1
The aff’s spirituality is neoliberalisms’ modern opiate---it displaces broader class
struggle
Jeremy Carrette 5, Religious Studies School of European Culture and Languages, University of Kent,
Selling Spirituality, The Silent Takeover of Religion, 1, 15
From feng shui to holistic medicine, from aromatherapy candles to yoga weekends, from Christian
mystics to New Age gurus, spirituality is big business. There has been an explosion of interest and popular literature
on mind, body and spirit and ‘personal development’. We now see the introduction of modes of ‘spirituality’ into educational
curricula, bereavement and addiction counselling, psychotherapy and nursing. Spirituality as a cultural trope has also been appropriated by
corporate bodies and management consultants to promote efficiency, extend markets and maintain a
leading edge in a fast-moving information economy. For many people, spirituality has replaced religion as old allegiances and social
identities are transformed by modernity. However, in a context of individualism and erosion of traditional community
allegiances, ‘spirituality’ has become a new cultural addiction and a claimed panacea for the angst of
modern living. Spirituality is celebrated by those who are disillusioned by traditional institutional religions and seen as a force for
wholeness, healing and inner transformation. In this sense spirituality is taken to denote the positive aspects of the ancient religious
traditions, unencumbered by the ‘dead hand’ of the Church, and yet something which provides a liberation and solace in an otherwise meaningless world. But is this
emergence of the idea of spirituality all that it seems? Is something more complex and suspicious at work in the glorification of the spiritual? continued – p. 15 In
the late twentieth century, however, there has been a second form of privatisation that has taken place. It partially builds upon the previous process, but also has
important discontinuities with it. It can be characterised as a wholesale commodification of religion, that is the selling-off of religious buildings, ideas and claims to
authenticity in service to individual/corporate profit and the promotion of a particular worldview and mode of life, namely corporate capitalism. Let us imagine that
‘religion’ in all its forms is a company that is facing a takeover bid from a larger company known as Corporate Capitalism. In its attempt to ‘downsize’ its ailing
competitor, Corporate
Capitalism strips the assets of ‘religion’ by plundering its material and cultural
resources, which are then repackaged, rebranded and then sold in the marketplace of ideas. This
reselling exploits the historical respect and ‘aura of authenticity’ of the religious traditions (what in business
terms is often called ‘the goodwill’ of the company) while at the same time, separating itself from any negative
connotations associated with the religious in a modern secular context (rebranding). This is precisely the
burden of the concept of spirituality in such contexts, allowing a simultaneous nod towards and
separation from ‘the religious’. The corporate machine or the market does not seek to validate or
reinscribe the tradition but rather utilises its cultural cachet for its own purposes and profit. Like the selling to
private companies of public utilities and services in our modern neoliberal economies, such as gas, electricity, water, healthcare and transport systems, the
material and cultural ‘assets’ of the various religious traditions are being plundered, ‘downsized’ and
sold off as commodities. ‘Religion’ is facing a ‘takeover bid’ from the business world, without the protection of the state, which increasingly recedes
from social welfare and public service initiatives in a neoliberal context. Today in most British cities you will find old church buildings that have been sold off to
become business offices, supermarkets, public houses, nightclubs and private apartments. However, it is not primarily the sale of buildings that we are concerned
with here, but rather the exploitation of the ‘cultural capital’ of the religious for the purposes of consumption and corporate gain. From the branding of perfumes
using ancient Asian concepts and the idea of the spiritual (‘Samsara’ perfume, ‘Zen’ deodorant, ‘Spiritual’ bodyspray) to clothe the product in an aura of mystical
authenticity, to the promotion of management courses offering ‘spiritual techniques’ for the enhancement of one’s work productivity and corporate businessefficiency, the sanitised religiosity of ‘the spiritual’ sells. However, this use of spirituality involves a number of complex levels of engagement. While appearing to
endorse the values of the ancient traditions that it is alluding to, such moves represent little more than a silent takeover of religion. Marketing ‘the spiritual’ allows
companies and their consumers to pay lip-service to the ‘exotic’, rich and historically significant religions of the world at the same time as distancing themselves
from any engagement with the worldviews and forms of life that they represent. Religion
is rebranded as ‘spirituality’ in order to
support the ideology of capitalism. A TYPOLOGY OF SPIRITUALITIES IN RELATION TO CAPITALISM When trying to understand the nature of what
we are calling capitalist spirituality, it is necessary to make a number of distinctions in order to appreciate the various relations that exist between contemporary
forms of spirituality and capitalism. Although we are not claiming that spirituality should (or indeed could) be separated from economic questions, we do believe
that it should not be fundamentally shaped by an economic ideology. We wish to challenge the way in which the concept of spirituality
is being
utilised to ‘smooth out’ resistance to the growing power of corporate capitalism and consumerism as
the defining ideology of our time. We do this not out of some misguided belief that traditional religious institutions and systems have been free
from authoritarian and oppressive strictures of their own, but rather out of a concern that cultural diversity is being eroded by the incessant march of a single
worldview – an economically driven globalisation – driven by a triumphalist and corporate-oriented form of capitalism.
particular oppression focus inhibits transformative politics that link broader struggles
Heideman 12 [Paul M. Heideman Rutgers University, Newark, pmheideman@gmail.com Historical
Materialism Volume 20, Issue 2, pages 210- 221 Beyond Black and White: Transforming AfricanAmerican Politics, Manning Marable, Second Edition, London: Verso, 2009]
This theorisation of transformative politics is further weakened by its failure to specify any agency that
could bring it about. Marable comes close to specifying such an agency with his repeated call to look to
‘the most oppressed sectors of our society’ for a vision of social transformation (pp. xv, 80, 310). Such a
call is clearly inadequate. It simply does not follow that the most oppressed sectors of society are best
positioned to carry out its most thorough remaking. The homeless, for example, are certainly among the
most oppressed groups in the United States (especially in the age of the destruction of free public space
and the social safety-net), yet this position does not automatically impart the most radical dynamics to
their struggle. Indeed, struggles for squatters’ rights and shelters very rarely break out of localised
confrontations with municipal authorities. 8 Additionally, Marable offers no account of how the disparate
struggles of the oppressed (for example, the fight against anti-immigrant racism and the fight for the
rights of the disabled) are to be unified, beyond the assertion that every confrontation with inequality
automatically is linked to every other. Such an inadequate account of social-movement agency deeply
weakens whatever strengths Marable’s theory of transformative politics may possess.
capitalism forms the basis for all oppressions, without its rejection racism will
continue to divide and rule the working class and maintain inequalities
Taylor 11 [Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, doctoral candidate in the department of African-American studies
at Northwestern University, Race, class and Marxism, January 4, 2011
http://socialistworker.org/2011/01/04/race-class-and-marxism]
Marxists argue that capitalism is a system that is based on the exploitation of the many by the few.
Because it is a system based on gross inequality, it requires various tools to divide the majority--racism
and all oppressions under capitalism serve this purpose. Moreover, oppression is used to justify and
"explain" unequal relationships in society that enrich the minority that live off the majority's labor. Thus,
racism developed initially to explain and justify the enslavement of Africans--because they were less than
human and undeserving of liberty and freedom. Everyone accepts the idea that the oppression of slaves
was rooted in the class relations of exploitation under that system. Fewer recognize that under capitalism,
wage slavery is the pivot around which all other inequalities and oppressions turn. Capitalism used
racism to justify plunder, conquest and slavery, but as Karl Marx pointed out, it also used racism to divide
and rule--to pit one section of the working class against another and thereby blunt class consciousness.
To claim, as Marxists do, that racism is a product of capitalism is not to deny or diminish its importance
or impact in American society. It is simply to explain its origins and the reasons for its perpetuation. Many
on the left today talk about class as if it is one of many oppressions, often describing it as "classism." What
people are really referring to as "classism" is elitism or snobbery, and not the fundamental organization
of society under capitalism. Moreover, it is popular today to talk about various oppressions, including
class, as intersecting. While it is true that oppressions can reinforce and compound each other, they are
born out of the material relations shaped by capitalism and the economic exploitation that is at the heart
of capitalist society. In other words, it is the material and economic structure of society that gave rise to
a range of ideas and ideologies to justify, explain and help perpetuate that order. In the United States,
racism is the most important of those ideologies.
unchecked neoliberal capitalism necessitates extermination in the name of profit –
ensures poverty and environmental and cultural destruction, culminating in
extinction.
Cole 11 [Dr. Mike Cole is Emeritus Research Professor in Education and Equality at Bishop Grosseteste
University College Lincoln, Lincoln, UK. His most recent book is Racism and Education in the U.K. and the
U.S.: towards a socialist alternative (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011 RACISM AND
EDUCATION IN THE U.K. AND THE U.S. Palgrave Macmillan (June 7, 2011), pgs. 180-182]
Neo-liberal capitalism, in being primarily about expanding opportunities for large multinational
companies, has undermined the power of nation¬states and exacerbated the negative effects of
globalization on such services as healthcare, education, water and transport (Martinez and Garcia, 2000).
However, the current hegemonic role of business in schooling is para¬mount in convincing workers and
future workers that socialism is off the agenda. Marxist educators and other Left radicals should expose
this myth. Students have a right to discuss different economic and political systems such as twenty-firstcentury democratic socialism. This is particularly press¬ing given the current economic recession. It is
easier in general for discussion in schools to embrace issues of gender, “race,” disability, sexual
orientation, and social class when social class relates just to attainment than to address social class in the
context of overthrowing capitalism, and replacing it with world democratic socialism, where participatory
democracy is central. The latter may thus be seen as the last taboo, and, of course, understandably so. It
is time to move forward and bring such discussions into schools, colleges, and universities, Marxist and
other Left educators can make the case that such considerations are a perfectly reasonable democratic
demand. Global capitalism is out of control, and the very survival of our planet is dependent on dialogical
education that considers the socialist alternative, an alternative distanced from the distortions of Marx
by Stalinism. No longer can socialism be divorced from environmental and ecologi¬cal issues. McLaren
and Houston (2005, p, 167) have argued that “escalat¬ing environmental problems at all geographical
scales from local to global have become a pressing reality that critical educators can no longer afford to
ignore.” They go on to cite “the complicity between global profiteering, resource colonization, and the
wholesale ecological devastation that has become a matter of everyday life for most species on the
planet.” Following Kahn (2003), they state the need for “a critical dialogue between social and eco-justice”
(McLaren and Houston 2005, p. 168). They call for a dialec¬tics of ecological and environmental justice to
reveal the malign interaction between capitalism, imperialism, and ecology that has created widespread
environmental degradation that has dramatically accelerated with the onset of neo-liberalism. World
capitalism’s environmentally racist (Bullard et al., 2007) effects in both the “developing” and “developed”
world should be discussed openly and freely in the educational institutions. As far as the “developing
world” is concerned, there are, for example, such issues as the environmentally dev-astating method of
extraction of natural resources utilized by multinational corporations in numerous “developing” countries
that have devastated eco-systems and destroyed cultures and livelihoods (World Council of Churches,
1994, cited in Robinson, 2000), with toxic waste polluting groundwater, soil and the atmosphere (e.g.,
Robinson, 2000). In addition, there is trans¬boundary dumping of hazardous waste by developed
countries to develop¬ing nations, usually in sub-Sahara Africa (e.g., Ibitayo et al., 2008; see also Blanco,
2010 on Latin America). As far as the “developed” world is concerned, in the U.S., for example, people of
color are concentrated around hazardous waste facilities-more than half of the nine million people living
within two miles of such facilities are minorities (Bullard et al., 2007). Finally, there is the ubiquitous issue
of climate change, itself linked to the totally destructive impact of capitalism. Joel Kovel (2010) has
described cli-mate change as “a menace without parallel in the whole history of humanity.” However, on
a positive note, he argues that “[it]s spectacular and dramatic character can generate narratives capable
of arousing general concern and thus provide a stimulus to build movements of resistance.” Climate
change is linked to loss to the planet of living things—also a rallying point for young people. For Marxist
educators, this provides a good inroad for linking envi¬ronment, global capitalism, and arguments for the
socialist alternative. As Kovel (2010) puts it, only within the framework of a revolutionary ecoso- cialist
society can we deal with the twinned crises of climate change and spe¬cies loss—and others as well—
within a coherent program centered around the flourishing of life.” Capitalism and the destruction of the
environment are inextricably linked, to the extent that it is becoming increasingly apparent that saving
the environment is dependent on the destruction of capitalism. Debate should therefore include a
consideration of the connections between global capital¬ism and environmental destruction, as well as a
discussion of the socialist alternative. The need for environmental issues to be allied to socialism is
paramount. As Nick Beams (2009) notes, all the “green” opponents of Marxism view “the overthrow of
the capitalist system by means of the socialist revolution as the key to resolving the problems of global
warming” as either “unrealis¬tic,” “not immediate enough,” or believe that socialism is hostile to nature.
