1NC
1NC
“Resolved” before a colon reflects a legislative forum
Army Officer School ‘04
(5-12, “# 12, Punctuation – The Colon and Semicolon”, http://usawocc.army.mil/IMI/wg12.htm)
The colon introduces the following: a. A list, but only after "as follows," "the following," or a noun for
which the list is an appositive: Each scout will carry the following: (colon) meals for three days, a survival
knife, and his sleeping bag. The company had four new officers: (colon) Bill Smith, Frank Tucker, Peter
Fillmore, and Oliver Lewis. b. A long quotation (one or more paragraphs): In The Killer Angels Michael
Shaara wrote: (colon) You may find it a different story from the one you learned in school. There have
been many versions of that battle [Gettysburg] and that war [the Civil War]. (The quote continues for
two more paragraphs.) c. A formal quotation or question: The President declared: (colon) "The only
thing we have to fear is fear itself." The question is: (colon) what can we do about it? d. A second
independent clause which explains the first: Potter's motive is clear: (colon) he wants the assignment.
e. After the introduction of a business letter: Dear Sirs: (colon) Dear Madam: (colon) f. The details
following an announcement For sale: (colon) large lakeside cabin with dock g. A formal resolution, after
the word "resolved:"
Resolved: (colon) That this council petition the mayor.
“The United States should” means the ballot is solely about a government policy
Ericson ‘03
(Jon M., Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts – California Polytechnic U., et al., The Debater’s
Guide, Third Edition, p. 4)
The Proposition of Policy: Urging Future Action In policy propositions, each topic contains certain key
elements, although they have slightly different functions from comparable elements of value-oriented
propositions. 1. An agent doing the acting ---“The United States” in “The United States should adopt a
policy of free trade.” Like the object of evaluation in a proposition of value, the agent is the subject of
the sentence. 2. The verb should—the first part of a verb phrase that urges action. 3. An action verb to
follow should in the should-verb combination. For example, should adopt here means to put a program
or policy into action though governmental means. 4. A specification of directions or a limitation of the
action desired. The phrase free trade, for example, gives direction and limits to the topic, which would,
for example, eliminate consideration of increasing tariffs, discussing diplomatic recognition, or
discussing interstate commerce. Propositions of policy deal with future action. Nothing has yet occurred.
The entire debate is about whether something ought to occur. What you agree to do, then, when you
accept the affirmative side in such a debate is to offer sufficient and compelling reasons for an audience
to perform the future action that you propose.
Legalize means to make lawful by judicial or legislative sanction
Business Dictionary No Date, "legalize", www.businessdictionary.com/definition/legalize.html
legalize¶ Definition¶ To make enforceable, justifiable, or lawful by judicial or legislative sanction.
It’s a voter for limits - they claim to win the debate for reasons other than the
desirability of topical action. That undermines preparation and clash. Changing the
question now leaves one side unprepared, resulting in shallow, uneducational debate.
Requiring debate on a communal topic forces argument development and develops
persuasive skills critical to any political outcome.
Debate over a controversial point of action creates argumentative stasis—that’s key
to avoid a devolution of debate into competing truth claims, which destroys the
decision-making benefits of the activity
Steinberg and Freeley ‘13
David Director of Debate at U Miami, Former President of CEDA, officer, American Forensic Association
and National Communication Association. Lecturer in Communication studies and rhetoric. Advisor to
Miami Urban Debate League, Masters in Communication, and Austin, JD, Suffolk University, attorney
who focuses on criminal, personal injury and civil rights law, Argumentation and Debate
Critical Thinking for Reasoned Decision Making, Thirteen Edition
Debate is a means of settling differences, so there must be a controversy, a difference of opinion or a
conflict of interest before there can be a debate. If everyone is in agreement on a feet or value or
policy, there is no need or opportunity for debate; the matter can be settled by unanimous consent.
