Fugivity
This file is created to help you engage in the method of fugitivity. This would require you to not only
advocate fugitivity, movement, elusiveness, freedom, but to also perform fugitive knowledge in debate.
A general 1NC is included and does not look like most 1nc’s that you may be used to because the
performance of the 1nc has to be consistent with the Tremblay McGraw evidence that speaks to the
power of playing with language and the parallels between the freedom generated by black linguistic
practices and the physical freedom experienced by those that had once been enslaved.
The key to winning with this method isn’t a huge impact debate but in reading, re-reading, and then
reading the method cards again. A negative ballot can be achieved by winning a single link to the
affirmative (whether it be the state or micro political) and leveraging that link argument to justify why
black people need alternative routes to accessing freedom that don’t leave them exposed/require them
to be fully known or understood by those that can oppress them.
There is no heavy “ AT: Perm” section because method debates are about what you DID in the debate ,
not about what you want to happen. You shouldn’t be using this file until you understand where perms
came from and why they may not apply to method debates.
You should be explaining why your performance is valuable and your method evidence is where you
should be leaning on. Additional “aff doesn’t get method arguments” are helpful and can be in any part
of the block.
The 1NC should be read separately from the Link Debate in the first speech. If you are going to read links
in the first speech I suggest reading those on the Solvency Flow to leave your judges room to flow the
case debate.
The better your solvency take outs against the affirmative, the more attractive your method will look to
a judge.
A floating PIC is also a pretty good option that you may want to take the next few weeks learning how to
work into your wheelhouse.
Re(member) , read. Because shade came from reading.
1NC Fugitivity
Lauryn Hill, “Motives and Thoughts”
Rotating bodies, confusion of sound
Negative imagery, holding us down
Social delusion, clearly constructed
Human condition, morals corrupted
Trapped in reaction, lawlessness, war
Dissatisfaction from bowels to core
Devil's technology, strategy for
Human mythologies, urban folklore
Sick of psychology, counterfeit cure
Wicked theology, robbing the poor
Scheme demonology mislead the pure
Strictly strategically studying war
Light shown in darkness, image exposed
Few can see through the new emperor's clothes
Lustful this hustle turn humans to hoes
When the blind lead the blind, just more trouble and woes
It's the mind that they chose
Its designed to stay closed
Standard of jokers, court jester a logic
Sick looking cosmics, from schoolyards to college
Primitive man with civilized knowledge
System collapse and he still won't acknowledge
God is the saviour, studies behavior
Trying to fix the mix mind that he gave ya
Stiff-necked scholars on prescription meds
Wishing their problems were all in their heads
Moral dilemma, pride is the root
Misguided from youth, heart divided from truth
Egyptians and Grecians, spiritually dead
Imperially led, by the gods in their heads
Motives and thoughts
Industrial wealth
Global economy, in it for self
Heart full of madness, covered with kind
Pleasure designed to take over your mind
Furnished in godliness, painted in good
This tainted priesthood got real saints misunderstood
While classes in government, set up the veil
And cultivate minds for more mythical tales
Typical Hollywood follies good girl
While vice and corruption take over the world
Motives and thoughts
Check your motives and thoughts
Blind with the wickedness, deep in your heart
Modern day wickedness is all you've been taught
Lied to your neighbors, so you get ahead
Modern day trickery is all you've been fed
Motives and thoughts
Check your motives and thought
FRED MOTEN ,”the salve trade”
all down on perdido street, from san juan
to inglewood, up on that bridge, up where the
soul trees grow by soul, dance to fantastic
information while we kick off the modern world.
the whistle sounded good like a kiss on a train.
a track below us in the cabinet in the tunnel
under the water. a steady boom to lift us out.
nobody lived, not without digging, but he wore
that ivory waistcoat and we loved to see that shit.
I love my people too much to be around them
at school. I slip underneath the cinema tree, move myself
in half, dance to fray, write a paper on the salve trade.
the big fat women and the heliocopters they bring
with them to watch them and their kids. whole long-
ass sheets of improper names. we refused to act right
at the hospital and I was right with ’em. at the wrong time
I started reading my paper and ash flew from their big ol’
legs. we rub down and dance everyday at the broke clinic
and I was right with ’em. johnny griffin turns to this long
burning to pray for fire. make a song about the sky they stole.
if you ain’t gon’ get down then what you come here for?
what they bring your ass up in here for if you ain’t gon’
tear shit up? if you wasn’t just as happy to be here as you was
to come then what you gon’ do, simple motherfucker? the salve trade
Nicki Giovanni-- Ego-Tripping
I was born in the Congo
I walked to the Fertile Crescent and built
The Sphinx
I designed a pyramid so tough that a star
That only glows every one hundred years falls
Into the center giving divine perfect light
I am bad
I sat on the throne
Drinking nectar with Allah
I got hot and sent an ice age to Europe
To cool my thirst
My oldest daughter is Nefertiti
The tears from my birth pains
Created the Nile
I am a beautiful woman
I gazed on the forest and burned
Out the Sahara desert
With a packet of goat's meat
And a change of clothes
I crossed it in two hours
I am a gazelle so swift
So swift you can't catch me
For a birthday present when he was three
I gave my son Hannibal an elephant
He gave me Rome for mother's day
My strength flows ever on
My son Noah built New/Ark and
I stood proudly at the helm
As we sailed on a soft summer day
I turned myself into myself and was
Jesus
Men intone my loving name
All praises All praises
I am the one who would save
I sowed diamonds in my back yard
My bowels deliver uranium
The filings from my fingernails are
Semi-precious jewels
On a trip north
I caught a cold and blew
My nose giving oil to the Arab world
I am so hip even my errors are correct
I sailed west to reach east and had to round off
The earth as I went
The hair from my head thinned and gold was laid
Across three continents
I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal
I cannot be comprehended except by my permission
I mean...I...can fly
Like a bird in the sky
Our poetics exist as part of a “legacy gone missing”, a strategy that both utilizes
enclosure and run, that is here but is not here, that is there but is not there. The
fugitive is not simply imagined or demanded but in the use of language and it’s
constant re-reading and re-use.
Tremblay McGraw 10
Robin Tremblay-McGraw @University of California, Santa Cruz “Enclosure and Run: The Fugitive
Recyclopedia of Harryette Mullen’s Writing” MELUS Volume 35, No.2 Summer 2010. Pp 71-94 (Article)
Oxford University Press [E.Smith]
Harryette Mullen has published five books of original poetry—Tree Tall Woman (1981), Trimmings
(1991), S*PeRM**K*T (1992), Muse & Drudge (1995), and Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002).
Additionally, she has published two books which reissue her earlier works: Blues Baby: Early Poems
(2002), which reprints Tree Tall Woman and also includes a previously unpublished collection; and
Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge (2006). Mullen self-consciously
inherits and intervenes in what Kathy Lou Schultz calls the “legacy gone missing” of “avant-garde
practice by African-American women poets” (n. pag.). Mullen is actively engaged in recovering this
legacy through her creative, scholarly, and editorial work.1 Poised in the dialectic of what I call
“enclosure” (identity, history, and the archive, but also, racism, exclusion, and limitation) and “run”
(mobility, flight, escape, critique, ongoing poesis, and revision), Mullen’s work plies the tensions
between these disparate but mutually dependent poles. From the negotiation of this tension, Mullen
produces a formal strategy predicated on the communal participation of others and distinctive
among innovative poets—the recyclopedia. Mullen’s writing creates texts that remain open to
ambiguity, diffi culty, and difference. Her writing engages in political and social criticism with
particular attention to race, gender, and the discourse of the commodity, while it delights in the
pleasures of an infi nite linguistic jouissance. Many of the critics who have written about Mullen’s work,
including Elisabeth A. Frost, Juliana Spahr, Allison Cummings, and Deborah Mix, foreground its complex “mixtery” of disparate sources and infl
uences, illustrating its rich and critical interrogation and reframing of literary history. Importantly, each critic also emphasizes Mullen’s attention
to communal reading practices and several situate Mullen’s work as a negotiation between multiple discourses and infl uences, including Black
Arts, Steinian modernism, and Language writing. Mix locates Mullen’s work in Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T in relation to Gertrude Stein but
demonstrates how Mullen’s “subversion of convention . . . is both more complicated [than Stein’s] (in its inclusion of race in the welter of
discourses of femininity and sexuality) and more communitarian (in its recognition of the individuals tangled in these linguistic webs” (71). Frost
demonstrates Mullen’s rare (“among recent avant-garde poets”) revamping of the lyric and argues 72 that Mullen “constructs lyric otherwise—as
an experiment in collective reading and an assertion of the complexities of community, language, and poetic voice” (466). While
Spahr
asserts that “what has interested me about Mullen’s work has been her attention to reading, an
attention that is rooted in the intersection between language writing’s pursuit of wild reading and
autonomy- and identity-centered poetry’s concerns with community building and alliance” (115),
Cummings points out that “Mullen’s work then has garnered critical adulation not only because it
works to synthesize disparate traditions, but because it refl ects on that synthesis explicitly” (24).
Surveying Mullen’s body of work as a whole and elaborating on Cummings’s assertion that Mullen self-consciously
refl ects her work’s synthesis of multiple discourses, I contend in addition that Mullen’s writing is characterized by a
productive tension between “enclosure” and “run,” between an archive of cultural, linguistic, and historical
references, images, and information and the fugitivity that is both a thematics and a formal strategy. Her archive
manifests in the form of the palimpsest, or, to use a fi gure that Mullen herself foregrounds, her archive is a
recyclopedia. She takes debased, erased, and forgotten histories and found discourses and runs with
and recycles them; she invites the reader to participate in this educative process of conservation
and production, enclosure and fugitive run. Her work articulates a need for a more equitable
ecology, one of acknowledgment and memory, conservation and reuse; she and we as readers are
caught up in her recyclopedia, an ongoing poetics of reuse that benefi ts from the multiple
perspectives of a heterogeneous community. The concept of the fugitive in Mullen’s work is
connected equally to the history of the United States, the global slave trade, historical strategies of
escape for enslaved blacks, and formal methods for escaping and reinventing genre and poetic
method. Furthermore, the fugitive is both critical and generative and intimately linked to Mullen’s
concept of the recyclopedia. Mullen’s formal strategies explicitly reference the history of the
fugitive slave laws. In an interview with Cynthia Hogue, Mullen delineates the connection of the
fugitive to her own work: I wanted the poem to have that quality of quick movement from one
thing to another, from one subject or thought to another, from one mood or emotion to another.
Partly because I wanted things to be in fl ux, a state of fl ux, a state of change. If you stand still too
long, they will put chains on you, so you want to keep moving. This is one of the things that is most
fascinating to me about the slave narratives I was studying while I was writing my dissertation. The
true freedom in the slave narrative is at the point of deciding to escape and the journey north . . .
the freedom that people experience is actually when they are on the road, in fl ight. (par. 25)\
Mullen links the structure of her poetry to the fl ight of the fugitive slave and then connects these
movements of fugitivity with freedom. Interestingly, Mullen simultaneously problematizes the effi cacy
of such movement and the resultant freedom gained when she further locates the moment of “true
freedom . . . at the point of [the slave’s] deciding to escape and . . . journey.” This quote suggests that
freedom is elusive, momentary, and a state of mind; it is discursive rather than related to the
location of the body. Such a freedom is utopian and fugitive. The diffi culties of fl ight and the
frequency of slaves being returned to owners as mandated by the Fugitive Slave Act made the
journey north dangerous, exhausting, and subject to failure. Furthermore, in the literature of
passing Mullen surveys in her article “Optic White: Blackness and the Production of Whiteness,” which
explores how whites repress and suppress miscegenation and argues that the racial category of white is predicated on the black,
she notes that in texts such as Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, “Death is better than slavery.” This is a
“recurring refrain in Jacobs’s and other slave narratives, [that] acquires an ironic signifi cance when Benjamin [Jacobs’s
lightskinned uncle] dies as a slave, vanishing into the white race in his third and fi nal escape” (82 ). For some, freedom
means leaving one’s family and community, effectively dying in order to take up a new life as a free
person or as a black who passes for white. Historically, fl ight is a means of escape, but not an
unproblematic or uncomplicated means. Flight and travel (voluntary or not) undertaken by slaves,
refugees, exiles, or nomads does not always erase histories but rather sometimes produces a
palimpsestic and productive layering. In her doctoral dissertation, Mullen writes about Olaudah
Equiano, the son of an African king who was taken into slavery and wrote from England in the eighteenth
century. Discussing how “captivity disrupts his life, so that this African child fails to be ritually initiated
[via scarifi cation] as an adult member of his tribe,” Mullen notes that in Equiano’s own discursive
production: the displaced African is no blank page, as his reconstruction of early memories goes to show. He
is more like a palimpsest, or like the protean “form of this Narrative.” . . . In the pages of Equiano’s prolifi c
narrative, the black body retains its relation to a place of origin, but never acquires a fi xed signifi cation; instead
layers of meaning accumulate as the character of the narrator evolves through a series of travels and adventures.
(“Gender” 59) According to Mullen, for Equiano “retrospectively this disruption of cultural
continuity is fi gured as a divine providence that intervenes to open up a new identity and destiny—
a destiny constructed out of the individual’s unique interaction with chance and continually
changing environments— rather than a predetermined fate or fi xed identity” (60). For some
individuals fl ight and “cultural disruption” will enable strategic redefi nitions or recycling and
make possible an identity open to change and resignifi cation; fl ight can create a kind of open
archive always sedimented and palimpsestic so that past traces are not erased but available and
recontextualized, refi gured and thus open to the future. Individuals and texts constructed out of
fugitive fl ight from the law or those that travel across multiple cultural communities constitute the
“recyclopedias” of disparate experiences, ideologies, and discourses. In the recyclopedia, fugitive fl
ight rewrites identity by enabling a return to and reappropriation of the past. The neologism recyclopedia
in the title of Mullen’s collection of three of her previous books is a combination of recycle and encyclopedia. Recycle references
reuse, suggesting “to use again in the original form,” and the taking of intractable “used” or “waste” material and making it
suitable for something new. Pedia recalls encyclopedia and its Greek root, paideia, meaning education. Mullen’s neologism
clearly articulates a project that is both process and product. It entails a cyclical reuse of given materials and a process that takes
dirty, contaminated, and worthless “waste” materials and turns them into something newly usable. Mullen’s recyclopedia
suggests that the continual reuse of materials, even those that construct blacks as dirty, contaminated, and worthless, can serve to
identify an original “use” (the racist construction of blacks as waste, for example); her writing enables the critical recycling of
problematic materials to produce something new, something with different or oppositional value for writer, reader, history, and
Mullen’s recyclopedia constructs fugitive movement as a means of escape from arrest and
as a productive process of remembering and rewriting. Mullen includes in her recyclopedia many
diverse materials, yet she is particularly attentive to bringing to the surface the unarticulated,
marginalized, nearly lost, and invisible as well as the “used” or “waste” material. Mullen’s
recyclopedia enables the sort of activity described by David Scott that opens up “vast possibilities
not just of memory but of countermemory; the moral idiom and semiotic registers of remembering
against the grain of the history of New World black deracination, subjection, and exclusion” (vi).
Such a process entails both identifying and preserving histories and experiences elided and
prohibited from offi cial discourses and simultaneously exposing such discourses’ bad faith. Rather
than placing them under lock and key in order to solidify, arrest, and exclude racist and sexist
discourses, Mullen remakes the encyclopedia—the discourse and its attendant pedagogies—
through her recycling of its alphabets, grammars, metaphors, and other tropes. In the process, these
discursive tigations reveal the often unmarked and unnamed structurings of various internecine
ideologies.
the future.
2NC Fugitivity
The Role of the Ballot is the deconstruct white supremacist
territoriality
Rodriguez 2009 [Dylan Rodriguez, University of California, Riverside, “The Terms of Engagement: Warfare, White Locality, and Abolition”Critical Sociology, Volume 36,
Issue 1, 2009]
white supremacist territoriality – a structure of feeling
that organizes the cohesion of racial and spatial entitlement – that ‘multiculturalism’ is recognized as a fact of life, an empirical
feature of the world that is inescapable and unavoidable, something to be tolerated, policed, and patriotically valorized at once and in turn. On the one hand, white locality is a
site of existential identification that generates (and therefore corresponds to) a white
supremacist materiality. As subjects (including ostensibly ‘non-white’ subjects) identify with this sentimental
structure – a process that is not cleanly agential or altogether voluntary – they enter a relation
of discomforting intimacy with embodied threats to their sense of the ‘local’. Those alien bodies
and subjects, whose movement suggests the possibility of disruption and disarticulation,
become objects of a discrete discursive labor as well as material/military endeavors. Most
importantly, they become
specified and particularized sites for white locality’s punitive
performances: racialized punishment, capture, and discipline are entwined in the historical
fabric of white supremacist social formations from conquest and chattel enslavement onward, and
the emergence of white locality’s hypermobility has necessitated new technologies
commensurate with the hyperpresence – actual and virtual – of white subjectivities. As white bodies and
subjects exert the capacity to manifest authority and presence in places they both do and do
not physically occupy (call the latter ‘absentee’ white supremacy for shorthand), the old relations of classical white
supremacist apartheid are necessarily and persistently reinvented: racial subjection
becomes a technology of inclusion that crucially accompanies – and is radically enhanced by –
ongoing proliferations of racist state and state-sanctioned violence. Further, this logic of
multiculturalist white supremacist inclusion does not exclusively rely on strategies of coercion or punishment to assimilate others – such as in
the paradigmatic examples of bodily subjection that formed the institutional machinery of Native American boarding and mission schools (Adams 1995; Smith 2005), but instead builds
upon the more plastic and sustainable platforms of consensus and collective identity
formation. I do not mean to suggest that either consensus building or identity formation are benign projects of autonomous racial self-invention, somehow operating independently of
the structuring relations of dominance that characterize a given social formation. Rather, I am arguing that the social technologies of white supremacy
are, in this historical moment, not reducible to discrete arrangements of institutionalized (and state
legitimated) violence or strategies of social exclusion (Da Silva 2007) but are significantly altered and
innovated through the crises of bodily proximity that white locality bears to its alien (and
even enemy) populations. It is in these moments of discomfort, when white locality is internally populated by alien
others who have neither immigrated nor invaded the space, but have in multiple ways
become occupied by the praxis of white localityconstruction, that logics of incorporation
and inclusion become crucial to the historical project of white supremacist globality.