Beams (ibid.) argues that, in reality, “the system of market relations is based on the separation of the
producers from the means of production, and it is this separation—-the metabolic rift between [human
beings] and nature— that is the source of the crisis.” In other words, instead of the real producers of
wealth (the working class) having control over what they produce and rationally assigning this to human
need, goods are irrationally produced for profit. Beams (ibid.) quotes Marx (1894 [1966] p. 959) as follows:
Freedom. ..can consist only in this, that socialised man, the associated pro¬ducers, govern the human
metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being
dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions
most worthy and appropriate for their human nature. As Beams (2009) concludes, “[f]ar from Marx being
outdated, the world has, so to speak, caught up with Marx.”
We endorse the best political strategy for addressing all manifestations of exploitation
and oppression. Debates about transforming society must center on the most
appropriate political method to address the multiple struggles including those
imperceptible by neolib’s violence
McGregor 13 [Sheila McGregor Marxism and women’s oppression today International Socialism Issue:
138 Posted: 10 April 13 http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=885&issue=138]
Revolutionary socialists take part in all struggles against exploitation and oppression, whether they are
against austerity measures, sexual violence, the impact of war, police racism or the growth of fascist
organisations, attempting to unite the maximum number of forces in any given struggle. At the same time,
revolutionary socialists are concerned not only with combatting the particular effects of exploitation and
oppression, but also with taking the struggle forward so as to break the very chains of exploitation, which
give rise to all forms of oppression. Thus involvement in struggle is both a practical question of how best
to build a protest or strike and an ideological question of how to win those you are struggling alongside
to an understanding that it is not enough to win over the particular struggle, but that what is required is
a revolutionary transformation of society. When people embark on a struggle over an issue, they usually
come with a mixture of ideas about the society they live in, what they are fighting for and how best to
achieve their goal. Inherent in any struggle is a debate about how to take it forward. Struggles against
sexism are no exception to this.
materialist critique of the historical relationship between means of production and
racialization as a starting point is key to destroy the ideological machinery that
legitimizes and sustains class domination and racist practices.
San Juan 8 [E. San Juan, Jr., Filipino American literary academic, mentor, cultural reviewer, civic
intellectual, activist, writer, essayist, video/film maker, editor, and poet whose works related to the
Filipino Diaspora in English and Filipino languages have been translated into German, Russian, French,
Italian, and Chinese.[2] As an author of books on race and cultural studies,[3] he was a “major influence
on the academic world”.[2] He was the director of the Philippines Cultural Studies Center in Storrs,
Connecticut in the United States.[1] In 1999, San Juan, Jr. received the Centennial Award for
Achievement in Literature from the Cultural Center of the Philippines because of his contributions to
Filipino and Filipino American Studies.[2] FROM RACE/RACISM TO CLASS STRUGGLE: On Critical Race
Theory Posted on October 4, 2008 FROM RACE TO CLASS STRUGGLE: A RE-TURN OF CRITICAL RACE
THEORY, THE PHILIPPINES MATRIX PROJECT http://philcsc.wordpress.com/2008/10/04/fromraceracism-to-class-struggle-on-critical-race-theory/]
Given its composition, and the pervasive climate of reaction, the Forum could not of course endorse a
radical approach that would focus on the elimination of the exploitation of labor (labor power as
commodity) as a necessary first step. Given its limits, it could not espouse a need for a thoroughgoing
change of the material basis of social production and reproduction—the latter involving the hegemonic
rule of the propertied bloc in each society profiting from the unequal division of labor and the unequal
distribution of social wealth—on which the institutional practices of racism (apartheid, discrimination,
genocide) thrive. “Race is the modality in which class is lived,” as Stuart Hall remarks concerning post1945 Britain (Solomos 1986, 103). Without the political power in the hands of the democratic-popular
masses under the leadership of the working class, the ideological machinery (laws, customs, religion, state
bureaucracy) that legitimizes class domination, with its attendant racist practices, cannot be changed.
What is required is a revolutionary process that mobilizes a broad constituency based on substantive
equality and social justice as an essential part of the agenda to dissolve class structures; any change in the
ideas, beliefs, and norms would produce changes in the economic, political and social institutions, which
would in turn promote wide-ranging changes in social relations among groups, sectors, and so on. Within
a historical-materialist framework, the starting point and end point for analyzing the relations between
structures in any sociohistorical totality cannot be anything else but the production and reproduction of
material existence. The existence of any totality follows transformation rules whereby it is constantly
being restructured into a new formation (Harvey 1973). These rules reflect the dialectical unfolding of
manifold contradictions constituting the internal relations of the totality. Within this conflicted,
determinate totality, race cannot be reduced to class, nor can class be subsumed by race, since those
concepts express different forms of social relations. What is the exact relation between the two? This
depends on the historical character of the social production in question and the ideological-political class
struggles defining it. In his valuable treatise, The Invention of the White Race, Theodore Allen has
demonstrated the precise genealogy and configuration of racism in the U.S. It first manifested itself when
the European colonial settlers based on private property in land and resources subdued another social
order based on collective, tribal tenure of land and resources, denying the latter any social identity—
“social death” for Native Americans. We then shift our attention to the emergence of the white race and
its system of racial oppression with the defeat of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1677 and the establishment of a
system of lifetime hereditary bond servitude (for African Americans): “The insistence on the social
distinction between the poorest member of the oppressor group and any member, however propertied,
of the oppressed group, is the hallmark of racial oppression” (Allen 1997, 243). In effect, white supremacy
defining the nature of civil society was constructed at a particular historical conjuncture demanded by
class war. The result is a flexible and adjustable system that can adjust its racial dynamics in order to divide
the subordinates, resist any critique of its ideological legitimacy, and prevent any counter-hegemonic bloc
of forces from overthrowing class rule. Class struggle intervenes through its impact in the ideologicalpolitical sphere of civil society. Racial categories operate through the mediation of civil society which (with
the class-manipulated State) regulate personal relations through the reifying determinations of value,
market exchange, and capital. Harry Chang comments on the social mediation of racial categories: “Blacks
and whites constitute social blocks in a developed setting of ‘mass society’ in which social types (instead
of persons) figure as basic units of economic and political management…The crucial intervention of
objectification, i.e., relational poles conceived as the intrinsic quality of objects in relation, must not be
neglected here. Racial formation in a country is an aspect of class formation, but the reason races are not
classes lies in this objectification process (or fetishization)” (1985, 43). Commodity fetishism enables the
ideology of racism (inferiority tied to biology, genetics, cultural attributes) to register its effects in
common-sense thinking and routine behavior in class-divided society (Lukacs 1971). Because market
relations hide unequal power relations, sustained ideological critique and transformative collective
actions are imperative. This signifies the heuristic maxim of “permanent revolution” (Lefevbre 1968, 171)
in Marxist thought: any long-term political struggle to abolish capitalism as a system of extracting surplus
value through a system of the unequal division of labor (and rewards) needs to alter the institutions and
practices of civil society that replicate and strengthen the fetishizing or objectifying mechanism of
commodity production and exchange (the capitalist mode of production). If racism springs from the
reification of physical attributes (skin color, eye shape) to validate the differential privileges in a bourgeois
regime, then the abolition of labor-power as a commodity will be a necessary if not sufficient step in doing
away with the conditions that require racial privileging of certain groups in class-divided formations.
Racism is not an end in itself but, despite its seeming autonomy, an instrumentality of class rule.
2
T (framework) versus affs nothing to do with the topic
Our interpretation is that the affirmative’s advantages must stem from topical action.
The aff does not advocate topical action.
(If clear from CX)
This is clear from CX. They do not advocate legalization of any of the topic areas.
(if not clear from CX)
Each term in the resolution is necessary to establish a reasonable limit on the number
of possible affirmatives:
“US should” proscribes both a stable agent and mechanism
Ericson ‘03
(Jon M., Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts – California Polytechnic U., et al., The Debater’s
Guide, Third Edition, p. 4)
The Proposition of Policy: Urging Future Action In policy propositions, each topic contains certain
key elements, although they have slightly different functions from comparable elements of
value-oriented propositions. 1. An agent doing the acting ---“The United States” in “The United
States should adopt a policy of free trade.” Like the object of evaluation in a proposition of value,
the agent is the subject of the sentence. 2. The verb should—the first part of a verb phrase that
urges action. 3. An action verb to follow should in the should-verb combination. For example,
should adopt here means to put a program or policy into action though governmental means.
4. A specification of directions or a limitation of the action desired. The phrase free trade, for
example, gives direction and limits to the topic, which would, for example, eliminate
consideration of increasing tariffs, discussing diplomatic recognition, or discussing interstate
commerce. Propositions of policy deal with future action. Nothing has yet occurred. The entire
debate is about whether something ought to occur. What you agree to do, then, when you
accept the affirmative side in such a debate is to offer sufficient and compelling reasons for an
audience to perform the future action that you propose.
Legalize means to make lawful by judicial or legislative sanction
Business Dictionary No Date, "legalize", www.businessdictionary.com/definition/legalize.html
legalize¶ Definition¶ To make enforceable, justifiable, or lawful by judicial or legislative sanction.
