AFF
RECONCEPTUALIZING RACE GOOD
THE 1AC’S RECONCEPTUALIZATION OF RACE IS NECESSARY TO REPRESS STATIC
NOTIONS OF BEING
RAI 12
/2012, Amit Rai is a Professor of Communication @ Stanford, Race and Ontologies of Sensation,
googlebooks, spark/
Note: this card is from Chapter 13 of Arun Saldanha and Jason Michael Adams’ book called Deleuze and
Race – Race and Ontologies of Sensation = name of that chapter
In his provocative analysis of the intersection between ecological philosophy and cognitive science, Andy Clark, in
Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment Action and Cognitive Extension, argues that an important characteristic of embodied,
embedded cognition may be called the Principle of Ecological Assembly (PEA). ‘According to the PEA, the canny cognizer
tends to recruit, on the spot, whatever mix of problemsolving resources will yield an acceptable result with a minimum of
effort’ (2008: 13; original italics). Intensive, autoreferential ecologies evolve slowly by correlating sensory, motor
and neural capabilities, and hence, after a threshold, reach a balance between the organismic bundle and
its ecological niche. Ecological assembly further complexifies
this tendency
of correlation by tracking a kind of near-instantaneous version of such
overall balance: the balanced use of a set of potentially highly heterogeneous resources
assembled on the spot to solve a given problem. ‘Ecological balance of this latter kind is what a flexible ecological
control system seeks to achieve’ (ibid.). What are the implications of Clark’s argument for an engagement with race and
virtual philosophy? In a recent posting (2011) on the blog Larval Subjects, Levi Bryant suggests that Clark’s arguments can
help transform social and political analysis. Bryant notes that Clark’s extended mind hypothesis has a number of
implications for ‘feminist, racial, queer, and Marxist thought’. If it is true that mind is extended, he writes, then a
crucial part of understanding ‘race and gender will involve careful and nuanced investigation of the
worldly scaffolding that comes to structure race and gender’ . Bryant notes, moreover, that this also concerns
sexuality and its institutions. ground heteronormativity? What are the scaffoldings that ground patriarchy and male
privilege? These scaffoldings, additionally, should be seen as simultaneously channeling men and
women, queer and straight, white and brown, etc. If we don’t engage in object-oriented archaeologies of these
scaffoldings then we will be unable to develop universal-egalitarian political interventions that respond to them. What does
the practice of feeding back into worldly scaffoldings have to teach us about questions of race, sexuality, gender and class in
a Deleuzian ontology of becoming? In this chapter, drawing on examples from contemporary media assemblages in
India, I argue that forms of ‘racialisation’ (not a common concept in Indian sociological discourse, we should note)
must be approached through an affirmation of becoming in ecologies of sensation . My itinerary follows
an elaboration of affirmation in virtual philosophy and its implication for an ethical practice of race racing in the first
section, and a pragmatic definition of ecology and sensation in the second section. Throughout these two sections I offer
various speculative examples from contemporary art and filmic cultures in globalising India that actualise affects of
ecologies of sensation. The reason why Gilles Deleuze continues to exert a defining influence on contemporary thought is
because he made an affirmation of becoming. Throughout his work, Deleuze shows us that the first effort in the
process of such an affirmation is to diagram differential forces, senses and values of our
contemporary habits, bodily capacities and sensorimotor circuits: the processes of composing
multiplicities. This
immanent differentiation is the first affirmation. What is the
habits must include matter, memory,
durations, technologies, biomass and energies with which bodies form
open, far-from equilibrium assemblages, ecologies, planes of
immanence. To affirm by experimenting, then, with these immanent differentiations, would be
second? Deleuze pointed out that the diagram of our
to make an affirmation of becoming itself. This double affirmation sharply diverges from the mass
of current criticism of processes of racialisation, which remain, by and large, representational and
social-constructivist. For instance, in the work of Sarah Ahmed, the bodily dimension of affect is reduced to
the racist symptom that inhabits the psychic apparatus (2010: 143; for a very different take on similar
processes, see Puar 2007). On the contrary, it is our argument that racial becomings occur through correlated ,
functionally resonant characterised by gradients of intensity, force, sense and value (Thrift 2005).
To affirm becoming, we need a plan or diagram of intensity, not yet
another interpretation of representation, no matter how polysemic or
aporetic (Vitale 2011). By postrepresentational I do not mean that representation does not exist or
that it has been overcome. Rather, in a virtual ontology, representation (or signification) must be
situated as actualised (relatively congealed) forms of affectivity abstracted from the flow of bodilymachinic intensity – blocs of sensation, sensorimotor circuits – that is its plane of potentiality. It is
in this congealed form that affectivity becomes emotion, as Brian Massumi so persuasively argues (2002: 27).
Representation is itself material, in so far as perception emerges from
material forces, spectrums of light, tactile frissons, muscle memory,
sensorimotor habituations and neuronal fluxes. In other words, representation
is involved / evolved in the dynamic affective charges of the body’s affordances; representational
and postrepresentational do not form a binary because representation is already embodied in
affection-images. In contemporary cultural critique, the postrepresentational and the representational are usually only
contrasting methods of thought. But affection-images are preindividual and intensive. Second, by diagram I
mean something like a ‘plan’ in the sense of an intersection of vectors, or processes of composition, which suggests that
diagrammatic thought pursue ethical experimentations with sensation (Deleuze 1988: 122–8; I return to this below).
Thought is diagrammatic to the extent that its concepts attain an affective intensity, or what amounts to the same thing, an
ethical validity. Thus, the
critique of the critique of racism is multiply
affirmative in so far as it accomplishes at least three things through its
procedures. The first is to bring into a diagrammatics of race the specific embodied , qualitative
differences that give to race its immanent, durational, intensive variability across and within
populations: to push, in other words, the critique of race toward a thought of race racing (the being of
race’s speedily becoming) as both qualified and qualifying, that is, as a virtual multiplicity (Ansell
Pearson 2002). This would enable a topology and typology of the will to power as a virtual force, real but not actual. Deleuze
writes in Nietzsche and Philosophy: what does ‘the will to power manifests itself’ mean? The relationship between forces in
each case is determined to the extent that each force is affected by other, inferior or superior, forces. It follows that will to
power is manifested as a capacity for being affected. This capacity is not an parts, and they are immanent to the interaction
of those parts (DeLanda 2010; Clark 2008). On the other hand, this capacity is not a physical passivity; the only passive
affects are those not adequately caused by the given body (Deleuze 2006: 61–2). We must carefully consider
Deleuze’s different conceptions of affect and affection, something that
is relegated in the too-quick assimilation of affect to emotion or even to
sentiment in some contemporary criticism (Colman 2010: 12; Massumi 2002: 27). In his
wide-ranging engagement with Baruch Spinoza, Deleuze notes that affections are ‘that which happens to the
mode [what we have been referring to as an intensive multiplicity], the modifications of the mode, the effects of other
modes on it’ (1988: 48). As I hinted above, Deleuze gives a definition of these modifications that involves us
in thinking about representation in a materialist, affective manner. As modifications of the mode,
affections are images or ‘corporeal traces’, and their ideas involve both the nature of the affected
body and that of the affecting external body. Deleuze quotes Spinoza thus: ‘The affections of the human body
whose ideas present external bodies as present in us, we shall call images of things . . . And when the mind regards bodies in
this way, we shall say that it imagines’ (1988: 48). These
image-affections or ideas affect, in
turn, the state of the body, pushing it along gradients of intensity,
strengthening or decomposing its capacities to affect and be affected:
from one state to another, from one image or idea to another, there are transitions, passages that
are experienced, durations through which we pass to a greater or a lesser perfection . Furthermore,
these states, these affections, images or ideas are not separable from the duration that attaches
them to the preceding state and makes them tend toward the next state . These continual durations
or variations of perfection are called ‘affects’, or feelings (affectus). (Deleuze 1988: 48–9)
FACIALITY LEADS TO VIOLENCE
SALDANHA ‘7 /Arun, Associate Professor, Department of Geography, Environment, and Society,
University of Minnesota and Senior Lecturer of Social Sustainability at Lancaster Environment Centre,
Lancaster University, Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race, Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, pg.194-196/
My disagreement is not with Fanon’s and Martín Alcoff’s insistence on embodiment and emotion, but with their
reliance on a Hegelian notion of recognition to explain encounter. Because of this they tend to treat white
and nonwhite not only as a dyad, but as almost naturally opposed entities. There is, then, little attention
paid to the complicated processes whereby some racial formations become dominant, that is, how racial
formations emerge from material conditions and collective interactions, which greatly exceed the
spatiality of self versus other. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of faciality is not based on an intersubjective
dialectics enlarged to world-historical scope. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari strongly distance themselves from
phenomenology and psychoanalysis. First of all, for them, it isn’t consciousness but an abstract machine of faciality
that arranges bodies into relations of power. And second, faciality constantly invents new faces to capture
deviant bodies, multiplying possible positions far beyond any binaries such as black/white (though
binarization can be an important effect). That is precisely its strength. There are thousands of encounters, thousands of
trains. Deleuze and Guattari believe faciality’s imperialism arose with institutional Christianity. Being imposed in lands
populated by different phenotypes, faciality became a matter of imperialist racialization . That faciality
originated in Renaissance humanism and depictions of Jesus seems a plausible if one-sided interpretation. It is less relevant than Deleuze and Guattari’s unusual theory of contemporary
racism: If the face is in fact Christ, in other words, your average ordinary White Man, then the first deviances, the first divergencetypes, are racial: yellow man, black man, men in the second or third category. They are also inscribed on the [white] wall [of
signification], distributed by the [black] hole [of subjectivity ]. They must be Christianized, in other words,
facialized. European racism as the white man’s claim has never operated by exclusion, or by the
designation of someone as Other: it is instead in primitive societies that the stranger is grasped as an “other.” Racism operates by the
determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face, which endeavors to integrate
nonconforming traits into increasingly eccentric and backward waves, sometimes tolerating them at given places
under given conditions, in a given ghetto, sometimes erasing them from the wall, which never abides alterity (it’s a Jew, it’s an
Arab, it’s a Negro, it’s a lunatic...). From the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior, there are no people
on the outside. There are only people who should be like us and whose crime it is not to be.5 For Anjuna’s psy-trance
parties, there were “no people on the outside.” Locals, domestic tourists, charter tourists, and beggars would join the white Goa freaks on the dance floor, sometimes even in Nine Bar. In fact, as with the United
the faciality machine
would place all bodies in relation to the Goa freak standard, both spatiotemporally and subjectively, measuring
their acceptability through increasingly meticulous signs : sociochemical monitoring, scene savviness, chillum circles, sexual attractiveness. Many nonfreaks
felt uneasy being pigeonholed like this—especially domestic tourists, who would retreat to the darker corners. The result was viscosity, bodies temporarily becoming
impenetrable—more or less. It would seem to me that to understand the intricate hierarchies of racism, a framework that
allows for gradual and multidimensional deviances is preferable to a dialectical model. Faciality also
explains why after colonialism, with television and tourism, there is scarcely place left for any “dark others.” Everyone is
included; everyone is facialized. At the same time, Euro-American ways of life continue to spread, and
White Man (Elvis Presley, Sylvester Stallone, David Beckham) remains the global standard against which all other faces are forced
to compete. What this account of racism has in common with the Fanonian is that whiteness is the norm,
even in our “post”-colonial era. Where it differs, however, is that deviance is based not on lack of recognition or negation or
annihilation of the other, but on subtle machinic differentiations and territorializations. The virtual
structures behind racial formations don’t look like formal logic (a/not-a); they continually differentiate as
actual bodies interact and aggregate. Racism, then, can’t be countered with a Hegelian sublation into the
universal.
Colors of Benetton, it will be remembered that the rhetoric of PLUR demonstrated faciality’s inclusiveness—the parties were supposed to be open to all. But immediately,
AFFIRM THE MULTIPLICITY OF IDENTITY
SALDANHA ‘6 /Arun, Associate Professor, Department of Geography, Environment, and Society,
University of Minnesota and Senior Lecturer of Social Sustainability at Lancaster Environment Centre,
Lancaster University, “Reontologising race: the machinic geography of phenotype”, Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space 2006, volume 24, pages 9-24, DOI:10.1068/d61j/
Every time phenotype makes another machinic connection, there is a stutter. Every time bodies are
further entrenched in segregation, however brutal, there needs to be an affective investment of
some sort. This is the ruptural moment in which to intervene. Race should not be eliminated, but
proliferated, its many energies directed at multiplying racial differences so as to render them
joyfully cacophonic. Many in American critical race theory also argue against a utopian transcendence of race, taking from W E B Du Bois and pragmatism a reflexive, sometimes
strategically nationalist attitude towards racial embodiment (compare Outlaw, 1996; Shuford, 2001; Winant, 2004). What is needed is an affirmation of race's
creativity and virtuality: what race can be. Race need not be about order and oppression, it can be
wild, far-from-equilibrium, liberatory. It is not that everyone becomes completely Brownian (or brown!),
completely similar, or completely unique. It is just that white supremacism becomes strenuous as many populations
start harbouring a similar economic, technological, cultural productivity as whites do now, linking
all sorts of bodies with all sorts of wealth and all sorts of ways of life. That is, race exists in its true mode when it is no longer stifled
by racism. ``The race-tribe exists only at the level of an oppressed race, and in the name of the oppression
it suffers; there is no race but inferior, minoritarian; there is no dominant race; a race is defined not
by its purity but rather by the impurity conferred upon it by a system of domination. Bastard and
mixed-blood are the true names of race” (Deleuze and Guattari, [1980] 1987, page 379). In ``A thousand tiny sexes'', Grosz (1994b) follows a well-known
passage of Deleuze and Guattari to argue for non-Hegelian, indeed protohuman feminism that utilises lines of flight of the gender assemblage to combat
heterosexist patriarchy. ``If we consider the great binary aggregates, such as the sexes or classes, it is evident that they also cross over into molecular assemblages of a different nature, and that there
is a double reciprocal dependency between them. For the two sexes imply a multiplicity of molecular combinations bringing into play not only the man in the woman and the woman in the man, but
the molecularisation of race would
consist in its breaking up into a thousand tiny races. It is from here that cosmopolitanism should
start: the pleasure, curiosity, and concern in encountering a multiplicity of corporeal fragments
outside of common-sense taxonomies. ``We walk the streets among hundreds of people whose patterns of lips, breasts, and genital organs we divine; they seem
the relation of each to the animal, the plant, etc.: a thousand tiny sexes'' (Deleuze and Guattari, [1980] 1987, page 213). Similarly,
to us equivalent and interchangeable. Then something snares our attention: a dimple speckled with freckles on the cheek of a woman; a steel choker around the throat of a man in a business suit; a
gold ring in the punctured nipple on the hard chest of a deliveryman; a big raw fist in the delicate hand of a schoolgirl; a live python coiled about the neck of a lean, lanky adolescent with coal-black
Machinism against racism builds upon a gradual,
fragmented, and shifting sense of corporeal difference, that of course extends far further than the
street. Responsibility, activism, and antiracist policy will follow only from feeling and
understanding the geographical differentials that exist between many different kinds of bodies:
between a Jew and a black soldier, between a woman in the Sahel and a woman in Wall Street,
between a Peruvian peasant and a Chinese journalist. A machinic politics of race takes into account
the real barriers to mobility and imagination that exist in different places; cosmopolitanism has to
be invented, not imposed. It may seem that machinism is as utopian and open ended as Gilroy's transcendent antiracism. It is
not, because it is empirical, immanent, and pragmatic. The machinic geography of phenotype shows that
racism differs from place to place, and cannot be overcome in any simple way. It shows that white
supremacy can subside only by changing the rules of education, or the financial sector, or the arms
trade, or the pharmaceutical industry, or whatever. For machinic politics, the cultural studies
preoccupations with apology, recognition, politically correct language and reconsiliation, or else
cultural hybridity, pastiche, and ambivalence, threaten to stand in the way of really doing
something about the global structures of racism. A thousand tiny races can be made only if it is
acknowledged that racism is a material, inclusive series of events, a viscous geography which
cannot be `signified away'. Miscegenation, openness to strangers, exoticism in art, and experimentations with whiteness can certainly help. But ultimately cosmpolitanism
without critique and intervention remains complacent with its own comfortably mobile position. In a word, ethics encompasses politics, and politics
starts with convincing people of race's materiality Close With racism enduring every well-meant attack (it's arbitrary! it's arbitrary!), it seems crucial
for the humanities and social sciences to start engaging with the reality of phenotype phenotype itself, unmediated, in all of its connective glory.
skin. Signs of clandestine disorder in the uniformed and coded crowds'' (Lingis, 2000, page 142).
Following recent turns towards embodiment and materiality, the mediation model as endorsed by Butler and many in race and ethnic studies becomes inadequate to understand processes of
Race is not only a problem of how people think about skin colour. We need to know what
race really is, that is, what it can be. Deontologising race, as Gilroy wishes to do, even if possible, seems a bad option if all the ontological questions are left to
reductionist sociobiologists and far-right politicians to answer. As Haraway's writings attest, social scientists and cultural theorists cannot let multinationals
and the sensationalist science press `do' all the biology. There is simply too much at stake to continue brushing aside the biological as
racialisation.
`discursive practice'. Haraway's project, like Latour's, nonetheless remains too epistemological (science studies). With the profusion of popular science books and television programmes on `human
nature', and this in conjunction with growing xenophobia, the public sphere is craving for critical social science interventions addressing these issues, not as mate- rial ^ semiotic constructions, but as
Race is completely contingent, but not arbitrary: in hindsight, its
differentiations and inequalities can be explained (Winant, 2004). A process such as race clearly cannot be
studied with classical notions of identity, causality, cogito, representation, and reducibility. As a
configuration made viscous by a whole host of processes, race requires genetics and ethnography and economics and literary
theory to be understood. And a critical dialogue between the humanities and the physical sciences will be greatly facilitated by the
nonmodern ontology of complexity theory. I discussed several entry points into such a pluralist ontological understanding of race. One is the phenomenology
debatable empirical, political and philosophical findings.
of race, provided it keeps the focus on embodied, social interaction, in which an ethics of responsibility follows from sensing the inten- sities between oneself and others, however distant. Another is
the political appraisal of difference in corporeal feminism. Anthropology is a third entry point, at least if eased from the epistemological and imperialist straightjackets of modernity. Biology, as
Deleuze's metaphysics of difference and
repetition, finally, gives philosophical valence to the scientific project of understanding the emergence
of race and the political project of striving for the freedom of more bodies . Race shows the openness
of the body, the way organisms connect to their environment and establish uneven relationships
amongst each other. The creativity of nature is not good in itself, but it can be made good. The
molecular energies of race can be sensed, understood, and harnessed to crumble the systemic
violence currently keeping bodies in place. Hoping for, striving for a thousand tiny races is not
annihilating nature from culture, but on the contrary, immersing oneself in nature's lines of flight.
This politics is also not mystical or anarchistic, it is pragmatic and includes state policy as well as what Deleuze and Guattari call micropolitics. It is first of all
empirical: understand what race is, know its potentialities, try to sense them hidi
inaugurated by Darwin, is a contextuall and nuanced way of understanding the intrinsic vitality of matter.
THE AFF’S NON-UNITARY SUBJECTIVITY CREATES THE CONDITIONS OF POSSIBILITY FOR
INTERCONNECTION WITH NON-HUMAN OTHERS. THE ALTERNATIVE SHIFTS OUR
PERSPECTIVE BUT NOT THE CARTOGRAPHY.
BRADIOTTI, Humanities, Utrecht, 2005 (Rosi, Rhizomes » Issue 11/12 (Fall 2005/Spring 2006))
A non-unitary vision of the subject endorses a radical ethics of transformation, thus running against the grain
of contemporary neo-liberal conservatism, but it also asserts an equally strong distance from relativism or
nihilistic defeatism. The posthumanist ethics I want to defend aims at a qualitative shift, not at quantitative cumulation of possible subject-positions. A sustainable ethics
for a non-unitary subject proposes an enlarged sense of inter-connection between self and others,
including the non-human or 'earth' others, by removing the obstacle of self-centred individualism. Far from
entailing the loss of values and a free fall into relativism, this rather implies a new way of combining self-interests with the well being
of an enlarged sense of community, which includes one's territorial or environmental inter-connections. It
is a nomadic eco-philosophy of multiple belongings. In this perspective, an exclusive focus on unitary identity, especially in the liberal tradition of individualism
[36]
and in its off-shoot: the pluralistic multiplication of options, is of hindrance rather than assistance. Identity involves a narrowing down of the internal complexities of a subject for the sake of social conventions. A
multi-layered subject is no guarantee that molar power formations have been de-territorialized: a change of scale may not be a qualitative shift. Transposing the subject out of identity politics into a non-unitary or
Consciousness is redefined accordingly not as the core of the
humanistic subject, but at best as a way of synchronising the multiple differences within each and
everyone, which constitutes the ethical core of nomadic subjects. The return of the master-narratives of genetic determinism and
market capitalism today provide a perverse equation of individualism with the multiple inter-connective
capacities of advanced technologies. This results in simultaneously containing and narrowing down the
enormous potential of the technologies themselves, which are advanced enough to redesign our
cosmological views as well as social relations. They also prevent humans from active experimentations
with new thresholds of sustainability: how far we can go without cracking, how much our bodies can take on the current transformations. [37] A subject of bios-zoe power
nomadic vision of selves as inter-relational forces is a more useful approach.
raises therefore questions of ethical urgency. Given the acceleration of processes of change, how can we tell the difference among the different flows of changes and transformations? This calls for a revision of the
The shift to bio-centred egalitarianism posits the subject as a postidentity site, or an embodied and embedded entity, which exists in the interaction with a number of
external forces and others, not all of them human, social or historical others. Such a vision of the subject transposes both humanism and
subject in terms of an eco-philosophical integration into his/her environment.
social constructivism and calls for a revision of vitalism as a major theoretical issue. All the more so as zoe is not neutral: the play of complexities it introduces does not eliminate power differentials, but multiplies
them along multiple axes. Zoe is sexualised, racialised and rendered anthropocentrically. Thinking through these complexities means radicalising our relationship to power. The nomadic social critic in the era
Before we mistake a shift of scale for a
qualitative shift of perspective, we need to develop more accurate cartographies, to stay focused on the
potential for qualitative changes (becoming-minor), not just quantitative proliferations. In order to
answer these challenges, the specific time-sequences and temporality of nomadic subjectivity need to be
accounted for.
of bios-zoe aims at resisting the schizoid pull of euphoria or over-optimism on the one hand and nostalgia or melancholia on the other.
--- ENVIRONMENT A/O
BECOMING IS NECESSARY IN SOLVING THE ENVIRONMENT
HANAFIN 14 /Patrick, Professor of Law at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. He has been a
visiting professor at the School of Law at the University of Porto, Portugal, and at the Law Faculty at the
University of Pretoria in South Africa. He has held research fellowships at the European University
Institute in Florence and at the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School, The Subject of Rosi
Braidotti, pp. 214-220
In this chapter I examine the potential of Rosi Braidotti’s work for a rethinking of the relationship between norm and life. In doing so, I proffer the possibility of a
micropolitics of posthuman rights that subverts the majoritarian model of
human rights, figured as a certain kind of thinking of the human (constructed as a white neoliberal
male). Such a contestatory micropolitics of rights is one that is practiced by embodied beings who act to
reshape their position in relation to both law and biopower. In Braidotti’s thought, the figuration of an active citizen
can be seen in the multiple locations of the struggles of social movements from feminism to
environmentalism. In locating her rethinking of subjectivity and ethics in actually existing political struggles, she engages in a conceptual move from the “what” that she would term the
transcendental arrogance of the subject, to the “who” of the complex singularities of the transversal subject. As Braidotti observes: The kind of “self” that is “styled” in and through such a process is... an embedded
and embodied set of interrelations, constituted in and by the immanence of his or her expressions, acts and interactions with others and held together by the powers of remembrance: by continuity in time.
Braidotti, in other words, is engaged in a project of rethinking the political in a manner that gives
body to each unique individual in order to undo the conceptual default setting of political subjectivity as the
disembodied transcendent subject. In this conceptual remapping of the subject, we witness an active refusal of disembodiment. This is a politics
and ethics of becoming something other than how we are defined by the biopolitical order. Braidotti’s
thinking of a differential “we” rather than a possessive individualist “I” assists us in dismantling the
imposed “what” of the masculine subject of rights. This hegemonic model is informed by a vision of social
relations that valorizes male power and neoliberal capitalist social organization. Braidotti’s project
presents us with a means of transforming the political order through the critical
refusals of social movements and resistant individuals. This is an intriguing intervention in debates on biopolitics and allows
us to think of a micropolitics of life as zoe (as material embodied singularity) that contests the ordering molarpolitics of Life
as bios, (understood as transcendental and always already male). This micropolitical encounter with the law undoes the imposition of a
biopolitical ordering on individuals and allows them, through their own continuous intervention in the
domains of law and politics, to perform an active and contestatory form of citizenship, which leads to “a
dispersed and active process of reordering—indeed, reconstituting—knowledge and society” (Jasanoff 2011, p. 290).