It thus is within the confines of Homeland Security as
We can’t risk white supremacy---Institutional structures of domination create everyday holocausts—you
should reject singular focused impacts in favor of working against the ongoing extinctions of people of
color
Omolade 89, [1989, Barbara Omolade is a historian of black women for the past twenty years and an
organizer in both the women’s and civil rights/black power movements, “We Speak for the Planet” in
“Rocking the ship of state : toward a feminist peace politics”, pp. 172-176]
Recent efforts by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan to limit nuclear testing,
stockpiling, and weaponry, while still protecting their own arsenals and selling arms to countries and
factions around the world, vividly demonstrate how "peace" can become an abstract concept within a
culture of war. Many peace activists are similarly blind to the constant wars and threats of war being
waged against people of color and the planet by those who march for "peace" and by those they march
against. These pacifists, like Gorbachev and Reagan, frequently want people of color to fear
what they fear and define peace as they define it. They are unmindful that our lands and peoples
have already been and are being destroyed as part of the "final solution" of the "color
line." It is difficult to persuade the remnants of Native American tribes, the starving of
African deserts, and the victims of the Cambodian "killing fields" that nuclear war is the
major danger to human life on the planet and that only a nuclear "winter" embodies fear
and futurelessness for humanity. The peace movement suffers greatly from its lack of a historical and
holistic perspective, practice, and vision that include the voices and experiences of people of color; the
movement's goals and messages have therefore been easily
coopted and expropriated by world
leaders who share the same culture of racial dominance and arrogance. The peace movement's
racist blinders have divorced peace from freedom, from feminism, from education reform, from
legal rights, from human rights, from international alliances and friendships, from national
liberation, from the particular (for example, black female, Native American male) and the general
(human being). Nevertheless, social movements such as the civil rights-black power movement in the
United States have always demanded peace with justice, with liberation, and with social and economic
reconstruction and cultural freedom at home and abroad. The integration of our past and our present
holocausts and our struggle to define our own lives and have our basic needs met are at
the core of the
inseparable struggles for world peace and social betterment. The Achilles heel of the organized peace movement in this country has
always been its whiteness. In this multi-racial and racist society, no allwhite movement can have the strength to bring about basic changes. It is axiomatic that basic changes do not occur in any society unless the people who are
oppressed move to make them occur. In our society it is people of color who are the most oppressed. Indeed our entire history teaches us that when people of color have organized and struggled-most especially, because of their
particular history, Black people-have moved in a more humane direction as a society, toward a better life for all people.1 Western man's whiteness, imagination, enlightened science, and movements toward peace have developed
from a culture and history mobilized against women of color. The political advancements of white men have grown directly from the devastation and holocaust of people of color and our lands. This technological
and material progress has been in direct proportion to the undevelopment of women of color. Yet the dayto- day survival, political struggles, and rising up of women of color, especially black women in the United States, reveal both complex resistance
to holocaust and
undevelopment and often conflicted responses to the military and war . The Holocausts Women of color
are survivors
of and remain casualties of holocausts, and we are direct victims of war-that is,
of open armed conflict between countries or between factions within the same country. But women of
color were not soldiers, nor did we trade animal pelts or slaves to the white man for guns, nor did we sell or lease
our lands to the white man for wealth. Most men and women of color resisted and fought back, were
slaughtered, enslaved, and force marched into plantation labor camps to serve the white masters of war and to build their empires and war machines.
People of color were and are victims of holocausts-that is, of great and widespread destruction, usually by fire. The world as we knew and created it was destroyed in a continual scorched earth policy of the white man. The
experience of Jews and other Europeans under the Nazis can teach us the value of understanding the totality of destructive intent, the extensiveness of torture, and the demonical apparatus
of war aimed at the human spirit. A Jewish father pushed his daughter from the lines of certain death at Auschwitz and said, "You will be a remembrance-You tell the story. You survive." She
lived. He died. Many have criticized the Jews for forcing non-Jews to remember the 6 million Jews who died under the Nazis and for etching the names Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Terezin and
Warsaw in our minds. Yet a
s women of color, we, too, are "remembrances" of all the holocausts against the people of the
world. We must remember the names of concentration
camps such as Jesus, Justice, Brotherhood,
and Integrity, ships that carried millions of African men, women, and children chained and
brutalized across the ocean to the "New World." We must remember the Arawaks, the Taino, the Chickasaw,
the Choctaw, the Narragansett, the Montauk, the Delaware , and the other Native American names of thousands of
U.S. towns that stand for tribes of people who are no more. We must remember the holocausts visited against the
Hawaiians, the aboriginal peoples of Australia, the Pacific Island peoples, and the women and children of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We must remember the slaughter of
men and women at Sharpeville, the children
of Soweto, and the men of Attica. We must never, ever, forget the children disfigured, the men maimed,
and the women broken in our holocausts-we must remember the names, the numbers, the faces, and the
stories and teach them to our children and our children's children so the world can never forget our suffering and
our courage. Whereas the particularity of the Jewish holocaust under the Nazis is over, our holocausts
continue. We are the madres locos (crazy mothers) in the Argentinian square silently demanding news of
our missing kin from the fascists who rule. We are the children of El Salvador who see our mothers
and fathers shot in front of our eyes. We are the Palestinian and Lebanese women and
children overrun by Israeli, Lebanese, and U.S. soldiers. We are the women and children of
the bantustans and refugee camps and the prisoners of Robbin Island. We are the starving in the
Sahel, the poor in Brazil, the sterilized in Puerto Rico. We are the brothers and sisters of Grenada
who carry the seeds of the New Jewel Movement in our hearts, not daring to speak of it with our lipsyet. Our holocaust is South Africa ruled by men who loved
Adolf Hitler, who have developed the Nazi techniques of terror to more sophisticated levels. Passes replace the Nazi badges and stars. Skin color is the ultimate badge of persecution. Forced removals of women, children, and the
elderly-the "useless appendages of South Africa"-into barren, arid bantustans without resources for survival have replaced the need for concentration camps. Black sex-segregated barracks and cells attached to work sites achieve
two objectives: The work camps destroy black family and community life, a presumed source of resistance, and attempt to create human automatons whose purpose is to serve the South African state's drive toward wealth and
hegemony. Like other fascist regimes, South Africa disallows any democratic rights to black people; they are denied the right to vote, to dissent, to peaceful assembly, to free speech, and to political representation. The regime has
all the typical Nazi-like political apparatus: house arrests of dissenters such as Winnie Mandela; prison murder of protestors such as Stephen Biko; penal colonies such as Robbin Island. Black people, especially children, are routinely
arrested without cause, detained without limits, and confronted with the economic and social disparities of a nation built around racial separation. Legally and economically, South African apartheid is structural and
institutionalized racial war. The Organization of African Unity's regional intergovernmental meeting in 1984 in Tanzania was called to review and appraise the achievements of the United Nations Decade for Women. The meeting
considered South Africa's racist apartheid regime a peace issue. The "regime is an affront to the dignity of all Africans on the continent and a stark reminder of the absence of equality and peace, representing the worst form of
institutionalized oppression and strife." Pacifists such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi who have used nonviolent resistance charged that those who used violence to obtain justice were just as evil as their
oppressors. Yet all successful revolutionary movements have used organized violence. This is especially true of national liberation movements that have obtained state power and reorganized the institutions of their nations for the
benefit of the people. If men and women in South Africa do not use organized violence, they could remain in the permanent violent state of the slave. Could it be that pacifism and nonviolence cannot become a way of life for the
oppressed? Are they only tactics with specific and limited use for protecting people from further violence? For most people in the developing communities and the developing world consistent nonviolence is a luxury; it presumes
that those who have and use nonviolent weapons will refrain from using them long enough for nonviolent resisters to win political battles. To survive, peoples in developing countries must use a varied repertoire of issues, tactics,
and approaches. Sometimes arms are needed to defeat apartheid and defend freedom in South Africa; sometimes nonviolent demonstrations for justice are the appropriate strategy for protesting the shooting of black teenagers
. Peace is not merely an absence of 'conflict that enables white
middleclass comfort, nor is it simply resistance to nuclear war and war machinery. The
by a white man, such as happened in New York City
litany of "you will be blown up, too" directed by a white man to a black woman obscures
the permanency and institutionalization of war, the violence and holocaust that people of
color face daily. Unfortunately, the holocaust does not only refer to the mass murder of Jews, Christians, and
atheists during the Nazi regime; it also refers to the permanent institutionalization of war that is part
of every fascist and racist regime. The holocaust lives. It is a threat to world peace as
pervasive and thorough as nuclear war.
Our method of fugitivity makes black freedom a possibility
Tremblay McGraw 10
Robin Tremblay-McGraw @University of California, Santa Cruz “Enclosure and Run: The Fugitive
Recyclopedia of Harryette Mullen’s Writing” MELUS Volume 35, No.2 Summer 2010. Pp 71-94 (Article)
Oxford University Press [E.Smith]
Fugitivity and the recyclopedia are figures and processes exemplifi ed in Mullen’s writing in
numerous ways, including her use of discrepant discourses— from advertising, the blues, hymns,
popular songs, and the discourses of black intellectuals—that run into and across one another. Her
writing also mobilizes puns and anagrams that entail the literal movement and recycling of letters
and sounds from word to word. A close examination of one particular word in several pieces of writing
is illustrative. In an interview with Calvin Bedient, Mullen discusses the use of the word shuffl e in
Muse & Drudge: “[T]here’s always at least some punning going on with ‘shuffl ing,’ because it’s not
a neutral term when you’re talking about images of black people” (“Solo” 668). In Mullen’s
discursive play, words retain their histories even as they are redeployed and recycled. Out of
constraint comes not only a citation of historical abuses, but also an active criticism that is
productive and creative: “the folks shuffl e off / this mortal coffl e and / bamboula back to / the
motherland” (Muse 31). Here the language is playful and deadly serious, mimetic and critical. The word
shuffl e suggests both the dragging of feet and also “an evasive trick; evasion” (“Shuffl e”) while it
also retains, as Mullen points out in her interview with Bedient, its association with racist depictions
of blacks on fi lm, in minstrel shows, and in other cultural productions (“Solo” 668). The quatrain
begins with the folks shuffling off, a racist depiction. This phrase is followed by another that refers to
slaves being chained together in a line, “this mortal coffle,” a line of bodies subject to death. In
terms of history, this second line of the quatrain refers to a time that precedes the content of the fi
rst line—Africans are fi rst dehumanized and brought to North America, the Caribbean, and
elsewhere as slaves and then depicted in racist caricatures as shuffl ing fi gures. Yet, in the third
line of the quatrain, the reader understands that the “folks . . . bamboula back to / the motherland.”
They use the bamboula—a song and a dance performed in “early nineteenth century slave dances
held at Congo Square in New Orleans” (Donaldson 63)—figuratively to escape through culture to
the “motherland.” Furthermore, the shuffl ing of the fi rst line seems to be the force that gets the
folks off “this mortal coffle”; they shuffle off line. This quatrain performs a resignifi cation of its own
lines. Having read the whole quatrain, we must reinterpret the fi rst line as more than a racist
caricature. We understand it as a potentially subversive resignifi cation, so that shuffl ing in the
quatrain becomes an evasive or regenerative strategy. It looks like one thing initially, but ends up
performing something else. It does not lose its initial meaning but rather the trope turns back on
itself, the later lines recasting the earlier so that the word shuffl e references the content of the
poem but also one of its formal strategies—it moves forward and backward and reorganizes its own
materials. Mullen’s use of assonance and consonance in this quatrain and elsewhere further
underscores the fugitive interrelation between lines, the ways in which words, sounds, and tropes
echo and reverberate, are disassembled and reassembled. The ou in bamboula is picked up and
extended by the o in the word to at the end of the line, extending thematically and phonically the mobility
or stretch suggested by bamboula. This singular use in the quatrain of the ou or long u vowel sound with
the vowel o calls attention to and sets up a rhyme between the words in which the sounds are contained. It
also marks similarity and difference; the ou and the o are phonically similar in these words though the
sound is produced differently –one with a single o and the other with a diphthong, ou. Materials—words,
letters, images, short and long vowel sounds—and temporalities can be shuffl ed and reordered like cards
in a deck or the (now) old-fashioned catalog cards in a library. Time as constructed in this quatrain is
malleable, elastic, and nonlinear. There is a constant recombinatory shuffl ing between past and
present, a disordering of temporality and geography. Flight and fugitivity enable escape and a way
back to the motherland, even if that return is fi gurative, ephemeral, and occurring in the present
moment (in the present tense) of the quatrain while it also refers to a fugitive moment of quasifreedom for slaves on Sundays in nineteenth-century New Orleans. Furthermore, the poem, written
in the late twentieth century, does not attest to literal contemporary experience but inscribes such
historical facts and experiences and makes evident their resonances in the palimpsestic present.
These returns to the past constitute the “archive,” the shuffl ed playing or catalog cards that turn up in
different combinations and in different hands.
AT: PERM
The permutation turns the politics of inclusion into appropriation that fails to question the core of
the scholarship of the 1AC. This results in the reproduction of oppression because it valorizes the
original hegemonic structure.
Dhaliwal ‘96
[Amarpal K. Dhaliwal, Doctoral candidate in the ethnic studies department at the University of California at Berkley, where she teaches courses
in Asian American and Women’s studies, “Radical Democracy: identity, Citizenship, and the State ( Can the Subaltern Vote)”, 1996, pg. 43-44]
soap
Asking “How will ‘radical’ democracy deal with colonial legacies in ways that ‘non-radical’ democracy does not”, I will critique this presumed alternative for
its embeddedness in modernist principles about difference, identity, subjectivity, opposition, and, most notably, inclusion. Pushing inclusion, advocates of radical
democracy generally see the problem as one of implementation and realization of the ideals of modern democracies rather than the ideals and structures
themselves. Chantal Mouffe, in fact, believes that “radical democracy is the only viable alternative for the Left today, and that it consists in trying to extend the
principles of equality and liberty to an increasing number of social relations.” This belief an inclusionary impulse that needs to be problematized because the
privileging of inclusion politics does not account for the ways that inclusion can still oppress or fail to alter
structures of domination. The inability of radical democratic inclusion politics to deal with inclusion retaining peripheralization is a key
limitation, especially given that, in many liberal democratic societies, many subordinated groups have been “included” by
being accorded certain formal rights like the right to vote. If inclusionary attempts often reaffirm “a hegemonic core
to which the margins are added without any significant destabilization of that core” or continue to valorize the very
center that is problematic to begin with, it is clear that the motivation to include needs questioning. The governing
assumptions or conceptual logic guiding gestures to include must be integrated to grapple with oppression in
the form of appropriation, [and]commodification, fetishization, and exoticization, to name a few. Liberal
discourses and their encouragement of inclusion politics do not adequately theorize “oppressive inclusion” and
tend to interpret “inclusion” as a sign of “fairness” and “equality”. This interpretation misses how the “other(ed)”
can be include to actually craft a hegemonic self. Liberal discourses that presume to want to make everyone a “self”
(through inclusion) ignore that the liberal “self” always needs and is often manufactured in opposition to the
“other(ed)” (the excluded)
AT: PERM
The Perm is Strategic whiteness---It shifts to absorb and discredit alternative epistemologies that
challenge the framework through which they validate knowledge..
COLLINS 90
Patricia Hill Collins “Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (1990) Routledge: New York and
London.
Alternative knowledge claims in and of themselves are rarely threatening to conventional knowledge. Such
claims are routinely ignored, discredited, or simply absorbed and marginalized in existing
paradigms, Much more threatening is the challenge that alternative epistemologies offer to the basic process used by
the powerful to legitimate their knowledge claims. If the epistemology used to validate knowledge comes into
question, then all prior knowledge claims validated under the dominant model become suspect . An alternative epistemology
challenges all certified knowledge and opens up the question of whether what has been
taken to be true can stand the test of alternative ways of validating truth. The existence of a selfdefined Black women’s standpoint using an Afrocentric feminist epistemology calls into question the content of
what currently passes as truth and simultaneously challenges the process of arriving at the
truth.
.
Link Debate
Constitution Link
The Constitution is part of the problem--- it protects the dream of equal rights and the result of
continued slavery in the United States.
Farley 05
Anthony P. Farley [Associate Professor, @ Boston College Law School. J.D., Harvard Law School]
“Perfecting Slavery” Boston College Law School Faculty Papers 1-27-2005 [E. Smith]
In 1995, Missouri v. Jenkins ended the saga.79 With Missouri v. Jenkins we find “the tradition of all the dead generations
weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”80 Missouri v. Jenkins returns us to white-over-black, a place we never left;
it is a perfect map of the undiscovered country. As Dylan puts it, “[t]hat long black cloud is coming down.”81 The slave
argues for equal rights. The slave gives his product to the law. The slave fashions a prayer for relief
from white-over-black and gives it to the law. Robert Morris was the second black lawyer in the
United States. He was admitted to the practice of law in Suffolk County, Massachusetts in 1847. The
following year he was enlisted by Benjamin Roberts and five-year old Sarah Roberts in her effort to
attain an education free of the colorline.82 The Boston School Committee separated school children
into black and white and assigned each to separate schools. Morris argued that separation destroys
equality and lost at trial. Morris then enlisted white abolitionist Charles Sumner to argue the case on
appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. The two filed their appeal together. Sumner
used Morris’s argument and lost. The slave’s product, equal rights, was filled with white-over-black
and then returned as “separate but equal.”83 Separate or together, equal or unequal, all of it is whiteover-black in a system that is white-over-black. The empty vessels of law are filled with the lived
relations that we attempt to disavow. The empty vessels of law are filled with white-over-black. The
label on the vessel may say whatever it says but its sum and substance will be white-over-black as
surely as the Triangle Trade that gave the whites of New England the leisure for all their town meetings
followed the molasses-to-rum-toslaves formula. In Plessy, the majority and the dissent agreed about
white-over-black. Justice Harlan, dissenting, argued that the white race would forever remain “the
dominant race in this country . . . if it . . . holds fast to principles of constitutional liberty.” Harlan’s
dissent became Brown I and II. Fifty years after Brown, we see that the white race is “the dominant
race in this country . . . in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth and in power.” Fifty years
after Brown, there is no reason to doubt the truth of Justice Harlan’s statement that “the great
heritage” and the “principles of constitutional liberty” would allow the “the white race” to “continue
to be” “the dominant race in this country” “for all time.”84 Equality of right, the thought-product of
the slave, like any commodity, gives us an uncanny reflection of the lived relations that we disavow.
Equality of right could not be thought except from the position of the slave, the one who suffers. The
slave would not suffer if it were not the slave. The slave attempts to escape through fantasies of right
and equality and dreams a system of equal rights into being. The slave does the dreamwork needed to
make life look like death and death look like life. The slave dreams of all the equations that are
needed to balance the system’s every crisis. The slave builds the law rooms of the many mansions of
the house of law. The slave, in other words, is itself the author of Justice Harlan’s “great heritage” and
“principles of constitutional liberty.”85 The slave forges its own chains through its juridical strivings. The slave builds
the home for the future good will of the master.86 That is what its dream of equality of right amounts to, a home for the future
good will of the master. If the master of the future might be good then the crisis of servile insurrection can be deferred again
and again and again. But the master cannot be anything other than the master, just as the slave cannot be anything but the
slave. There is a colorline or there is not. Without the dreamwork of the slave, the many crises of the system of white-overblack blossom in revolution. The flames are wooed from their buds and continue to unfold until the entire plantation system is
gone. The servile insurrection continues until it brings down the system of marks, the system of property, and the system of
law. Slaves are trained to not think this way. Slaves are trained to be objects. Slavery is death.
Black Suffering Reps Link
The accounts of black suffering in exchange for a ballot produces a feigned connection between the
human and the captive body that allows white bodies to produce a phantasmical scenario in which they
literally fear for their own enslavement. This production of empathy allows the white body to slip under
the skin of the captive, erasing the lived experience of the enslaved and triggering a narcissistic cycle in
which they use the subordinate body as a playground for their fantasies.