Topicality should be a voter
Limits
Limits are necessary for negative preparation and clash and for debate to occur.
Without limits, there can't be a rigorous testing of ideas. Advocacy and decision skills
are minimized – this turns the case
Morson 4 - Northwestern Professor, Prof. Morson's work ranges over a variety of areas: literary
theory (especially narrative); the history of ideas, both Russian and European; a variety of literary genres
(especially satire, utopia, and the novel); and his favorite writers -- Chekhov, Gogol, and, above all,
Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. He is especially interested in the relation of literature to philosophy
http://www.flt.uae.ac.ma/elhirech/baktine/0521831059.pdf#page=331
Bakhtin viewed the whole process of “ideological” (in the sense of ideas and values, however unsystematic) development as an endless dialogue. As
teachers,
find it difficult to avoid a voice of authority, however much we may think of ours as the rebel’s voice, because our
rebelliousness against society at large speaks in the authoritative voice of our subculture.We speak the language and
thoughts of academic educators, even when we imagine we are speaking in no jargon at all, and that jargon, inaudible to us, sounds with all
the overtones of authority to our students. We are so prone to think of ourselves as fighting oppression that it
takes some work to realize that we ourselves may be felt as oppressive and overbearing, and that our own voice
we
may provoke the same reactions that we feel when we hear an authoritative voice with which we disagree. So it is often helpful to think back on the great
authoritative oppressors and reconstruct their self-image: helpful, but often painful. I remember, many years ago, when, as a recent student rebel and activist, I
taught a course on “The Theme of the Rebel” and discovered, to my considerable chagrin, that many
of the great rebels of history were the
very same people as the great oppressors. There is a famous exchange between Erasmus and Luther, who hoped to bring the great Dutch
humanist over to the Reformation, but Erasmus kept asking Luther how he could be so certain of so many doctrinal points. We must accept a few things to be
Christians at all, Erasmus wrote, but surely beyond that there must be room for us highly fallible beings to disagree. Luther would have none of such tentativeness.
He knew, he was sure. The Protestant rebels were, for a while, far more intolerant than their orthodox opponents. Often enough, the oppressors are the ones who
present themselves and really think of themselves as liberators. Certainty that one knows the root cause of evil: isn’t that itself often the root cause? We know from
Tsar Ivan the Terrible’s letters denouncing Prince Kurbsky, a general who escaped to Poland, that Ivan saw himself as someone who had been oppressed by
noblemen as a child and pictured himself as the great rebel against traditional authority when he killed masses of people or destroyed whole towns. There
is
something in the nature of maximal rebellion against authority that produces ever greater intolerance,
unless one is very careful. For the skills of fighting or refuting an oppressive power are not those of openness,
self-skepticism, or real dialogue. In preparing for my course, I remember my dismay at reading Hitler’s Mein Kampf and discovering that his
self-consciousness was precisely that of the rebel speaking in the name of oppressed Germans, and that much of his amazing appeal –
otherwise so inexplicable – was to the German sense that they were rebelling victims. In our time, the Serbian Communist and nationalist leader Slobodan
Milosevic exploited much the same appeal. Bakhtin surely knew that Communisit totalitarianism, the Gulag, and the unprecedented
censorship were constructed by rebels who had come to power. His favorite writer, Dostoevsky, used to emphasize that the worst
oppression comes from those who, with the rebellious psychology of “the insulted and humiliated,” have seized power
– unless they have somehow cultivated the value of dialogue, as Lenin surely had not, but which Eva, in the essay by Knoeller
about teaching The Autobiography of Malcolm X, surely had. Rebels often make the worst tyrants because their word, the voice they hear in their consciousness,
has borrowed something crucial from the authoritative word it opposed, and perhaps exaggerated it: the aura of righteous authority.
If one’s ideological
becoming is understood as a struggle in which one has at last achieved the truth, one is likely to want to impose that
truth with maximal authority; and rebels of the next generation may proceed in much the same way, in an ongoing spiral of
intolerance.
Sufficient research-based preparation and debates focused on detailed points of
disagreement are crucial to transforming political culture
Gutting (professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame) 13
(Gary, Feb 19, A Great Debate, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/a-greatdebate/?emc=eta1)
This is the year of what should be a decisive debate on our country’s spending and debt. But our political
“debates” seldom deserve the name. For the most part representatives of the rival parties exchange
one-liners: “The rich can afford to pay more” is met by “Tax increases kill jobs.” Slightly more sophisticated
discussions may cite historical precedents: “There were higher tax rates during the post-war boom” versus
“Reagan’s tax cuts increased revenues.”
Such volleys still don’t even amount to arguments: they don’t put forward generally accepted premises
that support a conclusion. Full-scale speeches by politicians are seldom much more than collections of
such slogans and factoids, hung on a string of platitudes. Despite the name, candidates’ pre-election
debates are exercises in looking authoritative, imposing their talking points on the questions, avoiding
gaffes, and embarrassing their opponents with “zingers” (the historic paradigm: “There you go again.”).
There is a high level of political discussion in the editorials and op-eds of national newspapers and
magazines as well as on a number of blogs, with positions often carefully formulated and supported
with argument and evidence. But even here we seldom see a direct and sustained confrontation of
rival positions through the dialectic of assertion, critique, response and counter-critique.
Such exchanges occur frequently in our law courts (for example, oral arguments before the Supreme
Court) and in discussions of scientific papers. But they are not a significant part of our deliberations
about public policy. As a result, partisans typically remain safe in their ideological worlds,
convincing themselves that they hold to obvious truths, while their opponents must be either
knaves or fools — with no need to think through the strengths of their rivals’ positions or the
weaknesses of their own.
Is there any way to make genuine debates — sustained back-and-forth exchanges, meeting high
intellectual standards but still widely accessible — part of our political culture? (I leave to historians
the question of whether there are historical precedents— like the Webster-Hayne or Lincoln-Douglas
debates.) Can we put our politicians in a situation where they cannot ignore challenges, where they must
genuinely engage with one another in responsible discussion and not just repeat talking points?
A first condition is that the debates be focused on specific points of major disagreement. Not,
“How can we improve our economy?” but “Will tax cuts for the wealthy or stimulus spending
on infrastructure do more to improve our economy?” This will prevent vague statements of
principle that don’t address the real issues at stake.
Another issue is the medium of the debate. Written discussions, in print or online could be easily
arranged, but personal encounters are more vivid and will better engage public attention. They should
not, however, be merely extemporaneous events, where too much will depend on quick-thinking
and an engaging manner. We want remarks to be carefully prepared and open to considered
responses.
Three points of clarification
The issues is whether both sides can be thoroughly prepared to debate – make
knowledgeable, researched, and defendable arguments to rigorously test the
affirmative.
Limits are an evaluative standard for interpretations in debate. So, it's a matter of
what you justify, not what you do. Also, in-round abuse is a bad standard – it's too
subjective, it ignores out of round abuse, and it discourages research and
preparation.
Skills of refutation are critical to solving the affirmative, rather than debating
about government good/bad. We are not endorsing "governmental role playing."
Debate is not that kind of role playing - we can debate whether the federal
government should take topical action just as we would debate other things like
where we should go to dinner.
case
A2 Structural Antagonism – Clark 95 and Patterson – Inaccurate
REJECT THE THESIS THAT SOCIETY IS STRUCTURALLY EXCLUSIONARY AND VIOLENT ---it is historically reductive and totalizes every progress made for racial equality ---- this
proves why progress and engagement are critical, voting to reject that undermines
every force for good
Clark 95 - professor of law – Catholic University, Leroy D., 73 Denv. U.L. Rev. 23
Second Qualitative Leap Forward
The black-led, and white-supported, civil rights movement gathered momentum in the late 1950s and early 1960s
through marches, "sit-ins"--which breached racial segregation in public establishments--and the
development of legal strategies to provide cover and protection. White Americans were shocked
by the vicious resistance of small pockets of rabid southern racists to the disciplined non-violent protests of blacks,
and public opinion began to move toward support for racial equality. n63 Key whites in the media, especially television,
influenced this shift in public opinion by portraying black grievances in a sympathetic and appealing light. n64 The
movement culminated in 1960s legislation prohibiting racial segregation and discrimination in
public accommodations, n65 employment, n66 voting rights, n67 and housing. n68 This was the next
qualitative leap forward, and there has been no massive backsliding into the rank forms of segregation and
discrimination that characterized the pre-1960 period. Professor Bell treats the post-1960s claims of progress as
an illusion: discrimination simply became more covert, but equally efficient. n69 The facts, however,
viewed with a holistic perspective, largely refute this claim. n70 The most thorough analysis of black-American
status since Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma in 1944, is A Common Destiny--Blacks and American Society. n71
The report covers the period from 1940 through 1986, and is more comprehensive than the studies
Professor Bell relied on in recent law review articles. A Common Destiny answers Professor Bell's central question in Faces:
Contemporary views of the status of black-white relations in America vary widely. Perspectives range from optimism that the main
problems have been solved, to the view that black progress is largely an illusion, to assessments that the nation is retrogressing and
moving toward increased racial disparities. To some observers, the present situation is only another episode in a long history of
recurring cycles of apparent improvement that are followed by new forms of dominance in changed contexts: the level of black
status changes, it is said, but the one constant is blacks' continuing subordinate social position. To other observers, the opposite is
correct: long-run progress is the dominant trend. n72 A Common Destiny, however, concludes that the
overwhelming
majority of black-Americans made substantial progress since 1940: Over the 50-year span covered by this
study, the social status of American blacks has on average improved dramatically, both in absolute
terms and relative to whites. The growth of the economy and public policies promoting racial
equality led to an erosion of segregation and discrimination, making it possible for a substantial fraction of
blacks to enter the mainstream of American life. n73 Just five decades ago, most black Americans could not work, live, shop, eat,
seek entertainment, travel where they chose. Even a quarter century ago--100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863-most blacks were effectively denied the right to vote. . . . Today the situation is very different. n74 The Committee acknowledged
that "the great gulf that existed between black and white Americans in 1939 . . . has
not closed," because one-third of
blacks "still live in households with incomes below the poverty line." n75 Yet the study reported that 92% of blacks lived below the
poverty line in 1939. n76 A
60% drop in poverty is an astounding improvement, by any measure, and is an
even faster movement out of poverty than that of the white public that was also suffering from the ravages of
the economic depression of the 1930s. n77 Some reduction of black poverty occurred when blacks secured higher paying jobs
in defense industries during World War II. But the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act brought a significant reduction
in racial employment discrimination. By 1984, blacks had $ 9 billion more per year in real income, adjusted for
inflation, than they would have had if they had remained arrayed throughout the occupational spectrum as they were before the
Act. n78 A new black economic elite developed through movement into higher paying employment in the private sector and away
from employment in government, the clergy, and civil rights organizations; this new elite should sustain their progress and finance
opportunities for their young. n79 The number of black elected officials increased from a few dozen in 1940 to 6,800 by 1988, and
the number of black public administrators went from 1% in 1940 to 8% in 1980. n80 No white elected official has openly supported
racial segregation since Governor Wallace in the early 1960s, a testament, in part, to the substantial increases in black voter
registration and voting, due to the Voting Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1965. n81 One could
also show decreases in
racial segregation in education, housing, and other aspects of American life, coupled with the
virtual disappearance of racial exclusion in public accommodations--all due to enforcement of the new
legislation. It is true, racial discrimination has not been totally eradicated. n82 But, Peter F. Drucker summarizes: In the fifty years
since the Second World War the
economic position of African-Americans in America has improved faster
than that of any other group in American social history--or in the social history of any country.