From human rights to posthuman rights Braidotti’s work allows us to think human rights differently, this time as posthuman rights, a
praxis of relations between singular embodied beings, engaged in a project of transforming communities
from below. In her book Transpositions (2006g), Braidotti critiques Peter Singer’s utilitarian liberal model of animal rights. This critique
allows us to open up a minoritarian thinking of rights as posthuman. In her argument, she notes that Singers model of
animal rights is tantamount to a becoming-human of animals (Braidotti 2006g, p. 107). According to Braidotti, Singer’s
model contains the same flaws as those of the traditional liberal model of rights as applied to humans,
that is, it is a majoritarian model of rights informed by a notion of social relations that valorizes male
power and capitalist social organization. In such a model, animals can hope to have rights only if they
become human or almost human. This becoming human of animals fails to recognize the singularity of animals as
such, just as the liberal rights model, more generally, fails to see the singularity and differential nature of human beings. Thus, in order to be included within the
protective clothing of liberal rights protection, one must first divest oneself of one’s singularity and become
human, where human is figured as the abstract and always already male subject. The alternative model
proposed by Braidotti is premised on philosophical nomadism and holds that “no qualitative becoming
can be generated by or at the center, or in a dominant position. Man is a dead static core of ego-indexed negativity” (Braidotti
2006g, p. 107). It is the becoming animal of the human, rather than the becoming human of animals that helps us
to move beyond the trap of making rights discourse another form of subjection under the guise of
emancipation. Braidotti’s model assists us in transforming the default setting of liberal rights
(Braidotti 2006, pp. 251-2)
discourse into a relational notion of rights that takes account of our relation to other citizens, animals, and the environment.
THIS POLITICS OF RADICAL AND VITAL AFFIRMATION IS NECESSARY TO INTERRUPT THE
CONTEMPORARY NECRO-POLITICAL CONDITION THAT MAKES EXTINCTION THROUGH
ECOLOGICAL CATASTROPHE INEVITABLE.
BRAIDOTTI 13 (Rosi, holds Italian and Australian citizenship, was born in Italy and grew up in
Australia, where she received degrees from the Australian National University in Canberra in 1977 and
was awarded the University Medal in Philosophy and the University Tillyard prize. Braidotti then moved
on to do her doctoral work at the Sorbonne, where she received her degree in philosophy in 1981. She has
taught at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands since 1988, when she was appointed as the
founding professor in women's studies.[1] In 1995 she became the founding Director of the Netherlands
research school of Women's Studies, a position she held till 2005. Braidotti is a pioneer in European
Women's Studies: she founded the inter-university SOCRATES network NOISE and the Thematic
Network for Women's Studies ATHENA, which she directed till 2005. She was a Leverhulme Trust
Visiting Professor at Birkbeck College in 2005-6; a Jean Monnet professor at the European University
Institute in Florence in 2002-3 and a fellow in the school of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced
Study in Princeton in 1994. Braidotti is currently Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University
and founding Director of the Centre for the Humanities, onored with a Royal Knighthood from Queen
Beatrix of the Netherlands; in August 2006 she received the University Medal from the University of Lodz
in Poland and she was awarded an Honorary Degree in Philosophy from Helsinki University in May 2007.
In 2009, she was elected Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Since 2009 she
is a board member of Consortium of Humanities Centre and Institutes, The Posthuman Malden: polity,
pg. 110-141
This chapter deals with the multi-layered issue of the inhuman by examining multiple modes of relation to death and dying. In an argument about life that
constitutes the perfect counterpart of the idea of zoe as a posthuman continuum , I propose to look more closely at
Thanatos, and to necro-politics, as a way of constructing an affirmative posthuman theory of death. I think that a
conceptual shift towards 'matter-realist' vitalism, grounded in ontological monism, can assist us in this project of rethinking
death and mortality in the contemporary bio-mediated context. Politically, we need to assess the advantages of the
politics of vital affirmation. Ethically, we need to re-locate compassion and care of both human and nonhuman others in this new frame. We saw in the previous chapter that the posthuman predicament understood as the biopolitical management of living matter is post-anthropocentric in character, raising the need for a Life/zoecentred approach. Now I want to go a step further and argue that posthuman vital politics shifts the boundaries between life and
death and consequently deals not only with the government of the living, but also with practices of dying .
Most of these are linked to inhuman(e) social and political phenomena such as poverty, famine and homelessness, which Zillah Eisenstein aptly labelled as 'global obscenities' (1998). Vandana Shiva (1997) stresses
bio-power has already turned into a form of 'biopiracy', which calls for very grounded and
concrete political analyses. Thus, the bodies of the empirical subjects who signify difference
(woman/native/earth or natural others) have become the disposable bodies of the global economy. Contemporary
capitalism is indeed 'bio-political' in that it aims at controlling all that lives, as Foucault argues, but because Life is not
the prerogative of humans only, it opens up a zoe-political or post-anthropocentric dimension. If anxiety
about extinction was common in the nuclear era, the posthuman condition, of the anthropocene,
extends the death horizon to most species. Yet there is a very important difference, as Chakrabarty points out: 'A nuclear
war would have been a conscious decision on the part of the powers that be. Climate change is an
unintended consequence of human actions as a species' (2009: 221 ). This not only inaugurates a negative or
reactive form of pan-human planetary bond, which recomposes humanity around a commonly shared
bond of vulnerability, but also connects the human to the fate of other species, as I argued in the previous chapter. Death
and destruction are the common denominators for this transversal alliance. Let me give you some examples of
contemporary ways of dying to illustrate this political economy. The posthuman aspects of globalization encompass many phenomena that, while not being a priori
inhumane, still trigger signiflcant destructive aspects . The postsecular condition, with the rise of religious extremism in a variety
of forms, including Christian fundamentalism, entails a political regression of the rights of women, homosexuals and all sexual minorities.
Significant signs of this regression arc the decline in reproductive rights and the rise of violence against women and GLBT people. The effect of global financial networks and unchecked hedge
funds has been an increase in poverty, especially among youth and women, affected by the disparity in access to the new technologies. The status of children is a
chapter apart; from forced labour, to the child-soldier phenomenon, childhood has been violently inserted in infernal cycles of exploitation . Bodily politics has
the extent to which
the proliferation of pandemics like
SARS, Ebola, HIV, birdflu and others, more familiar epidemics have also returned, notably malaria and tuberculosis, so much so that health has become a public policy issue as well as a
human rights concern. The point is that Life/zoe can be a threatening force, as well as a generative one . A great deal of health
and environmental concerns as well as geo-political issues, simply blur the distinction between life and death.
shifted, with the simultaneous emergence of cyborgs on the one hand and renewed forms of vulnerability on the other. Thus, next to
In the era of biogenetic capitalism and nature-culture continuum, zoe has become an infra-human force and all the attention is now drawn to the emergency of disappearing nature. For instance, the public
discourse about environmental catastrophes or 'natural' disasters – the Fukushima nuclear plant and the Japanese tsunami, the Australian bushfires, hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, etc. – accomplishes a
significant doublebind: it expresses a new ecological awareness, while re-inserting the distinction between nature and culture. As Protevi argues (2009), this results in the paradoxical re-naturalization of our bio-
geo-political forces are simultaneously re-naturalized and subjected to the old
hierarchical power relations determined by the dominant politics of the anthropomorphic subject. Public
discourse has become simultaneously moralistic about the inhuman forces of the environment and quite hypocritical in perpetuating
anthropocentric arrogance. This position results in the denial of the man-made structure of the catastrophes that we continue
technologically mediated environment. The
to attribute to forces beyond our collective control, like the earth, the cosmos or 'nature'. Our public morality is simply not up to the challenge of the scale an~ the complexity of damages engendered by our
technological advances. This gives rise to a double ethical urgencv: firstly, how to turn anxiety and the tendency to mou~n tl~e los: of the natural order into effective social and political action, and secondly, how to
ground such an action in the respo.nsib~l!ty for future generation, in the spirit of social sustamability that I have also explored elsewhere (Braidotti, 2006). Another significant case in point is the posthuman
digital umverse that I analysed in the previous chapter and which engenders its own inhuman variables. They arc best manifested by the proliferation of viruses, both computer-based and organic, some of which
transit from animals to humans an~ ?ack. Illness is clearly not only a prerogative of organic entitles, but includes a widespread practice of mutual contamination between organic matter – anthropomorphic or not
– and electronic circuitry. A rather complex symbiotic relationship has emerged in our cyber universe: a sort of mutual dependence between the f1esh and the machine. This engenders some significant paradoxes,
fantasies of escape via techno-transcendence, and it
promotes dreams of immortality and control over life and
death: 'And yet, such beliefs about the technological future "life" of the body are complemented by a palpable fear of death and
annihilation from uncontrollable and spectacular body-threats: antibiotic-resistant viruses, random contamination, flesh-eating bacteria' (Balsamo,
namely that the cor~ oreal site of subjectivity is simultaneously denied, in practices of human enhancement and in
is also re-enforced as increased vulnerability. Balsamo ( 1996) argues that digital technology
1996: 1-2). The inhuman forces of technology have moved into the body, intensifying the spectral reminders of the corpse-to-come. Our social imaginary has taken a forensic turn. Popular culture and the
infotainment industry are quick to pick up this contradictory trend that reflects the changing status of the demise of the human body, including illness, death and extinction. The corpse is not only a daily presence
m global media and journalistic news, but also an object of entertainment in contemporary popular culture, notably in the successful genre of forensic detectives. Culture and the arts have been very sensitive in
registering the rise in women who kill, as shown by the success of recent literary and stage renditions of classics like Hecuba and Medea. Not to mention, of course, the global appeal of sharp-shooting Lara Croft in
the world of computer games. The evolution of gender roles towards a more egalitarian participation by both sexes in the business of killing is one of the most problematic aspects of contemporary gender politics.
They can be summarized as the shift from the universal Human Rights stance of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, to the brutal interventionism of the Chechnya war widows, pregnant female suicide-bombers and
Spiritual death is part of the picture as well, if we take into account contemporary embodied social
practices that are often pathologized and never addressed fully, such as addictions, eating disorders and melancholia, burn-out and states of apathy and disaffection. I
propose not to simply classify these practices as self-destructive, but rather to see them as normatively neutral
manifestations of interaction with and resistance to the political economy of commodification of all that
lives. They exemplify the shifting social relations between living and dying in the era of the politics of 'life
itself'. The currency granted to both legal (Ritalin, Prozac) and illegal drugs in contemporary culture blurs the boundaries between self-destruction and fashionable behaviour and forces a
reconsideration of what is the value of 'life itself'. Last but not least, assisted suicide and euthanasia practices are
challenging the Law to rest on the tacit assumption of a self-evident value attributed to 'Life'. As is often the case,
advanced capitalism functions by schizoid or internally contradictory moves. Thus, a socially enforced ideology of fitness, health and
eternal youth goes hand in hand with increased social disparities in the provision of health care and in mortality
rates among infants and youth. The obsession with being 'forever young' works in tandem with and forms
the counterpart of social practices of euthanasia and assisted death. The moment one starts thinking about it,
multiple ways of dying, of inflicting death and suffering losses are proliferating around us. And yet, when it comes to
accounting for them, social theory tends to refer to this political economy as 'biopolitical. What does life (bios) have
to do with it, though? Bio-political analyses since Foucault have transformed the field and introduced more precise understandings of what is involved in the management of the living. Why is
not the same degree of analytical precision devoted to the analysis of the necro-political management of dying? Both
the quantity and the scale of the changes that have taken place in social and personal practices of dying, in
ways of killing and forms of extinction, as well as the creativity of mourning rituals and the necessity of
bereavement, are such as to support the expansion of the socio-cultural agenda. This includes the emergence of a new discursive
the growing role of women in the military 'Humanism' of 'humanitarian' wars.
domain. 'Death Studies' has become a new and much needed addition to the academic landscape, growing out of the 1970s counter-culture into a serious interdisciplinary area that includes moral and religious
discussions about mortality, but also research in social, policy and health issues as well as the very practical aspect of professional training.2 I shall return to this expansion of new 'studies' areas in chapter 4.
OTHER
Hegelian dialectics are always predicated on oppositional strategies which deny
affirmation
Braidotti ‘8 /Rosi, Distinguished Professor and Director of the Centre for Humanities at Utrecht
University and a visiting professor in the Law School of Birkbeck College, “In Spite of the Times: The
Postsecular Turn in Feminism Theory”, Culture & Society 2008 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi,
and Singapore), Vol. 25(6): 1–24 DOI: 10.1177/0263276408095542/
In the rest of this article I want to leave aside the cartographic mode and turn instead to a theoretical argument about the postsecular predicament as a practice of affirmation, instead of negativity, which
bears a close link to residual forms of spirituality. More specifically, I shall address and challenge the traditional equation between political subjectivity and critical oppositional consciousness and the
The legacy of
Hegelian-Marxist dialectics of consciousness is deep: critical theory banks on
negativity and in a perverse way even requires it. The assumption here is
that the same material and discursive conditions that create the negative
moment – the experience of oppression, marginality, injury or trauma –
are also the conditions of their overturning. Thus, the same conditions provide both the
reduction of both to negativity. This is important to the discussion about secularism because it casts a new light on the role of spirituality in social and critical theory.
material that damages and that which engenders positive resistance, counter-action or transcendence (Foucault, 1977 [1975]). What
triggers and at the same time is engendered by the process of resistance is oppositional consciousness.
Existentialist critical theory, working from a dialectical scheme, translated this process in terms of the shift from bad faith to authenticity. This has proved of capital
importance for feminist emancipation and liberation projects because it provides both a conceptual and an ethical
scheme to process the marks of exclusion and the legacy of marginalization, at both the macro and the
micro levels. The Althusserian critique of the imaginary role in ideology recasts this debate in terms of the political necessity to elaborate an adequate understanding and suitable
representation of our real-life conditions. The negative experience can be turned into the matter that critical theory has to engage with, and thus into the
productive source of counter-truths and values which aim at overthrowing the negative instance. This process is too often rendered in purely functional terms as the equation of political
creativity/agency with negativity, or unhappy consciousness. I want to suggest, however, that much is to be gained by adopting a non-Hegelian analysis
that foregrounds the creative or affirmative elements of this process. This shift of perspective assumes
philosophical monism and an ethical and affective component at the core of subjectivity; it is thus an antirationalist position. A subject’s ethical core is not his/her moral intentionality, as much as the effects of
the relations of power (as repressive – potestas – and positive – potentia) and hence also the potential for empowerment that
his/her actions are likely to have upon the world. It is a process of engendering empowering modes of
becoming (Deleuze, 1990 [1968]). Given that in this neo-vitalist view the ethical good is equated with radical relationality aiming at
affirmative empowerment, the ethical ideal is to increase one’s ability to enter into modes of relation with
multiple others. Oppositional consciousness and the political subjectivity or agency it engenders are processes or assemblages that actualize this
ethical urge. This position is postsecular in the sense that it actively works towards the creation of affirmative alternatives by working actively through the negative instance. What this means
practically is that the conditions for political and ethical agency are not dependent on the current state of the
terrain. They are not oppositional and thus not tied to the present by negation; instead they are
affirmative and geared to creating possible futures. Ethical relations create possible worlds by mobilizing
resources that have been left untapped, including our desires and imagination. They are the driving forces
that concretize in actual, material relations and can thus constitute a network, web or rhizome of
interconnection with others. Such a vision of the subject, moreover, does not restrict the ethical instance within
the limits of human otherness, but also opens it up to inter-relations with non-human,
posthuman and inhuman forces. The emphasis on non-human ethical relations can also be described as an eco-philosophy, in that it values one’s
reliance on the environment in the broadest sense of the term. Considering the extent of our technological development, emphasis on the eco-philosophical aspects is not to be mistaken for biological
determinism. It rather posits a nature–culture continuum (Guattari, 1995, 2000; Haraway, 1997) within which subjects cultivate and construct multiple ethical relations.3 The concepts of immanence and of
oppositional
consciousness is central to political subjectivity but it is not the same as negativity and that, as a
consequence, critical theory is about strategies of affirmation. Political subjectivity or agency therefore
consists of multiple micro-political practices of daily activism or interventions in and on the world we
inhabit for ourselves and for future generations. As Rich put it in her recent essays, the political activist has to think ‘in
spite of the times’ and hence ‘out of my time’, thus creating the analytics – the conditions of possibility – of the
future (2001: 159). Critical theory occurs somewhere between the no-longer and the not-yet, not looking for easy reassurances
neo-vital politics, which I discussed above, become relevant again here. This eco-philosophical dimension is essential to the postsecular turn. I have argued so far that
but for evidence that others are struggling with the same questions. Consequently, we are in this together. Conclusion: Out of My Time The kind of consciousness-raising required by a political subject in
neither self-evident, nor free of pain. In post-structuralist feminism, this process has also been discussed
dis-identification from experiences that may be negative, but also paradoxically familiar (Braidotti, 1994; De
Lauretis, 1987). This strategy of dis-identification is important to the making of a postsecular vision of subjectivity. Dis-identification involves the loss of habits of
thought and representation, which is liberating, but it can also produce fear, a sense of insecurity and nostalgia. Change is certainly a painful process, especially
order to actualize a radical repositioning of his/her position is
in terms of
changes that affect one’s sense of identity. Given that identifications constitute an inner scaffolding that support one’s sense of identity, shifting our collective imaginings (Gatens and Lloyd, 1999) is not as
simple as casting away a used garment. Psychoanalysis taught us that imaginary relocations are complex and as time-consuming as shedding an old skin. Moreover, changes of this qualitative kind
happen more easily at the molecular or subjective level, and their translation into a public discourse and shared social experiences is a complex and risk-ridden affair. All radical epistemologies have had
to confront this paradox. A discursive alliance across the different branches of radical critical theory is therefore a necessary move. This point is stressed by all the contributors to this Special Section. It
involves notably feminism, postcolonial and anti-racist theory, in line with globalization studies and the critique of war and the militarization of the social space. Let me give a series of concrete examples
of how this productive alliance on the issue of dis-identifications from dominant models of subjectformation can be affirmative. First of all, feminist theory is based on a radical dis-engagement from the
dominant institutions and representations of femininity and masculinity, to enter the process of becoming-minoritarian or of transforming gender. In so doing feminism combines critique with creation of
alternative ways of embodying and experiencing our sexualized selves. In spite of massive media battering and the marketing of political conservatism, there is no credible evidence among European
in race discourse, the awareness of the
persistence of racial discrimination and of white privilege has led to serious disruptions of our accepted
views of what constitutes a subject. This has resulted on the one hand in the critical reappraisal of
blackness (Gilroy, 2000; Hill Collins, 1991) and on the other in radical relocations of whiteness (Blaagaard, 2007, forthcoming; Griffin and Braidotti,
women of a nostalgic desire to return to traditional gender and sex roles. Some dis-identifications are here to stay. Second,
2002; Ware, 1992). Here, I want to refer to Edgar Morin’s (1987) account of how he relinquished Marxist cosmopolitanism to embrace a more ‘humble’ perspective as a European. This process includes
both positive and negative affects: disappointment with the unfulfilled promises of Marxism is matched by compassion for the uneasy, struggling and marginal position of post-war Europe squashed
between the USA and the USSR. This produces a renewed sense of care and accountability that leads Morin to embrace a post-nationalistic redefinition of Europe as the site of mediation and
transformation of it own history (Balibar, 2002). Beneficial or positive aspects balance the negative aspects of the process. The benefits are epistemological but extend beyond; they include a more
adequate cartography of our real-life conditions and hence less pathos-ridden accounts. This enhances the lucidity of our assessments and therefore clears the ground for more adequate and sustainable
relations. It also reiterates the point made before: that the emphasis commonly placed on the force of the negative is out of balance and needs to be reconsidered. The postsecular position on the
affirmative force of oppositional consciousness inevitably raises the question of faith in possible futures, which is one of the aspects of the residual spirituality I mentioned above. The system of feminist
civic values rests on a social constructivist notion of faith as the hope for the construction of alternative social horizons, new norms and values. Faith in progress itself is a vote of confidence in the future.
Ultimately, it is a belief in the perfectibility of Wo/Man, albeit it in a much more grounded, accountable mode that privileges partial perspectives, as Haraway (1988) put it. It is a postsecular position in
that it is an immanent, not transcendental theory, which posits generous bonds of cosmopolitanism, solidarity and community across locations and generations. It also expresses sizeable doses of residual
spirituality in its yearning for social justice and sustainability. In order to ground this statement, please consider the perverse temporality of our social system, with its obsession for the continuous present
Being nothing more than all-consuming entropic energy, capitalism is a future-eater (Flannery,
Lacking the ability to create anything new, it can merely promote the recycling of spent hopes,
repackaged in the rhetorical frame of the ‘next generation of gadgets’ . The construction of sustainable futures, to the contrary, is a social
project: it is a basic and rather humble act of faith in the possibility of endurance, as duration or continuity, which honours our obligation to the generations to come. Virtual futures
grow out of sustainable presents and vice versa. Transformative postsecular ethics takes on the future
affirmatively, as the shared collective imagining that endures in processes of becoming, to effect multiple
modes of interaction with heterogeneous others. Futurity is made of this non-linear evolution towards an
ethics that moves away from the paradigm of reciprocity and the logic of recognition, installing a rhizomic
relation of mutual affirmation and accountability. The social construction of social horizons of hope for
the future is a form of intergenerational justice which runs against the traditionally hierarchical and
oppositional ways in which we think about generational difference s. A concern for intergenerational decency is a way of displacing the Oedipal
hierarchy and of practising an ethics of non-reciprocity in the pursuit of affirming sustainable futures. My argument has shown that there is no logical necessity to link
political subjectivity to oppositional consciousness and reduce the latter to negativity. Critical theory can
be just as critical and more persuasively theoretical if it embraces philosophical monism and vital politics,
and disengages the process of consciousness-raising from the logic of negativity, connecting it instead to
creative affirmation. The corollary of this shift is twofold: first, it proves that political subjectivity or agency need not be aimed
solely at the production of radical counter-subjectivities. It is not a destructive oppositional strategy that
aims at storming the Bastille of phallocentrism, or undoing the Winter Palace of gender. It rather involves negotiations with dominant
norms or technologies of the self. Second, it argues that political subjectivity rests on an ethics of otherness
that values reciprocity as mutual specification or creation, but not as the recognition of sameness. The
political economy of subjectivity I have been arguing for does not condition the emergence of the subject
on negation but on creative affirmation, not on loss but on vital generative forces. This shift is central to the
postsecular turn in feminist theory, which imagines a subject whose existence, ethics and politics are not indexed on
negativity and hence on the horizon of alterity and melancholia. This subject is looking for the ways in
which otherness prompts, mobilizes and allows for the affirmation of what is not contained in the present
conditions. This is the core of postsecular subjectivity defined as the ethics of becoming: the quest for new
creative alternatives and sustainable futures. In spite of the times, indeed, and hence out of my time.
of everlasting consumption.
1994).
They turn lines of flight into lines of death
Koerner ‘12 /Michelle, Professor of Comparative Literature @ UC-Berkeley, “Line of Escape: Gilles
Deleuze’s Encounter with George Jackson” Genre, Vol. 44, No. 2 Summer 2011 DOI 10.1215/001669281260183/
On the first page of the provocatively titled essay “On the Superiority of Anglo- American Literature,” Jackson’s line is once again deployed, but here it is in reference to the idea that the “highest aim of literature”
is to escape (Deleuze and Parnet [1977] 2006: 26). An interesting convergence occurs here between political and aesthetic practices, suggesting an indiscernibility between the two insofar as both effectuate
becomings. Genet had already made a similar point in describing Soledad Brother as a “poem of love and combat,” but deploying Jackson with respect to the question of literature as such, this essay invites us to
rethink a more profound relation between blackness and writing. At some distance from traditional Marxist theory, Deleuze and Parnet insist we reject any account of literature as an “imaginary representation” of
the unleashing of the creative force
of becoming in language (a line of flight), is not finally reducible to already existing historical conditions,
because such an act involves the production of new conditions . Literature, as they underscore, is driven by a desire to
liberate what existing conditions seek to govern, block, capture; as such, it asserts a force in the world that
existing conditions would otherwise reduce to nonexistence. Such formulations enable a radical
assertion: Soledad Brother, insofar as Jackson’s letters defy the prison system and the arrangement of a social order
defined by the criminalization and capture of blackness, escapes what would otherwise be
thought of as the historical conditions of its production. Jackson’s writing gains its real force by a
total refusal to adjust to existing conditions of capture, enslavement, and incarceration. And it
does so concretely by rejecting the subjectivity produced by the structures of what Genet, in his introduction to the
letters, called the “enemy’s language” (Jackson [1970] 1994: 336). Jackson (ibid.: 190, 305) himself underscores this dimension of the letters several times, remarking, “I work on
real conditions (literature as ideology) in order to consider writing as a production at the level of real conditions.10 Writing, which is to say
words,” and more precisely describing an operation by which the intensities of black resistance come to be expressed in writing: “We can connect the two, feeling and writing, just drop the syntax” (ibid.: 331).