Hartman 97 [Saidiya V. Hartman Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in NineteenthCentury America. Oxford University Press 1997]
The shocking accounts of whipping, rape, mutilation, and suicide assault the barrier of indifference, for the
abhorrence and indignity roused by these scenes of terror, which range from the mockery of the coffle to the dismemberment
and incineration of a slave boy, give rise to a shared sentience between those formerly indifferent and those suffering . So
intent and determined is Rankin to establish that slaves possess the same nature and feelings as himself, and thereby
establish the common humanity of all men on the basis of this extended suffering, that he literally narrates an
imagined scenario in which he, along with his wife and child, is enslaved. The “ horrible scenes of cruelty that were presented
to [his] mind” as a consequence of this imagining aroused the “ highest pitch of indignant feeling.” In addition, this scenario enables
Rankin to speak not only for but literally in the place of the enslaved. By believing himself to be and by
phantasmically becoming the enslaved, he creates the scenariofor shared feelings: My flighty imagination added much to
the tumult of passion by persuading me, for the moment, that I myself was a slave, and with my wife and children placed under the reign of
terror. 1 began in reality tofeel for myself, my wife, and my children— the thoughts of being whipped at the pleasure of a morose and
capricious master, aroused the strongest feelings of resentment; but when I fancied the cruel lash was approaching my wife and children, and
my imagination depicted in lively colors, their tears, their shrieks, and bloody stripes, every indignant principle of my bloody nature was excited
to the highest degree. (56) The nature of the feelings aroused here is rather complicated. While this flight of imagination enables a
vicarious firsthand experience of the lash, excoriates the pleasure experienced by the master in this brutal exercise of power, and
unleashes Rankin's fiery indignation and resentment, the phantasmic vehicle of this identification is complicated, unsettling,
and disturbing. Although Rankin’ s fantasy culminates in indignant outcries against the institution of slavery and,
clearly, the purpose of this identification is to highlight the crimes of slavery, this flight of imagination and slipping into the
captive’s body unlatches a Pandora’ s box and, surprisingly , what comes to the fore is the difficulty and slipperiness
of empathy. Properly speaking, empathy is a projection of oneself into another in order to better understand the
other or “ the projection of one’ s own personality into an object , with the attribution to the object of one’s own
emotions. ” 4 Yet empathy in important respects confounds Rankin’ s efforts to identify with the enslaved because in making the
Olive’s suffering his own, Rankin begins to feel for himself rather than for those whom this exercise in imagination
presumably is designed to reach. Moreover, by exploiting the vulnerability of the captive body as a vessel for the
uses, thoughts, and feelings of others, the humanity extended to the slave inadvertently confirms the expectations
and desires definitive of the relations of chattel slavery. In other words, the case of Rankin’s empathic identification is as
much due to his good intentions and heartfelt opposition to slavery as to the fungibility of the captive body. By
making the suffering of others his own, has Rankin ameliorated indifference or only confirmed the difficulty of
understanding the suffering of the enslaved? Can the white witness of the spectacle of suffering affirm the
materiality of black sentience only by feeling for himself? Does this not only exacerbate the idea that black sentience is
inconceivable and unimaginable but, in the very ease of possessing the abased and enslaved body, ultimately elide an understanding and
acknowledgment of the slave’s pain? Beyond evidence of slavery’ s crime, what does this exposure of the suffering body of the bondsman
yield? Does this not reinforce the “ thingly” quality of the captive by reducing the body to evidence in the very effort to establish the humanity
of the enslaved? Does it not reproduce the hyperembodiness of the powerless? The purpose of these inquiries is not to cast doubt on Rankin’ s
motives for recounting these events but to consider the precariousness of empathy and the thin line between witness and spectator. In the
fantasy of being beaten, Rankin must substitute himself and his wife and children for the black captive in order that this pain be perceived and
experienced. So, in fact, Rankin becomes a proxy and the other’s pain is acknowledged to the degree that it can be imagined, yet by virtue of
this substitution the object of identification threatens to disappear. In order to convince the reader of the horrors of slavery, Rankin must
volunteer himself and his family for abasement. Put differently the effort to counteract the commonplace callousness to
black suffering requires that the white body be positioned in the place of the black body in order to make this
suffering visible and intelligible. Yet if this violence can become palpable and indignation can be fully aroused only
through the masochistic fantasy, then it becomes clear that empathy is double-edged, for in making the other’s
suffering one’ s own, this suffering is occluded by the other’s obliteration . Given the litany of horrors that fill Rankin’s pages,
this recourse tofantasy reveals an anxiety about making the slave’ s suffering legible. This anxiety is historically determined by the denial of
black sentience, the slave’s status as object of property, the predicament of witnessing given the legal status of blacks, and the repression of
counterdiscourses on the “ peculiar institution." Therefore, Rankin must supplant the black captive in order to give expression to black
suffering, and as a consequence, the dilemma— the denial of black sentience and the obscurity of suffering— is not attenuated but
instantiated. The ambivalent character of empathy— more exactly, the repressive effects of empathy— as Jonathan Boyarin notes, can be
located in the “ obliteration of otherness” or the facile intimacy that enables identification with the other only as we “ feel ourselves into those
we imagine as ourselves.” And as a consequence, empathy fails to expand the space of the other but merely places the self in its stead.5 This is
not to suggest that empathy can be discarded or that Rankin’ s desire to exist in the place of the other can be dismissed as a narcissistic exercise
but rather to highlight the dangers of a too-easy intimacy, the consideration of the self that occurs at the expense of the slave’ s suffering, and
the violence of identification.6 As well, we need ask why the site of suffering so readily lends itself to inviting
identification. Why is pain the conduit of identification? This question may seem to beg the obvious, given the violent domination
and dishonor constitutive of enslavement, the acclaimed transformative capacities of pain in sentimental culture, the prevalence of public
displays of suffering inclusive of the pageantry of the trade, the spectacle of punishment, circulating reports of slavery’ s horrors, the runaway
success of Unde Tom's Cabin, and the passage through the “ bloodstained gate,” which was a convention of the slave narrative, all of which
contributed to the idea / t hat the feelings and consciousness of the enslaved were most available at this site. However, what I am trying to
suggest is that if the scene of beating readily lends itself to an identification with the enslaved, it does so at the risk
of fixing and naturalizing this condition of pained embodiment and, in complete defiance of Rankin’s good
intention, increases the difficulty of beholding black suffering since the endeavor to bring pain close exploits the
spectacle of the body in pain and oddly confirms the spectral character of suffering and the inability to witness the
captive’ s pain. If, on one hand, pain extends humanity to the dispossessed and the ability to sustain suffering leads
to transcendence, on the other, the spectral and spectacular character of this suffering, or, in other words, the
shocking and ghostly presence of pain, effaces and restricts black sentience.
Economy Link
Neoliberalism and economic growth is fundamentally raced—the idea that trade is a
level playing field perpetuates colorblind visions that make race invisible
Ward Univ. of Illinois @ Urbana-Champaign, ‘07 Robert Anthony-; Neoliberal Silences, Race, &
The Hope of CRT; A paper Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Research Association; April
Draft; http://www.urban.illinois.edu/apa-pw/APA07/Neoliberal%20Silences_Robert%20Ward.pdf
Neoliberalism fosters an economic theory of democracy. The idea is that democracy is commodified at the price of political liberalism,
subordinating the state to the market. Highlighting the parallel between economic and political markets. Neoliberal policy in the development of charter schools does not
create an “equal playing field”, in contrast, by undoing the memory of past discrimination, and unseating our historical consciousness of institutional discrimination it seeks to
overlook civic values in the interest of developing commercial interests. The need through actualizing the academic function of education to place individuals in the division of labor
and integrate them into the workforce (distributive and economic functions of education) takes precedent for charters and is disconnected from concepts of
the social, justice, or civic responsibility. As
such, colorblindness negates relationships between racial difference and
power. The danger in such an ideological approach to educational policy and other implications is that the “rhetoric of
color-blindness is commonly used as a pretext to continue to justify hierarchical racial divisions (Parker, 2003,
150).” Though market ideology virtually ignores notions of race, the history of racialization and discrimination
in both the national and New Orleans context are implicit in every facet of the restructuring process. Through a shift in
focus from individual actors or governing bodies determining school structures to the market as the primary
delineator, power is “uncoupled from matters of ethics and social responsibility (Giroux, 2004, 59).” Thus, social
responsibility is shifted from the state and those governing bodies onto the poor and oppressed groups and
historical discriminatory policies and treatments forgotten. Under the neoliberal approach to education through
charter schools, market ideology replaces longstanding social contracts that sought equality and opportunities that public schools were
hoped to one day fulfill. The chartering of public education is representative of a much larger effort that is deeply
ingrained in America’s racial consciousness, in whiteness, and in the new left’s attempts to position
class over the legacy of racialization in America. Market ideology is the triumph of capital over
politics as well as morality. It is the triumph of economic logic over all other domains of human existence,
and therefore represents the end of history (Giroux 2004). The promotion of a new relationship between government and knowledge: the development
of new forms of social accounting and expertise (via technological advances) to promote notions of government at a distance. The notion of educational reform for “equal educational opportunity” finds little material
import and is purely ideological at best. Major criticism levied on both reform movements since the mid 1950’s and research such as the landmarks studies of the Coleman Report and the work of Jencks, and Bowles and
Gintis are extensive in scope. Of particular interest are that reforms and research to this end were all results based with a primary focus on individualism, competition, and meritocracy. Also, the ideological stance of
“equal educational opportunity” concentrates too heavily on site based reform, choosing to view schools as autonomous instead of as closely tied to the wider society of racial segregation mechanisms, the labor market,
and the state itself. Finally, the too little
consideration in reform language considers the question of what education is and seeks to accomplish,
besides being viewed as purely functional (Burbules & Sherman 1979). This is to say that without reform addressing past
discrimination by way of race and class then reform initiatives are not only still inequitable and unequal but
still in fact discriminatory. Particularly through reform initiatives using market ideology, but also in discussions of educational
equity in general, too little attention is paid to the fact that American public education “depends heavily on local property taxes, and
inequalities in tax revenues among school districts produce inequalities in educational resources, facilities, programs, and opportunities
(Walters, 2001, 44).” Whereas the federal response is for local and state governance to turn to market ideology to solve the questions of
equal educational opportunities, particularly in urban districts, what ends up occurring is that the market ideology
approach to education veils how racial histories accrue political, economic, and cultural weight to the power of
whiteness. This occurs simply by
virtue of refusal to acknowledge it. As a final point from the
establishment of common schools in the early 19th century to the market approach to education in the present day, “racial inequality in
educational funding and other forms of educational opportunity were explicit policies of the state throughout the country (Anderson,
2001, 35).” What the market approach to educational reform offers to Whites and the power structures driving these
reforms is the belief that the concept of institutional racism have no merit. It legitimates the idea that
America has achieve a “level playing field” and as such privileges in education and economic opportunities that
Whites enjoy are due to individual “determination, a strong work ethic, high moral values, and a sound
investment in education (Giroux, 2004).” This ideological standpoint leaves Whites and the elite free and clear,
absolving them from feeling any sense of responsibility to rebuild the physical infrastructure of American schools. This
task proves critical for sustaining a high-quality learning environment for those students who have been cheated from such opportunities.
This leaves millions of students in need of decent facilities and educational opportunities, especially in urban areas, and in a
strange twist of fate, only themselves to blame for the conditions in which they exist (Anderson, 2005, 133).”
Economy Link
Globalization reinforces racial divisions between nations.
Brien and Leichenko, 2000 (Karen - Center for International Climate and Environmental Research At
the U of Oslo, and Robin - Department of Geography and Center for Urban Policy Research, Rutgers
University, "Double exposure: assessing the impacts of climate change within the context of economic
globalization," Global Environmental Change Volume 10, Issue 3, October 2000, Pages 221–232)
Despite a widespread perception that globalization is a unifying and all-encompassing force, these processes
have (heretofore) been highly uneven across all geographic scales. In fact, it has been argued that globalization
accentuates, rather than erodes, national and regional differences (Mittelman, 1994). Processes of globalization have
been uneven among major regions of the world, characterized by an increasing proportion of trade and resource flows taking place both
within and between between three major economic regions, including North America (US, Canada and Mexico), the European
Union and East and Southeast Asia (led by Japan). These three regions, often referred as the Triad, accounted for
76% of world output and 71% of world trade in 1980 (Dicken, 1997). By 1994, the Triad accounted for 87% of world merchandise
output and 80% of world merchandise exports (Dicken, 1997). Increased concentration of global economic
activity among the Triad has meant that large regions outside the Triad, particularly Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, have
become increasing marginalized vis a vis the global economy (Castells, 1996; Mittelman, 1994). Examination of the global
distribution of foreign direct investment among low and middle income countries aptly illustrates these regional differences (Table 2). More than 10% of the
world population currently lives in Sub-Saharan Africa, yet this region receives only 1% of total world foreign direct investment (World Bank, 1998).
Similarly, South Asia contains 22% of the world population, but receives only 1.1% of world foreign direct investment (World Bank, 1998).
Globalization processes are also uneven among regions within countries ( Hirst and Thompson, 1996). Within China,
for example, coastal regions have been increasingly integrated into the global economy, while more remote areas
of the country remain largely untouched by globalization. As a result, globalization is exacerbating existing patterns
of uneven development within China. Even within an advanced country such as the United States, the impacts of
globalization have been highly uneven. Studies of international trade involvement of US cities and regions by Markusen et al.
(1991),Hayward and Erickson (1995) and Noponen et al. (1997), for example, find substantial variability in the level of involvement in international trade
and in the relative contribution of international trade to regional economic growth. As with climate change, the
uneven nature of globalization
leads to the emergence of winners and losers. In addition to globalization's frequently identified winners, which include large
transnational corporations and advanced and newly industrializing countries (Cook and Kirkpatrick, 1997; Fischer, 1990; Greider, 1997), winners may also
include subnational regions and social groups which benefit directly or indirectly from globalization (Tardanico and Rosenberg, 2000). Frequently identified
losers in the process of globalization include countries of Sub-Saharan Africa, as noted above, as well as unionized labor and small, locally oriented firms
(Conroy and Glasmeier, 1993). Additional losers may include other regions and groups that are left out of globalization processes or that experience direct
negative impacts.
Legalism Link
Anthony P. Farley [Associate Professor, @ Boston College Law School. J.D., Harvard Law School]
“Perfecting Slavery” Boston College Law School Faculty Papers 1-27-2005 [E. Smith]
Slavery is with us still. We are haunted by slavery. We are animated by slavery. White-overblack is slavery and segregation and neosegregation and every situation in which the
distribution of material or spiritual goods follows the colorline. The movement from slavery to
segregation to neosegregation to whatever form of white-over-black it is that may come with
post-modernity or after is not toward freedom. The movement from slavery to segregation to
neosegregation is the movement of slavery perfecting itself. White-over-black is
neosegregation. White-over-black is segregation. White-over-black is slavery. All of it is whiteover-black, only white-over-black, and that continually. The story of progress up from slavery is
a lie, the longest lie. The story of progress up from slavery is told juridically in the form of the
rule of law. Slavery is the rule of law. And slavery is death. The slave perfects itself as a slave
when it bows down before its master of its own free will. That is the moment in which the
slave accomplishes the impossible reconciliation of its freedom with its unfreedom by willing
itself unfree.3 When exactly does this perfection of slavery take place? The slave bows down
before its master when it prays for legal relief, when it prays for equal rights, and while it
cultivates the field of law hoping for an answer. The slave’s free choice, the slave’s leap of faith,
can only be taken under conditions of legal equality. Only after emancipation and legal
equality, only after rights, can the slave perfect itself as a slave. Bourgeois legality is the
condition wherein equals are said to enter the commons of reason4 or the kingdom of ends5
or the New England town meeting of the soul to discuss universalizable principles, to discuss
equality and freedom. Much is made of these meetings, these struggles for law, these festivals
of the universal. Commons, kingdom, town meeting, there are many mansions in the house of
law, but the law does not forget its father, as Maria Grahn-Farley observes: The law of slavery
has not been forgotten by the law of segregation; the law of segregation has not been
forgotten by the law of neosegregation. The law guarding the gates of slavery, segregation,
and neosegregation has not forgotten its origin; it remembers its father and its grandfather
before that. It knows what master it serves; it knows what color to count.6 To wake from
slavery is to see that everything must go, every law Requests for equality and freedom will
always fail. Why? Because the fact of need itself means that the request will fail. The request
for equality and freedom, for rights, will fail whether the request is granted or denied. The
request is produced through an injury.8 The initial injury is the marking of bodies for less—less
respect, less land, less freedom, less education, less. The mark must be made on the flesh
because that is where we start from. Childhood is where we begin and, under conditions of hierarchy, that childhood
is already marked. The mark organizes, orients, and differentiates our otherwise common flesh. The mark is race, the mark is
gender, the mark is class, the mark is. The mark is all there is to the reality of those essences—race, gender, class, and so on—that
are said to precede existence. The mark is a system.9 Property and law follow the mark. And so it goes. There is a pleasure in
hierarchy. We begin with an education in our hierarchies. We begin with childhood and childhood begins with education. To be
exact, education begins our childhood. We are called by race, by gender, by class, and so on.
Hegemony/Modeling Link
Their Modeling advantage is based on the exportation of a violent anxiety and fear of raced bodies
Rodriguez ‘07 [Dylan, PhD in Ethnic Studies Program of the University of California Berkeley and Associate Proffessor of Ethnic
Studies at University of California Riverside, “American Globality And the US Prison regime: State Violence And White Supremacy from Abu
Ghraib to Stockton to bagong diwa”, Ateneo de Manila University, 2007, Kritika Kultura 9 (2007): 022-048]
To consider the US prison as a global practice of dominance, we might begin with the now-indelible photo exhibition of captive brown
men manipulated, expired, and rendered bare in the tombs of the uS-commandeered Abu Ghraib prison: here, I am concerned less with the
idiosyncrasies of the carceral spectacle (who did what, administrative responsibilities, tedium of military corruption and incompetence, etc.) than
I am with its inscription of the where in which the worst of uS prison/state violence incurs. As
the bodies of tortured prisoners in this
somewhere else, that is, beyond and outside the formal national domain of the United States, have become the hypervisible and accessible raw material for a global critique of the US state —with Abu Ghraib often serving as the signifier for a
generalized mobilization of sentiment against the American occupation—the intimate and proximate bodies of those locally and
intimately imprisoned within the localities of the United States constantly threaten to disappear from the political
and moral registers of US civil society, its resident uS establishment left, and perhaps most if not all elements of the global
establishment left, which includes NGOs, political parties, and sectarian organizations. I contend in this essay that a new theoretical
framing is required to critically address (and correct) the artificial delineation of the statecraft of Abu Ghraib prison, and other
US formed and/or mediated carceral sites across the global landscape, as somehow unique and exceptional to places outside
the US proper. In other words, a genealogy and social theory of US state violence specific to the regime of the prison needs to be
delicately situated within the ensemble of institutional relations, political intercourses, and historical conjunctures that
precede, produce, and sustain places like the Abu Ghraib prison, and can therefore only be adequately articulated as a genealogy
and theory of the allegedly “domestic” US prison regime’s “globality” (I will clarify my use of this concept in the next part of this
introduction). Further, in offering this initial attempt at such a framing, I am suggesting a genealogy of US state violence that can
more sufficiently conceptualize the logical continuities and material articulations between a) the ongoing projects of domestic
warfare organic to the white supremacist US racial state, and b) the array of “global” (or extra-domestic) technologies of
violence that form the premises of possibility for those social formations and hegemonies integral to the
contemporary moment of US global dominance. In this sense, I am amplifying the capacity of the US prison to inaugurate
technologies of power that exceed its nominal relegation to the domain of the criminal- juridical. Consider imprisonment, then,
as a practice of social ordering and geopolitical power, rather than as a self-contained or foreclosed jurisprudential practice: therein, it is possible
to reconceptualize the significance of the Abu Ghraib spectacle as only one signification of a regime of dominance that is neither (simply) local
nor (erratically) exceptional, but is simultaneously mobilized, proliferating, and global. The overarching concern animating this essay revolves
around the peculiarity of US global dominance in the historical present: that is, given
well as the differently
the geopolitical dispersals, and dislocations, as
formed social relations generated by US hegemonies across sites and historical contexts, what
modalities of “rule” and statecraft give form and coherence to the (sapatial-temporal) transitions,
(institutional-discursive) rearticulations, and (apparent) novelties of “War on Terror” neoliberalism? Put
differently, what
technologies and institutionalities thread between forms of state and state-sanctioned dominance that
are nominally autonomous of the US state, but are no less implicated in the global reach of US state formation?