Thus, for example, it would be pointless to attempt to debate "Resolved: That two plus two equals
four,” because there is simply no controversy about this statement. Controversy is an essential
prerequisite of debate. Where there is no clash of ideas, proposals, interests, or expressed positions of
issues, there is no debate. Controversy invites decisive choice between competing positions. Debate
cannot produce effective decisions without clear identification of a question or questions to be
answered. For example, general argument may occur about the broad topic of illegal immigration. How
many illegal immigrants live in the United States? What is the impact of illegal immigration and
immigrants on our economy? What is their impact on our communities? Do they commit crimes? Do
they take jobs from American workers? Do they pay taxes? Do they require social services? Is it a
problem that some do not speak English? Is it the responsibility of employers to discourage illegal
immigration by not hiring undocumented workers? Should they have the opportunity to gain
citizenship? Does illegal immigration pose a security threat to our country? Do illegal immigrants do
work that American workers are unwilling to do? Are their rights as workers and as human beings at risk
due to their status? Are they abused by employers, law enforcement, housing, and businesses? How are
their families impacted by their status? What is the moral and philosophical obligation of a nation state
to maintain its borders? Should we build a wall on the Mexican border, establish a national identification
card, or enforce existing laws against employers? Should we invite immigrants to become U.S. citizens?
Surely you can think of many more concerns to be addressed by a conversation about the topic area of
illegal immigration. Participation in this “debate” is likely to be emotional and intense. However, it is
not likely to be productive or useful without focus on a particular question and identification of a line
demarcating sides in the controversy. To be discussed and resolved effectively, controversies are best
understood when seated clearly such that all parties to the debate share an understanding about the
objective of the debate. This enables focus on substantive and objectively identifiable issues
facilitating comparison of competing argumentation leading to effective decisions. Vague
understanding results in unfocused deliberation and poor decisions, general feelings of tension
without opportunity for resolution, frustration, and emotional distress, as evidenced by the failure of
the U.S. Congress to make substantial progress on the immigration debate. Of course, arguments may
be presented without disagreement. For example, claims are presented and supported within speeches,
editorials, and advertisements even without opposing or refutational response. Argumentation occurs in
a range of settings from informal to formal, and may not call upon an audience or judge to make a
forced choice among competing claims. Informal discourse occurs as conversation or panel discussion
without demanding a decision about a dichotomous or yes/no question. However, by definition, debate
requires "reasoned judgment on a proposition. The proposition is a statement about which competing
advocates will offer alternative (pro or con) argumentation calling upon their audience or adjudicator
to decide. The proposition provides focus for the discourse and guides the decision process. Even
when a decision will be made through a process of compromise, it is important to identify the
beginning positions of competing advocates to begin negotiation and movement toward a center, or
consensus position. It is frustrating and usually unproductive to attempt to make a decision when
deciders are unclear as to what the decision is about. The proposition may be implicit in some applied
debates (“Vote for me!”); however, when a vote or consequential decision is called for (as in the
courtroom or in applied parliamentary debate) it is essential that the proposition be explicitly expressed
(“the defendant is guilty!”). In academic debate, the proposition provides essential guidance for the
preparation of the debaters prior to the debate, the case building and discourse presented during the
debate, and the decision to be made by the debate judge after the debate. Someone disturbed by the
problem of a growing underclass of poorly educated, socially disenfranchised youths might observe,
“Public schools are doing a terrible job! They' are overcrowded, and many teachers are poorly qualified
in their subject areas. Even the best teachers can do little more than struggle to maintain order in their
classrooms." That same concerned citizen, facing a complex range of issues, might arrive at an
unhelpful decision, such as "We ought to do something about this” or, worse, “It’s too complicated a
problem to deal with." Groups of concerned citizens worried about the state of public education could
join together to express their frustrations, anger, disillusionment, and emotions regarding the schools,
but without a focus for their discussions, they could easily agree about the sorry state of education
without finding points of clarity or potential solutions. A gripe session would follow. But if a precise
question is posed—such as “What can be done to improve public education?”—then a more profitable
area of discussion is opened up simply by placing a focus on the search for a concrete solution step.
