with African culture. It was inconceivable to them that either phonological, morphological, or
semantic interference could have existed where Africans retained their language behavior in connection with
English.
The survival of African religion also disproves the idea that black culture has no
ontological reach since it was a key element of slave uprisings and revolts.
Mulira 1990 [Jessie Gaston, Associate Professor of History and Ethnic Studies at CSU Sacramento, “The Case of Voodoo in New
Orleans,” Africanisms in American Culture ed. by Joseph E. Holloway p. 37]
It is more difficult to measure and evaluate the persistence of African culture elsewhere, especially in the United States, outside the core areas of
New Orleans and the Sea Islands. In many “pocket areas” in the southern states and in cities and towns through the United States,
remnants of African culture abound: in language patterns and vocabulary, in literature, in techniques of storytelling, in
folktales such as Breb Rabbit and Tar Baby, in music and dance forms, singing, and rhythm, in foods, and in ways of eating
certain foods. The extended-family concept and respect for elders in many rural areas were African transplants. Africanisms are of course most
prevalent among black southerners because the South was the heart of the slavery system in the United States. These people took their traditions
outside the South once they migrated. The most dominant and intact African survival in the black diaspora has proved to be
the religion voodoo. The survival of African religious and magical systems is directly linked to their importance in
everyday life. In addition, their ability to accommodate and be associated with various facets of other established religions strengthened their
chances of survival. Ancient deities in the African pantheon were often given Catholic saints’ names. The most tenacious African religious
retentions in the United States are found where Catholicism has been particularly strong, including New Orleans. By appealing to traditional
deities and mystical forces, the slaves were able to keep alive their link with Africa. During the early stages of slavery the link was reinforced by
voodoo priests and root doctors who continued to be represented among the newly arrived slaves. The priests in particular led the crusade for the
survival of their religious practices by identifying African deities with Catholic saints in Haiti and Brazil. And African concepts of good and evil
found counterparts in the Christians’ belief in heaven and hell and Christ and Satan. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the root doctors
have been more visible in practicing their craft than the priests. From its beginning, voodoo encompassed certain elements such as divination,
manipulation, and herbalism that gave it the appearance of a magical rather than a religious system. In the early days of slavery, magic was often
the strongest element because of the suppression of voodoo as a religion by the authorities and slave owners. These antivoodooists managed to
limit the number of voodoo meetings among slaves, but they found it impossible to stop the making of voodoo and hoodoo objects in the slaves’
cabins. (Hoodoo is the negative component of voodoo.) Magic helped the slaves to cope with their daily situations, to win the
affection of the ones they desired, to cause harm to their enemies, and to feel protected from harm themselves. Its main value was and
continues to be psychological. Magic is intimately related to voodoo, as it is to most religions, but is not its essence. Voodoo contains
some elements of magic, and magic receives much of its strength from the voodoo deities and rituals. African religious and magical
systems also survived because of the organizational role they played in slave revolts throughout the New World but
particularly in Haiti and Brazil. Revolutionary protest appears to have been engraved in voodoo upon its arrival in the
Americas. Revolts in the early period of slavery were largely the work of African priests and medicine men. In
conducting insurrectional meetings disguised as religious ceremonies, voodoo leaders often promised the gods’
support for any rebellion the slaves decided to engage in. The assurance of supernatural support to both leaders and
followers and the priests’ promise that the ancestors were aiding the struggle for freedom gave the slaves the necessary
inspiration, courage, and determination. Various charms, gris-gris, potions, and small parcels containing bits of paper, bones, or potions
hung around the necks of the fighting men provided protection and good luck by warding off bullets. The slave insurrection in New
York in 1712 was led by a conjurer who convinced the fighters they were invulnerable. A leader in the 1822 insurrection in
North Carolina, “Gullah Jack,” also was a conjurer and root doctor; his charms, chiefly of animal claws, were designed to make the
insurrectionists invulnerable. Voodoo priests also helped suicide victims by telling them what to do to ensure their return after death to their
homeland in Africa.
Culture is an indispensable resource for collective struggle against anti-black oppression
that posits blackness as absent of culture and identity. Identifying a usable past is the raw
material for the creative self-making and in turn self-determination of Afro-Diasporic
peoples that exists as a transnational architecture for effective combat against global white
supremacy. Identification with African culture is the best means of scaffolding rhetorical
devices and points of affinity and solidarity that translate into actual social mobilization
and change.