The specific feeling invoked here is linked first to Jackson’s total rejection of the terms of captive society — “the feeling of capture . . . this slave can
never adjust to it” (ibid.: 40) — but it further affirms a connection to the “uncounted generations” of enslaved black labor : “I feel
all they ever felt, but double” (ibid.: 233). In dropping the syntax, Jackson describes a method for rearticulating the relationship between
the historical experience of capture (and the multiplicity of feeling carried across the passage) and the
feeling of that experience. In his introduction to Soledad Brother, Genet focuses almost entirely on how Jackson’s use of language could be understood as a “weapon” precisely because
Jackson’s lines were shot through with such violent hatred of the “words and syntax of his enemy” that he “has only one recourse: to accept this language but to corrupt it so skillfully the whites will be caught in his
In corrupting the “words and syntax” of domination, one directly attacks the “conditions
that destroy life,” because language is here considered a mechanism by which one’s thought, agency, relations,
and subjectivity are “caught” by Power. As can be seen, this idea is not one that Genet imports into Soledad Brother. Rather, these are ideas that Jackson himself has already
emphasized. Jackson’s “minor use” of a standard, major language thus contributes to Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of literature. This is to say that, while commonly associated with Franz Kafka, the
very notion of “minor literature” is also linked to the encounter between black radicalism and French
philosophy in the early 1970s. The connection forged between writing and feeling in Jackson’s letters suggests that
the production of resistant subjectivities always involves a dismantling of the dominant order of
language. To “drop the syntax” names a strategy for forcibly rearranging existing relations. But such a
strategy also implies that one releases something else, specifically the affective force of what resists those relations. Writing here becomes the
“active discharge of emotion, the counterattack” (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987: 400). Or put differently, writing becomes a
weapon.12 When Deleuze (1997: 143) states that “in the act of writing there’s an attempt to make life something more than personal, of freeing life wherever it’s
imprisoned,” he seems to refer to something exceedingly abstract, but Jackson’s letters concretely assert writing as a freeing of life — of blackness — from the
terms of racist imprisonment. As we will see, Jackson twists and pulls on the joints of language itself, quite literally seizing on the standard syntax until it breaks. In doing so, what
Jackson describes as his “completely informal” style makes language an open field shot-through with fugitive uses (Jackson [1970] 1994: 208). Writing becomes an expression
of thought on the run, a way of mapping escape routes and counterattacks that cannot be adequately
understood in terms of structure or an understanding of language as an invariable system. But escaping the existing dominant social order on “lines of flight” — given the volatile
trap” (ibid.: 336).11
intensities they assert in the world — carries a real danger. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari ([1980] 1987: 229) note the risk of “the line of flight crossing the wall, getting out of the black holes, but
a restricted concept of
abolition, understood simply as the destruction of the existing social order, runs the risk of
transforming the “line of flight” into a line of death. For this reason the issue of escape must not stop at
negation “pure and simple” but become one of construction and the affirmation of life. And it is for this reason
that the effort to connect “lines of flight” and to compose consistencies across these lines becomes a matter of politics: an affirmation of a politics of
reconstruction as the immanent condition of abolition. Jackson ([1970] 1994: 328) wrote from prison: “Don’t mistake this as a message
from George to Fay. It’s a message from the hunted running blacks to those people of this society who profess to
want to change the conditions that destroy life.” A collective imperative determines the reading of these letters — namely, the necessity to put them in connection with
other lines. The circulation of these letters in France during the 1970s offers a compelling example of how Jackson’s message insinuated itself into what would seem an
unlikely arrangement of French philosophy in the 1970s. Yet it is precisely in understanding that moment in French thought as an effort to “change conditions
that destroy life” that we gain a sense of how Jackson’s book arrives at its expressly stated destination. In making the connection between Jackson’s line and the lines of Capitalism and
instead of connecting with other lines and each time augmenting its valence, turns to destruction, abolition pure and simple, the passion of abolition.” Here,
Schizophrenia, Deleuze and his coauthors can be said to have gotten the message.
around you, find out what is keeping them from becoming actual.
AT: WILDERSON
ONTOLOGICAL FATALISM – WILDERSON’S ENTIRE ARGUMENT RELIES ON THE IDEA OF
BLACK AND WHITE AS TRANSCENDANT AND NON-CONTINGENT ONTOLOGICAL
CATEGORIES WHICH IS FALSE AND THEORETICALLY BANKRUPT
HUDSON 13 (Political Studies Department, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg) 13 (Peter,
Social Dynamics (2013): The state and the colonial unconscious, Social Dynamics: A journal of African
studies, DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2013.802867)
[BEGIN FOOTNOTE]
My foil here is the ontological fatalism of Frank Wilderson’s argument . See Wilderson (2008), according to which “the only way Humanity can
maintain both its corporeal and libidinal integrity is through the various strategies through which Blackness is the abyss into which humanness can never fall” (105). And “were there to be a place and time for
Here then, the closure of colonialism is absolute.
[END FOOTNOTE]
“Whiteness” as whiteness – the meaning of whiteness and that of “blackness” – is carried via “a constellation of
postulates, a series of propositions that slowly and subtly work their way into one’s mind and shape one’s view of the world of the group to which one belongs” – “a thousand details,
anecdote stories” which are “woven” into “prejudices, myths, the collective attitudes of a given group ” (Fanon
1968, 78, 133). This is how the “subject positions” of both whites and blacks are constituted . We can call this constellation the Colonial
blacks cartography and temporality would be impossible” (111).
Big Other (symbolic) in and through which the colonial relation is constituted and reproduced. This Big Other is white, in that whiteness is its master signifier and therefore all identities are “white” under
colonialism.
Everyone is white in the colonial symbolic – including blacks; it is just that they are “less white” than “whites” to the point of not being at all – Fanon says again and again that “the black man desires to be white” –
but, when he looks at himself through the eyes he has adopted, the “eyes” that are “his” – what he (qua white eyes) sees is something that doesn’t exist – “inequality, no non-existence” (Fanon 1968, 98, original
emphasis). He “subsists at the level of non-being” (131) – just as the white, when it sees the black, sees an other that is, as Fanon says “absolutely not self,” so does the black see himself – “as absolutely not self”
(114). This is the depth of the fissure in the black colonial subject position, caught between two impossibles: “whiteness,” which he desires but which is barred to him, and “blackness,” which is “non-existence.”
Colonialism, anxiety and emancipation3 Thus the self-same/other distinction is necessary for the possibility of identity itself. There always has to exist an outside, which is also inside, to the extent it is designated
the very
possibility of inclusion and identity may be universal (may be considered “ontological”), its content (what
fills it) – as well as the mode of this filling and its reproduction – are contingent. In other words, the meaning of the signifier
of exclusion is not determined once and for all: the place of the place of exclusion, of death is itself over-determined, i.e. the very framework for
deciding the other and the same, exclusion and inclusion, is nowhere engraved in ontological stone but is political and
never terminally settled. Put differently, the “curvature of intersubjective space” (Critchley 2007, 61) and thus, the specific modes of the “othering” of
“otherness” are nowhere decided in advance (as a certain ontological fatalism might have it) (see
Wilderson 2008). The social does not have to be divided into white and black, and the meaning of these signifiers is never necessary – because they are signifiers. To be sure,
colonialism institutes an ontological division, in that whites exist in a way barred to blacks – who are not. But this ontological relation is
really on the side of the ontic – that is, of all contingently constructed identities, rather than the ontology of
the social which refers to the ultimate unfixity, the indeterminacy or lack of the social . In this sense, then, the white man
as the impossibility from which the possibility of the existence of the subject derives its rule (Badiou 2009, 220). But although the excluded place which isn’t excluded insofar as it is necessary for
doesn’t exist, the black man doesn’t exist (Fanon 1968, 165); and neither does the colonial symbolic itself, including its most intimate structuring relations – division is constitutive of the social, not the colonial
It
may be so deeply sedimented that it becomes difficult even to identify the very possibility of the
separation of whiteness from the very possibility of order, but from this it does not follow that the “void”
of “black being” functions as the ultimate substance, the transcendental signified on which all possible
forms of sociality are said to rest. What gets lost here, then, is the specificity of colonialism, of its constitutive
axis, its “ontological” differential.
division. “Whiteness” may well be very deeply sediment in modernity itself, but respect for the “ontological difference” (see Heidegger 1962, 26; Watts 2011, 279) shows up its ontological status as ontic.
WILDERSON’S CRITICISM REAFFIRMS THE VERY MANICHEAN DIVISIONS HE SETS OUT
TO CRITICIZE. THEIR POSITION ONTOLOGIZES SLAVERY AND REAFFIRMS THE VERY
SENTIMENTAL MORALISM WHICH STRUCTURES ANTI-BLACK VIOLENCE IN THE FIRST
PLACE WHILE WALLOWING IN THEIR DESPAIR.
MARRIOTT ‘12 /David, Professor, History of Consciousness Department, Humanities Division, UCSanta Cruz, Received his Ph.D. in literature from the University of Sussex “Black Cultural Studies,” The
Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, doi:10.1093/ywcct/mbs003/
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 not-yet that forces Fanon to rethink the teleological form of the human as already and essentially violent in its separation from the state of
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
nature from which it has come) forms
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
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. 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
Humanism’, then any teleological appeal to a humanism beyond racism is doomed from the start (p. 22).
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 nonniggerness, 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
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
confined to parole), it is clear 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 nonrecuperable 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). This argument could be illustrated at many
points in Red, White, and Black, which all interconnect. Wilderson is concerned, for example, to argue that a Marxian ontology of labour and/or commodity form is philosophically inadequate for reading black
accumulation and fungibility: this idea, which is not altogether new, is supported by a lengthy reading of the film Monster’s Ball (Chapter Four (‘Monster’s Ball’) and is perhaps the most valuable part of his book in
critiques of what Wilderson calls ‘empathetic’ as against
‘analytical’ cinema, with the former offering ‘sentimental apologies for structural violence’, rather than
‘paradigmatic analyses’ of black suffering (p. 341). It is not at all clear how this argument differs from film theory’s opposition between a cinema of distraction and a
socially engaged cinema: it seems to me that this theory of the filmwork describes quite precisely the distinction between analysis and empathy Wilderson is trying to make (and unsettle). However, unlike
film theory, Wilderson’s attempt to preserve the distinction seems to work with an unquestioned notion of
film spectatorship—i.e. either seduced or interrogated—which means that the theory of cinema he puts forth somewhat undermines his more
general claim that film theory can never understand black suffering. It is also a little strange that a work
so concerned with the chasm between ‘Human life and Black death’ should indict cinema for its ‘efforts to
reassert relational logic’, but nowhere mentions how the very form of this reproach relies on reasserting
the endless non-relational absence of Blackness (and thereby reducing the history and politics of race to a
logic of nonrelationality) (p. 340). This transcendentalizing of black suffering is
fundamentally absolutist (and, once again, moralistic) in effect if not in intention.
its illustration of the links between race, violence, contingency, and death). Other chapters offer
LINEARITY DA – THE ALTERNATIVE’S NARRATIVE THAT LINKS RACIAL ORIGIN TO
RACIAL PRESENT IN A UNICAUSAL TIMELINE RENDERS BLACKNESS REACTIVE AND
WHITENESS DOMINANT
WRIGHT, African American Studies, Northwestern, 2015 (Michelle, The Physics of
Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology)
When a linear spacetime epistemology begins, as many Black diasporic epistemologies do, with object
status—being enslaved, colonized, relocated, and so on—the laws of cause and effect make it difficult to
reverse the binary that is set in place, because oppression is asserted as the cause of all historical events
(effects) in the timeline, excepting those events that are caused by a Black (resistant) reaction to an
oppressor’s action. Yet because it is a reaction to an action, we are again returned to a weird and dismally
fixed race-ing of this Black physics, in which whiteness always retains the originary agency and, because
origins dominate a linear narrative, white racism is always the central actor in Black lives now condemned
to the status of reactors. If, however, we add Epiphenomenal time to our interpellation here, the “now” is
foregrounded by agency because Blackness begins as its own interpellation in the moment. At the same
time, this moment is nuanced because it involves a potentially endless set of negotiations. Instead of the
Black Subject being moved down a line through cause and effect as in a strictly linear interpellation, the
Subject in the moment is variously informed by a variety of external and internal stimuli (what is
witnessed and what happens; what is thought and felt) that also can intersect with one another. For
example, I might watch an episode of a television show in one moment and laugh uproariously at what I
find to be a daring but insightful joke about racism; in another moment, watching the same show and
hearing the same joke, I might well have forgotten my previous reac- tion (or remember it, in whatever
valence) and find myself ambivalent about or offended by the joke. In other words, I do not move through
the world reacting in the same way to the same stimuli all the time—and perhaps this is because the
stimuli are never the same because if not the space then the time has shifted (even if I am watching from
my same place on the couch, I am doing so on different days).
This is both liberating and problematic to our lives, in which intellectual and behavioral consistency is
more highly valued than its less predictable performances. It means that one does not always behave as
one wishes, and for the Black Subject who seeks to adhere to a Middle Passage interpellation, the clarity of
this linear timeline is often belied by the familiar complexity of lived moments. Similarly, the last
paragraph of “Everybody’s Protest Novel” asserts agency as an ambivalent possession, but a possession
nonetheless: “Our humanity is our burden, our life; we need not battle for it; we need only to do what is
infinitely more difficult—that is, accept it.”8
AT: TOPICALITY
A2: T—INTENT
SURVEILLANCE ISN’T DEFINED BY INTENT
BOWERS 3
/24 August 2003, Jeremy Bowers, jerf.org,
http://www.jerf.org/iri/blogbook/communication_ethics/privacy, spark/
I define "surveillance" as "collecting information about people". I
deliberately leave out any considerations of "intent". When you accidentally look into
your neighbor's window and happen to see them, for the purposes of this essay, that's "surveillance", even though I'd never
use the term that way normally. I'd like a more neutral term but I can't think of one that doesn't introduce its own
distortions. The reason I believe intent shouldn't enter into it at the most fundamental level is that the intent of the
collector has no effect on the data collected. Nor does the intent of the collector constrain what will be done with
the data in the future; police investigations routinely use data that was collected for accounting purposes, such as phone
records. Such intent is useful in the context of a specific problem, but it is not worth clouding the issue by trying to make it
part of the fundamental part of privacy. "Intent" is a secondary consideration at
fundamentally matters is that surveillance has occurred, and information has been collected.
best. What
WE MEET – GATHERING OF DATA – SURVEILLANCE DOESN’T INCLUDE INTENT
RULE 12
/James B. Rule is a sociologist and writer based in Berkeley, California. He is Distinguished Affiliated
Scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society, pictured below, part of the UC Berkeley School of
Law. “Needs” for surveillance and the movement to protect privacy, googlebooks, spark/
Note: this card is from section c. of David Lyon, Kristie Ball, and Kevin D. Haggerty’s book called
Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies – “Needs” for surveillance and the movement to protect
privacy = name of that section
For many people, the term “surveillance” conjures up images of the systematic tracking of
individuals’ lives by distant and powerful agencies. These pop-up cartoon images are not entirely misleading. To
be sure, surveillance takes many different forms. But since the middle of the twentieth century, the
monitoring of ordinary people’s affairs by large institutions has grown precipitously. Such direct
intakes of detailed information on literally millions of people at a time—and their use by organizations to
shape their dealings with the people concerned—represent one of the most far-reaching social changes of the
last 50 years. These strictly bureaucratic forms of surveillance, and their tensions with values
of privacy, are the subject of this chapter. Surveillance Surveillance is a ubiquitous
ingredient of social life. In virtually every enduring social relationship, parties note the actions of others and
seek to influence future actions in light of information thus collected. This holds as much for intimate dyads—mutually
preoccupied lovers, for example, or mothers and infants—as for relations among sovereign states. Surveillance and
concomitant processes of social control are as basic to the life of neighborhoods, churches, industries and professions as
they are to relations between government or corporate organizations and individuals. But whereas the ability of
communities, families, and local associations to track the affairs of individuals has widely declined in the world's "advanced"
societies, institutional surveillance has lately made vast strides . Throughout the
world's prosperous liberal societies, people have come to expect their dealings with all sorts of large
organizations to be mediated by their "records." These records are ongoing products of past interactions
between institutions and individuals—and of active and
resourceful efforts by the institutions to gather
data on individuals. The result is that all sorts of corporate and state performances that individuals expect—from
allocation of consumer credit and social security benefits to the control of crime and terrorism—turn on one or another form
of institutional surveillance. Perhaps needless to say. the outcomes of such surveillance make vast differences in what Max
Weber would have called the "life chances" of the people involved. No twenty-first-century society, save perhaps the very
poorest, is altogether without such large-scale collection, processing and use of data on individuals' lives. Indeed, we might
arguably regard the extent of penetration of large-scale institutions into the details of people's lives as one measure of
modernity (if not post-modernity). The feet that these activities are so consequential—for the institutions, and for the
individuals concerned—makes anxiety and opposition over their repercussions on privacy values inevitable. Despite the
slightly foreboding associations of the term, surveillance need not be unfriendly in its
effects on the individuals subjected to it. In the intensive care ward at the hospital, most
patients probably do not resent the intrusive and constant surveillance
directed at them. Seekers of social security benefits or credit accounts will normally be quick
to call attention to their recorded eligibility for these things—in effect demanding performances
based on surveillance. Indeed, it is a measure of the pervasiveness of surveillance in our world that we reflexively
appeal to our "records" in seeking action from large institutions. But even
relatively benevolent
forms of surveillance require some tough-minded measures of institutional enforcement vis-a-m
individuals who seek services. Allocating social security payments to those who deserve them—as judged by the letter
of the law—inevitably means hoi allocating such benefits to other would-be claimants. Providing medical benefits, either
through government or private insurance, means distinguishing between those entitled to the benefits and others. When the
good things of life are passed around, unless everyone is held to be equally entitled, the logic of surveillance demands
distinctions between the deserving, and others. Ami this in turn sets m motion requirements for positive identification, close
record-keeping, precise recording of each individual case history, and so on (see also Webster, this volume).
AT: REFORM CENSUS CP [PTX NB]
LINKS TO POLITICS
O’NEIL 9
/16 July 2009, Michael J. O’Neil, Huffington Post, Census Pick Illustrates Broader Obama Strategy,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-j-o/census-pick-illustrates-b_b_215847.html, spark/
But an 800 pound gorilla loomed over any pick to head the Census Bureau: whether to use statistical
estimation to adjust the results of the Census for purposes of congressional apportionment. The issue is a political hot
potato: any hint of using estimation for apportionment would result in screams from the Republican
side of the aisle that the Census was being manipulated for political purposes. Why? While the Census
attempts to interview everyone, complete enumeration is an especially imperfect business. And the professionals at the
Census Bureau not only know this, they know the characteristics of those they miss. Poor people (particularly homeless
ones), minorities, and
immigrants are those most likely to be missed -- over 4 million of them according to a
these groups tend to be Democrats -- and live in areas with disproportionately more
Democrats. So applying statistical estimation would inevitably increase population estimates in
Democratic areas, and thus result in more Democrats in Congress.
study of the 2000 census. And
AT: CENSUS GOOD
USING THE CENSUS TO INCREASE SOCIAL SERVICES ONLY EXTERNALIZES RACISM
ABROAD
SCHRAM, SOSS & FORDING 3
/Sanford F. Schram is Visiting Professor of Social Work and Social Research at Bryn Mawr College. Joe
Soss is Associate Professor of Government at American University. Richard C. Fording is Associate
Professor of Political Science at the University of Kentucky, Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform,
googlebooks, spark/
The welfare state is a particularly useful focus for the comparative study of race relations. It is, among other things, a
mechanism of social solidarity, a means of linking citizens to the state through a set of social rights and to each other by ties
of interdependence (Marshall 1964; Baldwin 1990). Of course, welfare states are at once inclusive and exclusive
mechanisms. On the one hand, they embody these solidaristic ties among a community of citizens.
On the other hand, they define a boundary between the community and outsiders, depending on
who is eligible for assistance on what terms, and in so doing they can also construct and reconstruct
lines of inequality and social division within societies along lines not only of class but also of
gender, citizenship, and race (Esping-Andersen 1990; Freeman 1986; Orloff 1993; Lieberman 1998). Thus the
welfare state is one of the key defining structures of social and political inclusion and exclusion in
the modern nation state. But welfare states differ in the balance they strike between their inclusive and exclusive
imperatives, and so the welfare state is critical to understanding the capacities of states to incorporate racial minorities.
Thus variations in the nature of imperialism and colonialism (or pat terns of racial rule more generally)
were potentially of critical importance in shaping welfare state formation. In particular, the
domestic politics of imperial rule— the extent to which clear racial boundaries between home
citizens and colonial subjects underlay the power and democratic legitimacy of metropolitan
political elites in imperial powers had important effects on the politics of social solidarity. To the
extent that imperial politics demanded a hard and fast racial line between citizens at home and
subjects abroad, social welfare policies were more free to insist on a high level of social solidarity
among their beneficiaries. In other words, the presumption of racial homogeneity at home allowed
for the construction of welfare systems with more forceful and authoritative means of connecting
individual citizens to the state. There were both positive and negative reasons for this outcome, On the positive side,
the challenge of imperial rule demanded an "imperial race," which placed a burden on the state to ensure the health and
welfare of its own citizens. On the negative side, the hermetic racial division between home and abroad
meant that a strong, centralized, and deeply penetrating welfare state did not pose an unacceptable
challenge to a racial hierarchy that ordered political life within the home country. But where the
boundaries of imperial and racial citizenship were more permeable, the possibilities for social
policy were restricted by the possibility of racial inclusion. The presence of racial diversity within rather than
across national boundaries changed the solidaristic imperatives of social politics, making the creation of centralized national
welfare states rather more politically dangerous. In such countries, the problem of distinguishing between those
who were and were not entitled to consideration as members of the solidaristic national community
was a more complicated political and administrative enterprise, since one could not simply
presume that social and national boundaries coincided. Rather, welfare states in these countries
were more likely to take complex institutional forms, involving decentralized decision making and
administration rather then constructing direct links between citizens and the state . This argument
about the connection between forms and patterns of racial rule allows for a comparison of the role of race in welfare state
formation in the United States, Britain, and France. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, all three countries
ruled over far flung territories with racially diverse populations with states that institutionalized racial rule in some form.
Although the United States, among these three countries, would conventionally be considered the most multiracial, many
more people of non European descent were ruled from London or Paris than Washington. In the early twentieth century,
both the British and French empires had majority nonwhite populations by a wide margin, while the nonwhite population of
the United States hovered at around 10 percent (Lieberman 1997). The principal difference in the form of racial rule was
whether racial minorities were located inside or outside national boundaries. In the United States, the racial minority
population was located entirely within the country's home borders, and the immediate proximity of African Americans
posed a particular set of political challenges for American whites, especially in the post Civil War South (Key 1949). In
Britain and France, by contrast, almost all nonwhites lived in the colonies and not in the home country (although in France,
as we shall see, national and racial boundaries remained more politically porous than in Britain), producing a very different
set of political challenges for white elites at home.
THE CENSUS DESTROYS THE ABILITY FOR RACIAL GROUPS TO COALESCE TO FIGHT
RACIAL OPPRESSION AND TO RECEIVE STATE SERVICES
KING 2K
/Rebecca Chiyoko King is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of San Francisco.
Racialization, Recognition, and Rights: Lumping and Splitting Multiracial Asian Americans in the 2000
Census, Journal of Asian American Studies, Volume 3, Number 2, June 2000, Project Muse, spark/
Problematizing the assumptions of a monolithic community and recognizing difference in the Asian American community is
an important task that has been taken on by the Census. I argue that it is because the Census attempts to recognize both
individual racial/ethnic identities and collective racial identities simultaneously that the change in the Census has been so
controversial. By trying to respect the self-esteem of mixed race people (politics of recognition) and
allowing them to check more than one racial box on the Census, the Census may be undermining
the collective racial goals (politics of rights) that it is supposed to resolve such as equal opportunity
employment and the like. 12 Therefore, it may be fundamentally a conflict between the politics of
recognition and the politics of rights that the check more than one policy reveals or even creates . It is
the tension between these two goals in the Census that has created a unique opportunity to see how recognition and rights
are each [End Page 194] linked to unique understandings of racialization. It is their conceptualizations of race that has led
some social actors to understand rights to be fundamentally about individual recognition and others to see rights as a
collective political recognition. Examining different strategies to get the Census to recognize multiracial people reveals the
different racialized thinking and assumptions behind each type of racial category proposal. By seeking recognition
across racial categories, multiracial activists were fundamentally undermining the racial basis of
the categories themselves. These groups used their politics of recognition and rights to challenge
institutional modes of racialization in the Census. The check one or more strategy, while it may
satisfy individual multiracial goals, may leave many monoracial groups unable to gain the
reparations that they need because check one or more undermines the foundation of current
monoracial understandings by allowing people to be more than one race. Lisa Lowe discusses a similar
tension between the politics of recognition and rights when she describes the social construction of the category and culture
"Asian American." To the extent that Asian American culture dynamically expands to include both internal critical dialogues
about difference and the interrogation of dominant interpellations, however, Asian American culture can likewise be a site in
which the "horizontal" affiliations with other groups can be imagined and realized. In this respect, a politics based
exclusively on racial or ethnic identity willingly accepts the terms of the dominant logic that organizes the heterogeneous
picture of differences into a binary schema of "the one" and "the other." 13 The changes in the census might be seen as an
example of how APAs have challenged dominant racial meanings by insisting that the Census Bureau recognize the
difference within the category Asian American particularly by including those who are of mixed descent and want to check
multiple boxes. However, that recognition of difference, if done solely along racial (i.e. Asian
American) lines may in fact be reinforcing dominant racial norms. Therefore, because the Census
seems contradictory in that it is trying to meet individual and collective goals, it may be that
recognition of the multiplicity/diversity within the category "Asian Pacific American" may come at
the cost of losing the political connectivity between Asian Americans that has historically been so
important. [End Page 195] Allowing people to check more than one box on the Census, I argue, is a
direct challenge to the political clout that lumping gave Asian Americans initially. This change in
census format could stand to decrease the number of people, who identify as and thus check Asian
American. If this loss of numbers plays out empirically, it will mean fewer dollars for funding Asian
American causes. Indeed, when the Census Bureau ran a Racial and Ethnic Target Test (RAETT) in the summer of 1996,
Asian and Pacific Islanders were hit hard by the results. Using a multiracial category did in fact decrease the API community
in the target sample from sixty-five percent to sixty percent, and using instructions that told people to mark all that apply
decreased it even more to fifty-eight percent. Ironically, the mark one or more instruction did not affect the total percentage
of responses to the API category. 14 This loss of numbers is a testament to the fact that Asian Americans may have indeed
outgrown the API label and that our identities as Asian American may be more racially diverse than we had previously
recognized. Particularly, it may mean that multiracial Asian Americans are having a disproportionate effect on the category
"Asian American" as APIs lost more of their population than any other group when multiple responses were allowed.