One or more judgments can be phrased in the form of debate propositions, motions for parliamentary
debate, or bills for legislative assemblies, The statements "Resolved: That the federal government
should implement a program of charter schools in at-risk communities” and “Resolved; That the state
of Florida should adopt a school voucher program" more clearly identify specific ways of dealing with
educational problems in a manageable form, suitable for debate. They provide specific policies to be
investigated and aid discussants in identifying points of difference. This focus contributes to better and
more informed decision making with the potential for better results. In academic debate, it provides
better depth of argumentation and enhanced opportunity for reaping the educational benefits of
participation. In the next section, we will consider the challenge of framing the proposition for debate,
and its role in the debate. To have a productive debate, which facilitates effective decision making by
directing and placing limits on the decision to be made, the basis for argument should be clearly
defined. If we merely talk about a topic, such as ‘"homelessness,” or “abortion,” Or “crime,” or “global
warming,” we are likely to have an interesting discussion but not to establish a profitable basis for
argument. For example, the statement “Resolved: That the pen is mightier than the sword” is debatable,
yet by itself fails to provide much basis for dear argumentation. If we take this statement to mean Iliad
the written word is more effective than physical force for some purposes, we can identify a problem
area: the comparative effectiveness of writing or physical force for a specific purpose, perhaps
promoting positive social change. (Note that “loose” propositions, such as the example above, may be
defined by their advocates in such a way as to facilitate a clear contrast of competing sides; through
definitions and debate they “become” clearly understood statements even though they may not begin
as such. There are formats for debate that often begin with this sort of proposition. However, in any
debate, at some point, effective and meaningful discussion relies on identification of a clearly stated
or understood proposition.) Back to the example of the written word versus physical force. Although
we now have a general subject, we have not yet stated a problem. It is still too broad, too loosely
worded to promote weII-organized argument. What sort of writing are we concerned with—poems,
novels, government documents, website development, advertising, cyber-warfare, disinformation, or
what? What does it mean to be “mightier" in this context? What kind of physical force is being
compared—fists, dueling swords, bazookas, nuclear weapons, or what? A more specific question might
be, “Would a mutual defense treaty or a visit by our fleet be more effective in assuring Laurania of our
support in a certain crisis?” The basis for argument could be phrased in a debate proposition such as
“Resolved: That the United States should enter into a mutual defense treaty with Laurania.” Negative
advocates might oppose this proposition by arguing that fleet maneuvers would be a better solution.
This is not to say that debates should completely avoid creative interpretation of the controversy by
advocates, or that good debates cannot occur over competing interpretations of the controversy; in
fact, these sorts of debates may be very engaging. The point is that debate is best facilitated by the
guidance provided by focus on a particular point of difference, which will be outlined in the following
discussion.
Tailoring identity claims to common topics for deliberation is possible and desirable--the 1ac’s failure to affirm topical action impedes the debate---T is engagement, not
exclusion
Amanda Anderson 6, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English at Brown University,
Spring 2006, “Reply to My Critic(s),” Criticism, Vol. 48, No. 2, p. 281-290
MY RECENT BOOK, The Way We Argue Now, has in a sense two theses. In the first place, the book makes the
case for the importance of
debate and argument to any vital democratic or pluralistic intellectual culture. This is in many ways an
unexceptional position, but the premise of the book is that the claims of reasoned argument are often trumped, within
the current intellectual terrain, by appeals to cultural identity and what I gather more broadly under the rubric of ethos, which includes
cultural identity but also forms of ethical piety and charismatic authority. In promoting argument as a universal
practice keyed to a human capacity for communicative reason, my book is a critique of relativism and
identity politics, or the notion that forms of cultural authenticity or group identity have a certain
unquestioned legitimacy, one that cannot or should not be subjected to the challenges of reason or
principle, precisely because reason and what is often called "false universalism" are, according to this pattern of
thinking, always involved in forms of exclusion, power, or domination. My book insists, by contrast, that
argument is a form of respect, that the ideals of democracy, whether conceived from a nationalist or an internationalist perspective,
rely fundamentally upon procedures of argumentation and debate in order to legitimate themselves and to
keep their central institutions vital. And the idea that one should be protected from debate, that
argument is somehow injurious to persons if it does not honor their desire to have their basic beliefs
and claims and solidarities accepted without challenge, is strenuously opposed. As is the notion that any
attempt to ask people to agree upon processes of reason-giving argument is somehow necessarily to
impose a coercive norm, one that will disable the free expression and performance of identities, feelings,
or solidarities. Disagreement is, by the terms of my book, a form of respect, not a form of disrespect. And by disagreement,
I don't mean simply to say that we should expect disagreement rather than agreement, which is a frequently voiced-if misconceived-criticism of Habermas. Of
course we should expect disagreement. My point is that we
should focus on the moment of dissatisfaction in the face of
disagreement-the internal dynamic in argument that imagines argument might be the beginning of a process of persuasion
and exchange that could end in agreement (or partial agreement). For those who advocate reconciling ourselves to
disagreements rather than arguing them out, by contrast, there is a complacent-and in some versions, even celebratory-attitude toward fixed disagreement.