Public Hostility Link
Making policy decisions based on the outrage /hostility of the public without focusing on the needs of
black people is historically anti-black. Decorum and calm are only requirements for those that speak up
against the racism of America
Williams 13
Edward Wyckoff Williams, contributing editor at The Root and a contributor to Al Jazeera America. “Our
real problem is white rage” JUL 15, 2013 http://www.salon.com/2013/07/15/our_real_problem_is_white_rage/
If there is no justice, there can be no peace. But in the American South it seems
white folks suddenly believe that decorum and charm are a proper response to
unspeakable acts of violence and unconscionable injustice. The day before a jury
delivered an acquittal in the murder trial of George Zimmerman, Seminole County
Sheriff Don Eslinger and Sanford Police Chief Cecil Smith gave a national press
conference to appeal for a peaceful reaction to the verdict — regardless of its
outcome. Eslinger, who is white, said, “We will not tolerate anyone who uses this
verdict as an excuse to violate the law.” The veiled threat of an aggressive police
response to imaginary civil unrest belies the very logic that led to Trayvon Martin’s
death to begin with. For, you see, African-Americans are never protected or served
by the law enforcement apparatus — yet they are always subject to its military
might. Sanford police coyly “tolerated” the actual killing of an unarmed black child, but yet refuse to “tolerate” any anger expressed for the
acquittal of his murderer. This is the new Jim Crow realized. It bears reminding that it was Sanford’s police who first allowed Zimmerman to walk away
uncharged — his gun in tote. The story of self-defense seemed logical to them given the brown body lying on the ground. It was their decision not to
investigate the case as a crime that led to public outcry, rallies and marches. It is only because of their total failure to do their jobs that the world now
knows the name and face of Trayvon Martin. The complete incompetence (or indifference) of Sanford police is why certain evidence that could have
more easily convicted Zimmerman was inadmissible at trial — the most glaring example being their failure to perform a toxicology test on Zimmerman
the night he shot Martin. Had they done so, it would have revealed whether he was under the influence of either illegal substances, alcohol or the two
prescriptions drugs he had admittedly been taking — Temazepan and Adderall — the side effects of which include hallucinations, insomnia and
aggressive behavior. Instead, Sanford police let Zimmerman walk away, quietly into the night, as he did again yesterday. But the same police now
This
arrogant call to remain calm in the face of such fatal injustice reveals a basic
disregard for the humanity of black people. It is this fundamental disconnect —
an unwillingness or inability to see African-Americans as fully realized human
beings — that allows whites to blindly ignore the need for equal treatment and equal justice. It is this warped mentality that led
George Zimmerman to murder an unarmed child, feel no remorse and say it was “God’s plan.” Human beings are
allowed to be angry. They are allowed to emote fear, love, joy, relief, pride and
pain. Perhaps if the white women on this jury could see a murdered child — as
opposed to a “black” child — they would instinctively know that Trayvon was
afraid of Zimmerman, confused by this man following him in the dark, and
perhaps they could intuit Trayvon screaming for his life. There is, after all, no other way to see the
threaten a quick and forcible response to any violence perpetrated in reaction to injustice their own department has engendered.
facts of this case — beyond a reasonable doubt or otherwise. But neither justice nor humanity are colorblind in the eyes of American law. The nation’s
sociopolitical consciousness remains plagued by a three-fifths compromise that devalues the lives of black people in general, and black boys and men
in particular. And when the criminal justice system — in the hands, as it was, of two white defense attorneys, two white prosecutors and a mostly white
jury presided over by a white judge — choose to disregard the life of an innocent black teenager, it can hardly be a surprising result. Trayvon Martin
was profiled not just by Zimmerman on the night he was killed, but by the very people charged with adjudicating justice on behalf of his senseless
The paradox of being implicitly excluded from the
guarantee of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness has been reiterated and
reinforced by public policy and social malaise for centuries. President Barack
Obama is not immune — as he’s become the target of incessant “white rage”:
race-baiting attacks, prejudice and bias even prior to his election. The Republican Party and its
death. For African-Americans this is not new.
neo-Confederate Tea Party wing has been committed to invalidating his political and legislative legacy as much as the Zimmerman jury invalidated the
civil rights of Trayvon. The disparate precedent set, therefore, becomes all the more insulting when we’re told to simply shut up and bear it. Melissa
Harris-Perry, on her eponymous MSNBC show, explained this weekend that “race riots” is a biased term that dismisses the underlying calls for justice,
which are often the primary purpose for protests by black and brown people. She highlighted the key fact that in America’s history the worst “race riots”
In Tulsa, a
mob of armed white men charged into a black neighborhood, burning homes,
killing over 300 victims and leaving an estimated 8,000 people homeless. In
Rosewood, a series of lynchings escalated into hundreds of angry white rioters
killing an unknown number of black citizens and leaving the entire town in waste.
Yet white rage is never articulated by America’s law enforcement as a reason to
fear or strategically organize against. White males aren’t stopped by police in
disproportionate numbers nor frisked before entering movie theaters and firstgrade classrooms. But there are many angry white people out there. The image of a
featured violent attacks perpetrated by whites against blacks: The Tulsa race riot of 1921 and the Rosewood, Fla., riots of 1923.
threatening black male prevails in the minds of white prosecutors, juries and average citizens alike — and the
Zimmerman verdict will only serve to solidify that concept and embolden like-minded vigilantes to behave recklessly
and act with impunity against the lives, bodies and souls of black folks. African-American civil rights leaders,
politicians and religious authorities have all echoed the call for calm in the wake of the verdict. But what is most
confounding is the fact that a black male who chooses to riot is as likely to be met with violent and deadly force as if
he were walking quietly home with Skittles and iced tea in-hand. This is the ultimate tragedy that Zimmerman’s trial
has unleashed in the so-called “post-racial” age.
Radical Movements Link
Radical movements aren’t radical---any strategy that is a “pre-requisite “ to engaging in the
system will result in interest convergence and the smooth functioning of the system.
Singer 10
Joshua DeLorme and John N. Singer of Texas A&M “The Interest Convergence Principle and the
Integration of Major League Baseball”2010 Journal of Black Studies [E.Smith]
The interest convergence principle states, “The interest of blacks in achieving racial equality will be
accommodated only when it converges with the interest of whites” (Bell, 1980, p. 523). Furthermore, Bell
argued, “the Fourteenth Amendment, standing alone, will not authorize a judicial remedy providing effective racial
equality for blacks where the remedy sought threatens the superior status of middle- and upper-class whites” (p.
523). The interest convergence principle dictates that when Whites’ interests converge with
Blacks’ need for equality, the ensuing false generosity given on the part of Whites is often
disproportionate to the gains received by the Black community, as was the case with the integration
of MLB. Our goal is to provide a new perspective on MLB’s integration and stimulate critical thought by providing a more
holistic viewpoint, extending beyond the oversimplified notions of racial progress, equity, and equality that permeate the greater
dialogue and discourse on the subject. By introducing Bell’s principle as a potential governing theme of MLB’s integration, we
hope that readers will begin to question the seemingly altruistic notions of equity and equality on behalf of Branch Rickey and
MLB in their efforts to integrate America’s national pastime. As suggested by Effa Manley (1948) in the quotation at the beginning of this article, it is
important to critically reflect on the motives behind White power brokers’ decision to integrate America’s pastime. The purpose of this article is not to provide an all-encompassing historical
review of the Black community’s involvement with the game of baseball (for details, see Lanctot, 2004; Lomax, 2003), nor is it to provide readers with an in-depth examination of MLB’s
integration as a component of a larger context (e.g., post– World War II American sport and society; for details, see Lanctot, 2004; Miller & Wiggins, 2004). Although we are both keenly aware
of the significance of both the aforementioned topics, our intention is to focus on three things: the NLs, MLB’s integration, and the interest convergence principle. Therefore, this article has two
guiding purposes. First, we use critical race theorist Derrick Bell’s (1980) interest convergence principle as a conceptual framework to critically examine and better understand the integration of
MLB. The second focus is to begin to build a foundation for a new, more critical paradigm to examine the integration of MLB. In the sections to follow, we attempt to do a few things. First, we
provide a brief overview of critical race theory (CRT) and more specifically elaborate on the interest convergence principle as a central tenet of CRT. Second, we discuss applications of the
interest convergence principle in American sport and society. Third, we quickly highlight the history of the NLs, their players, their financial viability, and the social impact they had on the Black
community. Fourth, we interrogate the process of integration and discuss its subsequent aftermath. Finally, we conclude with a concise summary of the interest convergence principle’s influence
on the integration of MLB and the impact it had on the NLs, and we offer suggestions for future research directions. CRT is a form of scholarship that is rooted in the mission and struggles of the
civil rights movement (Taylor, 1998). It originated in the 1970s from the work of legal scholars (particularly Derrick Bell) who were disenchanted with the stalled progress of traditional civil
rights litigation to produce meaningful racial reform (Taylor, 1998). CRT is not an abstract set of ideas or rules (Taylor, 1998), and there are some defining principles that most scholars embrace.
The first is that racism is a normal fixture and occurrence in American society that is reproduced through routine and extraordinary, traditions, and experiences that critically affect the quality of
life and opportunities of racial groups (Brown, 2003). The embedded nature and permanence of racism are reflected in America’s many social systems and institutions, including sport. Second,
“Whiteness” has been deemed a property interest (Harris, 1993) or valuable commodity resulting from the historical social construction of race and the role the legal system played in reifying
conceptions of race (see Haney-Lopez, 1996). In this regard, being White has major privileges because Whiteness is the optimal status criterion or standard on which all other racial groups are
judged and evaluated in American society. Third, CRT offers a critique of liberalism by exposing the limitations of civil rights law. Scholars have suggested that laws designed to address racial
inequality are often undermined before they can be fully implemented (Crenshaw, 1988). As it relates to African Americans and sport, Davis (1999) asserted, “Because of the subtle nature of
aversive racism, traditional antidiscrimination laws are of dubious value in ameliorating its adverse impact on African Americans in sports” (p. 2). Fourth, CRT rejects the notion that racism is
outdated and argues against ideas such as objectivity, color blindness, and meritocracy, which have been advanced by many people in society (including Whites and racially underrepresented
groups). Instead, scholars argue that this is a camouflage for the power, privileges, and advantages Whites have gained throughout American history (Tate, 1997). Fifth, counter-storytelling is an
important tenet of CRT because it can be used (particularly by subordinated groups) to combat the pervasiveness of the privileged discourses of the majority (DeCuir & Dixson, 2004). The
narratives and stories of subordinated groups, and others who work on their behalf, have potential to counter the “taken-for-granted” assumptions of the status quo and cast doubt on the master
narratives widely espoused in society and sport. Sixth, and most relevant to our purpose in this article, the interest convergence principle—which posits that Whites will tolerate or support the
advancement of the racially underrepresented particularly when it promotes their own self-interest—is an integral part of CRT and the arguments made above. This tenet of CRT focuses on how
racial equality and equity will be promoted and pursued when they converge with the interests, needs, expectations, and ideologies of Whites (Milner, 2008). According to Milner (2008),
“Inherent in the tensions of convergence between whites and others are matters of self and systematic interests and a loss-gain binary” (p. 333). In terms of self-interests and systematic interests,
Whites) might sometimes support policies and practices that do not
oppress and discriminate, as long as they (i.e., White power brokers) do not have to alter or adjust
“their own ways and systems, statuses, and privileges of experiencing life” (p. 334). Related to this point,
it can be argued that people in power (typically
the loss-gain binary suggests that Whites desire to negotiate and make difficult decisions in providing more equitable policies and practices
might mean that they lose something of great importance to them, including their power, privilege, esteem, social status, linguistic status and their ability to reproduce these benefits and interests
to their children and future generations. (p. 334) This could be problematic for some Whites, because the idea of Whites losing something and people of color gaining something could cause the
property value of Whiteness to depreciate (Milner, 2008). In the next section, we provide a bit more insight into the history and origins of the interest convergence principle and specifically
discuss how it has been used to critically analyze issues within the context of American sport. Bell’s (1980) interest convergence principle was created in response to esteemed lawyer and law
professor Herbert Weschler’s “harsh and nagging criticism of the decision” (p. 519) rendered in the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the
groundbreaking ruling that officially desegregated public schools in America. Weschler was mainly concerned with the principles involved in making a decision such as the one rendered in
Brown and believed that the principle of interest in the case was not discrimination but the right to associate with whomever one pleases (Bell, 1980). Bell quoted Weschler as saying, “If the
freedom of association is denied by segregation, integration forces an association upon those for whom it is unpleasant or repugnant” (p. 521). On the other hand, Bell believed that the decision
in Brown to break with the court’s long-held position on these issues [segregation] cannot be understood without some consideration of the decision’s value to whites, not simply those concerned
about the immortality of racial inequality, but also those whites in policymaking positions able to see the economic and political advances at home and abroad that would follow abandonment of
segregation. (p. 524) This quotation embraces the essence of the principle of interest convergence. Since the interest convergence principle’s initial application by Bell (1980), it has most often
been used in reference to the holding rendered in Brown and/or what factors compelled that decision (Balkin, 2004; Dudziak, 2004; Forman, 2007; Gaines, 2004; Gerken, 2007; Lobel, 2007;
Powers, 2007; Rogers & Oakes, 2005). Bell’s interest convergence principle has also been used to examine and explain phenomena in fields outside of law, such as economics (Rubin, 1996),
education (Ladsen-Billings & Tate, 1995; Perea, 2004; Shiu, 2006; Snipes & Waters, 2005; Taylor, 1999), and women’s studies (Crenshaw, 1995; Wing, 1996). In some cases, it has even been
used to examine phenomena beyond the dichotomy of Black versus White (Castagno & Lee, 2007; Delgado, 2006; Shiu, 2006), as it was in Bell’s original context
. Bell’s
piece
has also been used to specifically look at issues of class and race pertaining to the earned
income tax credit component of U.S. tax policy (see Brown, 2007). Recently, it has also been
applied to the context of sport in American society (Castagno & Lee, 2007; Donnor, 2005).
Castagno and Lee (2007) used the interest convergence principle in a qualitative study
concerning the use of American Indian mascots as representatives for collegiate sports teams.
They applied it to a university’s policy that discourages, but does not prohibit, opposing
teams from bringing their American Indian mascots to the university for competition.
Furthermore, the university will not schedule a competition against an opponent with an American Indian mascot,
unless said team is a “traditional rival or a conference member” (p. 6). Castagno and Lee believed that the interest
convergence principle is demonstrated in the “traditional rival/conference member” component of the policy, insofar
as the institution clearly recognizes and honors the interests of the Native community on campus by refusing to
schedule games with some teams who have Native mascots, but the institution is even more protective of its own
interests by still scheduling games with teams with whom they have long standing commitments. (p. 7) Bell’s (1980)
principle is appropriately applied here because the university’s administration is acknowledging the
problematic nature of schools’ using American Indian mascots, thus eliminating future
interactions with said schools. Yet it refuses to eradicate all connections with schools that
use American Indian mascots, because it stands to incur great losses by severing ties with these “long
standing commitments” (p. 7). In other words, the university would lose some of its most long-standing rivalries, which translates to potential lost
revenue and lost fan and alumni support; therefore, the university will not altruistically ban competition with teams using American Indian
mascots, because it stands to lose too much for its so-called altruism. Donnor (2005) used the principle of interest convergence “as an analytical
lens for understanding the complex role of race in the educational experiences of African-American football student athletes” (p. 45). Donnor
noted, “For the majority of Black males who participate in major football programs either earning a college degree or developing a strong
academic skill-set in technology, literacy, science, numeracy, history and the humanities is unlikely” (p. 60). Therefore, Bell’s (1980) principle is
applicable here because, although
universities and their athletic departments reap the lucrative
benefits of Black players’ labor on the field, many of the athletes themselves leave the
universities without a true education and no careers in professional sports. Hence, although
integration provided these young Black student-athletes with more opportunities to attend
college, the majority of the benefit is realized by the universities and their athletic
departments (overwhelmingly operated by elite Whites; Lapchick, 2008), while Black studentathletes generate the
majority of the monetary and intangible rewards (e.g., prestige, notoriety, media coverage) for the colleges or universities as a result of their athletic prowess (for
empirical support, see Singer, 2009). The interest convergence principle has been applied to American college sport and also provides a useful lens to critically
analyze professional sport, more specifically the integration of MLB. In the sections to follow, we attempt to address this. However, before MLB’s integration can be
properly scrutinized, we need to provide a brief historical, social, and economic review of the NLs. Because the face of MLB’s integration (Jackie Roosevelt
Robinson) was a former NL sensation, it is both relevant and necessary to inspect the stand-alone entity that was the NLs and the role it played in the Black
community.
Small Farms Link
An advocacy for 'small farms' naturalizes Whiteness by valorizing a group of largely white farmers and
whitewashes immigrant and minority exploitation.