THE MULTI-RACIAL OPTION ON THE CENSUS DESTROYS RECOGNITION OF RACIAL
GROUPS
KING 2K
/Rebecca Chiyoko King is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of San Francisco.
Racialization, Recognition, and Rights: Lumping and Splitting Multiracial Asian Americans in the 2000
Census, Journal of Asian American Studies, Volume 3, Number 2, June 2000, Project Muse, spark/
Perhaps the most interesting development came when the issue of how these boxes would be
tabulated was being discussed. Both the NAACP and the Asian American Legal Defense and
Education Fund (AALDEF) urged those who were part white to identify themselves as simply black
or Asian on the Census. Other civil rights organizations are pressuring the government to reassign
multiracial Americans back into the traditional racial categories to resist dilution of any individual
non-white racial group. 31 Clearly, AALDEF was resisting the separation of the racial category Asian
American from the recognition of civil rights. It is because the concept of race is so closely tied with
the concept of recognition that the AALDEF could not envision recognizing multiracial Asian
Americans without possibly undoing the race and rights nexus. They therefore advocated
compliance and control of mixed-race Asian Americans to tow the racial line by checking only Asian
only on the Census. The JACL in contrast, had a more flexible view of what race will look like in the year 2000 and were
less concerned about losing numbers. This may be in part because the Japanese American community, which the JACL sees
as its main constituency, is shrinking relative to other Asian ethnic groups and therefore has fewer numbers to lose than
larger Asian ethnic groups such as South Asians who could withstand some numerical loss. Instead, the Japanese American
community is so quickly becoming the largest out-married Asian ethnic group that the JACL might have thought it could
score points and get membership from mixed-race Japanese Americans and this would only increase their numbers.
However, the JACL statement is clear and framed within the tone that recognizing mixed-race Japanese Americans is just
the right thing to do. While the change in the way race is enumerated in the 2000 census may not seem that radical of a
change, the implications are far-reaching. To recognize the multiraciality and hybridity present in the Asian American
community may mean the categories have to change to allow for multiplicity. This seems a humane thing to do, but causes
difficulties in the context of the Census because as it is currently envisioned and [End Page 206] used it is fundamentally
about collecting racial/ethnic data to make sure that there are civil rights compliance, equal opportunities, and fair voting
practices. In this logic, AMEA may be right, that it is not only how we see ourselves as mixed-race people, but also in cases of
discrimination how others see us as well. If that seeing is the basis for discrimination in hiring or housing, there may be a
need to know how many mixed-race people there are in order to insure compliance to equal housing and hiring laws. In this
vein, if people were to perceive mixed-race people as the same and lump them together in their treatment racially, then there
might be a call for mixed-race data. The Census has long been seen, and clearly still is seen by some mixed-race activists,
particularly AMEA, as a place to lobby for collective racial identities, representation, and rights. At the same time, the
Census has increasingly tried to recognize both group racial identities and individual racial identities. Some believe that the
goal of the Census is to track discrimination against certain racial/ethnic groups. Others believe that the goal of the Census
is fundamentally to represent individual racial identities. Because the mechanism for recognizing racial groups
is racial group membership which is mutually exclusive to other racial groups and it is this
membership that leads to recognition (as the basis as a claim for rights), and because the Census
has been formulated along mutually exclusive racial lines and is tied directly to recognition,
traditional civil rights groups see unlinking race and recognition as the end of rights . Ultimately, the
state, represented here by the Census, likes to construct fixed categories of citizens under the law,
and this conflicts fundamentally with the nature of the proposed changes to the Census where race
will be tabulated multiply for different uses in different contexts. The racial rigidity that the state
needs to enforce civil right laws competes with the flexibility proposed by multiracial activists.
AT: POLITICS
CENSUS IS A HIGHLY CONTROVERSIAL ISSUE – REPUBLICANS ARE LOOKING TO
CURTAIL IT
BERMAN 15
/9 June 2015, Russell Berman is a senior associate editor at The Atlantic, where he covers political news,
The Atlantic, Republicans Try to Rein In the Census Bureau,
http://www.govexec.com/oversight/2015/06/republicans-try-rein-census-bureau/114814, spark/
Why does the government want to know how many toilets you have in your home? It might seem
like a silly question, but it is now central to a dispute between congressional Republicans and the
Obama administration over the kinds of questions that the Census Bureau can ask in its mandatory
surveys. In addition to the decennial census, the government’s head-counters every year send 3.5 million Americans a
lengthy questionnaire seeking a wide range of information about their living situation and employment status. Known as the
American Community Survey, it replaced the “long form” portion of the official census beginning a decade ago. In addition
to questions about the number of toilets, since 2010 the ACS has also asked about what kind of plumbing
people have in their homes, and about their Internet access, energy use, whether they receive food
stamps, if live over a store, and how many cars they drive. Republicans have long argued that such
questions are too intrusive for a mandatory survey, and for the second
year in a row, House-passed spending legislation would effectively
make it voluntary by prohibiting the government from enforcing
criminal penalties—which can reach $5,000—against people who refuse to participate in the
ACS. To its opponents, the survey is yet another front in the privacy wars, and their arguments echo the complaints about
government spying in the name of national security. “This
survey is another example of
unnecessary and completely unwarranted government intrusion,”
wrote Representative Ted Poe in a recent op-ed. “The federal
government has no right to force Americans to divulge such private
information, especially information that they are uncomfortable giving away.” Poe, a conservative
former judge who represents the Houston suburbs, wrote the amendment that House Republicans included in the annual
spending bill that covers the Census Bureau. While Democrats in the Senate successfully blocked it in
previous years, the provision may stand a stronger chance now that Republicans run the upper
chamber. President Obama has threatened to veto the legislation, in part
because of the ACS amendment and deep cuts to funding for the 2020
Census. Senator James Lankford, an Oklahoma Republican in his first term, said he’s concerned
not only about the questions on the ACS but also with the methods the Census
Bureau uses to make sure they get answered. Recipients are first mailed a survey that
notes, in all capital letters on the envelope, that responses are mandatory. If they don’t send it back, government officials
follow up with phone calls and house visits. Lankford told me that constituents have complained to him that after they told a
census official they would not participate in the survey, the official sat in his car outside the house, waited for him to leave
for work, and then returned to ask his wife to answer the questions. Poe has accused the government of similar
“harassment” in Texas. “It’s
just really odd,” Lankford said. “It
comes across as just a really
intrusive way to conduct a survey.” In response to the concerns, the Census Bureau is testing out a
gentler approach without the bolded warnings, but according to Science, officials have said that when they have used less
aggressive methods in the past, response rates dropped significantly. A quick look at the Census Bureau’s website
reveals an extensive effort to overcome skepticism, and resistance, to many of the questions on the
American Community Survey. In addition to pamphlets outlining the history of the questionnaire, the website
includes documents that explain why the survey asks each question, how long the question has been asked as part of the
Census, and how federal, state, and local governments (as well as the private sector) use the information they gather. So why
do they ask about toilets? “We ask questions about kitchen and plumbing facilities because federal and
local governments need this information to allocate funding for housing subsidies and other
programs that help American families afford decent, safe, and sanitary housing,” the Bureau says.
Plumbing and kitchen questions first appeared on the Census “long form” in 1940. Without the toilet question, the
government might not know that even in 2015, there are nearly 2 million Americans in rural communities without indoor
plumbing, said Phil Sparks, co-director of The Census Project, a nonprofit advocacy consortium. “It’s irreplaceable,”
Sparks said. “There is no option B for that data.” The uses for ACS data go far beyond the government. More than a
dozen business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, wrote to lawmakers in April to urge them to keep
participation in the survey mandatory. “There
simply is no other source of high-quality,
detailed socioeconomic information that is comparable across time
and geography, allowing us to analyze current and trending markets
and community needs and to plan future investments accordingly,” the
organizations wrote. We use the ACS data to make decisions on a daily basis concerning investment in new facilities, the
availability of qualified workers and the need for job training programs, the characteristics (such as language preference,
disability, veterans status and type of housing) of the communities we serve, and the need for new plants , stores and other
places of business. Reliable information about population growth and density leads to the opening of new businesses in the
best possible locations to serve the immediate needs of communities, helping create jobs. Lankford said he
understands the need for accurate data, but he’s dubious of the claim that there are no other
options for the government. He said he’s asked the administration why it can’t get some of the data it seeks via the
ACS from other sources, or at minimum to study the methods that private research firms use to conduct surveys. “Their
approach seems to be the most expensive, most intrusive way to go about collecting data,” Lankford said. “If Gallup were to
use these methods, they’d have lawsuits all over.” A major part of the GOP concern with the American Community Survey is
that, in its eyes, the ACS takes the government far beyond the rather straightforward directive embedded in Article I of the
Constitution—that every 10 years, it should count all of the people for the purposes of determining proportional
representation in Congress. The ACS, by contrast, is conducted annually. As Lankford put it: “This is not the every-10-years
Census. This is a data update.” Yet Census officials and their allies like to quote James Madison in pointing out that the need
for collecting additional information to formulate public policy is just as deeply-entrenched in the nation’s history. “These
questions have been around since the beginning of the country,” Sparks said. The Census Bureau also isn’t helped
by its track record. The 2010 Census cost
twice as much as the survey in
2000, a total that included $3 billion spent on new hand-held devices
that didn’t work. This time around, the government is again promising to use new technologies that won’t
require officials to physically walk every street in the country or use pencil-and-paper to count every one of its residents. But
it needs money upfront to implement the new procedures, which the administration says will ultimately save $5 billion in
2020. So far, Republicans aren’t giving it to them. The House GOP proposal would eliminate any increase in
funds for 2020 planning, and it cuts nearly $500 million in total from the administration’s request,
including reductions for the American Community Survey.
IT’S THE OTHER WAY AROUND
KNOLLER 9
/12 February 2009, Mark Knoller is a Staff Writer for CBS, White House Denies Meddling In Census,
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/02/12/politics/politicalhotsheet/entry4797600.shtml, spark/
A White House spokesman denies Republican congressional charges that the White House is
"taking the unprecedented step of moving control of the Census Bureau" to "political operatives on
the White House staff." The charge is made in a letter House Republicans - including Minority Leader John Boehner
- sent yesterday President Obama - calling on him to "reconsider and reverse this harmful course of action." In response to
questions from CBS News, spokesman Ben LaBolt says the charge is not accurate. He says the Census Bureau and
the agency's director will continue to work at the Commerce Department. However, the spokesman
says that "White House senior management will work closely with the Census Director, given the
number of decisions that will need to reach the president's desk." The White House also says the
same congressional committees that had oversight of the Census Bureau during the previous
administration will retain that authority. Boehner and other House Republicans also used a news
conference today to express concerns that the White House will "undermine the goal of having a
fair and accurate census."
AT: RACE BASED SOCIAL PROGRAMS GOOD
WE MUST ADDRESS RACISM AND ITS HISTORICAL AND SOCIAL CONTEXT WITHIN THE
STATE TO SOLVE FOR THE SOCIOECONOMIC CONDITIONS OF TODAY
PRASHAD 2 (Vijay Prashad is the Professor of International Studies at Trinity College and has a Ph.D
from the University of Chicago. Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the
Myth of Cultural Purity, Print. 2002) JG
The problem of the twenty-first century, then, is the problem of the color blind. This problem is simple: it
believes that to redress racism, we need to not consider race in social practice, notably in the sphere of
governmental action. The state, we are told, must be above race. It must not actively discriminate∂ against
people on the basis of race in its actions. At the dawn of ∂ a new millennium, there is widespread
satisfaction of the progress on the∂ ‘‘race problem’’; this is so to some extent, but the compass of attacks
against∂ blacks and Latinos remains routine. If we do not live by
’s Plessy v. Ferguson,∂ we continue
to live by its principle axiom—that ‘‘race’’ is a formal and∂ individual designation and not a historical and
social one.5 That is, we are∂ led to believe that racism is a prejudicial behavior of one party against
another∂ rather than the coagulation of socioeconomic injustice against groups.∂ If the state acts without
prejudice (that is, if it acts equally), then that is proof∂ of the end of racism. Unequal
socioeconomic conditions of today, based as∂ they are on racisms of the
past and of the present, are thereby rendered untouchable∂ by the state.
Color-blind justice privatizes inequality and racism,∂ and it removes itself from the project of
redistributive and anti-racist justice.∂ This is the genteel racism of our new millennium.∂
AMERICAN COMMUNITY SURVEY SOLVES FOR EQUAL EMPLOYMENT, REPRESENTATION,
HOUSING, AND VOTING RIGHTS PROGRAMS
YU 12 (Corrine Yu, CIvilRights.org, “Civil and Human Rights Coalition Highlights Risks Posed by Census
Data Collection Bill” 3-6-12, http://www.civilrights.org/archives/2012/03/1271-census.html) JG
**ACS – American Community Survey
Since 2005, the ACS has functioned as a companion to the national census conducted every 10 years. While the
census asks only a few basic questions, the ACS is a longer-form survey that asks a smaller sample of the population
more detailed questions about their demographic, social, economic, and housing characteristics. These
detailed questions allow public and private decision-makers and advocates to gain a more accurate
understanding of the needs and challenges facing a diverse range of communities.∂ As Henderson and Zirkin
write, “Our wide-ranging efforts to promote equality of representation and economic opportunity are
guided significantly by objective, inclusive data on America’s diverse communities and populations.” They
point to enforcement of Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act, which relies on ACS data to determine whether a jurisdiction
must offer language assistance in elections, and note that “both the government and business sector rely on ACS data
to help ensure appropriate employment opportunities for racial minorities, people with disabilities, and
veterans.”∂ Henderson and Zirkin also warn that shifting to a voluntary ACS would increase the cost of conducting the survey. “A
decline in mail response rates would force the bureau to use more costly modes of data collection, such as telephone and door-todoor visits, thereby increasing the cost of the survey by thirty percent ...”∂ The Leadership Conference is being joined by business
groups, state and local governments, housing and child advocates, professional societies, and research organizations in opposing
H.R. 931
AMERICAN COMMUNITY SURVEY SOLVES FOR CIVIL RIGHTS
Leadership Conference 11 (CivilRights.org, “The Importance of the American Community Survey” 3-17-11,
http://www.civilrights.org/archives/2011/03/1171-acs.html) JG
**ACS – American Community Survey
Stakeholders, including civil rights and community groups, are urging Congress to ensure adequate funding to
maintain and expand the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS) and ensure the continued
reliability of data for all geographic areas and populations.∂ To help Hill staffers better understand the functions and
significance of the ACS, The Annie E. Casey Foundation partnered with the Population Reference Bureau on March 10 to host a
seminar titled "Better Data, Better Decisions," which focused on how Congress, the business community, and local governments use
ACS data.∂ As mandated by the U.S. Constitution, Congress must conduct a national census of the U.S. population. The ACS,
replaced the decennial census long form in 2010, and surveys nearly three million Americans every year. The difference between the
two is that the census provides a snapshot of the nation’s population count every ten years, while the ACS measures the
changing social and economic characteristics of the U.S. population. ACS data are released in the year after data are
collected.∂ Congress uses ACS data to determine how $450 billion of federal funds will be distributed
throughout the nation. Federal agencies rely on the ACS for implementation of the programs and
priorities of the federal government. Businesses use ACS data to make decisions based on costs and demographics. ACS
data drive state and local policy decisions that encourage economic growth, the recruitment and retention of industries, and
economic sustainability.∂ In addition to helping congressional staff understand how ACS is used, the seminar provided important
information about ACS confidentiality and the benefits of the ACS for members of Congress to disseminate to their constituents.
AT: RACE DATA IMPORTANT – GENERAL
RACE DATA IS OBSOLETE – LARGE NUMBER OF MIXED RACE PEOPLE MAKE IT HIGHLY
INACCURATE
JACOBY 11 (Jeff Jacoby is an op-ed columnist and laywer who was awarded the 1999 Breindel Prize and
the 2004 Thomas Paine award. “Irrelevant racial criteria,” 2-16-11,
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2011/02/16/irrelevant_racial_crit
eria/) JG
THE CENSUS Bureau has begun rolling out state-by-state demographic data distilled from the 2010 Census. They include statistics
on race and Hispanic origin that can be broken down with meticulous geographic precision. If you want to know how many African
Americans live in Arkansas’s Benton School District (1,302), or whether Maryland’s white population has gone up or down since
2000 (down 0.9 percent), or which Vermont county has the most Hispanics (Chittenden, with 2,586), the Census Bureau can tell
you. Spend a while with the census search engine, and you could be forgiven for thinking that the nation’s racial composition has
never been defined with such pinpoint accuracy.∂∂ In fact, the nation’s racial composition has probably never been
defined with less accuracy, and the margin of error is widening. Why? Because of the growing number of
Americans like Michelle López-Mullins, who render the government’s racial categories
meaningless or obsolete. The University of Maryland student was featured last week in a New York Times story
that illustrates the difficulties faced by the bean-counters in an increasingly post-racial society:∂ “The federal Department of
Education would categorize Michelle López-Mullins — a university student who is of Peruvian, Chinese, Irish, Shawnee, and
Cherokee descent — as ‘Hispanic,’ ’’ Susan Saulny’s story began. “But the National Center for Health Statistics, the government
agency that tracks data on births and deaths, would pronounce her ‘Asian’ and ‘Hispanic.’ And what does Ms. López-Mullins’s birth
certificate from the State of Maryland say? It doesn’t mention her race.∂ “Ms. López-Mullins, 20, usually marks ‘other’ on surveys
these days. But when she filled out a census form last year, she chose Asian, Hispanic, Native American, and white.’’∂ Though most
Americans may still think of themselves as belonging to a single race, the multiracial population is surging. Racial
boundaries are more permeable and easier to ignore than ever before.∂ Today, one in seven new marriages — 14.6
percent — unites spouses of different races, according to the Pew Research Center. The interracial marriage rate has
doubled since 1980, and is six times what it was in 1960. For some combinations, the rate of increase has been even more rapid.
When Barack Obama was born in 1961, less than one new marriage in 1,000 was, like his parents’, that of a black person and a white
person. “By 1980, that share had risen to about one in 150 new marriages,’’ Pew notes. “By 2008, it had risen to one in 60.’’∂
Although Obama identified himself simply as “black’’ in the census enumeration last year, a swelling cohort of younger
Americans refuses to be so easily pigeonholed. The Census Bureau currently recognizes 63 possible racial labels, but that
taxonomy is as limited and artificial as the one in an earlier age that subdivided Americans into the categories of “white,’’
“Japanese,’’ “Chinese,’’ “Negroes,’’ “mulattoes,’’ “quadroons,’’ “octoroons,’’ and “civilized Indians.’’ By what logic, for example, did
the 2010 questionnaire classify Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese as separate races, yet lump Scandinavians, Arabs, and Slavs
With so many millions of Americans dating, marrying, and
loving across the color line, and with the population of blended Americans
exploding, isn’t it clearer than ever that the pressure to keep sorting
ourselves into races that have no objective genetic meaning anyway is
incoherent and counterproductive?∂ Yet instead of shutting down the racial bean-counters, the
together as “white’’?
government is giving them new powers. The Times reports that new Department of Education rules require any student who
acknowledges any Hispanic ethnicity at all to be reported solely as “Hispanic’’ in federal filings. That doesn’t sit well with LópezMullins, whose Peruvian-Chinese-Irish-Shawnee-Cherokee family tree is considerably more diverse than the word “Hispanic’’ alone
can possibly convey.∂ To be sure, some lobbies and grievance groups profit from aggravating racial distinctions. But most
Americans have moved beyond the color-consciousness of generations past, and it’s time federal agencies
did too. Congress should instruct the Census Bureau to stop counting and classifying Americans by race,
and to mark the occasion by installing at its headquarters a monument bearing these words, which Thurgood Marshall wrote in a
brief for the 1950 Supreme Court case of McLaurin v. Oklahoma:∂ “Racial
criteria are irrational,
irrelevant, [and] odious to our way of life.’’
RACE DATA GETS INCORRECTLY INTERPRETED
ZUBERI AND BONILLA-SILVA 08 (Tukufu Zuberi is the Lasry Family Professor of Race Relations,
Professor and Chair of the Sociology Department, and professor of Africana Studies at the University of
Pennsylvania, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva is a professor of sociology at Duke University. White Logic, White
Methods: Racism and Methodology Print. 2008. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.) JG
In the area of statistics, Zuberi (2001) suggests that there is a connection between the development of the idea of race and the origins
of social statistics. He argues that the beginning of racial categorizing required a measure of social difference and that
the groundbreaking work of Galton and Pearson was developed in part to meet the need to racially differentiate (2001a). He argues
that the logic of statistical measurements of race is strongly connected to a period’s ideology and that those
ideologies guide the interpretation of data. For example, the use of statistics during the late nineteenth century
eugenics movement reflected the society’s overt commitment to categorizations of racial superiority and
inferiority. This suggests that inquiry is not objective and value free, but reflects the ideology of the time.
EUGENICS ADD ON
RACIAL CATEGORIZATIONS ARE A TOOL FOR EUGENICS
ZUBERI AND BONILLA-SILVA 08 (Tukufu Zuberi is the Lasry Family Professor of Race Relations,
Professor and Chair of the Sociology Department, and professor of Africana Studies at the University of
Pennsylvania, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva is a professor of sociology at Duke University. White Logic, White
Methods: Racism and Methodology Print. 2008. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.) jG
In the area of statistics, Zuberi (2001) suggests that there is a connection between the development of the idea of
race and the origins of social statistics. He argues that the beginning of racial categorizing required a measure of
social difference and that the groundbreaking work of Galton and Pearson was developed in part to meet the need to racially
differentiate (2001a). He argues that the logic of statistical measurements of race is strongly connected to a
period’s ideology and that those ideologies guide the interpretation of data . For example, the use of statistics
during the late nineteenth century eugenics movement reflected the society’s overt commitment to
categorizations of racial superiority and inferiority. This suggests that inquiry is not objective and value free, but reflects
the ideology of the time.
HISTORICALLY, DATA USED FOR EUGENICS
LOMBARDO NO DATE (Paul Lombardo is Senior Advisor to the Presidential Commission for the
Study of Bioethical Issues, he has lectured around the world and is an elected member of the American
Law Institute as well as having served as a committee member for the Institute of Medicine, Dolan DNA
Learning Center Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, “Eugenics Laws Restricting Immigration,”
http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/html/eugenics/essay9text.html) JG
In 1920, Laughlin appeared before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. Using data
for the U.S. Census Bureau and a survey of the number of foreign-born persons in jails, prisons and reformatories, he
argued that the "American" gene pool was being polluted by a rising tide of intellectually and morally
defective immigrants – primarily from eastern and southern Europe. Sympathetic to Laughlin's message, Committee
Chairman Albert Johnson of Washington State appointed Laughlin as "expert eugenics agent."∂ In this capacity,
Laughlin conducted research from 1921 to 1931. He took a fact-finding trip to Europe, used free postage to conduct large-scale
surveys of charitable institutions and mental hospitals, and had his results published by the Government Printing Office. His
research culminated in his 1924 testimony to Congress in support of a eugenically-crafted immigration
restriction bill. The Eugenics Research Association displayed a chart beneath the Rotunda of the Capitol building in
Washington showing the cost to taxpayers of supporting Laughlin's "social inadequates." ∂ The resulting law,
the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, was designed consciously to halt the immigration of supposedly
"dysgenic" Italians and eastern European Jews, whose numbers had mushroomed during the period from 1900 to 1920.
The method was simply to scale the number of immigrants from each country in proportion to their
percentage of the U.S. population in the 1890 census – when northern and western Europeans were the dominant
immigrants. Under the new law, the quota of southern and eastern Europeans was reduced from 45% to 15%. The 1924 Act ended
the greatest era of immigration in U.S. history.∂ Upon signing the Act, President Calvin Coolidge commented, "America must remain
American." This phrase would become the rallying cry of anti-immigration sentiment until after World War II. The eugenic intent of
the 1924 law and the quota system it established remained in place until they were repealed by the Immigration and Nationality Act
of 1965.
HISTORICALLY, CENSUS RACE CATEGORIES USED FOR EUGENICS
ORDOVER 03 (Nancy Ordover has a PhD in Ethnic Studies at the University of California at Berkeley,
and did a post-doc at Columbia University, American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of
Nationalism, Print. 2003. U of Minnesota Press.) JG
Galton Society members included eugenics heavyweights Madison Grant, Harry Laughlin, Carl C. Brigham, Lothrop Stoddard, and
Charles Davenport, among others. In 1927, Johnson asked the organization for suggestions on eugenic uses of the
upcoming 1930 census. Laughlin proposed that it become “a permanent and complete pedigree record of
the American people as individuals, and [as such] also would enable the nation to measure its racial
trend.”