Refusing these options, I make the case for dissatisfied disagreement in the final chapter of the book and argue that people
should be willing to
justify their positions in dialogue with one another, especially if they hope to live together in a posttraditional pluralist society. One example of the trumping of argument by ethos is the form that was
taken by the late stage of the Foucault/Habermas debate, where an appeal to ethos-specifically, an
appeal to Foucault's style of ironic or negative critique, often seen as most in evidence in the interviews,
where he would playfully refuse labels or evade direct answers-was used to exemplify an alternative to
the forms of argument employed by Habermas and like-minded critics. (I should pause to say that I
provide this example, and the framing summary of the book that surrounds it, not to take up airtime
through expansive self-reference, but because neither of my respondents provided any contextualizing
summary of the book's central arguments, though one certainly gets an incremental sense of the book's
claims from Bruce Robbins. Because I don't assume that readers of this forum have necessarily read the
book, and because I believe that it is the obligation of forum participants to provide sufficient context
for their remarks, I will perform this task as economically as I can, with the recognition that it might have
carried more weight if provided by a respondent rather than the author.) The Foucauldian countercritique importantly emphasizes a relation between style and position, but it obscures (1) the importance or value of the
Habermasian critique and (2) the possibility that the other side of the debate might have its own ethos to advocate ,
one that has precisely to do with an ethos of argument, an ideal of reciprocal debate that involves taking
distance on one's pre-given forms of identity or the norms of one's community, both so as to talk across differences
and to articulate one's claims in relation to shared and even universal ideals. And this leads to the second thesis of the book, the
insistence that an emphasis on ethos and character is interestingly present if not widely recognized in contemporary theory, and one of the ways its vitality and
existential pertinence makes itself felt (even despite the occurrence of the kinds of unfair trumping moves I have mentioned). We
often fail to notice
this, because identity has so uniformly come to mean sociological, ascribed, or group identity-race,
gender, class, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality, and so forth. Instances of the move toward character and ethos include the later
Foucault (for whom ethos is a central concept), cosmopolitanism (whose aspiration it is to turn universalism into an ethos), and, more controversially, proceduralist
ethics and politics (with its emphasis on sincerity and civility). Another version of this attentiveness to ethos and character appears in contemporary pragmatism,
with its insistence on casualness of attitude, or insouciance in the face of contingency-recommendations that get elevated into full-fledged exemplary personae in
Richard Rorty's notion of the "ironist" or Barbara Herrnstein Smiths portrait of the "postmodern skeptic." These examples-and the larger claim they support-are
meant to defend theory as still living, despite the many reports of its demise, and in fact still interestingly and incessantly re-elaborating its relation to practice. This
second aspect of the project is at once descriptive, motivated by the notion that characterology within theory is intrinsically interesting, and critical, in its attempt to
identify how characterology
can itself be used to cover or evade the claims of rational argument, as in appeals to
charismatic authority or in what I identify as narrow personifications of theory (pragmatism, in its insistence on insouciance in the
face of contingency, is a prime example of this second form). And as a complement to the critical agenda, there is a
reconstructive agenda as well, an attempt to recuperate liberalism and proceduralism, in part by
advocating the possibility, as I have suggested, of an ethos of argument. Robbins, in his extraordinarily rich and challenging response,
zeroes in immediately on a crucial issue: who is to say exactly when argument is occurring or not, and what do we do
when there is disagreement over the fundamentals (the primary one being over what counts as proper reasoning)? Interestingly,
Robbins approaches this issue after first observing a certain tension in the book: on the one hand, The Way We Argue
Now calls for dialogue, debate, argument; on the other, its project is "potentially something a bit
stricter, or pushier: getting us all to agree on what should and should not count as true argument." What this
point of entry into the larger issue reveals is a kind of blur that the book, I am now aware, invites. On the one hand, the book
anatomizes academic debates, and in doing so is quite "debaterly" This can give the impression that
what I mean by argument is a very specific form unique to disciplinary methodologies in higher
education. But the book is not generally advocating a narrow practice of formal and philosophical
argumentation in the culture at large, however much its author may relish adherence to the principle of non-contradiction in scholarly
argument. I take pains to elaborate an ethos of argument that is linked to democratic debate and the forms
of dissent that constitutional patriotism allows and even promotes. In this sense, while argument here is
necessarily contextualized sociohistorically, the concept is not merely academic. It is a practice seen as integral to