Three-fifths of America's blacks rose into middleclass incomes; before the Second World War the figure was onetwentieth. n83 I
doubt that Professor Bell believes that racial discrimination should have totally disappeared. But what, then, accounts for Professor
Bell's statements that "the civil rights gains, so hard won, are being steadily eroded"; that it has been "more than a decade of civil
rights setbacks in the White House, and in the courts"; n84 and that the civil rights movement is "a movement now brought to a
virtual halt"? n85¶ Professor Bell was not looking at the total sweep of black progress since the 1960s, but was dismayed by the
hostility towards--or lack of support for--civil rights displayed during the twelve years of the Reagan and Bush administrations. n86
Ex-president Jimmy Carter appointed a record number of black attorneys to the federal courts. n87 Reagan and Bush returned to the
old style, appointing few minorities and women to the federal bench. Further, their appointees often proved unsympathetic to the
arguments of civil rights organizations. n88 Reagan and Bush were the only presidents who opposed passage of the 1964 Civil Rights
Act, and the only presidents who vetoed civil rights legislation in the 20th century. n89 They also used subtle, and sometimes not so
subtle, "racial codes" to covertly organize whites to break the Democratic party's hold on the presidency, especially in the South.
n90¶ Even given this executive branch hostility to civil rights, the Congress, the branch of government much more vulnerable to the
electorate, consistently and successfully opposed or reversed actions that undermined civil rights. Congress amended and improved
the Voting Rights Act in 1982. n91 Congress overrode the veto of one of the most popular presidents in modern times, Reagan, and
passed the Civil Rights Restoration Act in 1986. n92 The enforcement machinery of the Fair Housing Act, prohibiting racial
discrimination in the sale or rental of housing, was substantially improved by amendment in 1988. n93 A bill barring discrimination
in employment and public accommodations for the disabled, a disproportionate number of which are blacks, passed in 1990. n94¶
The major "setbacks," to which Professor Bell refers, were several United States Supreme Court cases which limited the scope of
statutes prohibiting discrimination in employment, or which created proof problems for plaintiffs. n95 Congress passed a bill in 1991
which reversed all of the adverse decisions by the Court. n96 This history of Congressional repudiation of executive and judicial
hostility to civil rights and, indeed, the extension of civil rights to new areas, is not noted in either of Professor Bell's two books. n97¶
Why, if society is as irremediably racist as Professor Bell alleges, can Congress, which constantly sounds out
the public, confidently pass this wide range of pro-civil rights legislation? The answer is that the
overwhelming majority of white Americans underwent attitude changes in the last thirty years, generally
relinquishing crude or unadulterated racial prejudice. A majority of whites no longer believe in the racial inferiority of
blacks, and believe blacks should not be discriminated against in employment, schools, and access to public and private
accommodations. n98 Professor Bell's
books contain no mention of the extensive opinion poll data
showing less racial prejudice. Indeed, his books, especially Confronting Authority, portray the white public as massively,
and often incomprehensibly and stupidly, committed to racism. A Final Word
Despite Professor Bell's prophecy of doom, I believe he would like to have his analysis proven
wrong. However, he desperately leans on a tactic from the past--laying out the disabilities of the
black condition and accusing whites of not having the moral strength to act fairly. That is the
ultimate theme in both of his books and in much of his law review writing. That tactic not only
lacks full force against today's complex society, it also becomes, for many whites, an
exaggerated claim that racism is the sole cause of black misfortunes. n146 Many whites may
feel about the black condition what many of us may have felt about the homeless: dismayed,
but having no clear answer as to how the problem is to be solved, and feeling individually
powerless if the resolution calls for massive resources that we, personally, lack. Professor Bell's
two books may confirm this sense of powerlessness in whites with a limited background in this
subject, because Professor Bell does not offer a single programmatic approach toward
changing the circumstance of blacks. He presents only startling, unanalyzed prophecies of doom,
which will easily garner attention from a controversy-hungry media. n147
It is much harder to exercise imagination to create viable strategies for change. n148 Professor
Bell sensed the despair that the average--especially average black--reader would experience, so
he put forth rhetoric urging an "unremitting struggle that leaves no room for giving up." n149
His contention is ultimately hollow, given the total sweep of his work.
At some point it becomes dysfunctional to refuse giving any credit to the very positive
abatements of racism that occurred with white support, and on occasion, white leadership.
Racism thrives in an atmosphere of insecurity, apprehension about the future, and inter-group
resentments. Unrelenting, unqualified accusations only add to that negative atmosphere.
Empathetic and more generous responses are possible in an atmosphere of support, security,
and a sense that advancement is possible; the greatest progress of blacks occurred during the
1960s and early 1970s when the economy was expanding. Professor Bell's "analysis" is really
only accusation and "harassing white folks," and is undermining and destructive. There is no
love--except for his own group--and there is a constricted reach for an understanding of whites.
There is only rage and perplexity. No bridges are built--only righteousness is being sold.
A people, black or white, are capable only to the extent they believe they are. Neither I, nor
Professor Bell, have a crystal ball, but I do know that creativity and a drive for change are very
much linked to a belief that they are needed, and to a belief that they can make a difference.
The future will be shaped by past conditions and the actions of those over whom we have no
control. Yet it is not fixed; it will also be shaped by the attitudes and energy with which we face
the future. Writing about race is to engage in a power struggle. It is a non-neutral political act,
and one must take responsibility for its consequences. Telling whites that they are irremediably
racist is not mere "information"; it is a force that helps create the future it predicts. If whites
believe the message, feelings of futility could overwhelm any further efforts to seek change. I
am encouraged, however, that the motto of the most articulate black spokesperson alive today,
Jesse Jackson, is, "Keep hope alive!" and that much of the strength of Martin Luther King, Jr. was
his capacity to "dream" us toward a better place.
Adopting the social-antagonism thesis is net-worse for society ---- gives the Right the
theoretical basis for their justification that they are the oppressed minority
Patterson 98, Orlando Patterson is a Jamaican-born American historical and cultural sociologist
known for his work regarding issues of race in the United States, as well as the sociology of
development, The Ordeal Of Integration: Progress And Resentment In America's "Racial" Crisis
In the attempt to understand and come to terms with the problems of Afro-Americans and of
their interethnic relations, the country has been ill served by its intellectuals, policy advocates,
and leaders in recent years. At present, dogmatic ethnic advocates and extremists appear to
dominate discourse on the subject, drowning out both moderate and other dissenting voices. A
strange convergence has emerged between these extremists. On the left, the nation is misled by
an endless stream of tracts and studies that deny any meaningful change in America's "Two
Nations," decry "The Myth of Black Progress," mourn "The Dream Deferred," dismiss
AfroAmerican middle-class status as "Volunteer Slavery," pronounce AfroAmerican men an
"Endangered Species," and apocalyptically announce "The Coming Race War." On the right is
complete agreement with this dismal portrait in which we are fast "Losing Ground," except that
the road to "racial" hell, according to conservatives, has been paved by the very pQlicies
intended to help solve the problem, abetted by "The Dream and the Nightmare" of cultural
changes in the sixties and by the overbreeding and educational integration of inferior AfroAmericans and very policies intended to help solve the problem, abetted by "The Dream and the
Nightmare" of cultural changes in the sixties and by the overbreeding and educational
integration of inferior Afro-Americans and lower-class Euro-Americans genetically situated on
the wrong tail of the IQ "Bell Curve." If it is true that a "racial crisis" persists in America, this
crisis is as much one of perception and interpretation as of actual socioeconomic and interethnic
realities. By any measure, the record of the past half century has been one of great
achievement, thanks in good part to the suecess of the government policies now being
maligned by the left for not having gone far enough and by the right for having both failed and
gone too far. At the same time, there is still no room for complacency: because our starting
point half a century ago was so deplorably backward, we still have some way to go before
approaching anything like a resolution.
A2 Grammar of Suffering Defines “Us” – Hoang 9 – Authenticity Turn
The logic of their exclusion impact and grammar of suffering is violent ------ it relies on
a rhetorical interpretation of personal injury and guilt that forces performing
authenticity and this method becomes simultaneously inaccessible as well as overly
reductive
HOANG 2009 - Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (Haivan V., “Campus
Racial Politics and a “Rhetoric of Injury”, September 2009,
http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Journals/CCC/0611-sep09/CCC0611Campus.pdf)
In James Berlin’s history of college composition in the twentieth century, he writes convincingly about the importance of rhetorical education within the college curriculum. He
declares, “Writing courses prepare students for citizenship in a democracy, for assuming their political responsibilities, whether as leaders or simply as active participants.
Writing courses also enable students to learn something about themselves, about the often-unstated assumptions on which their lives are built” (189). This philosophy continues
to resonate for many of us who believe that teaching writing is about preparing students to critically express themselves within public forums, including universities.