EUGENICS SEEKS TO COMMIT GENOCIDE AGAINST ALL DEEMED OF A LOWER CLASS TARGETED THE MENTALLY ILL, ORPHAN, BLACK, AND IMMIGRANTS
KELLY 14 (Debra Kelly, “10 Horrifying Facts About American Eugenics,” 2/5/14,
http://listverse.com/2014/02/05/10-things-youve-never-heard-about-american-eugenics/)
At the height of the movement, 30 states had adopted legislation that legalized the sterilization of individuals deemed
unfit for reproduction. In most states, that meant the mentally ill or mentally deficient. By the time all was said and done,
somewhere in the neighborhood of 60,000 people had been forcefully sterilized in state-sanctioned procedures.
In some states, such as California, sterilization records are incomplete or often altered, making it impossible to truly know how
many people were subjected to the procedures. It was done to men and women, Caucasians as well as individual from other and
mixed races. State laws in California included permissions for those who were in prisons to be eligible for
sterilization, as well as those found to have any chance of carrying hereditary dementia or insanity. The laws
also removed the patients’ rights to contest the procedure, although it was still necessary for parents to consent to the
sterilization of their minor children. In the years between 1921 and 1950, roughly 450 people were sterilized in California each year.8
Feeble-Minded, Deaf, And Orphans4- orphan∂ The American eugenics movement had a very specific desire when it
came to creating the perfect, pure race. Not only were they tall, intelligent, and talented, but they were
blond-haired and blue-eyed. Sound familiar? It was described as a “Nordic” race in America, and it was the
Aryan race in Germany. That meant weeding out everyone who wasn’t that . . . and while the American version never went as
far as the German, the roots were there. While Alexander Graham Bell targeted the deaf, and laws on the whole targeted the sexually
deviant offenders and the mentally ill, there was another sub-group who fell victim to the forced sterilization procedures. In
California, all it took was a doctor to deem you “unworthy” to have the procedure done. And in some cases—as
late as 1963—that could simply mean you were an orphan. Men like California’s Charlie Follett were sterilized against
their will as children; Follett’s only crime was to be born to alcoholic parents who could not support him, leaving him a ward of the
state.7 Supported By Alexander Graham Bell And The Rockefellers3- bell∂ An appalling number of people supported the
movement, in voice and in finance. Alexander Graham Bell was a staunch supporter of the movement, and thought that
deaf people should not be allowed to marry. Many eugenics projects got their financing from some of the corporate
moguls of the day, including the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Harriman railroad conglomerate. In fact,
the Carnegies founded and funded the Cold Spring Harbor research facility, one of the largest centers of eugenics activities (more on
that in a minute). And it was the Rockefellers who put up the money behind a branch of eugenics in Europe—that was a German
branch that counted Joseph Mengele in its ranks. They also funded organizations like the German Psychiatric Institute, which in
turn gave rise to one of Hitler’s most instrumental minds in medical repression, Ernst Rudin. The United States Supreme
Court was also on board, upholding the laws of the eugenics movement , and one of the leaders of the
American eugenic movement, Madison Grant, received a fan letter from none other than Adolf Hitler, praising
his work as inspiring. While much of the financial support of families like the Rockefellers ended before the official beginning
of World War II, they had already helped set things in motion.6 The Racial Integrity Act6- wedding∂ The Racial Integrity Act
of Virginia was established in 1924. The purpose was to document the race of every person in the state, allowing for a massive
genetic database to be created. The database was necessary for the rest of the law—making sure that someone whose
heritage was purely white married only another similarly pure person. State Registrars were forbidden from
issuing a marriage license unless the man and the woman in question could both produce such a certificate stating that there was no
trace of any race other than Caucasian in their ancestry. If the clerk had any reason to doubt that the racial profile was accurate, they
didn’t have to grant a marriage license, either—not until both parties submitted proof that they actually, truly were white. Lying
about your race on the form was a felony, and could be punished by up to a year in jail.5 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory7davenport∂ The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory is still around, located in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. Now, it’s a research facility
in the fields of neuroscience, plant biology, quantitative biology, and, not surprisingly, genomics. It was originally opened in 1910 by
Charles Davenport, and was known as the Carnegie Institute of Washington. The Eugenics Record Office kept detailed family
records that allowed field workers to trace cases of mental and physical defects through a family line. Davenport also conducted
studies on the importance of other inherited traits, such as hair and eye color, hair texture, and skin pigments. In addition to
physical traits, they also tried to document how chronic diseases such as hemophilia and mental disorders like schizophrenia, along
with what they called “feeble-mindedness,” were passed through a family.4 The Immigrant Problem8- immigration∂ Those that
supported eugenics looked to immigrants as a problem variable that was introducing all sorts of new and
undesirable genetic qualities into the American gene pool. Researchers at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory isolated
some of the problems. For example, those with Italian blood were said to be prone to violence. As part of their research, prison and
mental institution populations across the country were surveyed to find out just how many members of these populations came from
what immigrant group. After outbreaks of illnesses like smallpox and cholera in New York City and immigrant-hub Ellis Island, the
work of the eugenics movement began to gain credence. By 1911, they were operating hand-in-hand with the Immigration
Restriction League to influence Congress and the Surgeon General to implement restrictions on immigration.3 Better Babies And
Fitter Families Contests9- fitter families∂ As the eugenics movement took off, state fairs across the country started holding Better
Babies contests. In some respects, it made sense. Mothers were encouraged to bring their babies to fair judging contests, and in
much the same way as livestock was judged, babies would be judged on things like health, weight, and size. While it also helped
promote health and good child care, the “this isn’t so bad” part of this entry ends right about there. Better Babies soon evolved into
Fitter Families, a contest where whole families would present judges not only with their happy, healthy babies, but with an
abbreviated version of their racial pedigree. Doctors would perform examinations on all the members of the family, awarding and
deducting points according to guidelines, and families were given a letter grade to show just how eugenics-friendly their family was.
Winners would be rewarded with medals and trophies in these contests, which remained hugely popular throughout the 1920s.2
Pioneered By A Stanford Professor5- jordan∂ The whole thing was started by a Stanford professor named David Starr Jordan. A
long-time student of Charles Darwin and the ideas of natural selection and Mendelian genetics, Jordan grew up in Western New
York and pursued an education in botany and science. After teaching at a number of different universities, it was when he went to
Stanford that he truly began preaching his values, including education, conservation, and eugenic breeding. After writing several
books on the topic of eugenics, he was one of the founding members of the Eugenics Committee of the American Breeders
Association and the Eugenics Record Office. Chief among his beliefs was that the upper class of America was being constantly eroded
by the lower class, and that careful, selective breeding would be necessary to preserve the country’s upper crust.
EUGENICS USED AS JUSTIFICATION FOR THE HOLOCAUST
KELLY 14 (Debra Kelly, “10 Horrifying Facts About American Eugenics,” 2/5/14,
http://listverse.com/2014/02/05/10-things-youve-never-heard-about-american-eugenics/)
1 Inspired Hitler’s Master Race10- hitler∂ We’ve mentioned it once already in brief, but it’s worth revisiting again in greater depth.
The American eugenics movement formed the basis for the Third Reich’s belief in a Master Race and their
attempts to create one. There was a bizarre sort of mutual respect that went on between American eugenics supporters and the
Nazi party. In 1937, the American Eugenics Society issued statements of praise for the work that the Nazis
were doing to cleanse the gene pool. For them, the scale on which the Nazis were carrying out their mass
sterilization was what they had wanted for America. Original writings of eugenic supporters spoke of cleansing the
American population by methods ranging from gas chambers to simply leaving the lower classes to the mercy of the elements or to
disease; they went on to lament that American society wasn’t ready for such a wide-spread, sweeping cleanse and saluted the Nazis
for doing exactly what they had wanted for their own country. Hitler’s fondness for the theories and science behind American
eugenics was clear; he would
not only quote American texts, but use them as evidence to support his madness
and to recruit others to his cause.
VIRGINIA PROVES EUGENICS ARE A THING WITH THE CENSUS DATA
SUSSMAN 14
/Robert Wald Sussman is a Professor of Physical Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. The
Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea, googlebooks, spark/
The anti-miscegenation law of Virginia is an excellent example of this racist motivation. As a prelude
to the law, in 1916, Alexander Graham Bell, an avid eugenicist and chairman of ERO's board of
scientific advisors, suggested that the United States Bureau of the Census
begin assisting the ERO in its efforts to collect data on family lineages
by adding father's and mother's names to individual records. The census bureau refused. Soon thereafter, in
1918, Laughlin proposed that the census bureau add surveys of all custodial and charitable facilities and jails. This was
agreed to and Laughlin was named special agent of the Bureau of the Census. The bureau had been collecting data
on what was referred to as the defective (in- sane), the dependent (elderly and infirm), and the
delinquent (prisoners) since 1880. Laughlin tried to get them to change their terminology to "the socially
inadequate," including "adding stratified contingents of the unfit, especially along racial lines" (Black 2003, 159). The
census bureau did not agree, and after a number of years of battle between the bureau and the ERO
and ERA (which urged the census bureau to create a massive registry of fit and unfit American citizens), the bureau
"simply refused to join the movement," one of the few federal organizations to do so (Black 2003, 161).
Laughlin, unable to get the federal census bureau to accept his eugenics classifications, began working with the House of
Representatives and with state governments. Virginia
was one of the states that was eager
to help the eugenics movement achieve its goals. In Virginia, Laughlin had the assistance
of Walter A. Plecker (1861-1947), a radical racist and eugenicist. Plecker, an obstetrician, held the office of registrar in
Virginia's newly formed Bureau of Vital Statistics from 1914 to 1942 (Lombardo 2008). His main interest was to
maintain Virginia's racial purity and pre- vent racially mixed marriages. He wrote to Laughlin in 1928,
"While we are interested in the eugenical records of our citizens, we are attempting to list only the mixed breeds, who are
endeavoring to pass into the white race." Thus, while "carrying the banner of eugenics, Plecker's true passion . . . was always
about preserving the purity of the white race" (Black 2003, 165). He believed that existing state laws were too permissive;
they were too vague about what constituted a "Negro" or "colored" person. Different states barred marriage between whites
and persons who were half, one-quarter, or one-eighth black.
EXTINCTION
VAKNIN 6
/Shmuel Vaknin is an Israeli writer. He is the author of Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited, editorin-chief of the website Global Politician, and runs a website about narcissistic personality disorder,
Racing Down: Eugenics and the Future of the Human Species, http://samvak.tripod.com/eugenics.html,
spark/
Does the evolutionary process culminate in a being that transcends its genetic baggage, that programs and charts its future,
and that allows its weakest and sickest to survive? Supplanting the imperative of the survival of the fittest with a
culturally-sensitive principle may be the hallmark of a successful evolution, rather than the
beginning of an inexorable decline. The eugenics movement turns this argument on its head. They accept the
premise that the contribution of natural selection to the makeup of future human generations is glacial and negligible. But
they reject the conclusion that, having ridden ourselves of its tyranny, we can now let the weak and sick among us survive
and multiply. Rather, they propose to replace natural selection with eugenics. But who, by which authority, and according to
what guidelines will administer this man-made culling and decide who is to live and who is to die, who is to breed and who
may not? Why select by intelligence and not by courtesy or altruism or church-going - or al of them together? It is here that
eugenics fails miserably. Should the criterion be physical, like in ancient Sparta? Should it be mental? Should IQ determine
one's fate - or social status or wealth? Different answers yield disparate eugenic programs and target dissimilar groups in the
population. Aren't eugenic criteria liable to be unduly influenced by fashion and cultural bias ? Can we
agree on a universal eugenic agenda in a world as ethnically and culturally diverse as ours? If we do
get it wrong - and
the chances are overwhelming - will we not damage our gene pool irreparably and, with it, the
future of our species? And even if many will avoid a slippery slope leading from eugenics to
active extermination of "inferior" groups in the general population - can we guarantee that
everyone will? How to prevent eugenics from being appropriated by an intrusive, authoritarian, or
even murderous state? Modern eugenicists distance themselves from the crude methods adopted at the beginning of
the last century by 29 countries, including Germany, The United States, Canada, Switzerland, Austria, Venezuela, Estonia,
Argentina, Norway, Denmark, Sweden (until 1976), Brazil, Italy, Greece, and Spain. They talk about free contraceptives for
low-IQ women, vasectomies or tubal ligations for criminals, sperm banks with contributions from high achievers, and
incentives for college students to procreate. Modern genetic engineering and biotechnology are readily applicable to eugenic
projects. Cloning can serve to preserve the genes of the fittest. Embryo selection and prenatal diagnosis of genetically
diseased embryos can reduce the number of the unfit. But even these innocuous variants of eugenics fly in the face of
liberalism. Inequality, claim the proponents of hereditary amelioration, is genetic, not environmental. All men are created
unequal and as much subject to the natural laws of heredity as are cows and bees. Inferior people give birth to inferior
offspring and, thus, propagate their inferiority. Even if this were true - which is at best debatable - the question is whether
the inferior specimen of our species possess the inalienable right to reproduce? If society is to bear the costs of overpopulation - social welfare, medical care, daycare centers - then society has the right to regulate procreation. But does it
have the right to act discriminately in doing so? Another dilemma is whether we have the moral right - let alone the
necessary knowledge - to interfere with natural as well as social and demographic trends. Eugenicists counter that
contraception and indiscriminate medicine already do just that. Yet, studies show that the more affluent and educated a
population becomes - the less fecund it is. Birth rates throughout the world have dropped dramatically already. Instead of
culling the great unwashed and the unworthy - wouldn't it be a better idea to educate them (or their off-spring) and provide
them with economic opportunities (euthenics rather than eugenics)? Human populations seem to self-regulate. A gentle and
persistent nudge in the right direction - of increased affluence and better schooling - might achieve more than a hundred
eugenic programs, voluntary or compulsory. That
eugenics presents itself not merely as a
biological-social agenda, but as a panacea, ought to arouse suspicion. The
typical eugenics text reads more like a catechism than a reasoned argument. Previous all-encompassing and
omnicompetent plans tended to end traumatically - especially when they contrasted a human elite
with a dispensable underclass of persons. Above all, eugenics is about human hubris. To presume to know better
than the lottery of life is haughty. Modern medicine largely obviates the need for eugenics in that it allows
even genetically defective people to lead pretty normal lives. Of course, Man himself - being part of Nature may be regarded as nothing more than an agent of natural selection. Still, many of the arguments advanced in favor of
eugenics can be turned against it with embarrassing ease. Consider sick children. True, they are a burden to society and a
probable menace to the gene pool of the species. But they also inhibit further reproduction in their family by consuming the
financial and mental resources of the parents. Their genes - however flawed - contribute to genetic diversity.
Even a badly mutated phenotype sometimes yields precious scientific knowledge and an interesting
genotype. The implicit Weltbild of eugenics is static - but the real world is dynamic. There is no such thing as a
"correct" genetic makeup towards which we must all strive. A combination of genes may be
perfectly adaptable to one environment - but woefully inadequate in another. It is therefore
prudent to encourage genetic diversity or polymorphism. The more rapidly the world changes, the
greater the value of mutations of all sorts. One never knows whether today's maladaptation will not
prove to be tomorrow's winner. Ecosystems are invariably comprised of niches and different genes even mutated ones - may fit different niches. In the 18th century most peppered moths in Britain were silvery
gray, indistinguishable from lichen-covered trunks of silver birches - their habitat. Darker moths were gobbled up by
rapacious birds. Their mutated genes proved to be lethal. As soot from sprouting factories blackened these trunks - the very
same genes, hitherto fatal, became an unmitigated blessing. The blacker specimen survived while their hitherto perfectly
adapted fairer brethren perished ("industrial melanism"). This mode of natural selection is called directional. Moreover,
"bad" genes are often connected to "desirable genes" (pleitropy). Sickle cell anemia protects certain
African tribes against malaria. This is called "diversifying or disruptive natural selection". Artificial
selection can thus fast deteriorate into adverse selection due to ignorance. Modern eugenics relies on
statistics. It is no longer concerned with causes - but with phenomena and the likely effects of intervention. If the adverse
traits of off-spring and parents are strongly correlated - then preventing parents with certain undesirable qualities from
multiplying will surely reduce the incidence of said dispositions in the general population. Yet, correlation does not
necessarily imply causation. The manipulation of one parameter of the correlation does not inevitably alter it - or the
incidence of the outcome. Eugenicists often hark back to wisdom garnered by generations of breeders and farmers. But the
unequivocal lesson of thousands of years of artificial selection is that cross-breeding (hybridization) even of two lines of inferior genetic stock - yields valuable genotypes. Inter-marriage between races,
groups in the population, ethnic groups, and clans is thus bound to improve the species' chances of survival
more than any eugenic scheme.
EUGENIC VIOLENCE IS THE WORST THING EVER
MONCERI 14
/Flavia Monceri is Associate professor of Political philosophy at the University of Molise, The nature of
the “ruling body”: Embodiment, ableism and normalcy, pdf, accessed via academia.edu, spark/
To recap the previous discussion, it can be stated that taking individual diversity seriously means acknowledging to its
radical consequences that “impairment” (just like “sex”) cannot be defined as something natural. If it is true that
human bodies manifest themselves “in nature” in very different forms, the definition of such forms
as fitting or not-fitting the ideal-type of a human body do not derive directly from “nature” (for which all
forms are legitimate for the simple fact of being there), but rather from an evaluation judgment by the part of human
beings themselves on the basis of a model, or standard, of the human body, which is already culturally constructed.
To say that «this body has no legs» is a plain and trivial statement that simply recognizes a difference between that body and
other bodies for which it can be stated that «this body has two legs». But defining that same body as “impaired” implies the
delivering of an evaluation judgment based on the alleged existence of a standard human body – equipped with two legs – to
be conceived as the correct body working as the reference model to declare that any other concrete body is fully human
(what I call the “ruling body”). So being things, the so called “disabled” bodies – to use a label that is thinkable only
under the current regime of “ableism” (Campbell 2009) – put
radically in question the notions of body and
embodiment as they are usually understood, since they can be considered, by the part of the alleged
“normal human beings” as having, being, displaying, representing and performing non-normative
embodiments (e.g., Shildrick 2009; Inckle 2010). In fact, they clearly uncover the implicit reference of body
and embodiment to normalcy (Davis 1995; 2002), that is to say to the supposed existence of a model of the human
body working as the fundamental norm against which all individual bodies might and should be measured in order to be
“correctly” positioned within the social group. It is through this process of normalization that the body
becomes a social institution: its definition, limits and abilities are stated from the very beginning,
before a concrete body comes to the world, that is to say even before its actual embodiment takes
place. In this sense, the body is a social institution because each one of us has been categorized at
birth according to the ruling body in force at that moment, after “passing” all the necessary tests to
declare its being fully human. And it goes without saying that the individual embodied experience – that is to say the
essential nature of the involved individual – had no relevance at all for this process, just like it happens for a number of
other processes taking place in the life-course of each one of us, unless it is not found out that our body is in some ways
“abnormal”– far from the ruling body. As a result, what taking “disabled” bodies seriously leads to is the
need to problematize “ability” and “normality”, instead of “disability” and “abnormality”. As for today,
the prevailing (social-)scientific discourse still seems to suggest that we should gain more knowledge about “disability” as a
social process of disabling (some) people by labelling them as “abnormal”. But this discourse, for all its merits, is not able to
frontally attack the notions of ability and normality, rather concealing them – making them invisible and therefore all the
more strong. Constructing a notion of disability, one that I would like to erase from any dictionary just like that of
abnormality, is possible only
because it refers to a notion of ability taken for granted and very rarely
made visible, let alone problematized. Such notion apparently seems to be rooted in an external nature
independent of human beings and having its universal and unchanging laws and rules that can however be broken giving
birth to abnormality – the abnormals as “nature’s errors”. The same notion of abnormality is possible only because of the
presence of a prior notion of normality, which is almost never directly problematized. From a political viewpoint, the
implicit acceptance of the notions of ability and normality means that the “disabled” and “abnormals” people can act only on
the presuppositions of an identity politics for “minority groups”, without the reference to which they could never claim to be
treated in terms of mutual recognition as fullyhuman- beings. Therefore, I agree with those scholars, who from a critical or
radical position try to address normality and ability as the questions we should make visible, problematize and investigate if
we want to let bodies and embodiments still labelled as “abnormal” and “disabled” actually matter. In his Enforcing
Normalcy, disability scholar Lennard J. Davis interestingly highlights the terms of this situation with direct reference to
bodies and embodiments: «For most temporarily abled people, the issue of disability is a simple one. A person with a visible
physical impairment (someone who has an injured, nonstandard or nonfunctioning body or body part) or with sensory or
mental impairment (someone who has trouble hearing, seeing, or processing information) is considered disabled» (Davis
1995: 1). This is possible because those temporarily abled people do think themselves as “normal”
and therefore alien to the experience of “disability”, which can be put away somewhere, far from
sight. But «what does not occur to many people is that disability is not a minor issue that relates to a relatively small
number of unfortunate people; it is part of a historically constructed discourse, an ideology of thinking
about the body under certain historical circumstances. Disability is not an object – a woman with a
cane – but a social process that intimately involves everyone who has a body and lives in the world
of the senses» (Davis 2002: 2). Just as Garland-Thomson in an above-mentioned quotation, Davis stresses the fact that
“disability” can be considered a characteristic trait of being human , of being and having a human body
simply given as such in nature, with all of its peculiarities. So, it is very surprising that “we” are not easily ready to
acknowledge that “we” are all notfully- able, or in the process of becoming disabled. In my opinion this
is just because of the invisible notion of normality, which works as a stabilizer, so to say, not only in order
to neutralize social fears about suffering, illness, and death as far as possible, but also to minimize and control the claims
that would arise by the part of the individual bodies if the fact of temporarily ablebodiedness or of the potential dis-ability of
all of us would be patently acknowledged at the intersubjective level. In this sense, normality performs also a
political task, consisting in blocking individual demands, coming from an out-of-control grassroots
level. Through the notion of “disability” a gap is constructed between the “normal/able body” and
the “abnormal/disabled body”, which helps to negate the existence of a continuum in the forms in which human
bodies are given by nature. Therefore it can be stated that «the construction of disability is based on a deconstruction of a
continuum» (Davis 1995: 11), just like the construction of the male/female binary is based on the deconstruction of the
natural continuum of sex (see, e.g., Fausto-Sterling 2000). In this sense, it is true that «the disabled body is not a discrete
object but rather a set of social relations» (Davis 1995: 11) having nothing to do with “nature as it is”, because just the refusal
of a natural continuum of the forms of the human body is the presupposition of its construction. The binary
normal/abnormal is just what lies beneath the idea that it should be possible to interrupt the natural continuum by means of
a human choice to re-interpret nature according to cultural assumptions, to the extent that at the end of the process the
normal body is no longer whatever body existing in the world, but only the one conforming to what is considered normal
according to the culturally constructed notion of the human nature. Lennard Davis suggests to distiguish between normality
and normalcy stating that normality is «the alleged physical state of being normal», whereas normalcy is «the politicaljuridical-institutional state that relies on the control and normalization of the bodies, or what Foucault calls “biopower”», so
that «like democracy, normalcy is a descriptor of a certain form of governmental rule, the former by the people, the latter
over bodies» (Davis 2002: 107). I would like to add, however, that normalcy is not properly a form of
governmental rule «over the bodies» (by the part of whom?), but just like democracy is a kind of
governmental rule “by the (alleged majority of) the people” through the body as a social institution
adopted as a tool to police and control the concrete bodies. Anyway, I agree with the distinction between
normality and normalcy, because it makes clear that while the former can be more easily deconstructed by considering the
evaluation judgment in which it consists as a kind of matter-of-fact statement clearly contradicted by nature itself, the latter
is much more difficult to recognize and argue against, for it entails all of the power relations that crystallize, moving from
individual interactions, in wider and wider structures that end up by forgetting their origins in plain statements about
alleged facts negotiated and conventionally agreed upon by single individuals. So, it is properly normalcy that should be
openly addressed in order to deconstruct the binary normal/abnormal with the final goal to overcome this dichotomy as a
mere result of negotiated opinions about the truth of body and embodiment. Of course, in the case of disability, this process
of exposing the binary normal/abnormal, which is common to all kind of differences (ethnic and racial, sexual and gender,
and so on), must address the binary able/disabled. As Fiona Kumari Campbell rightly points out, we can speak about an
“ableistnormativity” (Campbell 2009: 4), just like we can speak about a heteronormativity in the field of sexual and gender
differences (see Warner 1991). This is the reason why in the field of Disability theories «it is necessary to shift the gaze of
contemporary scholarship away from the spotlight on disability to a more nuanced exploration of epistemologies and
ontologies of ableism» (Campbell 2009: 1). Put differently, the point is to shift the focus from the
investigation of the abnormal to the uncovering and problematization of the normal , since «disability,
often quite unconsciously, continues to be examined and taught from the perspective of the Other», while the challenge «is
to reverse, to invert this traditional approach, to shift our gaze and concentrate on what the study of disability tells us about
the production, operation and maintenance of ableism» (4). Disability theory should investigate the positive pole, so to say,
of the able/disabled dichotomy, in order to expose and clarify the logic of ableism, instead of concentrating on disablism.