specific political forms and institutions in modern democracies, and to the more general activity of critique within
modern societies-to the tradition of the public sphere, to speak in broad terms. Additionally, insofar as argument
impels one to take distance on embedded customs, norms, and senses of given identity, it is a practice that at
once acknowledges identity, the need to understand the perspectives of others, and the shared
commitment to commonality and generality, to finding a way to live together under conditions of
difference. More than this: the book also discusses at great length and from several different angles the issue that Robbins
inexplicably claims I entirely ignore: the question of disagreement about what counts as argument. In the
opening essay, "Debatable Performances," I fault the proponents of communicative ethics for not having a broader
understanding of public expression, one that would include the disruptions of spectacle and performance. I return to and
underscore this point in my final chapter, where I espouse a democratic politics that can embrace and accommodate a
wide variety of expressions and modes. This is certainly a discussion of what counts as dialogue and hence argument in the broad sense in
which I mean it, and in fact I fully acknowledge that taking distance from cultural norms and given identities can
be advanced not only through critical reflection, but through ironic critique and defamiliarizing performance as
well. But I do insist-and this is where I take a position on the fundamental disagreements that have arisen with respect to communicative ethics-that
when they have an effect, these other dimensions of experience do not remain unreflective, and insofar
as they do become reflective, they are contributing to the very form of reasoned analysis that their
champions sometimes imagine they must refuse in order to liberate other modes of being (the
affective, the narrative, the performative, the nonrational). If a narrative of human rights violation is
persuasive in court, or in the broader cultural public sphere, it is because it draws attention to a violation of
humanity that is condemned on principle; if a performance jolts people out of their normative
understandings of sexuality and gender, it prompts forms of understanding that can be affirmed and
communicated and also can be used to justify political positions and legislative agendas .
Ethics in an absurd world demands that we enter into mutual discussion of the
consequences of institutionalized values and accept that we may be wrong through
constructive argument on fair terms – this commitment to democratic dialogue,
embodied in debate over specific policy proposals and the consideration of their
results rather than clashing ideologies, is all that can save us from authoritarianism,
nihilism, and extinction
David Spritzen 1988 – Prof philosophy @ U Long Island; Camus: A Critical Introduction; note – we
reject the use of gendered language in this evidence; p 266-267
If there is an absolute for Camus, it is an absolute of evidence grounded in human possibilities. It is an
absolute given; its significance remains hypothetical and nonexclusive with respect to others, but it
defines the range of our commitment. If experience is to prove fruitful, thought must be relativized and
corrigible. “Persuasion demands leisure,” observes Camus, “and friendship a structure that will never be
completed.” (R, 247). We are recalled once again to the definition of dialogue: an open inquiry among
persons. The persons are the basic unit; the inquiry seeks to achieve and to maintain guidelines for
interaction; while the openness refers to the recognition and acceptance of the permanent possibility of
novelty entering into human experience. The political problem therefore becomes that of seeking to
institutionalize, first, the method of inquiry; and second, its always provisional and pragmatically
considered results. The freedom, dignity, and growth of the person, and the collectivity are the
reference points and limits of action. To pose the problems outside these limits is to remove the
discussion from the ethical dimension. The institutionalization of the method of dialogue just referred
to is what Camus means by democracy. He has written: “Justice implies rights. Rights imply the liberty to
defend them. In order to act, man has to speak. We know what we are defending…I am speaking for a
society which does not impose silence.” (A/I, 229) Such an act requires a commitment to values that
transcend the purely political. The commitment to democracy is at bottom just such a politically
transcending commitment to the human community. “The democrat, after all, is the one who admits
that the adversary may be right, who permits him to express himself, and who agrees to reflect upon his
arguments.” (A/I, 125) What is fundamental is not any specific political society or set of laws by which it
may be given constitutional embodiment. These structures are no more fundamental than the concepts
we use to regulate our lives. The actual basis of such arrangements is to be found in the experience of
community, which is essentially the experience of unity – that is, the felt communality of actions
grounded in common practices and common perceptions of meaning. Where we have the core notion of
community: shared meaningful activity through time. Its method of communication through reciprocal
approximation and mutual development of meanings in response to novel experiences is what is meant
by dialogue. “We must be fought today is fear and silence, and with them, the separation of minds and
souls which accompanies them. What must be defended is dialogue and universal communication