College writing, in this sense, requires engagement with academic disciplines as well as the
politicized sites of college campuses. With widespread commitment to “diversity,” particularly
racial diversity, universities have refigured campus culture, and as the unhappy epigraphs
suggest, thus present new rhetorical challenges for student writers who “assum[e] their political
responsibilities” to the university community. As college writing faculty, we might examine the rhetorical exigencies inspired by our
campuses: How do commitments to diversity interpellate writing/speaking subjects? How are we to
prepare students to critically write amidst campus racial politics characterized by “diversity
fatigue” (451)? This article is interested in the ways diversity discourse, in a twist, can advocate for racial accountability
while also undermining those same struggles. Here, I join those who call for more inquiry into diversity and college composition, including
the CCCC Committee on Diversity who recently sponsored a blog series and this journal’s 2007 interchange on diversity writing.1 It is hard to miss that conversations about race
on college campuses are marked by general weariness and even resentment. About a half century after the social movements of the 1960s, racial accountability is ordered by
injury is perhaps the trope through which we
understand racial accountability. To be sure, the trope has been fundamental to identifying and
remedying those injuries caused by racial prejudice, but there are also worrisome ways in which
the rhetoric of injury gets taken up. As college writing faculty, we should be troubled by injury’s
articulations in campus racial politics. We see claims to and refutations against victimization, a
desire to occupy injured subject positions, and excessive attention to individual distress and
anxiety. We live in a privatized system that scrutinizes so very closely the wounds of individuals
that it deflects attention from the material conditions, cultural systems, and histories that
produced racial injustice in the first place. And according to Joan W. Scott, “the way to make a claim or to justify one’s protest against
perceived mistreatment these days is to take on the mantle of the victim” (17). How did victimhood become so sought-after,
seemingly desirable? To throw light on students’ rhetorical imperatives in campus racial politics, I explore a case study where, in 2002, college student leaders
what American studies scholar Carl Gutiérrez-Jones terms a “rhetoric of injury.” Indeed,
at a public university in California drew on a liberal democratic rhetoric—based on their student government discourse—to address interracial conflict.2 In particular, I focus on
students in a cross-cultural organization called the Vietnamese American Coalition, whose positions as Asian Americans and as student leaders trouble too-easy understandings
It is instructive to study the students’ rhetorical strategies because their capable
reasoning, their recasting of ethos, and general frustration call attention to the difficulties
generated by a rhetoric of injury. This rhetoric of injury was informed by liberal assumptions; the
students believed hopefully that justice could be attained by the individual, the freedom fighter. But the blame
game of injury and a related faith in the individual stymied a deliberation over community
values related to racial accountability. Despite such frustrations, the students’ rhetorical strategies also provide points of departure that allow us
of racial injury and privilege.
to reimagine a productive conversation about campus racial politics. In compositionists’ commitment to democracy, where the response to racial legacies often is understood
through the trope of injury, we might take care to foster students’ understanding of the historical production of racial difference, its impact on writing/speaking positions, and
the ways in which difference is rearticulated in the present. This is a call to examine the ways diversity discourse may shape campus racial politics and, moreover, to work with
students to recast the subject positions into which we step. Available Subject Positions: What Does Diversity Ask Us to Become? Within our field,
compositionists
have considered racial legacies by recovering the rhetoric practiced by racially othered writers,
but important questions remain: What are the processes of racialization that have identified
such writers? How have histories of racialization affected them? How have writers reperformed or “flipped the script” and what effect does this have on racial formation? Several
compositionists have already begun to respond to these questions—most notably, critiquing the ways race-conscious or deracialized disciplinary histories affect compositionists’ interpretive frameworks (Royster
and Williams); challenging multiculturalism’s reification of racial categories (Gilyard); analyzing how particular discourses may reenact exclusions of racialized others by casting literacy as white property
(Prendergast, Literacy); and calling on student writers to critically revise dominant literacy narratives (Young). In an effort to build on these studies, this section proposes that
scholarship on race in composition studies evidences the ways students
the existing
are called into the “rhetoric of injury.” To begin, I draw on Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s
definition of race as “a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies” (55). But the concept grows increasingly layered and complex when we take into account the fact that race is continually
projects have pivoted around the idea of injury, where racial
injustices constitute violations “against the ‘jur,’ against the law, rights and accepted privilege”
(Gutiérrez-Jones 24). Gutiérrez-Jones’s Critical Race Narratives: A Study of Race, Rhetoric, and Injury explicates a “rhetoric of injury” that typically operates
under an assumption of moral equivalences, balancing the effects of victimization against
perpetrator responsibility. To be emphasized is his claim that injury is not simply determined through the authority of legal institutions; rather, injury is
moreover “continually rearticulated and jostled as it is employed in a rhetorical battle,” a
matter of composition and interpretation (25). Phillip P. Marzluf ’s “Diversity Writing: Natural Languages, Authentic Voices” speaks to the
impact of this injury culture on higher education and gives special attention to the composition teacher’s role. In an essay that supports the trend to merge diversity
general education requirements and composition courses, he cautions that “diversity writing” risks calling on students to
perform authentic voices and on teachers to be “saviors” who expect true-to-self writing. A
more critical curriculum would reject authentic conceptions of voice and teach students to
recognize how they personally “participate in diversity as a social system” (519). Marzluf ’s critique is revealing
refigured by “historically situated projects” (55). Since the 1960s in particular, these racial
because the salvationist impulse among some teachers is not only the counterpart to a minority student needing salvation; the savior suggests moreover a triangular
relationship with the presumed victim and the injurer. With diversity writing at the nexus of savior, victim, and injurer, students have few productive subject positions from
we
need to step back to figure where our cultural systems have led us away from a productive
sense of racial accountability. Whereas Marzluf continues to find hope in the “personal,” Margaret Himley’s response to his essay challenges that
composition pedagogy must venture farther from the personal—from the belief in “a stable self in need
of greater audience awareness” (450)—and toward promoting ethical relationships within an “economy of
affect” (456). The current economy, after all, has yielded this: The word diversity makes me a little sick, too. Its problematic genealogy from management theory brings
which to write—especially if the student is cast as one who injures himself or herself. Indeed, what does diversity ask us to become? To get beyond this problem,
with it the problematic imperative to acknowledge diversity, celebrate it, manage it, as if it were a human resource to be put to better use and, of course, greater profit. Indeed,
the word circulates throughout U.S. culture invoking an apparent concern for others, especially those less fortunate than ourselves, those located on the margins, those
suffering still from systems of oppression—but for what purpose? What are we being interpellated into, asked to do, asked to become? I’d say not much. (Himley 453) As much
diversity is a performative, albeit an infelicitous one. The self-involved dialogue
pervasive claims to victimization, and an interest in guilt and shame: these cue
diversity’s performative nature. Then there are the material realities affected by diversity’s performance: college admissions, scholarship
as teachers and students alike are worn out by “diversity fatigue” (453),
between Cain and Abel,
opportunities, the support offered by universities’ multicultural offices. Public institutions—courts, legislative offices, and schools—structure understandings of race, and these
structures have enacted, are based on, and potentially carry on America’s vexing racial legacy.3 This is why it is so important that we reflect on Himley’s question. The task of
seeing diversity discourse as an institutional performance of racial order has grown more unwieldy since the civil rights movements. As Omi and Winant argue, the civil rights
movement constituted a “great transformation”: “The new ‘rules of the game’ thus contain both the legacy of movement efforts to rearticulate the meaning of race and to
mobilize minorities politically on the basis of the new racial ideologies thus achieved, and the heritage of deep-seated racism and inequality” (88; emphasis in original). Every
time the battle dust of racial politics settles, it gets pitched afresh and reconstituted by altered cultural formations—whether sparked by “great books” debates, the
neoconservative Students’ Bill of Rights, or a battle over colorblindness. The pervasive commitment to “diversity” in social institutions can be seen as an inheritance of these
movements, even while refiguring earlier civil rights activism. Even as I agree with critiques of diversity, then, my goal is to revise rather than eradicate diversity discourse.
One challenge is that diversity calls up authentic bodies that are part of taken-for-granted
racial categories. Race-conscious activists of the 1960s introduced a critical lens that exposed how social institutions had been and continued to be organized by
race, and ever since, universities have adopted racial classification systems to further root out racial inequalities in student admissions, faculty hires, and curricula. But in
recognizing the importance of racial difference, official diversity discourses have implicitly reified race and even naturalized racial difference (Gilyard; Hum).
Paradoxically, even though racial categories are in the foreground, race as a historical concept
and social construction has gone underground. The teacherly expectation of authentic voices
acts out this misconception of race and thus interpellates racial minority students into ones
who need to authentically perform their cultures. If racial minority students are positioned as
those denied authentic voice, where does that leave unmarked white students? Whiteness studies offers
important reasons for identifying whiteness (Barnett; Nakayama and Krizek; Prendergast, “Race”) but also suggests reasons to be wary of essentialist constructions of whiteness
While shame may be a turning point in one’s critical
consciousness (Himley 458; Swiencicki), I share AnnLouise Keating’s serious concern about pedagogies that invite
guilt: “Guilt-tripping plays no role in this process [of understanding racial legacies]. Indeed, guilt functions as a
useless, debilitating state of consciousness that reinforces the boundaries between apparently
separate ‘races’” (915). Students are thus left to choose between injured and injuring subject positions. Because race is overdetermined, solutions tend to be offthat lock white students into guilt, shame, and anger (Keating; Winans).
point, and as Sue Hum tells us, “[t]he cost of literacy for our students is to be either assimilated or to remain ‘native-like’” (576; emphasis in original). To discuss race is
this
bind inspires a second set of counterproductive interpellations: individuals who claim race
neutrality. Race neutrality may register resistance to the language of injury. Amy E. Winans’s insightful study suggests that race neutrality may be
about “white safety,” resulting from some white students’ fear of re-performing racial injustice
by recognizing racial difference. Whether or not fear of injuring—or fear of claims to injury—causes race neutrality, the effect is the same. Race
operates as an “absent presence” (Prendergast, “Race”), and within classroom discourse, students manage to dodge race through a “rhetoric of evasion” (Leverenz). As a
result of such discursive fumbling, race in university circles is typically understood through
problematically reified categories or evaded entirely, and we thus face the unintended effects
of multiculturalism: identity politics and divisive perceptions of campus diversity. In short, a rhetoric of injury
precarious, a difficulty of preserving racial categories long enough to expose racial injustice while also teaching students to destabilize those categories. Accordingly,
can perpetuate the reification of racial categories, the dissipation of these categories into an “absent presence,” and composition students’ “diversity fatigue.” My argument is
the seemingly opposing tendencies either to overdetermine racial difference or to treat race
as absent presence evidence a rhetoric of injury, which presents students with difficulties that
are helped but not necessarily resolved by fostering critical race consciousness among
individuals. Donna LeCourt, in her introduction to Identity Matters: Schooling the Student Body in Academic Discourse, points to such limitations when she reflects on
two students who developed a critical consciousness about identity and privilege but either chose to maintain or felt unable to change systems they deemed unfair. To be
clear, my point is not to support those who would rather ignore racial injury, who would
admonish that racial minorities need only to get over it and turn a colorblind eye to past and
present injustice. Not at all. On the contrary, we need to develop a rigorous discourse that
sheds light on the commonplace ways race works on campus. The problem with a rhetoric of
injury is that, first, it seeks out exceptions, neither elucidating nor redressing the more subtle
and commonplace inheritance of racism. Second, the only available subject positions are
victims and aggressors. And third, the rhetoric of injury allows for counterproductive accusations of
reverse discrimination that deny the present effects of past racism. What we require is a careful revision of “injury” as our
that
primary mediation of racial politics. Universities, in particular, have focused on injuries of exclusion, remedied by vital inclusions of underrepresented students through
an inclusion-exclusion
paradigm forecloses other ways of thinking about racial accountability, that “racial inclusion as
a remedy for discrimination (a particularly strong part of the 1980s ‘cultural wars’) has displaced
questions of what happens after inclusion is achieved” (13). What happens after inclusion? What happens when, in composition
admissions, faculty through hiring, and cultural histories through curricular reform. However, Gutiérrez-Jones cautions that
pedagogy, inclusion often means learning how to take on a particular discourse community’s existing practices? And what rhetorical tactics could we employ to foster
cooperative and critical interracial relationships when race has become an absent presence? The following case study of the Vietnamese American Coalition’s participation in a
and thus calls up the difficulties a rhetoric of
injury produces even after inclusion is achieved.