Ableism can be defined as «a network of beliefs, processes, and practices that produce a particular kind of self and body (the
corporeal standard) that is projected as the perfect, as the species-typical, and, therefore, as essential and fully human»
(Campbell 2005: 127n.2). What this investigation could contribute to has not only a scholarly relevance, but especially a
political one: Inscribing certain bodies in terms of deficiency and essential inadequacy privileges a particular understanding
of normalcy that is commensurate with the interests of dominant groups (and the assumed interests of subordinated
groups). Indeed,
the formation of ableist relations require the normate
individual to depend upon the self of “disabled” bodies being rendered
beyond the realm of civility, thus becoming an unthinkable object of
apprehension. The unruly, uncivil, disabled body is necessary for the reiteration of the “truth”
of the “real/essential” human self who is endowed with masculinist attributes of certainty, mastery
and autonomy (Campbell 2009: 11).
AT: NO EUGENICS PROGRAMS ANYMORE
EUGENICS FUELED STERILIZATION IS STILL HAPPENING
Campos 13 (Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado. He has published several
dozen academic articles and four books. He is also a journalist published in the New York Times, The Wall
Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, the Guardian, and more. “Eugenics Are Alive and Well
In the United States,” 7-10-13, http://ideas.time.com/2013/07/10/eugenics-are-alive-and-well-in-theunited-states/) JG
Informed consent is a concept at the core of both liberal democracy and the ethical practice of medicine. That is just one reason why
a new report that, between 2006 and 2010, at least 148 women were sterilized illegally in California prisons should
deeply disturb us.∂ The report found the inmates
were given tubal ligations without the prison administrators
bothering to get the case by case authorization for the procedures, required by law, from a state board. The point of
this requirement is to have state officials outside of the prison review whether a proposed sterilization is genuinely consensual. (At
least one woman has complained that she was coerced by prison officials into having the procedure).∂ Judging from the comments
being made on even many liberal internet sites regarding this story, it seems a refresher course in one of the darker sides of
American history is in order (A typical reaction: “So ridiculous making this procedure so difficult. Every woman who walks in the
door of a prison should be encouraged with times cuts and subsidies to get sterilized.”)∂ For much of the 20th century,
people –usually women – in American prisons and mental institutions were subjected to forced
sterilization. In an infamous 1927 Supreme Court opinion, Oliver Wendell Holmes enthusiastically approved of this practice,
saying of the coerced tubal ligation of a teenaged girl that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” (The evidence for the
girl’s “imbecility” consisted of the fact that she had had a child out of wedlock after being raped by a
relative). The practice of legal forced sterilization was an outgrowth of the eugenics movement – the idea
that the genetic quality of human populations should be improved by selective breeding practices, whereby
society’s elites would curtail unnecessary reproduction by the “feeble-minded” (a term that in the early decades of
the 20th century was used as a catch-all for what the elites deemed socially undesirable people).∂ The eugenics movement in
the United States was largely discredited by the fact that eugenics was central to both the theory and practice of
Nazism. Nevertheless, California in particular has a long and sordid history of forced sterilization: sterilizations
were forced on prisoners as late as the mid-1960s, in part because California’s long-time attorney general was a vociferous supporter
of the practice, and it wasn’t formally outlawed until 1979.∂ The law that was ignored in the case of the 148 prisoners over the past
few years was designed in the shadow of that history. It is a product of the understanding that forcibly
institutionalized people are especially vulnerable to having their “consent” extracted from them, in ways
that would never work if they were free persons.
MODERN EUGENICS CAUSES DEHUMYNIZATION, INCREASED RAPE, AND SEX SLAVERY
TAYLOR 12 [Rebecca Taylor“How Modern Eugenics Discounts Human Dignity,” National Catholic
Register, 1-27-2012,http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/how-modern-eugenics-discounts-humandignity1] JG
In this modern age, many people are no longer afraid of eugenics.∂ It is not that they are ignorant of the past. They know all about
the movement of the early 20th century that tried to create a better human race by preventing the birth of those deemed “unfit.”∂
Eugenics literally means “good birth,” and it seeks to “improve” the human gene pool.∂ The American eugenics
movement resulted in the forced sterilization of more than 60,000 Americans in 33 states who were considered unfit to reproduce.
And eugenics did not stop there.∂ Adolf Hitler was a huge fan of eugenics and brought it to its natural conclusion: the Holocaust of
World War II, where millions of the “genetically unfit” were exterminated in an effort to create a “master race.” Those considered
unfit were not just Jews, but also the criminal, weak, feeble-minded, insane and disabled (not to mention priests and nuns and those
who helped try to hide the Jewish people).∂ Modern eugenicists do not fear the horrors of the past. They support
aborting fetuses with disease or disability, what is sometimes called eugenic abortion. Or they advocate the
screening of in vitro fertilization (IVF) embryos for disease and “throwing out” the “defective” ones.∂ Modern eugenicists argue that
what went wrong in the 20th century was government enforcement; it was the fact that the authorities forced their will on the people
that made eugenics go wrong. Modern eugenicists believe improving the gene pool by making sure the genetically unfit are not born
is not a dangerous prospect for the 21st century.∂ The eugenics of today is “benign” because it will be accomplished not by
government coercion, but by individual choice — namely the choices of parents to have the best children possible.∂ Julian Savulescu,
chair of the Oxford Center for Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, argues that people should
choose the best children by looking at their genetics before they are born .∂ In his 2002 paper “Procreative
Beneficence: Why We Should Select the Best Children,” he wrote, “Couples should select embryos or fetuses which are most likely to
have the best life, based on available genetic information, including information about non-disease genes.”∂ So Savulescu argues for
the selection of children not just based on health, but also on traits like intelligence and gender. He insists that this is not eugenics,
which, remember, means “good birth.” Instead, Savulescu calls this attempt to have the best children a “private enterprise” based
solely on parental choice. This great experiment with individual parental choice based on genetic information
is already under way and has had some devastating results. According to Mara Hvistendahl’s groundbreaking book
Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, 163 million girls in Asia are “missing.”
They were likely aborted simply because they lacked a Y chromosome.∂ It is well known that Asians have a preference
for sons, but it was not until the West’s ideas of reproductive choice and population control came to the
East, along with cheap ultrasound technology, that girls started going “missing” in the millions. This preference for
sons found refuge in a worldwide culture that supported a woman’s individual decision about whether or not she wanted to be
pregnant. “Reproductive rights” now protect the personal decision to not give birth to a girl.∂ This dearth of girls is not a small
problem. One hundred sixty-three million girls is the entire population of females in the United States.∂ Speaking strictly, by the
numbers, this gendercide has easily outpaced the destruction of human life by any fascist or communist
regime.∂ This devastation was not the result of a great government program to eliminate girls. In fact,
governments in China and India have tried to curb sex selection by making it against the law. This epidemic of missing
females is instead the result of millions of individual choices.∂ The choice to have what parents believed
was the “best” child for them: a son. And the sum of these individual choices has magnified the prejudice
against girls, making the lives of women who survive the womb worse, not better.∂ With millions of unmarried men
unable to find brides, sexually transmitted diseases and crime are on the rise . Hvistendahl reports, “Between
1992 and 2004, China’s crime rate nearly doubled. In India, from 2003 to 2007, rape cases surged over 30% and
abductions by over 50%, prompting the government to unveil female-only trains.”∂ In their scarcity, Asian women have
also become commodities to be bought and sold . Parents all over the continent are guarding their girls against kidnappers
who would sell them to rich families who want to guarantee a future bride for their sons.∂ Women are routinely kidnapped
and dragged across boundary lines to be forced into the sex industry.∂ Poor families who could not afford
sex-selective procedures are selling their daughters to rich families who could . Individual choices in favor of
males are ensuring that women are born only to poor families who cannot afford sex selection.∂ This, then, increases the chances
that those women will be treated as commodities.∂ In an interview with TrustLaw, gender expert Tanushree Soni from
Plan International reports that sex-selective abortion is having devastating consequences for women.∂ Soni told TrustLaw, “An
imbalance of sexes fuels human trafficking and sexual exploitation. It endangers economic development
and increases social instability as a growing population of men search for partners .” Worse, she said, “When you
see very highly skewed ratios of sex, it’s very likely you’ll get a high prevalence of violence against women and girls.”∂
WESTERN KNOWLEDGE IS BAD
POLYCULTURALISM BREAKS DOWN THE INTELLECTUAL HIERARCHY THAT PUTS
WESTERN KNOWLEDGE AT THE TOP
PRASHAD 2 (Vijay Prashad is the Professor of International Studies at Trinity College and has a Ph.D
from the University of Chicago. Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting Print. 2002) JG
These examples are not random, for they enable us to indulge in one of the traits of the polycultural approach—to snub
the pretensions of Europe∂ and the United States, which arrogates certain parts of world knowledge to∂ itself,
thereby placing its ideas at the top of a cultural hierarchy leaving the∂ rest of us to fend off both the legacy of colonial
knowledge and violence with∂ our meager economic and cultural resources. Several historians of Europe∂ these days
recognize the interlocking heritage of the Eurasian landmass, as ∂ well as the substantial links between Africa
and Europe.127 The interchange between the continents produced what is today so cavalierly called ‘‘Western
rationality,’’ ‘‘Western science,’’ and ‘‘Western liberalism’’: this erases the influence of those Arab and Jewish
scholars who extended Aristotle’s insights,∂ those Indian wizards who made mathematics possible with their
discovery of the zero, those Iroquois whose experiments with federalism helped frame∂ some of the concepts for the
U.S. Constitution.128 Instead of laying claim to ∂ the complex heritage of these modern phenomena,
chauvinists of color argue∂ for such traditions as ‘‘Hindu Economics’’ and ‘‘Islamic Science,’’ as well∂ as cede
the terrain of democracy to Europe.129 Polyculturalism refuses to∂ allow the ‘‘West’’ to arrogate these
combined and uneven developments of∂ so many sociocultural formations, since it scrupulously investigates the
connections∂ that dynamically generate them.
POLYCULTURALISM – GENERAL
POLYCULTURALISM IS NOT ABOUT UNDERSTANDING THAT WE ARE ALL JUST
“HUMANS,” BUT THAT WE MUST OVERCOME SOCIAL DIVIDES TO CREATE A HUMANITY
THAT IS EQUAL
PRASHAD 2 (Vijay Prashad is the Professor of International Studies at Trinity College and has a Ph.D
from the University of Chicago. Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the
Myth of Cultural Purity, Print. 2002) JG
The answer to American ideology, then, comes against a language of∂ ‘‘skin,’’ but not in a color-blind fashion. Polyculturalism
does not posit an∂ undifferentiated ‘‘human’’ who is inherently equal as the ground for its critique∂ of the world,
one that says something like ‘‘we are all human after all,’’∂ but seems to offer only the smallest palliatives against racist
structures. Instead∂ it concentrates on the project of creating our humanity. ‘‘Human’’ is∂ an ‘‘unfinished
product,’’ one divided by social forces that must be overcome∂ for ‘‘human’’ to be made manifest.135 In the nineteenth
century near Delhi,∂ Akbar Illahabadi intoned that we are born people, but with great difficulty∂ we become human
(aadmi tha, bari muskil se insan hua). A polycultural humanism,∂ for this tradition, is a ‘‘practical index’’ that sets in motion the
processes∂ that might in time produce a humanity that is indeed in some way∂ equal.
MODERN NOTIONS OF RACE DESTROY FLUIDITY AND ALLOW FOR DEHUMYNIZATION
PRASHAD 2 (Vijay Prashad is the Professor of International Studies at Trinity College and has a Ph.D
from the University of Chicago. Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the
Myth of Cultural Purity, Print. 2002) JG
African and Asian peoples constituted notions of distinction based not∂ on skin color but on cultural exchange. The evidence we have
from the rim∂ of the Indian Ocean shows us that the peoples developed forms of ignorant∂ ethnocentrism and xenophobia. To feel
superior to someone is not necessarily∂ to hate that person, and it certainly does not ordain that one can then∂ capture, treat as
fundamentally inhuman, and utilize that person principally∂ for labor. Modern notions of ‘‘race’’ and modern, capitalist
racist institutions∂ render most of the fluidity of cultural difference moot . From da Gama’s arrival∂ onward,
traditions of xenophobia in the Indian Ocean world were∂ transformed into the hidebound theories of race that
emerge from Europe’s experiments with the enslavement of human beings for profit, most notably in the
Atlantic slave trade. With the invention of race and the advent of racism, the Afro-Asian world would alter
dramatically
ABOLISHING THE NOTION OF RACE IS KEY TO BREAKING DOWN THE RACIAL
HIERARCHY
PRASHAD 2 (Vijay Prashad is the Professor of International Studies at Trinity College and has a Ph.D
from the University of Chicago. Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the
Myth of Cultural Purity, Print. 2002) JG
In China we see a similar development. In the third century b.c.e., Chinese∂ classics ascribed colors to the different
tribes that they deemed to be∂ barbarians, the red or black Dai, the white or black Man, and the black Lang.∂ The Chinese classics
understood that those who did not enjoy the fruits of∂ civilization lived in recoupable banishment. There was, however, no
sense∂ that these people are in a race-based, and therefore permanent, hierarchy.∂ The Chinese notion of
cultural difference is captured in the idea of yongxiabianyi,∂ ‘‘to use the Chinese [Xia] ways to transform those who are different∂
[the Yi people, in this phrase]’’: assimilation, or the end to the hierarchy, is∂ possible. Historian Frank Diko¨tter rightly argues that
the coloration of people∂ in the Chinese texts was ‘‘symbolic. They indicated either the dominant∂ tint of the minorities’ clothes or
the five directions of the compass: white for∂ the West, black for the North, red for the East, blue-green for the South. Yellow∂
represented the centre.’’53∂ In ancient Europe, too, the association with skin color did not make for ∂ a decisive
difference. ‘‘The ancients did not fall into the error of biological ∂ racism; black skin color was not a sign of
inferiority [or it was only a contingent∂ sign of inferiority]; Greeks and Romans did not establish color as an∂
obstacle to integration in society; and ancient society was one that ‘for all∂ its faults and failures never made
color the basis for judging a man.’’’54 Furthermore,∂ as in Asia, the Europeans associated the color black
with certain∂ phenomena (such as the underworld in Greek and Roman cosmology), but∂ this association had ‘‘nothing to do with
skin color,’’ and it was perhaps only∂ much later that this association was harnessed to antiblack racism.55∂ In Europe, as in certain
circles within Asia, skin color developed aesthetic∂ qualities, so that some people wrote well of fair, as opposed to dark,∂ skin.
Ancient texts recorded variable notions of beauty and asked that each∂ standard be accorded its own validity. It was not odd,
therefore, that Philodemus,∂ Theocritus, Virgil, Ovid, and Martial had paeans to those with dark∂ skin.56 Ancient Chinese texts often
use white jade as a metaphor for beauty,∂ both for men and women. At the court of the Western Jin dynasty (
–
∂ c.e.),
Diko¨tter tells us that ‘‘male nobles even used powder to whiten their∂ faces.’’57 In India too there is a tendency among certain
groups to admire fair∂ skin more than dark skin (although duskiness is often eroticized), but, as I∂ argued earlier, to reduce an
unhealthy obsession with skin color to the idea∂ of ‘‘race’’ does not enable us to grasp the historical dynamics of skin color on∂ the
subcontinent.58 Even when the Chinese were made to suffer a European∂ pretense, they did not ascribe any ontological meaning to
color difference.∂ Most Chinese intellectuals during the Opium War (
– ) deployed notions∂ of skin color equally to denigrate
their vanquishers. English troops∂ were called ‘‘white devils/ghosts’’ or baigui—those whose skin was thought∂ to be white
due to daily baths of cold water and the consumption of milk.∂ Indian troops in the British army were known as
‘‘black
devils/ghosts’’ or∂ heigui. While each group was distinguished by its skin color, both were condemned∂ as
devils or ghosts. People across space and time used color as a symbol∂ for community or for the cardinal points, or else
ascribed beauty to various∂ colors, but this use of color itself cannot be taken to mean that they held ∂ fixed
cultural meanings for each color. White was not always good, and black∂ not always bad, and certainly
when these colors are used, they are not always∂ metaphors for the pigment of the skin.
RACIAL CLASSIFICATION ALLOWS FOR SYSTEMATIC RACISM
PRASHAD 2 (Vijay Prashad is the Professor of International Studies at Trinity College and has a Ph.D
from the University of Chicago. Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the
Myth of Cultural Purity, Print. 2002) JG
Frank Snowden, therefore, is quite correct in his assessment that antiblack∂ notions perhaps would not have gained
credence ‘‘in the modern world∂ in the absence of such phenomenon as Negro slavery and colonialism.’’75 Indeed,∂ most
scholars agree that the idea of race can be traced to the late 1600’s and the conventional marker is Francois Bernier’s Nouvelle
division de la∂ terre par les diff´erents espe`ces ou races qui’l habitant(1684).76 Bernier, a French∂ traveler, spent more than a
decade (
– ) in India and western Asia,∂ The Strange Career of Xenophobia∂ about which he wrote a famous travel book. His
travelogue was one of many∂ such, a panoply of books about places that Europe did not know before in∂ any detail and about which,
thanks to Magellan’s circumnavigation of the∂ globe in
– and the printing press, the European public was to know∂ more
than it could process. Bernier’s account of his travels provided considerable∂ knowledge to his contemporaries, but it also allowed
them to live with∂ the certain knowledge that their own society was the very best thing possible.∂ Comparing Mughal India and
Ottoman Turkey with the France of Louis∂ XIV, Bernier wrote that ‘‘take away the right to private property in land, and∂ you
introduce, as an infallible consequence, tyranny, slavery, injustice, beggary∂ and barbarism.’’77 Upon his return to Europe and after
the success of∂ his travel book, Bernier wrote Nouvelle division which was one of the first of∂ many such
compendiums on race. Bernier divided humanity into four or∂ five ‘‘espe`ces ou races,’’ with lines of
demarcation based on physical traits (hair, stature, nose, and lips), geography, and, significantly, skin color.78
Bernier’s∂ work was followed, in the eighteenth century, by that of the Swedish∂ scientist Carolus Linneaus (who transformed the
method of raciology with∂ his scientific classification schemes) and of the German naturalist Johann ∂ Friedrich Blumenbach (who
devised the field of physical anthropology and∂ who provided the early linkage of African man with ape). This scholarship∂ was
the first to classify humanity into groups or races based on biological ∂ principles. Xenophobia was
classified and institutionalized and the idea of∂ race was born.
STATE KEY
WE MUST ADDRESS THE IMPERFECT RACIAL SYSTEM OF THE STATE IN ORDER TO SOLVE
FOR IT
PRASHAD 2 (Vijay Prashad is the Professor of International Studies at Trinity College and has a Ph.D
from the University of Chicago. Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the
Myth of Cultural Purity, Print. 2002) JG
The problem of the twenty-first century, then, is the problem of the color blind. This problem is simple: it believes that
to redress racism, we need to not consider race in social practice, notably in the sphere of governmental
action. The state, we are told, must be above race. It must not actively discriminate against people on the basis of race in
its actions. At the dawn of∂ a new millennium, there is widespread satisfaction of the progress on the ‘‘race
problem’’; this is so to some extent, but the compass of attacks against∂ blacks and Latinos remains routine. If
we do not live by
’s Plessy v. Ferguson,∂ we continue to live by its principle axiom—that ‘‘race’’ is a formal and ∂
individual designation and not a historical and social one.5 That is, we are led to believe that racism is a
prejudicial behavior of one party against another∂ rather than the coagulation of socioeconomic injustice against groups.∂ If the
state acts without prejudice (that is, if it acts equally), then that is proof of the end of racism. Unequal
socioeconomic conditions of today, based as they are on racisms of the past
and of the present, are thereby rendered untouchable by the state. Color-blind
justice privatizes inequality and racism, and it removes itself from the project of redistributive and anti-racist justice. This is the
genteel racism of our new millennium.∂
NEG
POLITICS LINKS
OBAMA GETS BLAMED FOR CHANGES TO THE CENSUS
MATTHEWS 14 (Merrill Matthews is a resident scholar at the Institute for Policy Innovation in Dallas,
Texas, “If The Facts Don't Fit, Change The Facts: How The Obama Administration Undercuts Public
Confidence In Government Statistics” 4-21-14,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/merrillmatthews/2014/04/21/if-the-facts-dont-fit-change-the-facts-howthe-obama-administration-undercuts-public-confidence-in-government-statistics/) JG
John Adams, the second president of the United States, once noted, “Facts are stubborn things.” Well, not in the Age of Obama,
where “facts,” like the number of uninsured Americans, can be easily changed to suit the president and his agenda. ∂ Last week the
U.S. Census Bureau announced it will use a new way to count the uninsured . The Bureau concedes the new
approach is almost guaranteed to produce lower uninsured numbers—at exactly the time that President
Obama wants lower uninsured numbers. Coincidence?∂ The Washington Post quotes Census Bureau Director John H.
Thompson as saying, “I can assure you, I have had no discussions of this with the White House or with anyone else in the
administration.” But wasn’t that what former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman snidely told Congress, then later news reports
showed his name on the White House visitors’ log 157 times?∂ To be sure, there has been a long-running debate over whether the
Census Bureau overcounts the uninsured, so an effort to revise the system would be helpful. With any other administration it would
be reasonable to give it the benefit of the doubt, but you cannot make that assumption when Obama is involved. Indeed, the
administration may have tipped its hand early.∂ Recall that retiring Republican Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire had accepted
an Obama offer to become secretary of the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau. Gregg later retracted his
acceptance claiming the Obama administration planned to politicize the Census Bureau. As the New York Times reported on Feb. 12,
2009, “The
White House signaled last week that it would exert greater control
over the Census Bureau, in part because of a concern among minority
groups over Mr. Gregg’s leading the Commerce Department.”∂ The Census Bureau regularly conducts public surveys to
estimate how many Americans have insurance coverage, what kind of coverage, and how many are uninsured. People who went the
entire year without coverage are considered uninsured; those who had coverage for part or all of the year are considered insured.∂
Interviewers typically ask survey respondents if they had had coverage at any time during the previous year. But people can forget
they had coverage at some point, or they may omit Medicaid, or they might have had a minimal-coverage policy and didn’t think it
was real insurance.∂ In its new approach Census interviewers will ask respondents if they currently have coverage, and if the answer
is yes, then they will ask more questions to get additional information.∂ The Census Bureau says that the uninsured number dropped
by 2 percentage points, from 12.5 to 10.6 percent, when testing the new method. Something similar happened in Massachusetts.
When the Bay State passed Romneycare, state officials decided to do their own survey of the state’s uninsured as a baseline. They
came up with a figure about 3 percentage points lower than the Census number.∂ Now, more than ever, the country needs
reliable data to know if Obamacare is reducing the number of uninsured. But Bureau officials claim that
the new approach is so different that the uninsured numbers before and after the change will be
incompatible.∂ But even if you think transitioning to a better survey is a good idea—and I do—why would you do it right after the
Obamacare enrollment period ended? Can Bureau leadership really be that politically clueless?∂ American Enterprise Institute
Resident Scholar Michael R. Strain, who used to work at the Census Bureau, sees bad timing in the announcement, but no
conspiracy. He notes that researchers have been moving toward reforming the surveys for several years. And since there are other
surveys besides the one being changed, there will be data to compare it to.∂ But that’s where he underestimates Obama. The
president and his administration have been absolutely shameless in their misuse and abuse of statistics. And the media haven’t been
much better in holding the administration accountable. You can never take any numbers spouted by the administration at face
value.∂ Take Obama’s Thursday press conference claiming that 8 million people had signed up for Obamacare. All the reporters
know by now that number doesn’t tell us how many actually paid their premiums, or how many of those previously had coverage, got
it canceled, and so had to get new coverage.∂ Real Clear Politics’ Sean Trende in January analyzed the president’s claim that 4
million people had enrolled in Medicaid. But Trende’s detailed assessment put that number closer to 400,000—one-tenth of
Obama’s claim.∂ Obamacare requires Medicare’s trustees to assume that the government will dramatically cut Medicare and
Medicaid reimbursements for physicians and hospitals several years in the future. That required assumption cut, at least on paper,
Medicare’s long-term unfunded liabilities by about $50 trillion. Medicare’s Office of the Actuary thought those reimbursement
assumptions were so unrealistic that the office released its own paper providing an “alternative scenario” to the trustees’ report.∂ The
New York Post’s John Crudele ran a series of articles exposing how some Census Bureau employees were manipulating
unemployment data in the months leading up to the 2012 election to help the president.∂ The politicization of what is
supposed to be reliable, nonpartisan, government-sponsored economic research is one of the saddest
legacies of the Obama administration, second only to the politicization of what is supposed to be nonpartisan agencies, like
the IRS and the Justice Department. And the president has been repeatedly helped along the way by supposedly independent
organizations whose numbers also don’t stand up to scrutiny.∂ While it’s possible the Census Bureau simply made a badly timed
announcement, this administration has forfeited the benefit of the doubt. You have to assume Obama is manipulating the
numbers to promote his agenda and career, because he does it so often.