among men. Servitude, injustices, lies are the curses (les fléaux) which break this communication and
prevent dialogue. (A/I, 177) Speaking of the principles revealed by revolt, which provide the basis for
dialogue, Camus sums up much of the thesis in these words: “Nothing justifies the assertion that these
principles have existed eternally; it is of no use to declare that they will one day exist. But they do exist,
in the very period in which we exist. With us, and throughout history, they deny servitude, falsehood,
and terror.” There is, in fact, nothing in common between a master and a slave; it is impossible to
communicate with a person who has been reduced to servitude. Instead of the implicit and
untrammeled dialogue through which we come to recognize our similarity and consecrate our destiny,
servitude gives sway to the most terrible of silences. If injustice is bad for the rebel, it is not because it
contradicts an eternal idea of justice, but because it perpetuates the silent hostility that separates the
oppressor from the oppressed. It kills the small part of existence that can be realized on this earth
through the mutual understanding of men…the mutual understanding and communication discovered
by rebellion can survive only in free exchange of conversation. Every ambiguity, every misunderstanding,
leads to death; clear language and simple words are the only salvation from this death. The climax of
every tragedy lies in the deafness of its heroes. Plato is right and not Moses and Nietzsche. Dialogue on
the level of mankind is less costly than the gospel preached by totalitarian regimes in the form of a
monologue dictated from the top of a lonely mountain. On the stage as in reality, the monologue
precedes death. (R, 283-4). Dialogue grounded in truth and integrity is all that can protect us from the
despair of nihilism in a world that offers no meaning beyond what we can conjointly construct. “We
have a right to think,” Camus wrote a year or two before he died, “that truth with a capital letter is
relative. But facts are facts. And whoever says that the sky is blue when it is grey is prostituting words
and preparing the way for tyranny. This is not so much an implied theory of knowledge as a statement of
the moral role of intelligence. The question of Truth becomes derivative; the importance of truths for
experience, fundamental. Intelligence must bear witness to the facts of existence. It must disintoxicate
politics, as an essential condition for maintaining dialogue.
1NC
The 1AC theorizes Ferguson protests incorrectly – their politics of surrender mystifies
agency – a proper historical account would avoid the white liberal sympathy of the
ballot – this makes the case contradictory when it would be strong without the
gesture when physical guns are not being pointed
Dora Apel 2014 Wayne State University Art History Professor
Theory & Event > Volume 17, Issue 3 Supplement, 2014 “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot”:
If the shooting of Michael Brown is considered by many to be justified, and protest, no matter how
supplicating, is regarded as infuriating and intolerable, then we must see such cop killings of unarmed
black men as a form of modern legalized lynching. At the height of private and spectacle lynchings from
the 1890s to the 1930s, if black people were not sufficiently deferential and submissive, then they were
considered “uppity,” which could be grounds for lethal action. Not much has changed in decades since
then for cops and racist whites. A Huffington Post/YouGov poll finds that 76 percent of black
respondents say the shooting is part of a broader pattern in the way police treat black men, nearly
double the number of whites who agree (40 percent).2 Similarly, a Pew Research Center poll finds that
80 percent of blacks favor the statement that Brown’s shooting “raises important issues about race that
need to be discussed” while only 18 percent of whites favor this statement over another that says “the
issue of race is getting more attention than it deserves.”3 While the performance of non-resistance
expressed by the “hands up, don’t shoot” gesture of defenseless surrender is meant to advance black
interests by exposing the violation of basic civil rights and due process, it also is meant to pressure and
shame the racist establishment into effective reform . But for the racists in charge, the cops are just
“doing their job” when they humiliate, brutalize, and kill black people on the street. The cops have
always been the front-line defenders of a racist capitalist system that is built on the repression of
poor, black, Latino and working people in the service of a tiny wealthy elite, the ones to whom the cops
are accountable. As if demonstrating their power to kill with impunity, despite this recent round of
protests, two days later in Los Angeles cops killed Ezell Ford, another unarmed black man; eight days
later and less than four miles away from where Brown was killed, police in St. Louis shot to death
Kajieme Powell, an agitated black man on the street holding a knife. The submissive hands up gesture of
black protesters facing a militarized police force is meant to appeal to liberal sympathies by showing
that they are “respectful” and law-abiding, suggesting the opposite of “uppity.” Yet the deference of the
act has the paradoxical effect of reinforcing white stereotypes about black people. As Martin Berger
demonstrates in his revisionist study of iconic civil rights photos, Seeing through Race, white-run
newspapers selected civil rights photos showing black passivity in the face of police violence while blackrun newspapers selected photos that showed both protesters and police as active agents. Berger