democratic debate illustrates the ways students can be pulled into a rhetoric of injury
VAC Students and a Liberal Logic of Inclusion In 2002, students at a public university in California were caught up in an interracial dispute not explicitly recognized as such. The issue: Was the under- graduate student body’s funding of several student clubs’ high
school student mentorship programs constitutional, and by what process should the student government make this decision? When the conflict erupted in late May, I was a participant-observer studying the discourse practices of the Vietnamese American Coalition (VAC), a political student organization that had been mentoring local Vietnamese American high school students s ince 1995. In fact, most clubs that mentored high school students self-identified as “cross-cultural” organizations (read: racial minority) and moreover
identified student govern- ment leaders as white “Greeks” (read: white fraternity and sorority members). So when VAC learned that the student government judicial board had made funding high school outreach programs unconstitutional—based on the liberal argument that student funding allocation should benefit all individuals in the undergraduate body equally (rather than affirm group rights)—discussions about constitutionality grew tense. Even when the cross-cultural student club leaders and the legislative
representatives agreed, the existing democratic dis- course frustrated their dialogue. Eventually, the judicial board revised the ruling to allow funding of student clubs’ high s chool student mentorship programs but not until four years later when most of the students involved had gradu- ated. More importantly, what the students required was a deliberation about the wider campus discourses that structure understandings of racial difference. An account of VAC students’ rhetorical response to the judicial board’s decision reveals
the problems created by a rhetoric of injury. By examining how VAC’s chair Bryan made rhetorical preparations to argue for high school outreach funding and then educated a younger student into the campus democratic discourse, we see confirmation of the students’ successful inclusion into the student government’s democratic discourse, on the one hand, and why inclu- sion into the discourse community was inadequate, on the other. The Vietnamese American Coalition’s history suggests that their organiza- tion was a direct
inheritance of 1960s Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) efforts toward inclusion, specifically the facilitation of racial minority students’ participation in universities. In 1993, two undergraduates founded VAC in the midst of campus strikes for Asian American studies courses and faculty hires, and the goal, in one co-founder’s words, was to “get the word out, get people angry, and get people involved.” These arguments for inclusion relied on a be- lief in liberal premises. As Sharon Crowley explains, liberalism is a pervasive
ideology in which its adherents believe in individual rights, equal opportunity, and freedom. “[T]he liberal subject,” according to Crowley’s discussion of Hugh Blair’s work, is “that free and sovereign individual who can think his way through disagreements by resorting to reason and who authorizes the results of his investigation to his very ability to reason” (Crowley 35). Presumably, after inclusion into the democracy—here, the democratic structure of the student body—the liberal subject is then equal and free. To an extent,
liberal belief in the “sovereign individual” has been a stepping stone for early TWLF demands for “self determination,” or the right to determine their educational opportunities. Since the 1980s, however, the inclusion of Asian American students had become increasingly complex and contested, especially at universities in Cali- fornia where efforts toward inclusion resulted in majority minority (primarily Asian and Asian American) student bodies. While VAC students drew on the legacy of TWLF strikes and race-conscious activism,
they also confronted perceptions that they were overrepresented in California universities. Dana Takagi takes up this issue in her study of the 1980s Asian American admissions controversy at Berkeley. When Asian American activists in Berkeley called uni- versity administrators’ attention to a sudden drop in one year’s Asian American undergraduate admissions rates, the terms of debate continually shifted: Asian American activists claimed discrimination against Asian American students; university officials upheld the value of
“diversity,” which meant higher admis- sion rates of underrepresented minorities; and neoconservative politicians claimed that the drop in Asian American student admission rates indicated reverse discrimination that harmed white and Asian American students. Us- them conflicts became perplexing as different parties sought to redefine Asian American identity. It was in this climate at a fellow state university that, in 1995, VAC established a high school student mentorship program to facilitate Vietnamese American high school
students’ entry into college. Bryan, then a high school student, was in the first cohort of mentees. Seven years later, as a senior at the university and the current VAC chair, he had firsthand knowledge of the possibilities of mentorship and found himself defending the program. On May 20, 2002, Bryan and peer student club leaders spent the day res earching lines of argument to maintain funding for their high school out- reach programs. Two weeks earlier, the student legislative representatives had informed them that the
student government could no longer sponsor clubs’ high school outreach programs with student body funds. The judicial board claimed that, in 2001, they had received an anonymous letter challenging the constitut ionality of allocating student body money to high school outreach programs. Agreeing that such funding was unconstitutional, the judicial board wrote a letter to the legislative council and explained the decision on a public bulletin outside their office: The [high school outreach] activities and programs are not open
to the participa- tion by the greater student body and thus do not benefit associated students. The critical argument that these programs benefit the facilitators is acknowledged, but the number of facilitators is not proportional to the budget allocation nor to the greater student body. Here, the emphasis on individualism seemed at odds with students’ efforts to redress past racial injustice by mentoring racial minority youth into college life. As Crowley explains, “liberal pluralism harbors the hope that difference can be erased if
only everyone will just be reasonable—which means something like ‘think as we do’” (41). Indeed, “abstract liberalism” and an assumption of equal opportunity, according to Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s discussion of “color- blind racism,” is often used as a framework to “ignore the effects of past and contemporary discrimination on the social, economic, and educational status of minorities” (31). The legislative council soon charged a five-member judicial oversight com- mittee with the task of reviewing the judicial board’s decision
and would hold one more meeting before the oversight committee convened. Dismayed that they had only learned of the judicial board’s decision one year after the fact, the cross-cultural groups that sponsored high school outreach—which included cross-cultural clubs as well as the student government itself—sought to voice their concerns at the legislative council meeting. After a full day of researching arguments for high school outreach programs, Bryan’s last task of the day was to rhetorically prepare younger student
leaders at the VAC cabinet meeting; only Katie, VAC’s freshman representative, and I, a participant-observer then mentoring two high school students, attended that meeting on May 20. The meeting became a teaching moment that demonstrates how these student leaders believed knowledge of appropriate rhetorical reasoning would facilitate inclusion into the university community. Bryan opened by saying he wanted to “educate” us, especially Katie who would need to learn about campus governance and politics. “We want
to know just as much as them [the student government] if not more before we start talking with anybody,” he explained, walking us premise-by-premise through the judicial board’s reasoning: because student government “money comes straight from student fees,” because “it’s only right that what we pay we get back,” and because high school outreach “is not directly benefiting this university’s students,” the judicial board decided that funding high school outreach is unconstitutional. Katie listened and offered possible
counterarguments, which Bryan affirmed or revised according to his understanding of student government discourse. For instance, he countered her claims that VAC mentors are university students who benefit from the programs since this would not address the charge that benefits need to be proportionate to the entire student body. Inclusion into the student government discourse seemed clear-cut. The hierarchy of student government, modeled after the national branches of gov- ernment, and adherence to the
constitution for legitimate reasoning and to Robert’s Rules of Order for discussion procedures defined government officers’ rhetorical practices. Without explicit knowledge of the constitution, Bryan knew, their assertions would mark their outsiderness. As long as students played the right game, the liberal assumption was that individuals inherently held agency as university citizens and building coalitions of these voices would be an effective strategy. VAC students allied themselves with pan-Asian Pacific American, Japanese
American, Chicano/Chicana, and African American stu- dent organizations. Together, cross-cultural club leaders began to build a case challenging the fairness of the judicial board’s decision-making process, their decision, and even the judicial oversight committee. They visited the cross- cultural center to learn about the decision and the process by which it was made; they read the constitution and pored over the student body budget; they questioned whether the judicial board’s reasons for ending high school outreach funding
were consistent with other spending choices; they researched the makeup of the oversight committee, its function, and requirements to amend the constitution; and they spoke with other student leaders and university administrators to gain perspective. Elaborating on their united rhetorical preparation, Bryan explained to Katie that they would present the following arguments to the legislative council representatives: that the judicial board’s decision-making process was unfair since the vice president was not given due notice
(less than one hour to prepare for a preliminary hearing) to speak on behalf of the value of high school outreach programs to the student body; that the process excluded the testimony of all student clubs that participated in high school outreach programs; that the judicial board, in fact, did not directly notify these clubs of the challenge to fund- ing or their ruling until one year after the decision; that the judicial oversight committee is self-interested as the constitution designates two judicial board officers to be on the fivemember oversight committee (essentially overseeing their own decision); that the constitution designates one staff member to be on the oversight committee when only students should vote on student issues; and, finally, that the oversight committee’s makeup lacks by-laws that would clarify the committee’s self-interested nature. If inclusion were indeed the only criteria for students’ democratic partici- pation, then these capable appeals based on democratic assumptions should have resolved the dispute. However, the next
section’s discussion of the legisla- tive council meeting tells a different story. The dominant democratic conven- tions were limited in two important ways. First, the democratic conventions mistakenly assumed that everyone’s voice had equal weight when the playing field was not level; agency is not granted based on awareness of discourse conventions alone. Rather, since the fraternity system is among the oldest of university student organizations and since nonwhites had been historically segregated from educational
institutions until relatively late in this country’s history, white students at this university had greater involvement in student governance. Rhetorical authority had arisen out of the social structures that authorized white students, specifically “Greeks,” over racial minorities and the historically recent institution of “cross-cultural” organizations. Second, because cross-cultural clubs were limited to responding to the judicial board’s decision and to generating reasons validated by precedent, they could not confront is- sues of
historical injustice against racial minorities and the present interracial tension. In particular, the students required a way to discuss race in the climate of a “majority minority” campus, where over 40 percent of the student body that year was Asian or Asian American. While race did go underground in the legislative council meeting, it certainly was not absent from students’ consciousness. Racial politics likely instigated the anonymous letter challenging that high school outreach pro- grams (primarily for racial minorities) did not
benefit the larger student body. Bryan made sure that Katie understood this: “All the big clubs, all the big cultural clubs are all saying this is wrong, you know. And we . . . talked to a lot of people, and one person in admin said, actually said, from what he hears, it sounds like somewhat of a racist, uh, prejudice against the cultural clubs and [the student government].” He emphasized his point by relaying a conversation he had with the student government president, who reflected the civil rights backlash characteristic of today’s
university culture: See, the president is also like . . . He told us one time . . . He said about our [outreach] conferences, “Well, they’re somewhat exclusive, right?” Because we, we geared it toward minorities, right? People of color. He’s all like . . . That’s his argument. He’s all, “Let’s be realistic. Can I as a Caucasian male go to your conference, you know, and feel comfortable?” You know? I’m like, “You can go and do whatever you want to do. We don’t exclude anybody. You can be part of our conference as long as you go to the
training, da da da, do all the logistics.” The student president focused not on inclusion but exclusion, where white students were the victims. Despite his reading of campus racial politics, Bryan withheld this perspective and chose to employ accepted lines of constitutional reasoning in the next day’s more public forum. And he was not alone; no one mentioned the elephant in the room. What Happens after Inclusion? (or, When No One Mentions Race) At the open legislative council meeting the next day, race went
uninterrogated, and the result was not a productive democratic discussion. If the student democratic discourse was working, the legislative council meeting on May 21, 2002, should have been empowering: the legislative representatives agreed that the judicial board’s decision was wrongheaded and the decision-making process was unfair, and they had invoked a judicial oversight committee; the representatives and student club constituents were dialoguing in an inclusive legislative council meeting; and the cross-cultural
students were equipped with constitutional knowledge. All students involved—student government representatives and cross-cultural organization leaders—were capable rhetors who relied on the ideal of a liberal democracy and whose active engagement in campus politics indicated best intentions to realize that ideal. But racial politics operated quietly. The public forum of the legislative council meeting played out as a blame game roving far from any situated historical understand- ing of racial injustice. This section interprets