Allen, 2010
(Patricia Allen. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 2010
<https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~wright/Sociology%20929-assignments-2010_files/realizingjustice.pdf>
Accessed: 2/21/15 RJS)
Yet a prevalent viewpoint within local food movements is that a sustainable and equitable agrifood economy can and should be
based upon a family-farm agrarian structure (Allen and Hinrichs, 2007; Guthman et al., 2006). Nearly all local food
campaigns and many of those involved in direct marketing prioritize supporting farmers, although to
date there has been little discussion of other food-system workers. This is in keeping with American
agrarianism, which upholds a belief in the moral and economic primacy of farming over other
occupations and ways of producing (Fink, 1992). The greater emphasis on farmers than on food-system
workers in the local food movement inadvertently gives less attention to ethnic minorities simply
because few farms are owned by nonwhites. Taken together, Latinos and AfricanAmericans own only 3% of farms in
the USA and only 1.5% of farmland (US Department of Agriculture, 2009). In contrast, most hired farm labourers, not
currently prioritized in most food-system localization efforts, are ethnic minorities. Workers and owners
in the food system have interests that are not necessarily consonant. In the local food movement there is a
sense that, because people live together in a locality and encounter each other, they will make better, more equitable decisions
that prioritize the common good. While this is a beautiful vision, localities contain within them wide demographic
ranges and social relationships of power and privilege embedded within the place itself. At both global
and local scales, those who benefit—and those who do not—are arranged along already familiar lines of class, ethnicity and
gender. Given the disparate material and cultural conditions within localities, local food actors must be wary of the
assumption that people within a community will necessarily have the same understandings or interests
by dint of the fact that they share the same geographic place or are involved in the food system (Allen,
2004). Working toward social equity in local food systems requires questioning an assumption of shared interests among all
members of the community when there are often substantially different material interests and power allocations. In some
cases, highlighting social justice issues can alienate others in the food system working on different priorities. For example, local
food policy councils are illustrative of deliberate efforts to practice food democracy at a local level. However, these efforts have
had challenges in addressing the diverse interests of their members, at times due to social justice issues. In an early study of
local food policy councils, for instance, Dahlberg (1994) found that the formation of food policy councils failed where there was
more emphasis on hunger than on other food system issues. We can learn from the efforts in Toronto, Canada, where strong
leadership and commitment to justice have led to the creation of a food policy for the city that prioritizes food justice,
establishing the right of all residents to adequate, nutritious food and promoting food production and distribution systems that
are grounded in equity (Toronto Food Policy, 2010). Toronto is also an example of a community in which people from many
regions and cultures share a particular place and are developing socially inclusive ‘creative food economies’ (Donald and BlayPalmer, 2006). Anderson (2008) differentiates local- and community-based food systems. For her, community-based refers to
residents having control over and making decisions about their food system, while local means physical geographic dimensions.
Hegemony/Modeling Link
Defenses of hegemony is just rhetoric that rely upon a flawed Eurocentric misconception of reality
Kaplan, 03 (Amy, President of American Studies Association @ Pennsylvania University, Violent Belongings and the Question of
Empire Today Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, muse)
This is also a narrative about race. The images of an unruly world, of anarchy and chaos, of failed
modernity, recycle stereotypes of racial inferiority from earlier colonial discourses about races who are
incapable of governing themselves, Kipling’s “lesser breeds without the law,” or Roosevelt’s
“loosening ties of civilized society,” in his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. In his much-noted
article in the New York Times Magazine entitled “The American Empire,” Michael Ignatieff
appended the subtitle “The Burden” but insisted that “America’s empire is not like empires of
times past, built on colonies, conquest and the white man’s burden.”12 Denial and exceptionalism
are apparently alive and well. In American studies we need to go beyond simply exposing the
racism of empire and examine the dynamics by which Arabs and the religion of Islam are
becoming racialized through the interplay of templates of U.S. racial codes and colonial
Orientalism. These narratives of the origins of the current empire—that is, the neoconservative and
the liberal interventionist—have much in common. They take American exceptionalism to new heights:
its paradoxical claim to uniqueness and universality at the same time. They share a teleological narrative of
inevitability, that America is the apotheosis of history, the embodiment of universal values of human
rights, liberalism, and democracy, the “indispensable nation,” in Madeleine Albright’s words. In
this logic, the United States claims the authority to “make sovereign judgments on what is right
and what is wrong” for everyone else and “to exempt itself with an absolutely clear conscience
from all the rules that it proclaims and applies to others.”13 Absolutely protective of its own
sovereignty, it upholds a doctrine of limited sovereignty for others and thus deems the entire
world a potential site of intervention. Universalism thus can be made manifest only through the threat
and use of violence. If in these narratives imperial power is deemed the solution to a broken world, then
they preempt any counternarratives that claim U.S. imperial actions, past and present, may have
something to do with the world’s problems. According to this logic, resistance to empire can never
be opposition to the imposition of foreign rule; rather, resistance means irrational opposition to modernity
and universal human values.
Hegemony/ Modeling Link
US hegemony is just the racial violence of America gone global –aff claims to benevolence are symptoms
of white privilege
Rodriguez ‘07 [Dylan, PhD in Ethnic Studies Program of the University of California Berkeley and Associate Proffessor of Ethnic
Studies at University of California Riverside, “American Globality And the US Prison regime: State Violence And White Supremacy from Abu
Ghraib to Stockton to bagong diwa”, Ateneo de Manila University, 2007, Kritika Kultura 9 (2007): 022-048]
In fact, the
notion of American globality I have begun discussing here already exceeds negri and Hardt’s formulation to the extent that it
is a global racial formation, and more pointedly a global mobilization of a white supremacist social formation (read: a
united States of America formed by the social-economic geographies of racial chattel slavery and their recodification through the post-13th Amendment innovation of
other technologies of criminalization and imprisonment). The US prison regime’s production
of human immobilization and death composes
some of the fundamental modalities of American national coherence. It inscribes two forms of domination that tend to slip from
the attention of political theorists, including Negri and Hardt: first, the prison regime strategically institutionalizes the biopolitical
structures of white racial/nationalist ascendancy—it quite concretely provides a definition for white American
personhood, citizenship, freedom, and racialized patriotism. Second, the prison regime reflects the moral, spiritual, and
cultural inscription of Manifest Destiny (and its descendant material cultural and state-building articulations of racist
and white supremacist conquest, genocide, and population control) across different historical moments. to invoke and
critically rearticulate negri and Hardt’s formulation, the focal question becomes: How does the right of the US-as-global police to kill,
detain, obliterate become voiced, juridically coded, and culturally recoded? the structure of presumption—and
therefore relative political silence—enmeshing the prison’s centrality to the logic of American globality is precisely
evidence of the fundamental power of the uS prison regime within the larger schema of American hegemony . In this
sense the uS prison regime is ultimately really not an “institution.” rather it is a formulation of world order (hence, a dynamic and perpetual labor of
institutionalization rather than a definitive modernist institution) in which massively scaled, endlessly strategized technologies of human immobilization address
(while never fully resolving) the socio-political crises of globalization. The US prison regime defines a global logic of social organization that constitutes, mobilizes,
and prototypes across various localities. What would it mean, then, to consider state-crafted, white supremacist modalities of imprisonment as the perpetual end rather
than the self-contained means of American globality? I am suggesting a conception of the prison regime that focuses on what cultural and political theorist Allen
Feldman calls a “formation of violence,” which anchors the contemporary articulation of white supremacy as a global technology of coercion and hegemony. Feldman
writes, the growing autonomy of violence as a self-legitimating sphere of social discourse and transaction points to the inability of any sphere of social practice to
totalize society. Violence
itself both reflects and accelerates the experience of society as an incomplete project, as
something to be made. As a formation of violence that self-perpetuates a peculiar social project through the
discursive structures of warfare, the US prison regime composes an acute formation of racial and white supremacist
violence, and thus houses the capacity for mobilization of an epochal (and peculiar) white supremacist global logic. This contention should not be confused with
the sometimes parochial (if not politically chauvinistic) proposition that American state and state-sanctioned regimes of bodily violence and human immobilization are
somehow self-contained “domestic” productions that are exceptional to the united States of America, and that other “global” sites simply “import,” imitate, or reenact
US prison regime exceeds as it enmeshes the ensemble of
social relations that cohere uS civil society, and is fundamental to the geographic transformations, institutional
vicissitudes, and militarized/economic mobilizations of “globalization” generally. to assert this, however, is to also argue that the
these institutionalizations of power. In fact, I am suggesting the opposite: the
constituting violence of the US prison regime has remained somewhat undertheorized and objectified in the overlapping realms of public discourse, activist
mobilization, and (grassroots as well as professional) scholarly praxis.
Here I am arguing that it
is not possible to conceptualize and critically address the emergence and global proliferation of
the (uS/global) prison industrial complex outside a fundamental understanding of what are literally its technical and
technological premises: namely, its complex organization and creative production of racist and white supremacist
bodily violence. It is only in this context, I would say, that we can examine the problem of how “the Prison” is a modality (and not just a
reified product or outcome) of American statecraft in the current political moment. It is only a theoretical foregrounding of the white supremacist
state and social formation of the united States that will allow us to understand the uS prison regime as an American globality that materializes as
it prototypes state violence and for that matter, “state power” itself through a specific institutional site.
Public Reclamation Link
Public reclamation is based on a politics of recognition that re-affirms the unequal power relationship
between the colonizer and the colonizer, the master and the slave.
McCreary 15
Tyler McCreary,Department of Geography @University of British Columbia.” Review of Red Skin, White
Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition” February 2015 Antipode: A Radical Journal of
Geography < https://radicalantipode.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/book-review_mccreary-oncoulthard.pdf>
Coulthard dedicates the majority of Red Skin, White Masks to an analysis of the subjective dynamics
of Indigenous peoples’ relationship to settler colonialism. He makes the case that Indigenous efforts
to gain recognition within the existing order necessarily fail to achieve meaningful justice because
they remain premised on the preservation of the settler colonial political economy. Coulthard’s intervention
thus complements recent critiques of settler state recognition as serving to perpetuate the colonial order, such as Elizabeth Povinelli’s (2002)
The Cunning of Recognition and Damien Short’s (2008) Reconciliation and Colonial Power. Povinelli has interrogated how the incarceration of
Indigeneity in an impossible ideal of authentic traditions within settler discourse works to “defuse struggles for liberation waged against the
modern liberal state and recuperate these struggles as moments in which the future of the nation and its core institutions and values are
ensured rather than shaken” (2002: 29). Similarly, Short argues that reconciliation processes in Australia have “exhibited a subtle yet pervasive
nation building agenda that appeared to offer ‘post-colonial’ legitimacy via the ‘inclusion’ of previously excluded Aboriginal peoples, but which
actually served to weaken Aboriginal claims” (2008: 7). Coulthard contributes to and extends the critique of state recognition, emphasizing the
necessity of confrontation. Where Povinelli lauds Indigenous peoples’ strategic negotiations of the slippages and fractures within colonial
discourse, and Short argues for the constitution of a multinational liberalism in which settler society enters a treaty confederacy with
Indigenous peoples, Coulthard argues that the foundation of settler society in the dispossession of Indigenous peoples necessitates direct
confrontation to enable Indigenous peoples to subjectively decolonize. 5 Developing
the argument that recognition of
colonized peoples cannot be granted but must be won through struggle, Coulthard turns to Franz
Fanon. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon (2008) rebuts the Hegelian conceptualization of mutual
recognition, dismantling the myth of reciprocity between Master and Slave. For Hegel, these subjects’
dialectical juxtaposition enables each to obtain consciousness of the self against the foil of the other,
meaning that there is a mutual interdependence between Master and Slave. However, for Fanon,
Hegelian frames do not hold in the colonial context, where there can be no true reciprocity between
Master and Slave–colonizer and colonized–because the former always sets the terms of the latter’s
recognition. Any offer of mutual recognition in the colonial context is thus “profoundly asymmetrical
and nonreciprocal” (p.25), and continually distorts the meaning of colonized subjectivity. Fanon
argues that colonized subjects can only achieve self-definition by struggling against (and ultimately
overthrowing) colonial regimes. In Coulthard’s reading, Fanon is a prophylactic against the offers of
state recognition for Indigenous peoples. He applies Fanon’s analysis to interrogate the colonial
function of the contemporary politics of recognition, finding that colonial power works to define the
horizon of recognition. For example, in a chapter on Dene land claims in the Arctic, Coulthard demonstrates how negotiations with the
Canadian government transformed traditional reciprocal Dene relationships with the land into rights to participate in the exploitation of the
land as a resource. When Indigenous peoples quest for forms of justice sanctioned by colonial authorities, they subjugate themselves to
circumscribed categories of colonial reason. The effect is insidious, as colonized peoples learn to internalize colonial frames. Once such frames
become normalized, the original brutality of primitive accumulation morphs into a regime of subjectification that imparts a 6 seeming
consensuality to the reproduction of colonial hierarchies.
To breach the subjective effects of settler colonialism,
colonized peoples must eschew the politics of mutual recognition and instead develop knowledge of
self through struggle.**[to physically destroy the regime—see earlier in card] Thus, Coulthard eschews
negotiation with the settler state and calls instead for confronting colonial authorities through an
Indigenous political resurgence in which increased militancy plays a central role.
Public Reclamation Link
Public reclamation in the academy only makes disenfranchised communities more disempowered.
Tuck and Yang 14 (Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang , 2014, R-Words: Refusing
Research¶ , Ch12)/JA
educational research and much of social science research
has been concerned with documenting damage, or empirically substantiating the oppression
and pain of Native communities,¶ urban communities, and other disenfranchised communities.
Damage-centered researchers may operate, even benevolently, within a theory of change in
which harm must be recorded or proven in order to convince an outside adjudicator that
reparations are deserved. These reparations presumably take the form of addi- tional resources,
settlements, affirmative actions, and other material, political, and sovereign adjustments. Eve has described
this theory of change1 as both colonial and flawed, because it relies upon Western notions
Elsewhere, Eve (Tuck, 2009, 2010) has argued that
it requires disenfranchised
communities to posi- tion themselves as both singularly defective
and powerless to make change (2010). Finally, Eve has observed that “won” reparations rarely
of power as scarce and concentrated, and because
communities are left with a narrative that tells them that
they are broken.¶ Similarly, at the center of the analysis in this chapter is a concern with the
fixation social science research has exhibited in eliciting pain stories from com- munities
that are not White, not wealthy, and not straight. Academe’s demon- strated fascination with telling
become reality, and that in many cases,
and retelling narratives of pain is troubling, both for its voyeurism and for its consumptive implacability. Imagining
“itself to be a voice, and in some disciplinary iterations, the voice of the colonised” (Simpson, 2007, p. 67,
We observe
that much of the work of the academy is to reproduce stories of oppression in its own voice.
emphasis in the original) is not just a rare historical occurrence in anthropology and related fields.
At first, this may read as an intolerant condemnation of the academy, one that refuses to forgive past blunders and
see how things have changed in recent decades. However, it is our view that while many individual scholars have
cho- sen to pursue other lines of inquiry than the pain narratives typical of their disciplines, novice researchers
emerge from doctoral programs eager to launch pain-based inquiry projects because they believe that such
The collection of pain narratives and the
theories of change that champion the value of such narratives are so prevalent in the social
sciences that one might surmise that they are indeed what the academy is about .¶ In her
approaches embody what it means to do social science.
bell hooks (1990) portrays the core
message from the academy to those on the margins as thus:¶ No
need to hear your voice when I can talk about you better than you
can speak about yourself. No need to hear your voice. Only tell me
about your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it
back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it
has become mine, my own. Re-writing you I write myself anew. I am
still author, authority. I am still colonizer the speaking subject and
you are now at the center of my talk. (p. 343)¶ Hooks’s words resonate with our
examination of the symbolic violence of the academy,
observation of how much of social science research is concerned with providing recognition to the presumed
voiceless, a recognition that is enamored with knowing through pain. Further, this passage describes the ways in
which the researcher’s voice is constituted by, legitimated¶ by, animated by the voices on the margins.
The
researcher-self is made anew by telling back the story of the marginalized/subaltern
subject. Hooks works to untangle the almost imperceptible differences between forces that silence and forces
that seemingly liberate by inviting those on the margins to speak, to tell their stories. Yet the forces that invite
“Do not speak in a voice of resistance. Only
speak from that space in the margin that is a sign of deprivation, a
wound, an unfulfilled longing. Only speak your pain” (hooks, 1990, p. 343).¶
those on the margins to speak also say,
The costs of a politics of recognition that is rooted in naming pain have been critiqued by recent decolonizing and
feminist scholars (Hartman, 1997, 2007; Tuck, 2009). In Scenes of Subjection, Sadiya Hartman (1997)
recognizing the personhood of slaves enhanced the
power of the Southern slave- owning class. Supplicating narratives
of former slaves were deployed effectively by abolitionists, mainly
White, well-to-do, Northern women, to generate portraits of abuse
that ergo recognize slaves as human (Hartman, 2007). In response,
new laws afforded minimal standards of existence, “making
personhood coterminous with injury” (Hartman, 1997, p. 93), while
simultaneously authorizing necessary violence to suppress slave agency. The
discusses how
slave emerges as a legal person only when seen as criminal or “a violated body in need of
limited forms of protection” (p. 55). Recognition “humanizes” the slave, but is predicated
upon her or his abjection. You are in pain, therefore you are. “[T]he recognition of humanity
require[s] the event of excessive violence, cruelty beyond the limits of the socially tolerable,
in order to acknowledge and protect the slave’s person” (p. 55). Furthermore, Hartman
describes how slave-as-victim as human accordingly establishes slave-as-agent as criminal.
we note how the agency of Margaret Garner or
Nat Turner can only be viewed as outsider violence that humane
society must reject while simultaneously upholding the legitimated
violence of the state to punish such outsider violence. Hartman asks, “Is
Applying Hartman’s analysis,
it possible that such recognition effectively forecloses agency as the object of punishment . .
. Or is this limited conferral of humanity merely a reinscription of subjugation and pained
existence?” (p. 55).¶ As numerous scholars have denoted, many social science disciplines
emerged from the need to provide justifications for social hierarchies undergirded by White
supremacy and manifest destiny (see also Gould, 1981; Selden, 1999; Tuck & Guishard,
forthcoming). Wolfe (1999) has explored how the contoured logic of settler colonialism (p.
5) can be mapped onto the microactivities of anthropology; Guthrie (1976) traces the roots
of psychology to the need to “sci- entifically” prove the supremacy of the White mind. The
origins of many social science disciplines in maintaining logics of domination, while
sometimes addressed in graduate schools, are regularly thought to be just errant or
inauspi- cious beginnings—much like the ways in which the genocide of Indigenous peoples
that afforded the founding of the Unites States has been reduced to an unfortunate
byproduct of the birthing of a new and great nation. Such amnesia is required in settler
settler colonialism is
“characterized by a persistent drive to supersede the conditions of
its operation,” (2011, p. 3); that is, to make itself invisible, natural, without ori- gin (and without end),
colonial societies, argues Lorenzo Veracini, because
and inevitable. Social science disciplines have inherited the persistent drive to supersede the conditions of their
operations from settler colonial logic, and it is this drive, a kind of unquestioning push forward, and not the origins
of the disciplines that we attend to now.¶ We are struck by the pervasive silence on questions regarding the
contempo- rary rationale(s) for social science research. Though a variety of ethical and procedural protocols
require researchers to compose statements regarding the objectives or purposes of a particular project, such
protocols do not prompt reflection upon the underlying beliefs about knowledge and change that too often go
The rationale for conducting social science research that
collects pain narratives seems to be self-evident for many scholars, but when looked at
more closely, the rationales may be unconsidered, and some- what flimsy.
unexplored or unacknowledged.
Like a maritime archaeological site, such rationales might be best examined in situ, for fear
Why do researchers collect pain narratives?