suggests that images of blacks offering no resistance to police violence were selected by white editors
because it was easier to gain white liberal sympathy by visually defining racism as excessive acts of
brutality, from which moderate and liberal whites could distance themselves, while at the same time
their racial anxiety could be quelled by the picturing of black non-resistance, which meant that whites
were still in charge.4 Black editors, on the other hand, often preferred to show black agency . Similar
juxtapositions are established by the visual record of Ferguson. The hyper-militarized police deploy
tanks and automatic assault rifles, flash bombs, tear gas and rubber bullets, weapons that recall the
water cannons and dogs of the civil rights era. Both then and now, photos of the militarized police facing
black protesters who are non-resistant perform reassuring symbolic work that manages white anxieties
about race. Whites are still in control and racism is understood as brutal acts of violence , not as part of
the insidious indignities and brutalization of everyday life. Picturing blacks as non-threatening and nonresistant effectively places them in a role of limited power; it does not fundamentally threaten white
racial power. As Berger observes of civil rights photos, “The photographs presented story lines that
allowed magnanimous and sympathetic whites to imagine themselves bestowing rights on blacks, given
that the dignified and suffering blacks of the photographic record appeared in no position to take
anything from white America.”5 Whether progressive or reactionary, whites, not blacks , are
constructed as the agents of change while normalizing black passivity and even subtly promoting
ongoing black humiliation. It must be understood that equating racism only with acts of police brutality
obscures the values of whiteness that are foundational to the racial hierarchy and that repress black
agency.6 Demonstrating their control of the black body even after death, the police left Michael Brown’s
body in the street for more than four hours, lying face down with blood streaming from his head in
broad daylight in the summer sun. Although officers quickly secured the area with yellow tape, they
stood at a distance while horrified neighbors called news stations, shielded their children and took shaky
cellphone videos that have found their way into the national media. Although Brown’s body was
covered after a brief period with a sheet by a passing paramedic, his feet were left exposed and his
blood was visible. More cops were called to the scene as the tension levels mounted among shocked
residents. The Ferguson police defended the long delay by asserting that “the time that elapsed in
getting detectives to the scene was not out of the ordinary, and that conditions made it unusually
difficult to do all that they needed.”7 The former New York City chief medical examiner, Dr. Michael M.
Baden, who was hired by the Brown family’s lawyers to do an autopsy, observed that there was “no
forensic reason” for leaving the body in view for so long.8 At best, allowing Brown’s body to remain in
public view in the presence of distressed family members suggests gross incompetence and insensitivity.
At worst, it continues the legacy of American lynching in which white supremacists left murdered black
bodies exposed as warnings to members of the black community to “stay in their place.” Images of nonresistant protesters are not the only photos available, however. Another iconic image taken in Ferguson
is that of a young black man wearing an American flag t-shirt and hurling a tear-gas canister back at the
police with one hand while casually holding a bag of potato chips in the other (Figure 3). This is an act of
self-defense against the perpetrators of violence. For blacks, confronting the police and throwing back a
tear gas canister that had been flung at them became a badge of honor.9 For racist whites who are
predisposed to see images of blacks as active agents in their own defense as a form of “violence,” such
an image may validate what they believe about the proper hierarchy of racial power. The real fear of
seeing blacks as more than passive and non-resistant, that is, as active agents in defense of their rights,
is the specter it raises of more organized social and political struggle , in concert with allied whites,
against the racist capitalist system of injustice that allows the criminalization of blackness and the
wanton killing of black people. The police have become so militarized in great part as a response to the
threat of social struggle. Militarygrade hardware found its way into the hands of local police forces
around the country long before the attacks of 9/11. In 1990, the National Defense Authorization Act
empowered the Pentagon to transfer to federal and state agencies Department of Defense equipment
“suitable for use by such agencies in counter-drug activities.”10 Thus the “war on drugs,” which targeted
black men disproportionately, greatly furthered the militarization of the police and stockpiling of
hardware that we see in towns and cities such as Ferguson today. SWAT teams, in which helmeted and
masked police enter homes with guns drawn, knocking down the door with a battering ram and rushing
inside, were originally formed to deal with “civil unrest” as well as life-threatening situations. Today they
are routinely deployed to serve drug-related warrants in private homes.11 As economic inequality
continues to grow exponentially, the state invests in ever more security , surveillance and weaponry.