THE CENSUS IS A UNIQUELY CONTROVERSIAL ISSUE – KEY TO REDISTRICTING AND
REAPPORTIONMENT
SULLIVAN 09 (Amy Sullivan, TIME.com, “Why the 2010 Census Stirs Up Partisan Politics” 2-15-09,
http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1879667,00.html) JG
When Republican Senator Judd Gregg announced on Thursday that he no longer wished to be the Commerce Secretary nominee, he
said that the decision was based in part on serious disagreements with the Obama White House over the 2010 census. That night on
Fox News, Sean Hannity called Obama's plans for the census process "the biggest White House power grab ever," as his guest Karl
Rove voiced agreement. The same day, House Republicans declared that the White House had "an unprecedented plan" for the
census that "will taint results and open doors to massive waste of taxpayer funds."∂ It may sound surprising to those who don't
consider the decennial headcount a red-hot political matter, but the census has become the controversial subject of an
ongoing power struggle between Democrats and Republicans. And since the 2010 census will be the first in 30 years
to be taken under a Democratic administration, the stakes are particularly high this time around. (See behind-the-scenes pictures of
Obama's Inauguration.)∂ The latest problem arose when Obama nominated Gregg to head the Commerce Department, which
oversees the Census Bureau. Local Democratic officials and advocates for minority groups protested the nomination because they
feared Gregg would not support efforts such as sampling that they think will result in a more accurate census count. The White
House responded by publicly promising that the census director would "work closely with White House senior management." ∂ It was
a simple restatement of existing practice. But it was heralded by some liberals as a change in policy. The Huffington Post ran an
article headlined: "Democrats, Minority Groups Relieved That Gregg Won't Oversee Census." Those reports, in turn, disturbed
conservative activists who immediately condemned the White House "power grab." By Thursday, when Gregg bowed out, the GOP
had launched a coordinated assault on the "politicization of the census." The White House was forced to issue a written clarification,
noting that "this administration has not proposed removing the Census from the Department of Commerce."∂ Why does it matter
who oversees the census? In very general terms, Republicans would prefer to err on the side of undercounting and
Democrats would prefer to err on the side of overcounting. The options can yield very different numbers
for demographic groups and localities — and they have significant political and policy
implications. This most recent skirmish is more manufactured than real, the result of willful misunderstandings. But it has
its roots in an ongoing battle over whom the census counts — and how.∂ As mandated by the Constitution, a census has been taken
by the government every 10 years since 1790 in an effort to count every person living in the United States, both citizens and noncitizens. In recent times, the Census Bureau has arrived at a final count by relying on people to mail back surveys and then sending
out census takers to go door-to-door in an attempt to fill in the gaps. Those census takers not only visit homes that have not returned
the survey, but also seek to count those with no fixed address and those who live in nursing homes, prisons, shelters and other nonstandard housing.∂ The problem is that it is not easy to count every person in the United States, and some communities are
disproportionately left out of the total. The 1990 census missed an estimated 8 million people — mostly immigrants and urban
minorities — and it managed to double-count 4 million white Americans. Recent or illegal immigrants are often reluctant to answer
questions in a government survey, and many experts fear that concerns about government misuse of personal data post-9/11 could
hamper participation in the 2010 census as well. Children have also traditionally been underincluded in census totals.∂ It's possible
to use statistical modeling and sampling methods to supplement the census in order to arrive at estimated counts of various
demographic groups. But there is fierce debate about whether these methods correct or distort the census count. In 1999, the
Supreme Court ruled that sampling could not be used for the purposes of reapportioning congressional seats, and the Bush
Administration chose not to use sampling to fill in the gaps of the 2000 census.∂ The battle over how to count people only makes
sense when you look at what is at stake. The redistricting of local districts and reapportionment of congressional
seats is based on census counts — a state could gain or lose seats based on its population, and shifts within
a state determine plans for redrawing political boundaries. The redistricting that took place in Texas at Tom DeLay's
urging following the 2000 census — which swung six congressional seats to the GOP — is just one example of how dramatically
political fortunes can shift based on the use of those crucial numbers.∂ Census counts are also used to determine how many federal
dollars may flow to a city or state based on grants and other outlays. Democrats have long charged that the
undercounting of minorities and poor Americans prevents federal funding from reaching strapped
communities. Meanwhile, Republicans argue that Democrats seek to boost numbers in order to create extra
congressional districts in urban areas and to bring in more federal money for their constituencies. They
charge that sampling — which Democrats support because it provides estimates for communities that can be hard to track accurately
— is unconstitutional because the Constitution calls for an "actual enumeration" of the population.∂ It seems fairly certain that the
White House did not anticipate census politics to play into its nomination of Gregg to the Commerce post. And Gregg himself backed
off the issue in a news conference after he announced his withdrawal, insisting that his concerns over the census were "slight" and
refusing to address it further. Nonetheless, the experience has reminded partisans on the left and the right of their investment in the
census. The fight to determine how it happens and what the consequences will be has only just begun.
CONGRESS GETS INVOLVED TO INCREASE FUNDING FOR ACS
Leadership Conference 11 (CivilRights.org, “The Importance of the American Community Survey” 3-17-11,
http://www.civilrights.org/archives/2011/03/1171-acs.html) JG
**ACS – American Community Survey
Stakeholders, including civil rights and community groups, are urging Congress to ensure adequate funding to
maintain and expand the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS) and ensure the continued
reliability of data for all geographic areas and populations.∂ To help Hill staffers better understand the functions and
significance of the ACS, The Annie E. Casey Foundation partnered with the Population Reference Bureau on March 10 to host a
seminar titled "Better Data, Better Decisions," which focused on how Congress, the business community, and local governments use
ACS data.∂ As mandated by the U.S. Constitution, Congress must conduct a national census of the U.S. population. The ACS,
replaced the decennial census long form in 2010, and surveys nearly three million Americans every year. The difference between the
two is that the census provides a snapshot of the nation’s population count every ten years, while the ACS measures the
changing social and economic characteristics of the U.S. population. ACS data are released in the year after data are
collected.∂ Congress uses ACS data to determine how $450 billion of federal funds will be distributed
throughout the nation. Federal agencies rely on the ACS for implementation of the programs and
priorities of the federal government. Businesses use ACS data to make decisions based on costs and demographics. ACS
data drive state and local policy decisions that encourage economic growth, the recruitment and retention of industries, and
economic sustainability.∂ In addition to helping congressional staff understand how ACS is used, the seminar provided important
information about ACS confidentiality and the benefits of the ACS for members of Congress to disseminate to their constituents.
CONGRESS TAKES ACTION BASED ON DATA FROM CENSUS
LIGHTY 11 (Avril Lighty, CivilRights.org, “Census Poverty Data Reveal Disparity and Urgent Need for
Congressional Action” 9-14-11 http://www.civilrights.org/archives/2011/09/1238-census-povertydata.html) JG
Census Bureau data released yesterday reveal significant increases in poverty and a weakened middle class
in the United States, underscoring the urgent need for Congress to enact policies that create jobs and to
protect programs that benefit low-income Americans.∂ The data show that there were 46.2 million people – 15.1
percent of the population – living in poverty in 2010, and there were about 50 million people without health care coverage. From
2009 to 2010, 2.6 million more Americans fell into poverty and median incomes declined by 2.3 percent, bringing the poverty rate to
the highest it has been since 1993.∂ But the nation’s most vulnerable communities have been hit the hardest. The
number of Hispanics in poverty increased from 25.3 percent to 26.6 percent; for Blacks it increased from 25.8
percent to 27.4 percent; and child poverty rose from 20.7 percent to 22 percent.∂ “These numbers confirm what millions of
Americans have long felt. The recovery is not trickling down to the average worker, with communities of color, women, and singleparent households still feeling the harshest effects of the Great Recession,” said Wade Henderson, president and CEO of The
Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “We cannot expect these trends to reverse themselves; concerted action is
needed to create jobs and invest in vulnerable families if we are to ensure shared prosperity and opportunity for all.”∂
With August 2011 unemployment data showing zero job growth and stagnant unemployment, Half in Ten, the campaign to cut
poverty in half in 10 years, and its partners are calling on Congress to act with urgency to create jobs t hrough
mechanisms similar to President Obama’s proposals, including continuing federal unemployment benefits,
extending the payroll tax cut in a way most likely to increase employment, investing in infrastructure, creating
subsidized employment opportunities for low-income workers, and providing aid to states and localities.
CASE
TURNS CASE - IGNORING THE ROLE RACE PLAYS IN SOCIETY BY ABOLISHING RACIAL
CATEGORIES PERPETUATES RACISM
LUSCA 8 (Emanual L Lusca is graduate of UC Berkeley, double majoring in anthropology and
philosophy, Anthropology.net, “Race As a Social Construct” 10/1/08,
http://anthropology.net/2008/10/01/race-as-a-social-construct/)
Thus far, I have repeatedly said that social constructs are contingent on collective acceptance, agreement, and imposition. It seems
only natural to suppose that race will disappear altogether, as Fanon had hoped, once society stops collectively agreeing, accepting,
and continuously imposing the notion of race. Nonetheless, this is a naïve supposition. Racism is engrained not only in the
minds of people, but in the structure of society itself. Our legal system, our prison system, our educational
system, our housing system, and various other aspects of society are all racialized. Take for example, Roediger’s
assessment of the housing market after the Federal Housing Act in the 1930’s. Roediger shows how even capitalism–a layer in the
foundation of U.S. democracy–is racialized by showing that the value of neighborhoods decreased and increased according to how it
was racially organized. The more black people lived in a neighborhood the more the value of homes in that neighborhood would
decrease. Abandoning
the notion of race is not the solution to racism and white
privilege. No matter how much we may attempt to make our legal language and documents racially
neutral, race will always remain in the minds of people. Frankenberg’s notion of race cognizance seems to be a more viable and
productive option. At the least, we have to come to terms with race, not abandon it but be aware of it, and
understand it. Nonetheless, the general idea expressed in Fanon’s notion of socio-therapy (change society to cure the patient)
seems to be correct. However, the change is not the abandonment of race, but instead a paradigm shift, or a
revolution in the way race and differences are understood.
THE STATE REACTS VIOLENTLY TO POLYCULTURALISM
PRASHAD 2 (Vijay Prashad is the Professor of International Studies at Trinity College and has a Ph.D
from the University of Chicago. Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the
Myth of Cultural Purity, Print. 2002) JG
Faced with the combined rage of the Africans, East Indians, Chinese,∂ and others, the colonial state
moved fast to reduce contacts among them.∂ The officials bemoaned the complexity of cultural
productions such as Hosay∂ and the ‘‘loss of culture’’ of the indentured workers. Since the coolies andbex-slaves had ‘‘forgotten’’
their ‘‘original’’ cultures, the colonial state advocated∂ the development of dogmatic religious and cultural
boundaries among∂ peoples. Encouraged by colonial authorities, representatives of a Brahmanical∂ orthodoxy, both
the Sanathan Dharma Sabha and the Arya Samaj, came∂ to the Caribbean to put a stop, in effect, to polycultural
practices like Hosay.52∂ Clerics of Islam also traveled to the far-flung colonies in an attempt to∂ ‘‘reclaim the lost
brethren’’ to the Islam of the homeland.53 These missionaries∂ claimed to fight against the state-supported Christian
missionaries, when∂ in fact, apart from some Canadians, the state cleared the terrain for the swamis∂ and mullahs to create cultural
fissures across the landscape of the working∂ class. Each of these groups, for example, tried to rally East Indians from∂
the standpoint of an Indian religion and culture rather than engage them in∂ the polycultural
practices of their new
homeland. What these missionaries∂ did was to re-center ‘‘India’’ in the consciousness of the East Indians, who∂ sought a
language, culture, and religion for their children and themselves∂ almost as a comfort zone in a harsh social environment.54 Hosay
was thus∂ curtailed, while an orthodox kind of spirituality and domesticity that did∂ not at all resemble everyday interactions was
promoted among the East Indians.∂ The Africans bore the weight of a bourgeois Christianity from the missionaries,∂ who had earlier
given up on the East Indians—in
a planter∂ in Guyana noted that ‘‘if we cannot make Coolies Christians, let us build∂ them
Hindoo temples.’’55 Artistic, religious, spiritual, and social expressions∂ of the East Indians’ everyday life experience such as the
brutality of indenture,∂ the monotony of work life on a plantation, the colonial fissures between∂ the Africans and the Asians, the
difficulty of forming family and other∂ social networks in the midst of the plantation, and the attempt to make the∂ landscape both
familiar and sacred were dismissed and even feared.
AT: EUGENICS
THE EUGENICS HORRORS OF THE 20TH CENTURY WON’T HAPPEN AGAIN – SOCIETY HAS
CHANGED SCIENTIFICALLY AND MORALLY
KNAPP 12 (Alex Knapp, “Tesla, Eugenics And Rationalizing Dehumanization”11-19-12,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/11/19/tesla-eugenics-and-rationalizing-dehumanization/)
These are just a handful of ideas from the 19th and 20th centuries – some of which are still influential today – that share the idea
that science somehow makes it possible to plan biology and human organizations with clockwork precision. They also demonstrate
how easy it is to cherry pick scientific ideas to fit your prejudices. But apart from the moral horrors that many of these ideas bring to
the fore, what they also share is a fundamental misunderstanding of science. Especially as we understand the universe today . In
the 19th century, determinism was the purest scientific idea. From Newton on down stretched a line of scientists who
diligently and cleverly began to see the world around us as being part of the simple operation of simple natural laws. The success
of this science led to elites in many fields to believe that human organizations could be planned as easily
as a cleverly designed watch. But of course, as the 19th Century turned into the 20th, and now the 20th into the 21st we’ve
learned that the universe around us isn’t nearly that simple. From relativity to quantum mechanics to epigenetics to
economics to chaos theory, we’ve learned that the world is full of complicated systems, many of which are so vastly
complicated as to be unpredictable.∂ What’s more, as we’ve advanced scientifically, we’ve also advanced
morally. Though there are still scientific racists lurking about (they call themselves the “Human BioDiversity” movement these
days), racism is steadily dying. We’ve learned that democratic and market systems, which focus on local knowledge and
accountability, produce far better results than “planned” societies – and are better for human freedom, to
boot.∂ Furthermore, we’ve come to embrace and cherish those who in previous would have been housed in
institutions (for “scientific reasons,” of course). Not only do we cherish them, they enrich human society as a
whole when they are given the opportunity to flourish. The very people that Tesla would have wiped out include the
autistic Temple Grandin, the paralyzed Stephen Hawking, the blind and deaf Helen Keller, and, of course, the mentally ill Nikola
Tesla.∂ Nobody is “eugenically unfit.” Given the opportunity, we’re all capable of being our best selves and
helping to create a better world.∂ In one of the Doctor Who Christmas specials, there is a set of dialogue that I absolutely
cherish:∂ The Doctor: “Who’s she?”∂ Kazran Sardick: “Nobody important.”∂ The Doctor: ”Nobody important? Blimey, that’s
amazing. You know that in nine hundred years of time and space I’ve never met anybody who wasn’t important before.”∂ Matt Smith
sells the delivery on that, the tone of his voice stating in no uncertain terms the truth: everyone is important. And I fervently
hope, that as the years go on, people stop cherry-picking science to bolster their belief that only a few people are.
AT: POLYCULTURALISM
THE 1AC’S REDUCTIONIST UNDERSTANDING OF BLACKNESS AS JUST ANOTHER
IDENTITY CATEGORY FUELS ANTI-BLACKNESS
SEXTON 10
/Jared Sexton is associate professor of African American studies and film and media studies at the
University of California, Irvine. People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery, spark/
If the oppression of nonblack people of color in, and perhaps beyond, the United States seems
conditional to the historic instance and functions at a more restricted empirical
scope, antiblackness seems invariant and limitless (which does not mean that the
former is somehow negligible and short-lived or that the latter is exhaustive and unchanging). If pursued with
some consistency, the sort of comparative analysis outlined above would likely impact the
formulation of political strategy and modify the demeanor of our
political culture. In fact, it might denature the comparative instinct
altogether in favor of a relational analysis more adequate to the task.
Yet all of this is obviated by the silencing mechanism par excellence in Left political and intellectual
circles today: “Don’t play Oppression Olympics!” The Oppression Olympics dogma levels a
charge amounting to little more than a leftist version of “playing the race card.” To
fuss with details of compara- tive (or relational) analysis is to play into the hands of divide-and-conquer tactics and to
promote a callous immorality.72 However, as in its conserva- tive complement, one notes in this catchphrase the
unwarranted transla- tion of an inquiring position of comparison into an insidious posture of competition, the translation of
ethical critique into unethical attack. This point allows us to understand better the intimate relationship
between the censure of black inquiry and the recurrent analogizing to black
suffering mentioned above: they bear a common refusal to admit to significant
differences of structural position born of discrepant histories between blacks and
their political allies, actual or potential. We might, finally, name this refusal people-of-color-blindness, a
form of colorblindness inherent to the concept of “people of color” to the precise extent that it
misunderstands the specificity of antiblackness and presumes or insists upon
the mono- lithic character of victimization under white supremacy73 —
thinking (the afterlife of) slavery as a form of exploitation or colonization or a species of racial
oppression among others.74¶ The upshot of this predicament is that obscuring the structural position of the
category of blackness will inevitably undermine multiracial coalition building as
a politics of radical opposition and, to that extent, force the question of black liberation back to the
center of discussion. Every analysis that
attempts to understand the complexities of racial rule and the
machinations of the racial state without
accounting for black existence within its
framework—which does not mean simply listing it among a chain of
equivalents or returning to it as an afterthought—is doomed to miss
what is essential about the situation. Black existence does not represent the
total reality of the racial formation — it is not the beginning and the end of the
story—but it does relate to the totality; it indicates the (repressed) truth of the political and economic
system. That is to say, the whole range of positions within the racial formation is most fully
understood from this vantage point, not unlike the way in which the range of gender and sexual variance under
patriarchal and heteronormative regimes is most fully understood through lenses that are feminist and queer.75 What is lost
for the study of black existence in the proposal for a decentered, “postblack” paradigm is a proper analysis of the true scale
and nature of black suffer- ing and of the struggles — political, aesthetic, intellectual, and so on — that have sought to
transform and undo it. What is lost for the study of nonblack nonwhite existence is a proper analysis of the true scale and
nature of its material and symbolic power relative to the category of blackness.76¶ This is why every
attempt to
defend the rights and liberties of the latest victims of state repression
will fail to make substantial gains insofar as it forfeits or sidelines the fate of blacks, the
prototypical targets of the panoply of police practices and the juridical infrastructure built up around
them. Without blacks on board, the only viable political option and the only effective defense against the intensifying cross
fire will involve greater alliance with an antiblack civil society and further capitulation to the magnification of state power.
At the apex of the midcentury social movements, Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton wrote in their 1968 clas- sic, Black
Power: The Politics of Liberation, that black freedom entails “the necessarily total revamping of the society.”77 For
Hartman, thinking of the entanglements of the African diaspora in this context, the necessarily total revamping of the
society is more appropriately envisioned as the creation of an entirely new world:¶ I knew that no matter how far from home
I traveled, I would never be able to leave my past behind. I would never be able to imagine being the kind of person who had
not been made and marked by slavery. I was black and a history of terror had produced that identity. Terror was “captivity
without the possibility of flight,” inescapable violence, precarious life. There was no going back to a time or place before
slavery, and going beyond it no doubt would entail nothing less momentous than yet another revolution.78
THE AFF’S STRATEGY OF POLYCULTURALISM IS AN ATTEMPT TO TAKE THE OTHER BODY
AND ASSIMILATE IT WITHIN THE LOCALITIES OF WHITENESS – THIS IS THE FUEL OF
THE PROJECT OF WHITE SUPREMACIST GLOBALITY
RODRIGUEZ 9
/Dylan Rodriguez is Professor and Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside. The Terms
of Engagement: Warfare, White Locality, and Abolition, spark/
It thus is within the confines of Homeland Security as white supremacist territoriality – a structure of feeling
that organizes the cohesion of racial and spatial entitlement – that ‘multiculturalism’ is recognized as a fact of
life, an empirical feature of the world that is inescapable and unavoidable, something to be tolerated, policed, and
patriotically valorized at once and in turn. On the one hand, white locality is a site of existential identification
thatgenerates (and therefore corresponds to) a white supremacist materiality. As subjects (including
ostensibly ‘non-white’ subjects) identify with this sentimental structure –a process that is not cleanly
agential or altogether voluntary – they enter a relation of discomforting intimacy with embodied
threats to their sense of the ‘local’. Thosealien bodies and subjects, whose movement suggests the
possibility of disruption and disarticulation, become objects of a discrete discursive labor as well as
material/military endeavors. Most importantly, they become specified and particularized sites for white
locality’s punitive performances: racialized punishment, capture, and discipline are entwined in the
historical fabric of white supremacist social formations from conquest and chattel enslavement
onward, and the emergence of white locality’s hypermobility has necessitated new technologies
commensurate with the hyperpresence – actual and virtual – of white subjectivities. As white bodies and
subjects exert the capacity to manifest authority and presence in places they both do and do not
physically occupy (call the latter ‘absentee’ white supremacy for shorthand), the old relations of classical white
supremacist apartheid are necessarily and persistently reinvented: racial subjection becomes a
technology of inclusion that crucially accompanies – and is radically enhanced by – ongoing
proliferations of racist state and state-sanctioned violence. Further, this logic of multiculturalist white
supremacist inclusion does not exclusively rely on strategies of coercion or punishment to assimilate others – such as
in the paradigmatic examples of bodily subjection that formed the institutional machinery of Native American boarding and
mission schools (Adams 1995; Smith 2005), but instead builds upon the more plastic and sustainable
platforms of consensus and collective identity formation. I do not mean to suggest that either consensus
building or identity formation are benign projects of autonomous racial self-invention, somehow operating independently of
the structuring relations of dominance that characterize a given social formation. Rather, I am arguing that the social
technologies of white supremacy are, in this historical moment, not reducible to discrete arrangements of
institutionalized (and state legitimated) violence or strategies of social exclusion (Da Silva 2007) but
are significantly altered and innovated through the crises of bodily proximity that white locality
bears to its alien (and even enemy) populations. It is in these moments of discomfort, when white locality is
internally populated by alien others who have neither immigrated nor invaded the space, but have
in multiple ways become occupied by the praxis of white localityconstruction, that logics of
incorporation and inclusion become crucial to the historical project of white supremacist globality.
THEIR MOVEMENT AWAY FROM THE BLACK WHITE BINARY IS THE STRATEGY OF
STRENGTHENING THE ANTI-BLACK AGENDA – ONLY THE ALT SOLVES
SEXTON 8
/Jared Sexton is associate professor of African American studies and film and media studies at the
University of California, Irvine, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of
Multiracialism, googlebooks, spark/
As that which draws the line not only between white and nonwhite but also, more importantly,
between black and nonblack (Yancey 2003), the legacy of the one-drop rule of hypodescent
stands out within multiracial discourse as the fulcrum of historical distinction bctween a supposedly vestigial era
of "racial dictatorship" (Omi and Winant 1994) and the dawn- ing of an enlightened multiracial or nonracial democracy
in the United States. As noted, it is also supposed to counterpose the racial formations of Anglo and Latin America where
the latter provides a propaedeutic flor the lormer. As a result o[the vectors established by this spatial and tem- poral
mapping, political struggle is located in the relative degrees of free- dom afforded or secured apropos of racial definition
and identification. On this account, freedom from the one-drop rule is construed artfully (because not without
inconsistency) as freedom from the exigencies of being identified, or identifying oneself, with racial blackness.
Moderniz- ing the nation-at least that segment of the nation with the potential to be "more than black" (Daniel 2001) or
simply to move "beyond black" (Rockquemore and Brunsma 2002)-and liberating it from the deadening weight ofthe past
requires that the signature ofits persistence (or perse- verance or preservation) be effaced. In this light, multiracialism
can be read, as suggested previously, as an element of the ascendant ideology of colorblindness (Flernandez 1998), but it
is not thereby identical to it. Its target is not race per se, since multiracialism is still very much a politics of racial identity
(one often enough holding up multiracial identity as exceptional and exemplary), but rather the categorical sprawl of
blackness in particular and the insatiable political demand it presents to a nominally postemancipation society (Wilderson
2003). In this precise respect, multiracialism solicits alliances with other political and intellectual
efforts to go "beyond the black-white binary"- whether in the current campaigns for immigrant
rights or the research agendas of comparative ethnic studies-efforts which, in many cases, have
been shot through with an air of antiblackness (Matsu da2002).In the register of contemporary
racial politics, black identity appears as an antiquated state of confinement from which the
"multiracial imagined community" (Stephens 1999) must be delivered; the negative ideal against
which "the browning of America" (Root 1992a) measures its tenuous success. One
INTRODUCTION - 7 discovers in this new-fangled admonition of runaway blackness traces of
the criminalization and repression of Black Power that subtends the birth of Reaganism
(Churchili and Vander Wall 2002). In the longer view, the "communal tyranny" (Kennedy 2003)
imputed to the collective black personality in this context appears as a refraction of the
pronounced fear of "black domination" that underwrites the history of white supremacist discourse: whether postbellum alibis for institutionalized lynching, segregation, and
disenfranchisement (Hunter 1997) or the propaganda of reverse discrimination" fashionable
today-from "welfare queen" (Roberts 1998) to "coddled criminal" (Mauer 1999) to "affirmative
action baby" (Post and Rogin 1998). Ultimately, it is consternation about being eclipsed by
black- ness that articulates multiracialism with the array of political campaigns consolidated
under the heading of the New Immigration (Jaynes 2000) and links them collectively, and
perhaps unconsciously, to political projects they might otherwise oppose.