Why does the academy want them?¶ An initial and partial answer is
because settler colonial ideology believes that, in fiction author Sherril
Jaffe’s words, “scars make your body more interesting,” (1996, p. 58). Jaffe’s
of deterioration if extracted.
work of short, short of fiction bearing that sentiment as title captures the exquisite crossing
Settler colonial ideology, constituted by
its conscription of others, holds the wounded body as more
engrossing than the body that is not wounded (though the person with a
of wounds and curiosity and pleasure.
wounded body does not politically or materially benefit for being more engrossing). In
settler colonial logic, pain is more compelling than privilege, scars more enthralling than the
settler colonial ideology, pain is
evidence of authenticity, of the verifiability of a lived life.
Academe, formed and informed by settler colonial ideology, has
developed the same palate for pain. Emerging and established social science
body unmarked by experience. In
researchers set out to document the problems faced by communities, and often in doing so,
recircu- late common tropes of dysfunction, abuse, and neglect.
Space Link
The STEM fields and NASA are steeped in anti-black racism. Specifically, black women are marginalized
by a decades of marginalization of black culture and women.
Obiomon et.al 7
Obiomon et. al 2007 [Pamela Holland Obiomon, Ph.D., Prairie View A&M University, Virginia Cook
Tickles, Ph.D., Aerospace Engineer, NASA, Adrienne Holland Wowo, M.S., Manager, UPS, Shirley HollandHunt, M.B.A., Manager, NASA]”Advancement of Women of Color in Science, Technology, Engineering,
and Math (STEM) Disciplines” Faculty Resource Network .November 16-17, 2007 Johnson C. Smith
University.https://www.nyu.edu/frn/publications/advancing.women/Adv.%20Women%20in%20Stem%
20Tickles.html [E.Smith]
To promote career advancement of women scientists and engineers at all levels, the task of identifying
and eliminating institutional/organizational barriers, biases, and structures that impede women is
critical. Stereotyping is a barrier that is present in every environment. A stereotype is a belief that all
members of a specific group share certain traits or characteristics. Stereotypes are learned from
parents, culture, media portrayals etc. The effect of stereotyping is prejudice and the behavior is
discriminatory. Studies have indicated that everyone holds stereotypes (Fazio, Jackson, Dunton &
Williams,1995), (Diehl & Jonas, 1991). Internal stereotyping may not be harmful, but becomes a problem
when used to prejudge people’s competence and ability and result in the development of unfair and
incorrect expectations. African Americans are generally stereotyped as superstitious, lazy,
happy go-lucky, ostentatious, active in sports, entertainers and poor performers in
academics. The moment African Americans enter a predominately white organization, there
is a pressure to disprove preconceived stereotyping. Many African Americans feel like they
have to say the right thing, not say too much, or agree just to fit in. In many cases, the
African American attempts to disprove stereotypes until their technical value can be
exemplified to the organization and/or when the organization recognizes their value.
African Americans in STEM are concerned about about how others perceive them. The
ability to perform well in an environment where one must be creative, declines as a result
of the pressure formed from the anxiety of disproving stereotypes (Steele &Aronson, 1995). In
many cases, after a protracted period of high performance, the stereotype is finally eradicated. Treating people in accordance to a negative stereotype
can bring out stereotype confirming behavior (Word, Zanna & Cooper, 1974). After being exposed to repeated negative images of their ability, the group
internalizes performance anxiety. Stereotypes based on ethnicity have been shown to bias evaluations (Bodenhausen & Wyer, 1985). It has also been
shown that after negative feedback, individuals internalized a reduced sense of self-esteem (Fein & Spencer, 1997). Increased pressure to perform can
result in choking under pressure (Steele & Aronson 1995). Consequently, disparities in salaries related to poor performance can be justified. Individuals
oftentimes become disillusioned and leave the organization. Acceptance into organizational networks is important to long-term advancement. Being part
of a network increases information and knowledge, resulting in an increase in the chances of advancement in the STEM disciplines. African American
women are often excluded from networks and isolated in the work environment. White women may be more socially and culturally accepted in a white
male dominated organization than women of color. One reason for this lack of acceptance is racial visibility. Women of color stand out overtly because of
hair, skin, and body shape. Research by the Monthly Labor Review indicated that even though the African American woman had the same educational
Stereotyping affects
the psychic energy of the African American. When individuals are isolated by people who do
not want to work with them, a large amount of time is spent legitimizing one’s place in the
organization. One feeling that many African American women have is that they have to out
perform and out strategize their white male and white female colleagues to succeed. They
are constantly under pressure to be superstars, contending with stereotypes that consider them
inferior and incompetent. As a result of stereotyping they often feel that their work is unfairly
scrutinized and that they are not adequately challenged (Tickles, 2006). Bicultural stress is another
barrier that impedes the performance of African American women in STEM environments. There is
background and, in fact, additional work experiences, they did not receive the same benefits from these investments.
little tolerance of appreciation for cultural diversity in terms of behavioral styles, dress, or rich
aesthetics representing multiculturalism. Women of color have to wear two hats: one at home and one
at work. For women of color their work lives are embedded in white male dominated
organizations, where the norms, cultures, and values are based on the Anglo-Saxon
tradition and the Protestant work ethic of western society (Barriers, 2005). African
Americans have to manage two cultural contexts: one European American and the other
African American. Gender seems to be an easier barrier to negotiate than race. However, race and
gender have a negative impact on the work experiences and career advancement of African American
women (Coombs 2003, Bell & Nkomo, 2001). African Americans feel like they are outsiders. Cultural
differences at social gatherings make individuals feel out of place. They are often isolated in the work
environment. Without mentors they must learn to succeed from the main stream of organizational life.
There is a limited supply of these mentors because in the past educators have failed to nurture and
mentor young black women (Jordan, 2006). In this regard, African American women are doubly
disadvantaged. Tokenism represents another impediment for African American women in STEM
occupations. A token is a member of a group that is included in a larger group through policy or
practice to desegregate. Tokenism begins when a lone African American becomes part of an
organization or is placed in an area where they are underrepresented or only one of a kind. Research
by Karter, 1997 on stressful environmental factors reveal that under-representation leads to high
visibility and sets into place a variety of negative perceptions of persons labeled as tokens. When
African Americans are perceived as tokens by majority group employees their behavior and
job performance, whether good or bad, are magnified, distorted and overly scrutinized. In
many cases increased pressure to perform leads to choking under pressure (Steele and
Aronson, 1995). Performance decreases (Saenz, 1994) because token members get the attention, not
their work. Repeated poor performance leads to devaluing of ability. To overcome their perceived
incompetence, they experience increased pressure to perform, yet high level performance may not
necessarily lead to comparable rewards and the same level of recognition given to whites. African
American women are very conscious of their double minority standard. According to the Glass Ceiling
Commission, the psychological effects of being treated as a token take a heavy toll on the emotional
and psychic energy of African Americans. They find themselves isolated with colleagues who do not
want to work with them and have few outlets to express their frustrations and disappointments. Long
and Scott describe a triple penalty for women scientists (a) barriers in STEM field, (b)
perceived discrimination (limited aspirations), and (c) discrimination in opportunities and
rewards. Makobella and Green speak of a tri-consciousness of lived experiences (a) as an
African American woman, (b) as a women in a male dominated field, and (c) the inequities
in the African American community.Barriers for women, particularly African American
women in STEM fields, are real. Although these limitations exist, there are also solutions that may
diminish the effect these barriers have on the career advancement of African American women in
STEM occupations. These solutions are not a “one size fit all”, as STEM work cultures are unique and
dependent upon several factors. Alternatively, these solutions provide ideas on how to penetrate these
barriers and should be uniquely tailored to cultivate a paradigm that empowers the African American
woman to improve opportunities for advancement in the STEM workplace.
Terrorism Link
Representations of savage terrorists cannot be separated by historical racism—
critiquing faulty assumptions is key to eliminate racist mythologies.
Sharp, ‘7 [2007, Patrick B. Sharp, Chair, Department of Liberal Studies California State University, Los
Angeles, Ph. D. in English University of California, Santa Barbara, M.A. in English University of California,
Santa Barbara, B.A. in English (High Honors) University of California, Santa Barbara, American
Association of Colleges and Universities Institute on High-Impact Practices and Student Success,
University of Vermont, University of Oklahoma Press : Norman, “Savage Perils: Racial Frontiers and
Nuclear Apocalypse in American Culture” pdf]
This history provides the necessary context for understanding President Bush’s rhetoric about the “war on
terror.” Bush did not create the image of the terrorist: in the 1970s, the concept of the terrorist emerged as the modern
manifestation of the savage in American political rhetoric. Like savages, terrorists were described as cruel,
irrational, darkskinned primitives bent on destroying the “civilized world.” Since the Iran hostage crisis of
1979–1980, the U.S. government has used a parade of nonwhite terrorists and dictators to whip up support for its
policies. It has used the images of Ayatollah Khomeini, Muammar Khadafi, Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, and Kim Jong Il to
reinforce the sense that white American civilization is under siege by nonwhite savages. As President Bush’s
repeated comments underscore, the threat that terrorists will get control of high technology remains the biggest fear
in the “war on terror.” According to the U.S. government, only increased military expenditures and continuous warfare can contain
the terrorist threat to American civilization. President Bush’s “war on terror” is only the latest installment in an ongoing
fictional saga that has been at the heart of American identity since the beginning of the republic.
Understanding this saga is essential if we want to eliminate such racist mythologies from American life.
Terrorism Link
American policies are one of the largest causes of terrorism
Marable, ’01 [November 20th, Manning- Prof of History and Political Science @ Columbia U Director
of the Institute for Research in African American Studies; Z SPACE; online publication, November 20;
www.zcommunications.org/the-failure-of-u-s-foreign-policies-by-manning-marable.pdf]
The bombing campaign against the people of Afghanistan will be described in history as the "U.S. against
the Third World." The launching of military strikes against peasants does nothing to suppress terrorism, and
only erodes American credibility in Muslim nations around the world. The question, "Why Do They Hate
Us?," can only be answered from the vantage point of the Third World's widespread poverty, hunger and
economic exploitation. The United States government cannot engage in effective multilateral actions to
suppress terrorism, because its behavior illustrates its complete contempt for international cooperation. The
United States owed $582 million in back dues to the United Nations, and it paid up only when the September 11 attacks jeopardized its
national
security. Republican conservatives demand that the United States should be exempt from the jurisdiction of an International Criminal Court, a permanent tribunal now being established at The Hague, Netherlands. For the 2001 World Conference Against Racism, the U.S. government authorized the allocation of a paltry $250,000,
For three decades, the U.S. refused to ratify the 1965 United Nations Convention on the Elimination of Racism. Is it any wonder that much of the Third World questions our motives? The carpetThe U.S. media and opinion makers repeatedly have gone out of their way to twist facts and to distort the
political realities of the Middle East, by insisting that the Osama bin Laden group's murderous assaults had nothing to do with Israel's policies towards the Palestinians. Nobody else in the world, with the possible exception of the Israelis, really
compared to over $10 million provided to conference organizers by the Ford Foundation.
bombing of the Taliban seems to Third World observers to have less to do with the suppression of terrorism, and more with securing future petroleum production rights in central Asia.
believes that. Even Britain, Bush's staunchest ally, links Israel's intransigence towards negotiations and human rights violations as having contributed to the environment for Arab terrorist retaliation. In late September, during his visit to Jerusalem, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw stated that frustration over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict might create an
Millions of moderate and progressive Muslims who sincerely denounce terrorism are nevertheless
frustrated by the United States's extensive clientage relationship with Israel, financed by more than $3 billion in annual subsidies. They want to know why the U.S. allowed the Israelis to move over 200,000 Jewish settlers—one half of them after the signing of the 1993 peace agreement -- to relocate in
excuse for terrorism. Straw explained: "there is never any excuse for terrorism. At the same time, there is an obvious need to understand the environment in which terrorism breeds."
occupied Palestine. It is no exaggeration in saying that for most of the world's one billion Muslims that Israel is as anathema to them, as the apartheid regime of South Africa was for black people. How does terrorist Osama bin Laden gain loyal followers from northern Nigeria to Indonesia? Perhaps it has something to do with America's massive presence -- in
over thirty thousand U.S. citizens are employed by Saudi corporations, or by joint
Saudi-U.S. corporate partnerships. Just months ago, Exxon Mobil, the world's largest corporation, reached an agreement with the Saudi government to develop gas projects worth between $20 to $26 billion. Can Americans who are not Muslims truly comprehend how morally offensive
fact, its military-industrial occupation -- of Saudi Arabia. The Washington Post recently revealed that in the past two decades, U.S. construction companies and arms suppliers have made over $50 billion in Saudi Arabia. Today,
this overwhelming U.S. occupying presence in their holy land is to them? Even before September 11, the U.S. regularly stationed five to six thousand troops in Saudi Arabia. Today, that number probably exceeds 15,000 American troops. How would the U.S. government react if the P.L.O.'s close ally,
Cuba, offered to send 15,000 troops to support the Palestinian Authority's security force? There is, to repeat, no justification for
terrorism by anyone, anytime. But it is U.S. policies -- such as the blanket support for Israel, and the blockade against Iraq that
has been responsible for the needless deaths of thousands of children -- that help to create the very
conditions for extremist violence to flourish. There is a direct linkage between the terrible events of
September 11 and the politics represented by the United Nations World Conference Against Racism held in
Durban, South Africa, only days prior to the terrorist attacks. The U.S. government in Durban opposed the
definition of slavery as "a crime against humanity." It refused to acknowledge the historic and
contemporary effects of colonialism, racial segregation and apartheid on the underdevelopment and
oppression of the non-European world. It polemically manipulated the charge of anti-Semitism to evade discussions
concerning the right of self-determination for the Palestinian people. world's subaltern masses represented at Durban sought
to advance a new global discussion about the political economy of racism -- and the United States insulted
the entire international community. Should we therefore be surprised that Palestinian children celebrate in the streets of
their occupied territories when they see televised images of our largest buildings being destroyed? Should we be shocked that
hundreds of protest marches in opposition to the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan are being held throughout the world? The majority
of dark humanity is saying to the United States that racism and militarism are not the solutions to the
world's major problems. Transnational capitalism and the repressive neoliberal policies of structural adjustment represent a
dead end for the developing world. We can only end the threat of terrorism by addressing constructively the
routine violence of poverty, hunger and exploitation which characterizes the daily existence of several
billion people on this planet. Racism is, in the final analysis only another form of violence. To stop the
violence of terrorism, we must stop the violence of racism and class inequality. To struggle for peace, to
find new paths toward reconciliation across the boundaries of religion, culture and color, is the only way to
protect our cities, our country and ourselves from the violence of terrorism. Because without justice, there
can be no peace.
Impact Debate
Black Death Impact
Confrontations with the structures of state power result in black death
Richardson 15
L. Song Richardson @ UC Irvine School of Law and Wales “Police Racial Violence: Lessons from Social
Psychology”, 83 Fordham L. Rev. 2961 (2015) [E.Smith]
The recent rash of police killing unarmed black men has brought national attention to the persistent
problem of policing and racial violence. These cases include the well-known and highly controversial
death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri,1 as well as the deaths of twelve-year-old Tamir Rice in
Cleveland, Ohio;2 Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York;3 John Crawford III in Beavercreek, Ohio;4 Ezell
Ford in Los Angeles, California;5 Dante Parker in San Bernardino County, California;6 and Vonderrit D.
Myers Jr. in St. Louis, Missouri.7 Data reported to the FBI indicate that white police officers killed black
citizens almost twice a week between 2005 and 2012.8 This number is underinclusive because the FBI
database is based on self-reports by departments that choose to participate and only includes deaths
that the police conclude are justifiable.9 Many accounts attempt to explain these instances of racial
violence at the hands of the police, ranging from arguments that the police acted justifiably to
arguments likening these killings to Jim Crow lynchings.10 Certainly, it is tempting to blame racial
violence on either the racial animus of officers or the purportedly threatening behaviors of victims
because it simplifies the problem; either the individual officer or citizen is at fault. However, reducing
the problem of racial violence to the individual police-citizen interaction at issue obscures how
current policing practices and culture entrench racial subordination and, thus, racial violence. This is
because as a result of our nation’s sordid racial history, white supremacy and racial subordination
have become embedded not only within social systems and institutions but also within our minds. As a
result, unless corrective structural and institutional interventions are made, racial violence is inevitable regardless of whether officers have
malicious racial motives or citizens engage in objectively threatening behaviors. This Essay proceeds in three parts. Part I discusses how
unconscious racial biases and implicit white favoritism can result in racial disparities in police violence. Part II moves beyond unconscious biases
and focuses instead on how the personal insecurities of police officers in the form of stereotype threat and masculinity threat also can lead to
racial violence. Finally, Part III argues that when considered in combination, these psychological processes powerfully demonstrate why racial
violence is inevitable and overdetermined given current policing practices and culture, even when conscious racial animus is absent. Part III
concludes by discussing the need to implement institutional and structural changes to reduce instances of racial violence. I. IMPLICIT RACIAL
BIAS AND IMPLICIT WHITE FAVORITISM
Both implicit racial bias and implicit white favoritism are
consequential when it comes to racial violence, but in opposite ways. Implicit racial biases typically
refer to unconscious anti-black bias in the form of negative stereotypes (beliefs) and attitudes
(feelings) that are widely held, can conflict with conscious attitudes, and can predict a subset of real
world behaviors. For instance, implicit racial biases can influence whether blackindividuals receive callback interviews11 and lifesaving medical procedures,12 as well as whether individuals exhibit nonverbal discomfort when interacting with non-whites.13 Decades of
research demonstrate that most Americans are unconsciously biased against black individuals.14 Two specific types of implicit racial biases are
consequential when it comes to racial violence. First is the implicit association between blacks and criminality.15 This unconscious association
has led officers to misidentify blacks with more stereotypically black features such as dark skin, full lips, and wide noses as criminal suspects,16
to engage in unconscious racial profiling,17 and to shoot more stereotypical-looking black suspects more quickly than others in computer
simulations.18 More
recently, a second type of unconscious anti-black bias has proven consequential to
racial violence. Implicit dehumanization refers to the tendency of individuals to unconsciously
associate blacks with apes. Recent studies demonstrate that implicit dehumanization predicts police
violence against black juveniles.19 In one of these studies, subjects who had been subliminally primed
with images of apes were more likely to find a vicious beating of a black suspect to be justified.20
Similar effects did not occur when the victim was white or when individuals were not
primed.Additionally, this study found that implicit dehumanization influences real world behaviors. The
researchers discovered that the more closely police officers unconsciously associated black
youths with apes, the more likely they were to have used force against black children
throughout the course of their careers.21 The recognition that implicit racial biases can cause
racially disparate effects, even in the absence of conscious bias, is becoming increasingly
commonplace in mainstream discussions of police violence.2 2 This science demonstrates that even
when people are acting in identical ways, implicit racial bias places black citizens more at risk of mistaken judgments of danger and criminality. As a result, they are
more likely to be shot, more likely to be dehumanized, and more likely to be seen as deserving of an officer’s use of force.23 While significant attention has been
paid to implicit anti-black racial bias, a sister concept, implicit white favoritism, has received almost no attention in the legal literature. I am only aware of one law
review article on the subject.24 In that article, Professors Robert Smith, Justin Levinson, and Zoë Robinson explain that implicit white favoritism is “the automatic
association of positive stereotypes and attitudes with members of a favored group, leading to preferential treatment for persons of that group. In the context of the
American criminal justice system, implicit favoritism is white favoritism.”25 While the concept of implicit white favoritism is new, critical race scholars have long
identified white supremacy as a central building block of racial subordination.26 Now, social psychological evidence provides empirical support for
the theory.