what happened after inclusion, specifically in a climate of race-as-absent-presence, when VAC students used traditional democratic means for voicing their concerns in the university. In short, the rhetorical jostling by the legislative council and cross-cultural stu- dent organizations created shifting subject positions and closed off discussion before it even began. The next legislative council meeting, designated “open” and public, took place on May 21, 2002. Twenty-two legislative representatives sat on one side of the room, the
head of the council with gavel at the center and representatives with title plates on both sides of her, and over thirty cross-cultural student club leaders and members filled in the other side; racial identity politics were evident as almost all of the white students sat on one side and almost all of the nonwhite students sat on the other. VAC’s chair Bryan, their freshman repre- sentative Katie, one student member William, my high school mentee, and I attended the meeting on behalf of VAC.4 The moderator called the meeting to
order, following Robert’s Rules of Order, and when she arrived at the agenda item on the judicial oversight committee, one cross-cultural club constituent raised the critique of the oversight committee’s self-interested makeup. Although the council leader attempted to move on to the next agenda item, a murmur forced her back to the topic of the oversight committee and the judicial board’s ruling on high school outreach funding. With this halting start t o the discus- sion, another cross-cultural club member curtly asked
whether the oversight committee meeting would be open to the public and received a vague answer that he should email his legislative representative or judicial board members. A few cultural club representatives began to get agitated, and a few legisla- tive representatives began to grow defensive. Cuing into this dynamic, a cross- cultural club constituent tried to bring them back together: “I mean, I have a lot of respect for [the student government]. But with that comes a responsibility that you should have meetings open. I
know it’s not in the constitution [that the judicial oversight committee meeting be open or closed]. You represent us as constituents and us not having a voice . . . . We just want to talk about it, not attack one another. We just want to get our issues out.” This student was responding to legislative representatives’ positioning of cross-cultural clubs as “attack[ing].” Indeed, one or two of the thirty or so students’ statements were delivered with emotion, and one interrupted a legislative representative mid-sentence; however,
another explained that the anger was not directed at their representatives but their frustration at having no effective way of express- ing their concerns to those in power. After all, all of the students in the room supported high school outreach. Still, tensions mounted, and a division grew between the legislative council and cross-cultural groups. Soon, the students’ discussion stumbled into a rhetoric of injury and the roles of injurer and injured slipped back and forth. As Gutiérrez-Jones explains, Injury is . . . a bit fickle as regards
questions of agency. While one definition of the term emphasizes a willful action of hurt, and therefore a resulting blame, another definition treats injury as an effect without focus on the agent. In this sense, injury marks a dichotomy in legal thought that establishes distinct poles as adjudication works through either the perpetrator’s or victim’s pers pectives. Extending the implications of this dichotomy, one might well argue that the competing basis for arguments about reverse discrimination and institutional racism are bound
up in this slippage. (24) The legislative council meeting illustrates this slippage, where legislative representatives alternately positioned the racial minority students across from them as either those inflicting injury or as those injured. One legislative representative’s statement encapsulates both sentiments at once: You guys are, well, preaching to the wrong crowd. You’re getting angry at us, and we’re trying to help you out here. So I’m going to give you the best advice that I can right now, which is to take Cal for example and
rally against it, against this decision. Hold a protest. Get students to support your actions, your claims, your arguments, your positions. Go out there. Be seen by the student body. Most of the people who are out there on campus do not know what’s going on. This representative presented the council as injured by the cross-cultural stu- dent clubs’ anger (“You’re getting angry at us”) and proceeded to negate the council’s power, ironic in light of the authorit y of their office. Rather, he advised that the students protest against the
government of which he was a part and thus implied that they should take on the role of injured in order to achieve their goal. In referring to Berkeley protests, his statement alludes to struggles for inclusion and relies on the idea that everyone is equally authorized. This is why he could negate his own authority; he was just another individual. In Joan W. Scott’s words, “Here we have not only an extreme form of individualizing, but a conception of individuals without agency” (17). Even though several legislative representatives
positioned the cross- cultural student clubs primarily as injurer and as using their anger to appeal emotionally and without textual backing, the club constituents were raising logical arguments. One student questioned the definition and procedures of the oversight committee, another commented on the lack of by-laws about the committee in the constitution, and still another called on the council’s respon- sibility to represent them. While this rhetoric should have been acceptable, the head of the council still positioned the
cross-cultural clubs as outside of the discourse community. She stated, Another clarification. The judicial board, it’s not their job to represent [university] students. It’s because they’re appointed. It’s their job to interpret the constitu- tion. So if you guys want to talk to them about it or argue about them, you have to get the constitution and have constitutional background, your interpretation of the constitution. Because that is the only way that they will change their mind. Because if they see that there’s constitutional backing as
far as pulling high school outreach, then they won’t reconsider. But as far as just talking to them and arguing with them about it, it’s not gonna do anything because you’re, you’re going there, it’s just kind of like, with blanks. You’re not saying anything because you don’t have any constitutional backing. Bryan retorted, First of all, I’ve read the constitution, okay? And there’re supposed to be guide- lines to this oversight committee, but there aren’t. They’re supposed to be in the by-laws, but I didn’t see that in there, online.
Second of all, there’re supposed to be seven judiciary members, right? But I only counted five. Third of all, 25 percent [to change the constitution]?! The last elections, we only had 22.7 percent total. To turn out. That’s the best turn out we’ve had, so how are we supposed to get 25 percent to change the constitution? Fourth of all, the rationale that they say that outreach does not represent [university] students means we can never help out any other people than ourselves. We can never go, let’s say feed the homeless and use
[student body] money to do so because those people are not [university] students. So if this comes down, so that’s saying that our student groups can never help out the community, at least not with [student body] money, because that does not represent [university] stu- dents, right? That’s their rationale. If that happens, as long as that occurs, that’s just one thing we can never have the capacity to do. Repeatedly, Bryan and other members of cross-cultural clubs dodged the injur- er-injured subject positions because these
were inadequate to their proposed goals: to receive funding to mentor high school students. Bryan used logos to reposition himself, and others refigured their ethos (e.g., “We just want to thank you for hearing our voices, for letting us bring our issues to the table” and “We are all in support of the same issues . . . we’re your constituents.”) Even when the cross-cultural student clubs refashioned the rhetoric of injury so that both they and their legislative representatives could hold more empowering pos itions, all students
continued to fall back on a liberal logic of individualism. The student democracy worked under the assumption that individuals (regardless of race, class, gender) inherently have equal rhetorical agency, and in this system that assumes a level playing field, equality means treating everyone the same. That’s why the judicial board’s ruling assumes that the funding should benefit the student body proportionally. That’s also why the legislative representatives kept returning the cross -cultural representatives to their own actions:
students who objected to the judicial board’s decision needed to help themselves. In suggesting that the cross-cultural student clubs voice their concerns to the board, to the staff director, to the larger student body, the legislative representatives believed in each student’s rhetorical agency, the weight of each voice. Focusing exclusively on inclusion into a democratic system without in- terrogating the system itself can enable divisive racial politics and injustice to persist. The student president commended Bryan on noting that
the by-laws failed to give guidelines for the oversight committee, and he admitted that the makeup of the oversight committee was flawed because its creation was an abuse of power by a former president who, fearing that he would be recalled, instituted a mechanism for holding onto office. What’s telling is not just the abuse of power but also that he wasn’t held in check; the president thus had the means to abuse his office. This is a point made repeatedly by critical race theorists: the system is unjust as a result of historical
racial injustices that have left their traces on institutional structures—including the student government, student clubs, and university administration. Inclusion into an unjust system does not rect ify the unjust system. The racial division between representatives and their constituents was not surprising, especially in light of Bryan and his peer cross-cultural leaders’ belief that the student government was dominated by white fraternities and sororities. One way to expose the absent presence of race and thereby expose the unjust
the university, college
in a position to foster students’ rhetorical engagement within their campus
communities; such work could encourage students to critically read a rhetorical context that
matters to them and to articulate their concerns accordingly. And we can begin by interrogating
the knotted racial politics on our campuses. A rhetoric of injury may help adjudicate acts of
blatant racism but is ill-suited to the more subtle ways social structures carry on racial legacies
without participants’ intentions. The students at the meeting were, after all, on the same side,
and they were all in positions of authority. Critical race theorist Eric K. Yamamoto challenges that, too often, race
discourse tends to focus on “acts of invidious discrimination” such as housing discrimination or “horrific acts
of domination” such as ethnic cleansing. In our classes, we might invent with students a “critical race
praxis” that addresses the subtle and even unintended ways racial legacies continue to impinge
on speakers and writers today, a praxis that helps us understand the “oftentimes mundane
deployment of subordinating social, economic, and political structures” (84–85). As a start, composition
pedagogy must challenge the unfettered belief in the logic of individualism, the belief that
inclusion and awareness of academic rhetorical conventions alone will eradicate unequal
rhetorical agency. A critical race praxis, I propose, requires a deep sociohistorical inquiry into
articulations of race over time as well as serious deliberation over community values. An
interrogation into the history of racialization enables students to explore how speaking
positions are differentially authorized and to question how historically unequal access to
mainstream universities shaped their system of
system is through a critical historical engagement in which we identify the social structures that allow the racial injustice to persist. What the students needed was an interpretive framework that would enable them to analyze how their institutional structures—govern- ment offices, student organizations, and general democracy—were inflected by a history of race. Searching for a “Critical Race Praxis” Within
writing faculty are
student government representation, fraternities and sororities, and minority student organizations and coalitions. As Scott argues in an
essay on multiculturalism’s shortcomings, a more productive discourse about race would focus on “enunciations” of difference: [I]t makes more sense to teach our students and tell ourselves that identities are historically conferred, that this conferral is ambiguous
the project of
history is not to reify identity but to understand its production as an ongoing process of
differentiation, relentless in its repetition, but also and this seems to me the important political
point—subject to redefinition, resistance, and change. (
(though it works precisely and necessarily by imposing a false clarity), that subjects are produced through multiple identifications, some of which become politically salient for a time in certain contexts, and that
19; emphasis added) College writing courses can help students step away from us-them and you-me identity
politics by encouraging students to do such historical work. Histories of mainstream American universities clearly tell us that enrollment at early mainstream universities in the United States was reserved for white male students and that these early generations of
students created valuable student organizations of debate clubs, literary societies, and fraternities. But because nonwhite students were historically excluded from mainstream universities and because fraternities are among the oldest student organizations, the
Greek fraternity system built a tradition of leadership that places white students more firmly within university student governance. As I learned about VAC students’ concerns, I began to see that these students already had working knowledge of the ways racial
difference was historically enunciated in mainstream universities, and their understanding of the rhetorical situation illustrates historical work that we might adapt to the classroom. Bryan commented on differentiated student authority, So, we thought at least [the
student government] would support us. But no, they’re not. And see, they tell us, “Well, you should send a representative. Someone should run for something.” We have. We, we’ve run for things, but the thing is the people—ninety percent of the people that are
elected or win elections have a, have a background in Greek organizations. Meaning they get their fellow Greeks to vote for them. And Greeks have a lot of power on this campus. Asian Greeks are separate from Greeks. We don’t have voting, like we don’t have a
Greek council. Asian Greeks are on their own. And he was not alone in his perception. The next year, in a letter to the college newspaper, an undergraduate was cynical about the “Greek” dominance in student government and their ability to determine the student
body’s social and political direction; she argued that fraternities and sororities do not represent the student body’s concerns. With their long history, fraternities have effectively institutionalized themselves within and networked beyond universities. But Bryan
argues that the authority of this student organization has been limited to white fraternities and sororities. Quite simply, race-conscious student organizations— whether political, social, or disciplinary—have a more recent history because significant numbers of
nonwhites have only entered U.S. universities relatively recently in our nation’s history. To complicate matters, race has been rearticulated in major ways since the civil rights mov ement and related Third World Liberation Front strikes, and several VAC students had
The undergraduate curriculum reflects multiple ethnic studies
traditions, students create and participate in “cross-cultural” organizations,
learned about this history in Asian American and other ethnic studies courses.