AT: PERM
THE PERMUTATION OBSCURES THE POSITION OF BLACKNESS WHICH CAUSES ITS
COALITIONAL POLITICS TO FAIL – ONLY THE ALT ALONE SOLVES
SEXTON 10
/Jared Sexton is associate professor of African American studies and film and media studies at the
University of California, Irvine. People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery, spark/
The upshot of this predicament is that obscuring the structural position of the category of blackness will
inevitably undermine multiracial coalition building as a politics of radical opposition and, to that
extent, force the question of black liberation back to the center of discussion . Every analysis that
attempts to understand the complexities of racial rule and the machinations of the racial state
without accounting for black existence within its framework — which does not mean simply listing it among a
chain of equivalents or returning to it as an afterthought — is
doomed to miss what is- essential
about the situation. Black existence does not represent the total reality of the racial
formation — it is not the beginning and the end of the story — but it does relate to the totality; it
indicates the (repressed) truth of the political and economic system. That is to say, the whole range of
positions within the racial formation is most fully understood from this vantage
point, not unlike the way in which the range of gender and sexual variance under patriarchal and heteronormative
regimes is most fully understood through lenses that are feminist and queer. 75 What
is lost for the study of black
existence in the proposal for a decentered, “postblack” paradigm is a proper analysis of the true
scale and nature of black suffering and of the struggles — political, aesthetic, intellectual, and so on — that
have sought to transform and undo it. What is lost for the study of nonblack nonwhite existence is a proper analysis
of the true scale and nature of its material and symbolic power relative to the category of blackness. 76 This is why every
attempt to defend the rights and liberties of the latest victims of state repression will fail to make
substantial gains inso - far as it forfeits or sidelines the fate of blacks, the prototypical targets of the
panoply of police practices and the juridical infrastructure built up around them . Without
blacks on board, the only viable political option and the only effective defense against the
intensifying cross fire will
involve greater alliance with an antiblack civil society
and further capitulation to the magnification of state power. At
the apex of the midcentury social movements,
Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton wrote in their 1968 clas - sic, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation ,
that black freedom entails “the necessarily total revamping of the society.” 77 For
Hartman, thinking of the entanglements of the African diaspora in this context , the necessarily total
revamping of the society is more appropriately envisioned as the creation of an entirely new world : I
knew that no matter how far from home I traveled, I would never be able to leave my past behind . I
would never be able to imagine being the kind of person who had not been made and marked by
slavery. I was black and a history of terror had produced that identity. Terror was “captivity without the
possibility of flight,” inescapable violence, precarious life. There was no going back to a
time or place before slavery, and going beyond it no doubt would entail nothing less
momentous than yet another revolution.
AT: SALDANHA
SALDANHA OVERLOOKS WHAT IS BEYOND THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF RACE – THIS
TURNS THE CASE AND CRUSHES ANTI-RACIST POLITICS
KOBAYASHI 9
/Audrey Kobayashi is the Director of the Institute of Women's Studies and a full professor at Queen's
University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, Special Review Section on Arun Saldanha's Psychedelic white,
accessed via academia.edu, pdf, spark/
Saldanha takes are markable stab at laying out the theoretical basis on which such a freaking out might occur, and much of
his argumentation is compelling. I would like to take issue here, however, with a couple of points. The first is his critique of
the concept of social construction, which I think he has underestimated. He spends much of the book critiquing the social
constructionism of antiracist theorists such as PaulGilroy, and the field of cultural studies in general, for failing to provide a
material understanding of race, limiting it to a conceptual and representative realm. This limitation is a common claim of
the recent ‘material turn.’ To treat race as a concept, Saldanha’s new materialism argues, is to limit it to the world of
representation, as though representations are themselves immaterial, floating free of the bodies that created them, meaning
without substance. I agree with him that the interpretive turn in human geography has led to much—too much—analysis of
discourses separated from the bodies that discourse. But that is because so many studies that invoke social constructionism
do not follow its logic. It is not a question of what is only, or purely, a social construction and what is not, but of extending
the reach of social construction to maintain the link between human actions and the historical results of those actions.
Ironically, to study social constructions as disembodied representations misses the point at the very heart of social
construction theory: it is the act of construction, not only the symbolic result that is important. To take social construction
seriously is to take seriously the ongoing embodiment or performance of meaning that simply cannot be separated from the
bodies that produce it. Just as the concept cannot be disembodied, therefore, neither can the body be deconceptualized.
Indeed, to do so implies that there is some material realm that exists beyond social construction, or, as many recent
theorists would have it ‘beyond representation’ (see Thrift and Dewsbury 2000). This claim leads to my second point, that
by invoking Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of faciality as a complex machine, Saldanha falls into a
conceptual trap that also separates the body from the construction of meaning, albeit in the
creation of a realm that is supposed to be material rather than ideal. Both are essentialisms. The concept of faciality is very
attractive, and it works extremely well for much of the analysis, showing how bodies in Goa work to create difference.
Faciality is an ‘abstract machine’ that ‘arranges bodies into relations of power’ through ‘imperialist racialization’ (p. 194).
It is an intersubjective dialectic that goes beyond the Hegelian dialectic of recognition, transcending a
simple binary of black and white. It is intricate, multidimensional, capable of thousands of expressions that give
power to whiteness. Its capacity for transformation is also its capacity for power. By bringing bodies together, it is also
geographically located or assembled in place. The machinic process, claims Saldanha following Guattari, is neither
essentialist nor anti-essentialist, but rather non-essentialist: it originates in a complex set of human actions but emerges to
gain a life of its own, or immanence (p. 189). He wants to counter the power of whiteness by addressing the
immanent material quality of the white face, dissolving its power not only through the creation of new forms
of faciality but in the proliferation of such forms to the point where the machine no longer has the
capacity to reproduce itself. But it is the ontological gap between immanence and transcendence
that is problematic here, and Saldanha never quite comes to terms with the gap. There is a break in
the dialectic (and dialectics cannot, by definition, be broken) between what is socially constructed
and what is beyond. He speaks of the need for better ways of organizing politically, but provides
little basis for political action. If the power of race is, as he claims, beyond the capacity
of social construction to create it, then it is also beyond the capacity of social
construction to change it. His answer, instead, is to make that power, expressed in the lines of flight
through which faciality is transformed, less predictable, to place it outside the control, in other words, of ongoing social
we need to be mindful of the paradox, even the inherent
contradiction, of believing that to freak conventional practices is to go beyond the
conventional, is it not more effective to embrace the paradox than to
constructions (p. 207). And while
believe
that it can be dissolved? Is it not more important that we understand the direction of lines of flight and the
capacity of human actions to change those lines than simply to disrupt them? I have no
quarrel with Saldanha’s
political objectives, therefore, but I am concerned about the theoretical paths by
which he achieves them. To pick up the paradox of the title, while the psychedelic lifestyle of Goa freaks
did not overcome, but rather reinforced, the power of their whiteness, the concept of whiteness itself is
psychedelic, a delusion of superiority worked out in embodiment-face-location that ends up ‘reproducing
what it escapes’ (p. 211). The troubling ambiguity with which this book ends and his resistance to committing to a
political course, emphasizes strongly the limitations upon, as the first line of the first chapter has it, ‘what a white body can
rather than escaping the
contradictions and social challenges of race. On the last page, white freaks still dance
do’ (p. 11). Thus the book ends
by reproducing
around, not with, Indian beggars. While I may be unhappy with the lack of politics in the conclusion, there is one thing
about which Saldanha and I are in complete agreement: that before whiteness can be changed its complexity must be
understood. This volume does a great job of making sense of whiteness.
EUGENICS ADV CP [IMMIGRATION]
CP SOLVES THE EUGENICS ADVANTAGE – DENYING IMMIGRANTS CITIZENSHIP IS
INHERENTLY A EUGENIC SCHEME – THAT OUTWEIGHS YOUR INTERNAL LINK
HANSEN & KING 1
/Randall Hansen is Director of the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, Munk School of
Global Affairs and Full Professor and Canada Research Chair in Immigration & Governance in the
Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Desmond King is the Andrew Mellon Chair
of American Government and a Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. Eugenic Ideas, Political Interests, and
Policy Variance: Immigration and Sterilization Policy in Britain and the U.S. Johns Hopkins University
Press, Project Muse, spark/
The cases are particularly interesting in that they seem to undermine the expectations of powerful strains of institutionalist
theory that have dominated qualitative social science over the last decade and of path-dependence theories. In the first
instance, as historical institutionalists have emphasized, Britain is the quintessential unitary state with a strong executive, a
weak legislature, an emasculated court, and no bill of rights; 12 the U.S. is a federation with a powerful
legislature, a weak executive, and a strong (if then more timid) judiciary supported by a bill of rights
with unquestioned legitimacy. In other words, in the polity providing for multiple veto points and
blocking strategies of any bold policy innovation--the U.S.--eugenic policies were adopted earlier
and taken further, as numerous states adopted sterilization polices and thousands of individuals were sterilized. 13
Indeed, only Nazi Germany--in which institutional opposition and civil society were crushed--had a
more ambitious program. Likewise, the country that had operated the world's most liberal immigration regime from
1776 until 1882 adopted race-based and eugenic-inspired immigration policies. At the opposite end of the institutional
spectrum--Britain--no eugenic policies were adopted. This was the country whose institutions provide few channels for
gaining access to policy networks while privileging those actors who manage to do so and the one that most easily and
directly translates policy preferences into policy outcomes. The British pattern obtained despite the existence of a highprofile policy committee that proffered extensive evidence in favor of voluntary sterilization schemes. At the same time,
other influential studies have incorporated a different explanatory variable, policy trajectories, variously referred to as path
dependence or (more generally) policy feedback. 14 With respect to eugenics, however, previous policy was not a predictor of
subsequent policy. Rather, the concept of sterilization was peculiar to the violent and messianic twentieth century, so
policies encouraging it broke new ground. Moreover, in the area of immigration, which was also heavily conditioned in some
countries by eugenic ideas, previous race-based policies founded on assumptions of racial/national hierarchies did not [End
Page 241] result in their extension. Thus, although a British campaign in which Jews and East Europeans were demonized as
biologically inferior was followed by the avowedly anti-Semitic immigration legislation of 1905, there were afterward no
additional immigration measures of that type. The policy was liberally applied, but its racist aspects were curtailed, with
subsequent policy driven by security concerns and with Germans being the obvious target. In the U.S., immigration
policy was famously open until the 1920s, when eugenics arrived with a vengeance . 15 Race-based
quotas were implemented, and the country became until the 1960s kein Einwanderungsland (not a land that welcomed
immigrants). Viewed from the perspective of the theories of institutional structures and policy legacies, the outcomes in
Britain and the U.S. are a puzzle. Why did the profound intellectual support enjoyed by eugenics in the U.K., backed up by
government-sponsored commissions, not translate into a eugenic-based sterilization policy? Why, despite the
powerful myth of the U.S. as a country of immigration and despite the multiple veto points
provided to all actors opposing radical policy change, did the U.S. adopt eugenic-based immigration
policies? And what do these two cases reveal about the role of ideas in politics? Measuring the Influence of Ideas on
Politics The development of techniques for delineating the existence of ideas as independent variables and establishing their
influence on political processes and public policies has been patchy. Berman outlines the methodological steps she considers
prerequisite to demonstrating a role for ideas in determining policy choices. One must first establish the existence of
ideologies or "programmatic beliefs"--abstract, integrated, systematic patterns of belief with aims directly relevant to
particular courses of policy. One must then show an observable correlation between these ideas and selected public policies
that conform in their broad outlines to the ideas' basic tenets. Thus, although Milton Friedman promulgated his ideas in the
1960s, there would be little point in looking for the influence of monetarism on Harold Wilson's or Lyndon Johnson's
economic policies. And finally one must specify the mechanisms through which the ideas can be demonstrated to directly
influence politics in a way that is not merely epiphenomenal to material interests. 16 The issue of epiphenomenality is
central, and we return to it later. [End Page 242] Applying this framework to the study of eugenic ideas, there is a prima
facie case for the influence of ideas on politics. Eugenic ideas were abstract, systematic, and integrated,
positing an essentially genetic--hence, scientific--basis to biological and intellectual fitness across
individuals and nations. They offered clear policy prescriptions across policy areas: health policies
encouraging (or requiring) the sterilization of "mental defectives," immigration policies favoring
Northern Europeans and excluding Southern Europeans and the developing world, and family policies
that encouraged procreation among the genetically fit. A significant number of nation-states and/or subnational
governments adopted policies in some or all of these areas.
CENSUS GOOD
A. WELFARE, SOCIAL SERVICE POLICIES, RESOURCES
YANOW 3
/Dvora Yanow is Guest Professor in the Communication, Philosophy, and Technology sub-department,
Faculty of Social Sciences, at Wageningen University, Constructing "race" and "ethnicity" in America,
googlebooks, spark/
The state, through present public policy and administrative practices, is tied to funding and
programming categories, and it makes, defines, and enacts race-ethnicity. Census results
increasingly form the basis for welfare and social service policies and
resource reallocations by group size. Race and ethnicity data, as
established under OMB definitions and guidelines, provide ways of
naming discriminatory practices and seeking legal redress, and they
legitimate and provide credibility for claims for governmental
assistance (funds for schools, hospitals, health services, housing, jobs, etc.) and political representation. This is not
new. The first time Congress used census numbers to apportion money-$28 million surplus revenue-from the federal
government to the states was in 1837 (Holt 1929, p. 26). They were not used again for such purposes for another hundred
years, until the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935, a grant-in-aid system administered by the states, in which census
data were the basis for grant-making formulas (p. 179). Controversy over the use of census numbers is not new, either.
Debates in 1850 over census revisions raised questions not only about (dis)union, slavery, and the
North-South balance of power, but also about the scope of federal power and the centralized
collection of data by the federal government: whereas police, health, education, and other data are collected by
local agencies and reported up the federal system, census data collection and analyses are conducted by a
federal agency alone (albeit for good historical, constitutional reasons). Between 1850 and 1900, the purpose of the
census changed, in Anderson's (1988) analysis: 'Though still a political apportionment mechanism, the census also
became a full-fledged instrument to monitor the overall state of American society," influenced by the
professionalization and bureaucratization of the data collectors and paralleling the rise of the "science of statistics" (p. 85).
The latter seems to have driven a desire to know in more detail the characteristics of American "popular, economic, and
social life" (p. 98).
B. RURAL AREAS
LC NO DATE
/The Leadership Conference, Funding of Federal, State, And Local Programs,
http://www.civilrights.org/census/your-community/funding.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/,
spark/
Census information is used to plan tunnels, bridges, and roads. The data help federal and
local emergency management agencies assess the damage from
tornadoes, floods, and droughts and plan recovery assistance. Census
data also help local governments and businesses plan future economic
development by forecasting future demand for goods and services. The
federal government allocates approximately $15 billion in funds to assist rural areas. Specific programs critical to rural
Donation Program, which provides food to
individuals, families, and institutions; Intermediary Relending Programs, which
communities that rely on census data include: The Food
finance business facilities and community development projects in rural areas . Loans are made by the
Rural Business Cooperative Service (RBS) to intermediaries to establish revolving loan funds for rural recipients; Business
and Industrial Loans, which improve, develop, or finance businesses and industries, creating jobs
and improving the economic and environmental climate in rural communities (including pollution
abatement); The Emergency Community Water Assistance program, which assists rural communities
that have had a significant decline in the quantity or quality of drinking water in repairing and replacing
rural water treatment facilities; The Rural Domestic Violence and Child Victimization Enforcement Grant Program, which
improves and increases services available to women and children in rural areas by encouraging community involvement in
preventing domestic violence and child abuse. Funding helps increase victims' access to treatment and counseling and
further strengthens the investigation and prosecution of domestic violence and child abuse cases; Rural Development
Loans and Loan Guarantees, which provide zero interest loans and grants for telephone and electric
utilities to promote rural economic development and job creation; Rural Cooperative Development Grants,
which improve the economic condition of rural areas through the development of new cooperatives and the improvement of
existing cooperatives; The Very Low to Moderate Income Housing Loans program, which allows low-
income and moderate-income rural residents to purchase, construct, repair, or relocate a dwelling
and related facilities; Assistance to rural renters through the Rural Rental Housing Loans Program
and Rural Rental Assistance, which provide subsidies to very low-income individuals or direct
mortgage loans to very low-, low-, and moderate-income families; the elderly; and persons with
disabilities; Formula Grants for Other than Urbanized Areas, which funds operating and administrative assistance for
transportation in rural areas; Rural Education; and Various programs to provide quality, accessible health
care through the State Rural Hospital Flexibility Program, Rural Health Care Services Outreach and
Rural Health Network Development Program, Small Rural Hospital Improvement Grant Program,
Grants to States for Operation of Offices of Rural Health, and Development and Coordination of
Rural Health Services program.
C. DISABILITIES
LC NO DATE
/The Leadership Conference, Funding of Federal, State, And Local Programs,
http://www.civilrights.org/census/your-community/funding.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/,
spark/
Census data directly affect funding for many programs critical to individuals with
disabilities including programs for education, health care,
transportation, employment training, and housing. The federal government
uses census information to guide the annual distribution of approximately $15
billion in services to people with disabilities (FY 2007). For example, the information
is used to: Help state and county agencies plan for eligible recipients
under the Medicare, Medicaid, and Supplemental Security Income
programs; Distribute funds and develop programs for people with disabilities and the elderly under the
Rehabilitation Act; Distribute funds for housing for people with disabilities under the Housing and Urban Development Act;
Allocate funds to states and local areas for employment and job training programs for veterans under the Job Training
Partnership Act, Disabled Veterans Outreach Program; Ensure that comparable public transportation services
are available for all segments of the population under the Americans with Disabilities Act; Award
federal grants, under the Older Americans Act, based on the number of
elderly people with physical and mental disabilities; Allocate funds for
mass transit systems to provide facilities for people with disabilities
under the Federal Transit Act; Provide housing assistance and supportive services for
low-income individuals with HIV/AIDS and their families under the Housing Opportunities for
Persons with AIDS (HOPWA) program; and
D. IMMIGRATION
LC NO DATE
/The Leadership Conference, Funding of Federal, State, And Local Programs,
http://www.civilrights.org/census/your-community/funding.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/,
spark/
The ACS collects information on place of birth, citizenship, year of entry, and language spoken at
home in order to better serve the needs of immigrants and refugees. Knowing the
characteristics of immigrants helps policy makers understand how different immigrant groups are assimilated. The data
also help fund programs specifically geared towards those who have difficulty with
English. Decennial census data are used to: Allocate funds to public and private nonprofit
organizations to provide employment resources aimed at making the foreign-born economically
self-sufficient; Assist states and local agencies with developing health care
and other services tailored to the language and cultural diversity of
immigrants; Evaluate voting practices of government subdivisions, such as states, counties,
and school districts, under the Voting Rights Act; Evaluate the effectiveness of equal opportunity
employment programs and policies under the Civil Rights Act; Allocate grants to school districts for
children with limited English language proficiency; and Develop health care and other services tailored to the
language and cultural diversity of the elderly under the Older Americans Act.
E. EDUCATION
LC NO DATE
/The Leadership Conference, Funding of Federal, State, And Local Programs,
http://www.civilrights.org/census/your-community/funding.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/,
spark/
The accuracy of the 2010 census has significant implications for the education of the nation's
schoolchildren. The ACS provides the U.S. Department of Education with the most comprehensive data on school
enrollment and educational attainment. Census population figures are used to draw school district
boundaries and determine funding allocations for many education programs . Data from the
census provide federal, state, and district governments with
benchmarks for evaluating the need for and effectiveness of policies
that affect the well-being of children, for determining program
eligibility, and for applying financial aid allocation formulas. Census
information is needed for the following: Safe and Drug Free Schools and Communities State Grants that provide support to
state education agencies for a variety of drug and violence prevention activities focused primarily on school-age youth;
Special Education Preschool Grants for children ages 3 through 5. Funds under this program are also used to
cover the costs of related services including the salaries of special education teachers, speech
therapists, and psychologists; Reforming elementary and secondary school programs that serve Native American
students under the Indian Education Grants to Local Educational Agencies program; and Title I Program for Neglected and
Delinquent Children that provides grants to states to help provide education continuity for youth in correctional facilities so
they can make successful transitions to school or employment once they are released from state institutions. Additionally,
the census and ACS provide comprehensive demographic data that support the informed development of education policy.
Data on school enrollment (including whether individuals attend public or private schools) and educational
attainment can be cross-tabulated with information on the nation’s student population and the
households in which they live (including location, age, sex, income, family structure, labor force status, and
disabilities) to help educational policymakers address specific needs and challenges students might
face in their communities. Census data are also used for a number of critical education functions,
including drawing school district boundaries, providing direct aid to schools that serve children
with limited English proficiency, determining illiteracy levels among language minorities, profiling
the socio-economic conditions of school-age children, and measuring changes in education levels
across communities so employers can determine where to locate new jobs. Furthermore, census data
are used to help allocate approximately $26 billion annually in education funding (FY 2007): The
census is used to disperse Title I grants for state educational agencies to improve the education of economically
disadvantaged children and to distribute funding for the Rehabilitation Services-Vocational Rehabilitation State Grants
program and the Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities program; Other U.S. Department of Education programs
that use the data in their allocation formulas and eligibility determinations include: Special Education - Grants for Infants
and Families with Disabilities; Improving Teacher Quality Grants; Education Technology Grants; Rural Education; Even
Start State Educational Agencies; and Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration. There is no comparable
comprehensive source of information about the population to support U.S. Department of Education initiatives.
CENSUS DATA KEY TO LAUNDRY LIST OF FEDERAL AID PROGRAMS
CIVIL RIGHTS 15 (Civil Rights.org, “Funding of Federal, State, And Local Programs,” 2015.
http://www.civilrights.org/census/your-community/funding.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/)
JG
The decennial census determines the allocation of close to $400 billion annually for planning and implementation of
federal programs and services such as school construction, housing and community development, road
and transportation planning, and job training. The people served by many of these programs include those in hard-tocount communities who are at greater risk of being missed in the census, thereby skewing projections of needed resources and,
potentially, appropriations based on projected need. Examples of these programs include (dollar amounts reflect FY2007
allocations):∂ Food
stamps – $30.4 billion∂ Section 8 Housing Choice Vouchers – $16.1 billion∂ National School Lunch
Insurance Program – $5.5 billion∂ Women, Infants,
and Children (WIC) program – $5.3 billion∂ Foster care (Title IVE) – $4.5 billion∂ Child Care Mandatory & Matching Funds
– $2.9 billion∂ School Breakfast Program – $2.1 billion
Program – $8.6 billion Head Start – $6.2 billion∂ State Children’s
1. WORKERS RIGHTS, HEALTH CARE, AND COMMUNITY PROGRAMS
CIVIL RIGHTS 15 (Civil Rights.org, “Funding of Federal, State, And Local Programs,” 2015.
http://www.civilrights.org/census/your-community/funding.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/)
JG
Decennial census data provide the basis for local, state, and federal policy makers to make critical decisions
affecting workers and their families. In particular, census information is used for the following: Identifying local
areas eligible for grants to implement job training and other employment programs under the Job Training
Partnership Act;∂ Pinpointing state and local areas with a labor force surplus for programs that promote
business opportunities under the Labor Surplus Areas Program;∂ Monitoring and enforcing employment
discrimination laws under the Civil Rights Act; and∂ Planning job training programs for seniors under the Older
Americans Act.∂ Census information is also used to distribute approximately $12 billion in funds for the
following federal programs that are beneficial to workers and their families: ∂ Unemployment insurance;∂
The Workplace Investment Act provides funding to help adults, dislocated workers, and youth find employment that leads to selfsufficiency through various services available at local support centers;∂ The Employment Service focuses on providing a
variety of employment related labor exchange services, including, but not limited to, job search assistance, job referral, and
placement assistance for job seekers, re-employment services to unemployment insurance claimants, and recruitment services to
employers with job openings;∂ The Senior Community Service Employment Program; ∂ Native American
Employment and Training;∂ Prisoner Reentry programs seek to reduce recidivism by helping former inmates find work
when they return to their communities largely through faith-based and community organizations; and∂ Work Opportunity Tax
Credit Program (WOTC) and Welfare-to-Work Tax Credit (WtWTC).∂ Local governments in particular require data at the
neighborhood level for school planning, transportation, and economic development. They use census data to:∂ Fund child
care to enable low-income and working families to work, train for a job, or obtain an education; ∂ Fund
health care for infants and children;∂ Fund policing agencies and community-based entities to work
together to reduce crime;∂ Fund local agencies for food, health care, and legal services for senior citizens
and individuals with disabilities;∂ Develop and strengthen the criminal justice system's response to violence against women;
and∂ Determine the number of people eligible for Social Security and Medicare benefits.
CIVIL RIGHTS
CIVIL RIGHTS 15 (Civil Rights.org, “Funding of Federal, State, And Local Programs,” 2015.
http://www.civilrights.org/census/your-community/funding.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/)
JG
The decennial census collects data on Hispanic origin and race in order to comply with nondiscrimination
legislation, address racial disparities, and provide statistics to federal agencies. In particular census data are
used for the following:∂ Ensuring enforcement of language assistance rules and creating legislative districts
under the Voting Rights Act;∂ Identifying population segments that need medical services under the Public
Health Service Act;∂ Monitoring and enforcing equal employment opportunities under the Civil Rights Act;
and∂ Funding programs at historically black colleges and universities to foster equal opportunity through
post-secondary education for African Americans.