Considering implicit white favoritism in tandem with implicit racial bias is important because
it illuminates that racial disparities would remain in the context of racial violence even if all implicit
anti-black biases were eliminated.27 As Professor Smith and his colleagues explain, “Removing out-group derogation is
not the same as being race-neutral.”28 For instance, one study found that when subjects were primed with white faces, they
were slower to identify weapons than when they had not been primed withany faces at all.29 Thus, while black men are
associated with violence and criminality, facilitating racial violence against them, white men “are automatically and cognitively
disassociated with violence.”30 In other words, being white protects people against racial violence. It is simply cognitively more
taxing to associate whites with criminality.
Extinction Impact
Isolation of racially oppressed groups leads to extinction.
MARABLE Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies 1984
Manning-Professor of History @ Columbia University; “Speaking Truth to Power: Essays on Race, Resistance and
Radicalism; p. 198-199.
Black Americans also comprehend that peace is not the absence of conflict. As long
as institutional racism, apartheid, and social class inequality exist, social tensions
will erupt into confrontations. Most blacks recognize that peace is the realization
of social justice and human dignity for all nations and historically oppressed
peoples. Peace more than anything else is the recognition of the oneness of
humanity. As Paul Robeson, the great black artist and activist, observed in his autobiographical work Here I
Stand, “I learned that the essential character of a nation is determined not by the tipper classes, but by the
common people, and that the Common people of all nations are truly brothers in the great family of mankind.”
Any people who experience generations of oppression gain an awareness of the
innate commonalty of all human beings, despite their religions, ethnic, and
political differences. In order to reverse the logic of the Cold War, white Americans must begin
to view themselves as a distinct minority in a world dominated by people of color.
Peace between the superpowers is directly linked to the evolution of democratic rights,
economic development, and social justice in the third world periphery. Black
intellectuals, front W.E.B. DuBois to the present, have also comprehended their unique role in the struggle for
peace arid social justice. Cultural and intellectual activity for it is inseparable from politics. All art and
aesthetics, scientific inquiry, and social studies are directly or indirectly linked to
the material conditions of human beings, and the existing set of power
relationships which dictates the policies of the modern state. When intellectual
artists fail to combat racial or gender inequality, or the virus of anti-Semitism,
their creative energies may indirectly contribute to the ideological justification for
prejudice and social oppression. This is equally the case for the problem of war
and peace. Through the bifurcation of our moral and social consciences against the cold abstractions of
research and “value-free” social science, we may console ourselves by suggesting that we play 110 role in the
escalation of the Cold War political culture. By hesitating to dedicate ourselves and our work
to the pursuit of peace and social justice, we inevitably contribute to the dynamics
of national chauvinism, Militarism, and perhaps set the ideological basis necessary
for World War III. Paul Robeson, during the Spanish Civil War, expressed the perspective of the black
Peace tradition as a passionate belie in humanity: “Every artist, every scientist must decide, now, where he
stands, life has no alternative. There are no impartial observers. The commitment to contest public dogmas, the
recognition that we share with the Soviet people a Community of social, economic, and cultural interests, force the
if the peace consensus of
black America remains isolated from the electoral mainstream, the results
may be the termination of humanity itself.
intellectual into the terrain of ideological debate. If we fail to do so, and
White Enjoyment Impact
The spectacular nature of their discourse allow white’s to take pleasure in the carefree, infantile, and
hedonistic nature of the image of the enslaved that they crave. This forces the captive body to disappear
as the master subjugates the flesh of their property to their wishes yet again.
Hartman 97 Saidiya V. Hartman Scenes of Subjection:Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in NineteenthCentury America. Oxford University Press 1997
What concerns me here is the spectacular nature of black suffering and, conversely, the dissimulation of suffering
through spectacle. In one respect, the combination of imagined scenes of cruelty with those culled from unquestionable authority
evidences the crisis of witnessing that results from the legal subjection of slaves. At the same time, the spectacular dimensions of
slavery engender this crisis of witnessing as much as the repression of black testimony since to the degree that the
body speaks it is made to speak the master’s truth and augments his power through the imposition and
intensification of pain.13 All of this is further complicated by the “ half-articulate” and “ incoherent song” that confounds the transparency
of testimony and radically complicates the rendering of slavery. In light of these concerns, this chapter wrestles with the following questions:
Does the extension of humanity to the enslaved ironically reinscribe their subjugated status? Do the figurative
capacities of blackness enable white flights of fantasy while increasing the likelihood of the captive’ s
disappearance? Can the moral embrace of pain extricate itself from pleasures borne by subjection? In other words, does the scene of
the tyrannized slave at the bloodstained gate delight the loathsome master and provide wholesome pleasures to
the upright and the virtuous? Is the act of “ witnessing” a kind of looking no less entangled with the wielding of power and the extraction
of enjoyment? Does the captive’s dance allay grief or articulate the fraught, compromised, and impossible character of agency? Or does it
exemplify the use of the body as an instrument against the self? The scenes of subjection considered here— the coerced
spectacles orchestrated to encourage the trade in black flesh; scenes of torture and festivity; the tragedy of virtuous
women and the antics of outrageous darkies— all turn upon the simulation of agency and the excesses of black enjoyment. The affiliation
of performance and blackness can be attributed to the spectactularization of black pain and racist conceptions of
Negro nature as carefree, infantile, hedonistic, and indifferent to suffering and to an interested misreading of the
interdependence of labor and song common among the enslaved .14 The constitution of blackness as an abject and degraded
condition and the fascination with the other’s enjoyment went hand in hand. Moreover, blacks were envisioned fundamentally as vehicles for
white enjoyment, in all ol its sundry and unspeakable expressions; this was as much the consequence of the chattel status of the captive as it
was of the excess enjoyment imputed to the other, for those forced to dance on the decks of slave ships crossing the Middle Passage, slep it up
lively on the auction block, and amuse the master and his friends were seen 11s the purveyors of pleasure. The amazing popularity of
the “ darkies” of the minstrel stage must be considered in this light. Contending variants of racism, ranging from the
proslavery plantation pastoralism to the romantic racialism of abolitionists, similarly constituted the African as childish, primitive,
contented, and endowed with great mimetic capacities. Essentially, these characteristics defined the infamous and renowned Sambo. This
history is of central importance when evaluating the politics of pleasure, the uses of slave property, the constitution of the subject, and the
tactics of resistance. Indeed, the convergence of terror and enjoyment cannot be understood outside it. The pageantry of the coffle,
stepping it up lively on the auction block, going before the master, and the blackface mask of minstrelsy and
melodrama all evidenced the entanglements of terror and enjoyment . Above all, the simulated jollity and coerced festivity of
the slave trade and the instrumental recreations of plantation management document the investment in and obsession with “ black
enjoyment” and the significance of these orchestrated amusements as part of a larger effort to dissimulate the extreme violence of the
institution and disavow the pain of captivity. Indeed, the transubstantiation of abjection into contentment suggested that the traumas of
slavery were easily redressed and, likewise, the prevalence of black song confirmed blacks’ restricted sentience and immunity to sorrow. Most
important, enjoyment defined the relation of the dominant race to the enslaved. In other words, the nefarious uses of chattel licensed
by the legal and social relations of slavery articulated the nexus of pleasure and possession and bespoke the critical
role of diversion in securing the relations of bondage. In this way, enjoyment disclosed the sentiments and expectations of the “
peculiar institution
Aff Answers
Perm
Perm : View the aff as a starting point for change. Radical politics best serve the needs of
black people when they start with the state
Kazin 11 (Michael, History @ Georgetown, Has the US Left Made a Difference, Dissent Spring p. 52-54)
But when political radicals
made a big difference, they generally did so as decidedly junior partners in a coalition
driven by establishment reformers. Abolitionists did not achieve their goal until midway through the
Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln and his fellow Republicans realized that the promise of emancipation could
speed victory for the North. Militant unionists were not able to gain a measure of power in mines, factories, and on the
waterfront until Franklin Roosevelt needed labor votes during the New Deal. Only when Lyndon Johnson and other
liberal Democrats conquered their fears of disorder and gave up on the white South could the black
freedom movement celebrate passage of the civil rights and voting rights acts. For a political movement to
gain any major goal, it needs to win over a section of the governing elite (it doesn’t hurt to gain support from
some wealthy philanthropists as well). Only on a handful of occasions has the Left achieved such a victory, and never under its own name. The
divergence between political marginality and cultural influence stems, in part, from the kinds of people who have been the mainstays of the
American Left. During
just one period of about four decades—from the late 1870s to the end of the First World War— could
radicals authentically claim to represent more than a tiny number of Americans who belonged to what
was, and remains, the majority of the population: white Christians from the working and lower-middle class. At the time, this group
included Americans from various trades and regions who condemned growing corporations for controlling the marketplace, corrupting
politicians, and degrading civic morality. But this period ended after the First World War—due partly to the epochal split in the international
socialist movement. Radicals lost most of the constituency they had gained among ordinary white Christians and have never been able to regain
it. Thus, the wageearning masses who voted for Socialist, Communist, and Labor parties elsewhere in the industrial world were almost entirely
lost to the American Left—and deeply skeptical about the vision of solidarity that inspired the great welfare states of Europe. Both before and
after this period, the public face
and voice of the Left emanated from an uneasy alliance: between men and
women from elite backgrounds and those from such groups as Jewish immigrant workers and plebeian blacks whom
most Americans viewed as dangerous outsiders. This was true in the abolitionist movement—when such New England
brahmins as Wendell Phillips and Maria Weston Chapman fought alongside Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth. And
it was also the case in the New Left of the 1960s, an unsustainable alliance of white students from elite
colleges and black people like Fannie Lou Hamer and Huey Newton from the ranks of the working poor. It has always been difficult
for these top and- bottom insurgencies to present themselves as plausible alternatives to the major parties, to convince more than a small
minority of voters to embrace their program for sweeping change. Radicals did help to catalyze mass movements. But furious internal conflicts,
a penchant for dogmatism, and hostility toward both nationalism and organized religion helped make the political Left a
taste few Americans cared to acquire. However, some of the same qualities that alienated leftists from the electorate made
them pioneers in generating an alluringly rebellious culture. Talented orators, writers, artists, and academics associated with the Left put forth
new ideas and lifestyles that stirred the imagination of many Americans, particularly young ones, who felt stifled by orthodox values and social
hierarchies. These ideological pioneers also influenced forces around the world that adapted the culture of the U.S. Left to their own
purposes—from the early sprouts of socialism and feminism in the1830s to the subcultures of black power, radical feminism, and gay liberation
in the 1960s and 1970s. Radical ideas about race, gender, sexuality, and social justice did not need to win votes to become popular. They just
required an audience. And leftists who were able to articulate or represent their views in creative ways often found one. Arts created to serve
political ends are always vulnerable to criticism. Indeed, some radicals deliberately gave up their search for the sublime to concentrate on the
merely persuasive. But as George Orwell, no aesthetic slouch, observed, “the opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a
political attitude.” In a sense, the radicals
who made the most difference in U.S. history were not that radical at all.
What most
demanded, in essence, was the fulfillment of two ideals their fellow Americans already cherished: individual freedom
and communal responsibility. In 1875, Robert Schilling, a German immigrant who was an official in the coopers, or caskmakers, union, reflected on why socialists
were making so little headway among the hard-working citizenry: ….everything that smacks in the least of a curtailment of personal or individual liberty is most obnoxious to [Americans]. They
believe that every individual should be permitted to do what and how it pleases, as long as the rights and liberties of others are not injured or infringed upon. [But] this personal liberty must
be surrendered and placed under the control of the State, under a government such as proposed by the social Democracy. Most American radicals grasped this simple truth. They demanded
that the promise of individual rights be realized in everyday life and encouraged suspicion of the words and power of all manner of authorities—
political, economic, and religious. Abolitionists,
feminists, savvy Marxists all quoted the words of the Declaration of
Independence, the most popular document in the national canon. Of course, leftists did not champion self-reliance, the notion that an
individual is entirely responsible for his or her own fortunes. But they did uphold the modernist vision that Americans should be free to pursue
happiness unfettered by inherited hierarchies and identities. At the same time, the U.S. Left—like its counterparts around the world—struggled to establish a
new order animated by a desire for social fraternity. The labor motto “An injury to one is an injury to all” rippled far beyond picket lines and marches of the unemployed. But American leftists
who articulated this credo successfully did so in a patriotic and often religious key, rather than by preaching the grim inevitability of class struggle. Such radical social gospelers as Harriet
Beecher Stowe, Edward Bellamy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., gained more influence than did those organizers who espoused secular, Marxian views. Particularly during times of economic
hardship and war, radicals promoted collectivist ends by appealing to the wisdom of “the people” at large. To gain a sympathetic hearing, the Left always had to demand that the national faith
apply equally to everyone and oppose those who wanted to reserve its use for privileged groups and undemocratic causes. But it was not always possible to wrap a movement’s destiny in the
flag. “America is a trap,” writes the critic Greil Marcus, “its promises and dreams…are too much to live up to and too much to escape.”
Dialogue
They can’t solve our affirmative--The language games of the alternative are bad for
dialogue and makes collective politics impossible
Bankey 13
Brendon Bankey, MA in Communication @Wake Forest.The “Fact Of Blackness” Does Not Exist: An
Evocative Criticism Of Resistance Rhetoric In Academic Policy Debate And Its (Mis)Use Of Frantz Fanon’s
Black Skin, White Masks”. August 2013
https://wakespace.lib.wfu.edu/bitstream/handle/10339/39020/Bankey_wfu_0248M_10473.pdf
The Afro-American literary tradition contains in it the character Esu, who is represented as the Signifying Monkey. According
to Gates, “Esu is the Yoruba figure of the meta-level of formal language use, of the ontological and epistemological status of
figurative language and its interpretation.” In The Signifying Monkey, he explains, “the Signifying Monkey serves as the figureof-figures, as the trope in which are encoded several other peculiarly black rhetorical tropes.” Accordingly, “the Monkey’s
language of 135 Signifyin(g) functions as a metaphor for formal revision, intertextuality, within the AfroAmerican literary
tradition.” The Signifying Monkey views texts as having an “indeterminate relationship between truth on one hand and
understanding on the other.” The relevance of this interpretive principle for this discussion is that the signifyin(g) takes place
“at Esu’s crossroads, where black and white semantic fields collide.” Through black vernacular structure, it exploits
homonymic tension between common white cultural understandings of terms.37 Affectively, signifyin(g) resonates in
“perpendicular universes” to common white interpretations of terms to achieve “the obscuring of apparent meaning.” To
understand the true relationship of signifyin(g) to policy debate, it is necessary to reflect on an important myth that corresponds to the Signifying Monkey’s extended tradition. Gates explains:
The action represented in Monkey tales turns upon the action of three stock characters—the Monkey, the Lion, and the Elephant—who are bound together in a trinary relationship.
The Monkey—a rhetorical trickster figure, like Esu, who is full of guile, who tells lies, and who is a rhetorical genius—is intent
on demystifying the Lion’s self-imposed status as King of the Jungle. The Monkey, clearly, is no match for the Lion’s physical prowess; the Elephant is,
however. The Monkey’s task, then, is to trick the Lion into tangling with the Elephant, who is the true King of the Jungle for everyone else in the animal kingdom. This the Monkey does with a
rhetorical trick, … a play on language use.38 This tale corresponds well to the participants of policy debate. One can read the Monkey as the team signifyin(g) on the Lion, who represents the
traditional team. The judge 136 corresponds to the Elephant.