Singh 2004 [Simboonath, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, “Resistance, Essentialism, and
Empowerment in Black Nationalist Discourse in the African Diaspora: A Comparison of the Back to Africa, Black Power, and Rastafari
Movements,” Journal of African American Studies, Vol. 8, No. 3]
The resurgence of black consciousness and pride in the Caribbean a la the Rastafari and Black Power movements illustrates the power of activism
to inspire individual and collective ethnic pride and consciousness. The construction and reconstruction of history and culture to
redefine the meaning of ethnicity is an important aspect of ethnic movements. All three movements initiated a
cultural reconstruction process by substituting dominant oppressive symbols (colonialism, domination, exploitation,
subjugation, and European cultural imperialism and hegemony) for more positive and liberating African symbols. This cultural
inversion marked an important departure from the acculturation approach , in that both the Rastafari and the Black Power
advocates attempted to reverse the dominant structure that has characterized the Caribbean region--one based on colonial dominance and control,
resistance to slavery, indenture ship, and plantation society--to an emphasis on the positive and resilient character of the oppressed, i.e. the
descendants of former slaves, namely, Afro-Caribbean peoples. The centrality of black diasporic culture in all of the movements points to the
relevance of historical struggles in shaping and reshaping identities. Black diasporic culture, then, is concerned with struggles to be different. An
awareness of shared histories of enslavement, racist subordination, cultural survival, resistance and political rebellion is the core of the black
Diaspora (Clifford, 1994). The term Diaspora encompasses not only notions of transnationality and movement, but political struggles aimed at
defining self and community in historical contexts of displacement. Diasporic cultures with their emphasis on displacement and a desire to return
to an original homeland, be it real or symbolic, can be placed in the context of the Rastafari, Black Power, and Back to Africa movements. By
recasting the cultural material of the past in innovative ways, ethnic movements reforge their own culture and
history and, as a result, reinvent themselves (Nagel, 1994). In constructing an ethnic identity, a look backward in time, or what Dag
Blanck (1989) calls a "usable past," acts as an essential ingredient in the identity creation process. Anthony Cohen (1985, p.
99) writes, "in constructing culture the past is a resource used by groups in the collective quest for meaning and
community." Rick Fantasia (1988) describes a "culture of solidarity" that arises out of activism. "'Culture of solidarity" is defined as the
emergence of a collective consciousness and shared meanings that result from participating in collective action. From this perspective, it can be
argued that ethnic movements are the embodiments of cultures of solidarity because they challenge negative
hegemonic images and institutions by: (i) redefining the meaning of ethnicity in appealing ways; and (ii) using
cultural symbols to effectively dramatize grievances and demands (Nagel, 1994, p. 166). Ethnic groups engage in the
construction of culture by using particular aspects of their culture and history in order to create common meanings,
build solidarity and ultimately launch social movements. Joane Nagel's (1994, p. 164) shopping cart metaphor to describe the
dynamic character of ethnic culture is instructive here: "we construct culture by picking and choosing items from the shelves of the past and
present." Culture and history, therefore, are essential aspects of ethnicity, and in the context of social movements they
have been specifically employed as mobilization strategies to redefine and reconstruct identity and culture. The
Rastafari, Back to Africa, and Black Power movements used culture and history to define a common purpose, create
common meanings, build ethnic solidarity, and lay claims to self-determination. The manipulation of ethnic symbols, culture
and history in these movements supports the idea that culture, ethnic identity and customs are not "fixed." Indeed, the black cultural nationalists
and Black Arts proponents, in conceding that blacks were assimilated enough to engage in acts of self-hatred, such as modifying their looks to
conform to white standards, were implicitly acknowledging that black culture in the Diaspora was essentially hybrid (Robinson, 2001). In other
words, the idea that identity and culture are fixed and natural phenomena is a romantic and essentialist conception. Hybridity, then, becomes a
remedy for essentialist subjectivity (Hall, 1994). Cultural renewal and transformations are, therefore, important aspects of ethnic movements.
Activists use cultural icons, imagery, symbols and claims as part of the mobilization process (Nagel, 1994, p.165). David Snow et
al. (1986) contend that social movement activists utilize culture such as specific types of rhetorical devices, and cultural themes and
cultural discourses as a way of recruiting members, gaining political currency and achieving movement goals . Similarly
(Gamson, 1988) illustrates the relationship between culture and ethnic mobilization by showing how cultural symbols and themes are used to
serve movement ends. Protest, therefore, becomes a crucible of culture. These movements created a New World nationalist consciousness in
which notions of "Africa," "black ethnicity," "black pride," and "black nationalism," instilled a strong sense of deep cultural resonance among
diasporic Africans. By subscribing to the idealization of Africa perspective in which Africa represents a symbol of identity and home, the
Rastafari, Garvey, and Black Power movements represent a symbolic confrontation of the status quo in their respective societies (Chevannes,
1998). This was expressed in the symbols they employed: religion, dress, hair, drugs and music. Both movements represented symbolic attempts
at restructuring reality--an ideal concept of reality in which social change and social action were manifested in more symbolic rather than
concrete forms.