and university administrators fund programs to promote
diversity and community outreach. This university, specifically, is not only a majority minority campus but also an Asian/Pacific Islander American maj ority campus. The university’s office of institutional research reports that, in Fall 2002, 44.5% of the student body
was Asian/Pacific Islander, 26.1% White/Caucasian, 2.1% African American/Black, 10.4% Chicano/Latino, and 0.4% Native American.5 The respo nse has been backlash. In the term after the dispute, a student wrote a satirical opinion in the student newspaper that
aptly indexes uneasy racial politics. The student began, “I propose to create a new community within the university that has long been overdue. There is a vacancy in the herd of our campus’s multicultural atmosphere and I aim to fill it.” Then: “I present the
Caucasian American Coalition.” Even if his introduction is facetious, the proposal points to the university’s complex interracial climate. Since university cultural and material resources are limited, we might identify in the article’s argument a larger tension that is
about rhetorical positioning, cultural and material resources, and democracy. When naming racial categories and utilizing these categories to structure curricula, academic programs, student organizations, and funding opportunities, universities not only respond to
historical racial injustices but also revise complex exigencies for students, which affect their ability to rhetorically compete for resources. In her research on Asian American activism, Linda Võ states that “state bureaucracies, unwilling to deal with the intricacies of
subgroup difference, initiate new aggregate racial categories that can inadvertently activate group mobilization. . . . These classification systems, once institutionalized, become the basis for the distribution of resources by presenting groups with a particular logic for
collective action” (6). The editorial writer understood these campus racial politics but only in ahistorical terms. For this reason, he could draw on commonplaces in multiculturalism’s present-focused discourse (e.g., claims of “underrepresent[ation],” a desire to
“celebrate” white American culture), employing these rhetorical devices to argue for resources and agency within the current university economy. But he misunderstands that more recent articulations of race do not make earlier articulations simply disappear;
It was only from an ahistorical perspective that this white male student
could position white males as victims, injured from an alleged absence from university studies.
rather, the concept of race now bears its cumulative rearticulations .
In
actuality, an examination of existing student organizations shows that his anxiety over race-conscious student organizations dominating the student body was not justified. The university student affairs office describes the organizations on campus and indicates that
there are 52 fraternities and sororities compared to only 29 “cross-cultural” student organizations. Student academic clubs outnumber both. Another student newspaper article suggested that many students recognized the tension among student organizations and
the dominance of Greeks in student government, and as a result, the students organized a leadership forum to deliberate on their mutual concerns. In composition pedagogy, we might take a cue from the VAC students and their peers, who were acculturated into
and, at times, actively sought historical understanding of their university communities. Composition teachers often do a good job of asking students to research audience perspectives and to research their perspectives as writers. We might, moreover, ask students to
inquire into the ways subject positions are historically conferred and thereby interpellate them as writers and readers. In t his case study, the student government officers and the cross-cultural student club leaders could arrive at a more textured sense of race by
mentoring younger students into their university
community. This undertaking requires sophisticated interpretation and composition abilities that can
accommodate the multiple and ambiguous meanings of race, investigate how such meanings
may still be sedimented in their social structures, and identify the effects of this continued
racialization on their present circumstances. These students had already started the hard work of interpreting the subject positions available
reconsidering racial differentiation historically and, through this lens, re-examine the possibilities and limitations of
to them—peeling back the layers of histories of American universities, of racial minority students’ activism in the 1960s, and of the growth of the extracurriculum. But examining
the sociohistorical construction of subject positions is only a start. Beyond fostering students’ understandings of the rhetorical landscape generated by racial differentiation, the
rhetorical education in composition classrooms could continue with inquiry into what students will do with newfound understandings of their campuses. That is,
if we
are to generate a critical race praxis in our classrooms, then our discussions should involve
careful deliberation over community values that will direct future action. A rhetoric informed by
the commonplace of social responsibility, one in which students productively recognize and
make use of their authority, rather than personal injury, in which students deny all agency,
would better enable students to forward their democratic rhetoric. What would be possible if students were to
historicize the institutions that differentially authorized their speaking positions? What would be possible if students examined the ways a contemporary structuring of race—
e.g., the ubiquitous university valuing of diversity—affected their rhetorical exigencies? And what would happen if students deliberated community values with these more
equipping students to discuss campus racial politics in these terms, those of us who
teach composition can foster a critical understanding of speaking positions that emerge from and
potentially work against racial injustice and, more broadly, can engage students in their situated
realities.
textured understandings of race? By
A2 Personal > Political – Jensen 5 – Political 1st
Their starting point incorrectly places the cart before the horse ----the personal cant
succesfuly translate intot he political
Jensen 5 (Robert Jensen, Texas University Journalism Professor, Nowar Collective Founder, 2005, The
Heart of Whiteness, p.78-87)
I'm all for diversity and its institutional manifestation, multiculturalism. But we should be concerned about the way in which talk of
diversity and multiculturalism has proceeded. After more than a decade of university teaching and political work, it is clear to me
that a certain kind of diversity-talk actually can
impede our understanding of oppression by encouraging us
to focus on the cultural and individual, rather than on the political and structural. Instead of focusing
on diversity, we should focus on power. The fundamental frame for pursuing analyses of issues around race,
ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class should be not cultural but political, not individual but structural.
Instead of talking about diversity in race, class, gender, and sexual orientation, we should critique white supremacy, economic
inequality in capitalism, patriarchy, and heterosexism. We should talk about systems and structures of power, about ideologies of
domination and subordination—and about the injuries done to those in subordinate groups, and the benefits and privileges that
accrue to those in dominant groups. Here's an example of what I mean: A professor colleague, a middle-aged heterosexual white
man, once told me that he thought his contribution to the world—his way of aiding progressive causes around diversity issues—
came by expanding his own understanding of difference and then working to be the best person he could he. He said he felt no
obligation to get involved in the larger world outside his world of family and friends, work and church. In the worlds in which he
found himself personal and professional, he said he tried to be kind and caring to all, working to understand and celebrate
difference and diversity. There are two obvious problems with his formulation, one concerning him as an individual and one
concerning the larger world. First, without
a connection to a political struggle, it is difficult for anyone to
grow morally and politically. My own experience has taught me that it is when I am engaged in political activity with
people across identity lines that I learn the most. It is in those spaces and those relationships that my own hidden prejudices and
unexamined fears emerge, in situations in which comrades whom I trust call hold me accountable. Without that kind of engagement,
I rarely get to levels of honesty with people that can propel me forward. The colleague in question saw himself as being, as the cliché
goes, a sensitive new age guy, but from other sources I know that he continued to behave in sexist ways in the classroom. Because
he had no connection to a feminist movement—or any other liberatory movement where women might observe his behavior and he
in a position to hold him accountable— there was no systematic way for him to correct his sexist habits. His self-image as a liberated
man was possible only because he made sure he wasn't in spaces where women could easily challenge him. The second problem is
that if
everyone with privilege — especially the levels of privilege this man had—decided that all they were
obligated to do in the world was to be nice to the people around them and celebrate diversity, it is difficult
to imagine progressive social change ever taking place. Yes, we all must change at the micro level,
in our personal relationships, if the struggle for justice is to move forward. But struggle in the personal arena is not
enough; it is a necessary but not sufficient criterion for change. Lots of white people could make
significant progress toward eliminating all vestiges of racism in our own psyches—which would
be a good thing—without it having any tangible effect on the systems and structures of power in
which white supremacy is manifested. It would not change the ways in which we benefit from
being white in that system. It doesn't mean we shouldn't "work on" ourselves, only that
working on ourselves is not enough. It is possible to not be racist (in the individual sense of not
perpetrating overtly racist acts) and yet at the same time fail to be antiracist (in the political sense of
resisting a racist system). Being not-racist is not enough. To he a fully moral person, one must find some way to be
antiracist as we Because white people benefit from living in a white-supremacist society, there is an added obligation for us to
struggle against the injustice of that system. The same argument holds in other realms as well. Men can be successful at not being
sexist (in the sense of treating women as equals and refraining from sexist behaviors) but fail at being antisexist if we do nothing to
acknowledge the misogynistic sys- tern in which we live and try to intervene where possible to change that system. The same can be
said about straight people who are relatively free of antigay prejudice but do nothing to challenge heterosexism, or about
economically privileged people who do nothing to confront the injustice of the economic system, or about U.S. citizens who don't
seek to exploit people from other places but do nothing to confront the violence of the U.S. empire abroad. We
need a
political and structural, rather than a cultural and individual, framework. Of course we should not ignore differences
in cultural practices, and individuals should work to change themselves. But celebrating cultural differences and
focusing on one's own behavior are inadequate to the task in front of us. I have been clearer on that
since September 11, 2001 after which George W. Bush kept repeating "Islam is a religion of peace," reminding Americans that as we
march off on wars of domination we should respect the religion of the people we are killing. Across the United States after 9/11,
people were saying, "I have to learn more about Islam."