The signifyin(g) team seeks to deflate the perceived superiority of the traditional
debaters by rendering them “hapless” due to their inability to interpret the black vernacular. Accordingly, they seek to
convince the traditional team they have “spoken literally, when all along [they have] spoken figuratively.” Upon losing to the
signifyin(g) strategy, the traditional team “realizes that [its] status has been deflated … because [it] fundamentally misunderstood the status of the” signifyin(g) team’s arguments. This explains
why traditional teams are commonly upset when they lose to non-traditional strategies. Their dissatisfaction stems not from losing the debate as much as not understanding the function of
their opponent’s argument throughout the debate.39 A
useful example of this phenomena occurred in the Octafinal debate of the 2013 NDT
between Harvard University and The University of West Georgia. Throughout the tournament, West Georgia’s affirmative consisted primarily of poetry and jazz music inspired
by the BAM. The affirmative offered a performance that violated traditional genres of debate to express how language has objectified black humanity in the United States. Arguing for the need of a new language to articulate black
humanity before seeking action, they stated: One should mainly wonder why of course, why we cannot do both. Why that is talking about pain must we deemphasize your beauty to put aside or substitute it before talking about
plans to commence. … We who are dark have done precious little talking about our pain in this post-civil rights era and probably a bit too much posturing about our plans. If anything, we have a surplus of plans…what we do not
have is a language.40 137 In this particular debate, however, they added the following statement to the beginning of the first affirmative constructive: Listen! I think y’all should listen. I think the USFG1 should do something with….I
think the USFG should do something with…with energy. Like, you know, solar and shit.41 Harvard responded to West Georgia’s position with a Framework argument stating that the affirmative should be rejected for its failure to
provide a normative plan that endorsed the resolution.2 They argued that discussing federal government action was necessary to preserve debate as a site of political engagement. Within this strategy, however, Harvard failed to
acknowledge the presence of the advocacy statement that West Georgia set forth at the beginning of the debate. West Georgia rebutted Harvard’s position by arguing, among other things, that the preceding statement met the
negative’s interpretation for debate. Observe the following statement from West Georgia’s first affirmative rebuttal: They read all these arguments about how we’re not political engagement. They are absolutely wrong. This is how
we engage within this debate space and this is how we engage outside of the debate space. We are constantly in a state of subversion where we are tricking white people into these ideas. We’re tricking 1 This is a common
acronym for “United States Federal Government.” 2 The 2012-2013 NDTCEDA resolution read – Resolved: The United States Federal Government should substantially reduce restrictions on and/or substantially increase financial
incentives for energy production in the United States of one or more of the following: coal, crude oil, natural gas, nuclear power, solar power, wind power. 138 white people with this whole central advantage because we
understand that y’all want a text so we give you text and then we trick you.42 In this respect
, West Georgia ‘tricked’ Harvard with their opening statement that
signified on a normative plan. West Georgia went on to win the debate on a 4-1 decision. Read alongside Reid-Brinkley’s assessment of the Louisville Project, this example demonstrates the success of
signifyin(g) as a strategy for winning individual debate rounds. Recognizing its viability as a successful debate strategy does not however guarantee its success at fostering resistance. At its core, “signifyin(g) is the black trope of
tropes, the figure for black rhetorical figures” that seeks to disguise the black vernacular from white audiences. While this serves West Georgia’s purpose of a “survival tactic,” it calls into question its viability at fostering
disalienation and acknowledgment.43 Instead of arguing openly, signifyin(g) disguises advocacy in tropes. For Tell, “undoing the synthetic work of rhetoric and its tropes” is a requirement for achieving the “‘first and final point of
resistance.’” Similarly, Moten argues that the signifyin(g) tradition as forwarded by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Houston A. Baker is “anathema” to resistance because it “arrest[s]” black folks’ ability to challenge their objectivity by
cloaking that challenge in language. Rather than seek out genuine argument, signifyin(g) as public argument is infected by what Ruth Shively describes as a “‘parasitic’ need” for “an order to subvert.” In this sense, signifyin(g) is
more concerned with demonstrating rhetorical prowess than generating successful resistance.44 As a model of argument to foster black public voice and resistance, signifyin(g) is particularly suspect. Resistance requires a mutual
understanding to challenge opposing forces, especially in settings of debate. Shively writes: 139 At the very least, we must agree about what it is that is being debated before we can debate it. … Nor can one demonstrate resistance
to a policy if no one knows that it is a policy. In other words, contest is meaningless if there is a lack of agreement or communication about what is being contested. Resisters, demonstrators, and debaters must have some shared
ideas about the subject and/or the terms of their disagreements. … And a demonstrator’s audience must know what is being resisted. In short, the contesting of an idea presumes some agreement about what that idea is and how
one might go about intelligibly contesting it.45
Signifyin(g) presents a problem for resistance spaces of debate because it creates confusion about
the necessity of challenging normative structures. An observer of this form of performance is left without an understanding
of the necessity of an institutional challenge. Joyce Ann Joyce argues that, by avoiding direct contestation in favor of playing
the indeterminancy of language, signifyin(g) “only exacerbates the Black critic’s estrangement from the important social,
political, economic, and … psychological forces that shape Black culture.” Instead of taking a discursive scalpel to the abstractions that suppress black
humanity, signifyin(g) leaves negative essentialisms in place as it is content to trope the trope. As a survival tactic, moreover, it fails the task of recovering from social death because it is reliant
on masking itself in the presence of white bodies. Returning to the original tales of the Signifying Monkey, Joyce explains: Relying on the power of words, the monkey in the tale of The
Signifying Monkey uses the power of words to manipulate the lion and the elephant so as to secure his 140 own survival. The monkey's survival depends on a common understanding of
language that he shares with the lion and the elephant. It is this commonality that the monkey exploits and destabilizes. Moreover, the monkey has to stay in the tree until the lion leaves—
that is, until the monkey's environment is safe. This need for safety, in this case the political and social safety of black lives, is the “essential point” that Gates's poststructuralist ideology will
not allow him to explore.46 Signifyin(g)’s
reliance on deconstruction is ultimately “nihilistic” because it refuses to recognize the
possibility for communication to alleviate social death. Rather than erect the challenge of disalienation through authentic
speech acts, it retreats into alienation and treats public “existence [as] a [linguistic] game” to be played by tricking white
folks in shared spaces. Watts identifies this aspect of the signifyin(g) tradition as antithetical to the goal of fostering public
voice. By masking language through rhetorical tricks, signifyin(g) fails to generate the necessary discomfort for white folks to
challenge negative essentialism of black humanity. He writes: The deliberate construction of such misreadings is a part of a black folk discursive legacy where the
storyteller becomes a “trickster” (Gates). … As deceivers, “tricksters” mask their faces against the blows of white supremacy. White racists are tricked into believing that no challenge to their
authority accompanies such public performances. Du Bois understands that an overt form of public acknowledgment is required for the cultivation of a black public voice. And so he asks black
citizen singers to reflect on the rhetorical potentialities of speaking 141 unmasked and in the open. … White Americans must note the stresses placed on public speech. Thus, in the space of
this public acknowledgment on the ethics and emotions of African American speech, “voice” occurs.47 In the context of the debate between West Georgia and Harvard, it is difficult to
separate their victory from the new advocacy text they provided at the beginning of their affirmative. For the four individuals who determined West Georgia won the debate, myself included,
it was clear that the ‘plan’ they provided met Harvard’s initial Framework interpretation. Despite the power of their advocacy which challenged traditional forms of debate requiring plan
action, they won largely in part because of the signifyin(g) act that began the affirmative. This raises the question of whether the remaining judges voted in acknowledgment West Georgia’s
ethical critique of normative debate or simply because they successfully tricked Harvard.
If it is true, as Wise posits, that privileged debaters must
acknowledge the voices of marginalized people in order to challenge their unquestioned assumptions of whiteness, then it
appears imperative that we do away with signifyin(g) as a method of argument.
Visibility Good
Fugitivity is a bad strategy--- only public visibility and pressure on the government can improve black
lives
Blow 15
Charles M. Blow“Beyond ‘Black Lives Matter’” New York Times Online FEB. 9, 2015
The Black Lives Matter protesters took some criticism for what others viewed as a lack of clear focus and
detailed agenda. But in truth, raising an issue to the point where it can no longer be ignored is the grist
for the policy mill. Visibility and vocalization have value. In the same way that Occupy Wall Street
forever elevated that concept of income inequality, the Black Lives Matter protesters have elevated
the idea of inequity in policing as it relates to minority communities. Protests following the grand jury
decisions in the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner on Staten Island
have largely died down. Those stories no longer command front page placement or lead the news. The
news machine, hungry for newness, as is its wont, has moved on to measles and back to the Islamic State’s medieval murder tactics. But, as is
often the case, there was no full resolution or reconciliation. The issue of police-community relations was raised but not solved. The memory of
mistrust still wafts through the air like the smell of rot being carried by the breeze. What was it all for? What came of it? Where do we go from
here?
First, the encouraging news. In December, President Obama signed an executive
order establishing the Task Force on 21st Century Policing, which in part aims to “foster strong, collaborative
relationships between local law enforcement and the communities they protect.” The White House has promoted the use of body cameras, and
The task force has held listening sessions
around the country, and Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. is holding round-table discussions. The
Ferguson Police Department last week began testing a “less lethal” device that attaches to an officer’s
gun.According to The Washington Post, “When a bullet fired, it melded with an attached projectile the
size of a Ping-Pong ball that flew with enough force to knock a person down, maybe break some ribs,
but not kill him, the product’s makers said — even at close range.” The Huffington Post reported in November that in 2013, 27 law enforcement officers
police departments across the country are considering their purchase and use.
“were killed as a result of felonious acts — the lowest such figure in more than 50 years of F.B.I. reporting.” That month, The Chicago Tribune reported that “U.S.
violent crimes including murders fell 4.4 percent in 2013 to their lowest number since the 1970s, continuing a decades-long downturn, the F.B.I. said.” Now the
discouraging news. According to a November USA Today report, “The number of felony suspects fatally shot by police last year — 461 — was the most in two
decades, according to a new F.B.I. report.” Something about these numbers doesn’t add up, and it will be interesting to see whether the protests and the
heightened sensibilities they brought to the surface will affect these numbers in next year’s reporting. In New York, after Mayor Bill de Blasio and the police union
came to loggerheads, the mayor skipped an opportunity to address the issue of the police and minorities communities, and Police Commissioner Bill Bratton seems
to be going out of his way to reassure the department at the expense of future protests. The worry is that rapprochement may come to resemble appeasement. In
this month’s State of the City speech, as The Village Voice put it, de Blasio hardly mentioned policing, offering anodyne praise for the city’s officers. This raised the
hackles of many reform advocates, even among his supporters. Bratton has announced the creation of a separate police unit of roughly 500 patrol officers to handle
temporary issues like large protests. He has resisted Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s proposal for an independent monitor in cases where grand juries fail to indict officers in
the death of a civilian. And he proposed raising resisting arrest from a misdemeanor — a charge that carries a maximum penalty of one year in prison and is often
tossed out — to a felony.
According to BuzzFeed, the president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, Pat
Lynch, “also called for enhanced penalties against protesters, asking the Legislature to make assaulting
a police officer at a public assembly a Class B felony, which would carry a penalty of up to 25 years in
prison.” Few people support resisting arrest or assaulting officers, but in the scrum of protests, such
severe penalties for sometimes subjective or even dubious charges seem disproportionate and an
attempt to chill dissent. This is what happens when a story fades from the headlines, the heat is
dialed down and the eyes avert: In the silence, amid the stillness, there is movement. The immediacy
of protests gives way to the glacial pace of policy. The burden is to remain vigilant, so that movement
is in the right direction.
Policy Solutions First
Poetry is aesthetically valuable but doesn’t result in material change. Abandoning
rights based frameworks is uniquely worse for women of color – the theory that
informs fugitivity should be applied to developing policy solutions
Evans 1993 – Assistant Professor of Law, Santa Clara University School of Law (Monica, “STEALING
AWAY: BLACK WOMEN, OUTLAW CULTURE AND THE RHETORIC OF RIGHTS,” 28 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev.
263)
The critique of rights discourse explicitly and implicitly challenges the emphasis placed on individualism and
autonomy as the appropriate model of legal, political and social orderings. n70¶ The primacy of
individualism traditionally has been, and continues to be, difficult to recognize as a position deriving from and expressing local values rather than embodying
a universal truth. The rights model, with its emphasis on individual autonomy, is at the core of American liberalism and reflects what Mark Tushnet describes as a
"legitimation" function -- the process by which the current social order is posited as naturally occurring. n71 If "the experience of justice is intimately connected with one's
perceptions of 'fact,' just as it is connected with one's beliefs and values," n72 then justice occurs only to the extent that one's beliefs and values are legitimated. The critique of individual
rights has centered on a recognition that various communities experience the world in fundamentally different ways. These disparities suggest that alternate epistemologies [*289]
could provide the basis for alternate legal models. For instance, Professor Robin West argues that women perceive and receive the world in ways profoundly
different from men. n73 Scholarly discussions of essentialism and our own experiences (if we allow ourselves to trust our experiences) tell us that women of color
perceive and receive the world quite differently from white women. n74 The construction of legal rules and norms of justice that reflect and speak from womencentered or women-informed epistemologies may rest on values other than rights, individualism and autonomy. At this point, one may well ask what is so wrong with
rights, even if rights reflect only local values and not universally experienced truths. For the purposes of this discussion, I will focus on the atomistic view of rights discourse, in
which rights as the core principle of legal ordering perpetuates an atomistic and disconnected view of the world. Legal scholars offer several criticisms of rights. n75
Some claim that rights set the individual against the community and provide the basis by which the individual may fend off and avoid her responsibilities to the
world. n76 Critics of the rhetoric of individualistic [*290] autonomy assert that it teaches a person to jealously guard his rights to finite and shrinking resources from
intrusion of outsiders. n77 To the extent that the resources in question include money and property (including property interests in being white), n78 critics claim that
the rights model allows for the manipulation of legal rules to perpetuate and legitimate existing inequitable distributions of power and opportunity. The rights model posits that
inequitable distributions are at worst lamentable, but that a man has a right to the distribution status quo. Rights discourse, as it is practiced in American courts and
in the larger society, has devolved from the 18th century French model of "liberty, equality and fraternity," n79 -- where fraternity is a principle which recognizes
the reality of community enjoyment and responsibility as a necessary co-partner of "liberty" -- to the Brandeis conception of rights: That the individual shall have
full protection in person and in property is a principle as old as the common law; but it has been found necessary from time to time to define anew the exact nature
and extent of such protection . . . . Gradually the scope of these legal rights "to life, liberty, and property" broadened; and now the right to life has come to mean
the right to enjoy life, -- the right to be left alone. n80 In this Brandeis view, "to be left alone" is not only a means to the enjoyment of life, it is the very definition of
the enjoyment of life. Thus, both the Lockean formula of "life, liberty and property" [*291] and the Jeffersonian inalienable rights of "life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness" (expressed by Brandeis as the enjoyment of life) rest upon and are conflated with the right to be left alone. n81 This model leaves very little room for
"fraternity" or for recognition of communal responsibility. n82 A related critique of atomistic rights rhetoric focuses on its origin in and expression of non-universal
masculine values of abstraction and rationalism. Professor Leslie Bender, in her exploration of implicit patriarchal norms underlying tort law, notes that "our legal
system . . . resolves problems through male inquiries formulated from distanced, abstract and acontextual vantage points, while feminism emphasizes relationships,
context, and factual particulars for resolving human problems." n83 Viewed in this way, rights discourse may perpetuate patriarchal orderings of legal rules that
¶
¶
¶
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gain legitimacy by marginalizing other epistemologies and other ways of relating to the world. n84 However, even
¶
scholars of outsider
jurisprudence constitute a multiplicity of voices, and not
all the voices are committed to a departure
from the rights model as the best means of legitimating subordinated communities. To some, the critique
of rights speaks from a position of privilege even as it reveals the privileged position of
traditional legal discourse, especially when the critique is advanced by Critical Legal Studies (CLS)
scholars who, to a great degree, are white men associated with an elite profession. n85¶ [*292] The argument of
the privileged position of rights critique may be characterized this way: rights may not be great, but they're
all we've got. It's all well and good to talk about abstraction and atomism embedded in individualism, but when
They come after us, talking that "relationship-and-interconnectedness" talk won't help much. We'd better have
some rights to fall back on. When They -- the sexual
harasser, the police, the child abuser, the
prosecutor-inquisitor -- come after us, we need to be able to fend Them off by reference to rights, because
it's a sure bet that the market will not take care of things, or of us. Only those (for example, white male law
professors at elite institutions) who least need rights in order to secure their existence have the luxury of
abandoning rights as an organizing jurisprudential principle. Communities of color do not have that luxury. ¶
Kimberle Crenshaw's work in law and legitimation posits:¶ Rights have been important. They may have
legitimated racial inequality, but they have also been the means by which oppressed groups have
secured . . . the survival of their movement in the face of private and state repression . . . .
[Critical legal scholars] are correct in observing that engaging in rights discourse has helped to de-radicalize and co-opt the challenge. Yet they fail to acknowledge the
limited range of options presented to Blacks in a context where they were deemed "other," and the unlikelihood that specific demands for inclusion and equality would be heard if articulated
in other terms. n86 In this passage, Professor Crenshaw highlights the dilemma for black reformers posed by the dual, limiting/redemptive role that rights play for
¶
subordinated communities, and the difficulty that CLS has had posing an alternative to rights that is viable for subordinated communities. [*293] While I share many
of the concerns both explicitly and implicitly present in this passage, my own dissatisfaction with CLS arguments regarding the disutility of rights does not replicate
the Crenshaw or Delgado positions. My concern with standard CLS disutility arguments, as well as critiques of those arguments, is that they conflate concepts of rights,
individualism and self-interest. Those concepts can and should be evaluated separately. What, then, is the "right" view of the rights dilemma? The arguments on both sides are
¶
¶
compelling, especially to women of color who, in the multiplicities
of their experiences, are simultaneously drawn to
apparently contradictory positions. Must we relinquish reliance on individualism and rights in
order to give expression to the core experiences of subordinated communities? Is it possible to
develop a jurisprudence that includes subordinated communities in the conversation on justice and still maintain a viable concept of rights? B.
Intersectionality, Multiple Consciousness and Outlaw Culture I argue for a reconceptualization of the rights/relationship discourse : clubwomen's
practices suggest that rights are not necessarily premised on individualistic self-absorption or even self-interest as such. Clubwomen have
constructed theories of rights in combination with, not opposed to, communitarian concepts. To respect and creatively respond to the complexities of
¶
¶
these issues, we must first be willing to move away
from the model of binary opposites. The either/or paradigm does not serve
the ultimate goal of creating a legal scheme that speaks from the experiences of all. Characterizing the rights question as a dilemma reinforces the
relationship to law and legal scholarship as being win/lose. n87 Appreciation of the complex relationship of rights and voice suggests that a but/and rather than an either/or approach would better serve. Professor Matsuda
¶
suggests "[t]hat those who have experienced discrimination speak with a special voice to which we should listen. Looking to the bottom -- adopting the perspective of those [*294] who have
seen and felt the falsity of the liberal promise -- can assist . . . in defining the elements of justice." n88 Looking to the communal activity of the clubwomen and their outlaw culture provides
valuable insights into strategies for bringing an ethic of care and interconnectedness into political and legal discourse. Patricia Hill Collins notes that, although African-American women's
experiences in communities have not been recognized as representing an alternate ethic of interconnectedness, black women's day-to-day actions in fact construct a community based on a
¶
prove quite useful as a means of informing our understanding of rights and
relationships. Rather than adopting an ethic of care and relationships to replace rights as an organizing principle of
jurisprudence, I propose that scholars turn to those women and communities of women who embody an outlaw
culture as a source of guidance for constructing lives at the margins of rights.¶ Outlaw culture involves the
care ethic. n89 Looking to black women and outlaw culture would
¶
practice of shifting in and out of identities. n90 Outlaw culture is an extraordinarily complex but/and
intersection of life outside the purview of law that still holds law to its promises. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said: We've come here today to cash a
¶
check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution . . . they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to
fall heir . . . . Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check . . . . [But] we refuse to believe that there are insufficient
funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. n91 He was urging the nation to honor its broken promise of constitutional rights to people of color. He was
saying that a promise [*295] broken is still a promise. Like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., outlaw culture does not abandon the concept of rights: outlaws still have a claim
upon the legal system to the extent that the system is centered on the discourse of rights. Women in outlaw culture have also built a rich life in the absence of rights. Therefore,
¶
outlaws are an appropriate and particularly helpful model of how to simultaneously hold on to rights and hold the nation to its promise of rights while using other, non-rights epistemologies
for self-definition.
Black Life Improving
Death is not the same threat that it used to be. American life is improving for black people---- life
expectancy gap is decreasing
Connover 14
Emily Conover “Life expectancy gap between blacks and whites improves — but not in Wisconsin”
Journal Sentinel < http://www.jsonline.com/news/health/life-expectancy-gap-between-blacks-andwhites-improves--but-not-in-wisconsin-b99324230z1-269883861.html> Aug. 4, 2014
The discrepancy in life expectancy between black and white Americans is improving — but not in
Wisconsin. Wisconsin is the only state in which the life expectancy gap between blacks and whites has grown significantly, particularly for
women, according to research published Monday. Black Americans, on average, do not live as long as white Americans. This difference in life
expectancy between blacks and whites, known as the life expectancy gap, is the subject of a new study published in the journal Health
Affairs. The gap, the study shows, has been closing over time, but Midwestern states, and Wisconsin in particular, are
lagging in comparison to other states. In 1990, the first year of data the scientists studied, white men in the U.S. lived on average 8.1 years
longer than black men, and white women lived 5.5 years longer than black women. Twenty years later, this gap had shrunk to 5.4 years for men
and 3.8 years for women. But the scientists wanted to know how these trends played out when separated by states.
"We've known for
the past couple of years that the nationwide gap in life expectancy between blacks and whites has
been going down, which is a good thing. But we didn't know at all how specific states had been doing," said Sam Harper of McGill
University in Montreal, the study's lead author. Although overall life expectancies for both blacks and whites
increased in all states, the scientists found that different states were performing differently in
reducing the discrepancy between white and black life expectancies. New York, in particular, outperformed
the other states, shaving 5.6 years off their life expectancy gap for men, and 3.1 years for women. Wisconsin was the only
state in which the gap showed a statistically significant increase, meaning that the discrepancy between life expectancies of
whites and blacks actually got worse. For women, the gap increased by 1.6 years. In men, the data was consistent with no
change in the gap.