Far more money is spent on policing and government efforts to counteract protest movements than on
rebuilding our declining cities by creating jobs, renewing infrastructure, providing adequate housing, city
services, or access to health care and education. While it is more difficult to photograph the complex
social dynamics of poverty and economic decline in hundreds of cities across the nation and the
criminalization of black people, another Ferguson image alludes to the larger racial dynamic in America.
A young black protester holds a sign written on cardboard that says, “My blackness is not a weapon”
(https://twitter.com/erikasway/status/502289519178444800). This assertion recognizes that in a
country where racial equality has yet to be achieved, blackness itself is regarded as a threat, especially if
you are young and male. As conservative pundit Ben Stein openly said of Michael Brown on Newsmax,
“He wasn't unarmed. He was armed with his incredibly strong, scary self.”12 Blackness itself evokes
white racial anxiety and the need to contain and control that anxiety through racist repression. Such
repression can only be countered by organized social struggle with clear emancipatory goals . Moral
appeals through passive non-resistance, or other symbolic gestures, while courageous and useful in
raising the visibility of injustice, will not be enough .
Musical identity politics reinforce exclusion by fetishizing cultural objects as a mode of
resistance- this occludes critical analysis of materiality
John Hutnyk 2000 “Critique of Exotica: Music, Politics and the Culture Industry” pg. 132-134 Hutnyk is
Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, London. He is the author of The Rumour of
Calcutta: Tourism, Charity and the Poverty of Representations (1996) and co-editor of Dis-Orienting
Rhythms (1996).
Exclusive identity affiliation and separatism poses an obstacle for alliance and solidarity, but it is possible
to imagine affiliations across identifications (see Sharma and Housee 1999). In an interview With Lowe,
Angela Davis offered the formula of 'basing identity on politics rather than the politics on identity' (Davis
1997). Since groupings like Asian, South Asian, and even Indian or Pakistani, as well as British Asian,
Asian-American, etc., Can only be usefully thought Of as socially constructed entities and never in the
natural or static ways that are deployed by racists, nationalists and dullards, any strategic deployment
Of these terms in a 'positive essentialism' should maintain a watch over the ways terms may be
reified and become counter-productive even within the politics for which they are deployed. The
'scrupulously visible political interest' proposed by Spivak ( 1987 : 205) must do serious duty in the
context of alliance formation with other groups in colour, class, sexuality and gender-based struggles.
Lowe cites Fanon's recognition that any movement to dismantle colonialism faces the challenge Of
providing a 'new order' that does not reproduce 'the social structure Of the Old system' nor any
assimilation to the 'dominant culture's roles and positions by the emergent group, which would merely
caricature the old colonialism' (Lowe 1996: 72). Fanon's text about anti-colonial nationalism proves
instructive in the context Of the so-called postcolonial, as elite and comprador classes seem to have
failed exactly this challenge, and have done so, it would seem, by way Of abandoning the Leninist
project which required Of revolutionaries that they first Of all smash the State apparatus. Schools,
communications media, the legal system, etc., work to assimilate diverse differences in a melting pot
public domain" which operates a rhetoric of equality or rights but consistently forgets and occludes
the material inequalities that persist — for clear historical and political reasons — within that
domain.ls This is yet again the same trick Which suggests that the sale Of labour power by the worker to
the capitalist is a fair and free exchange. In the culture industry's fascination with curry and cornershop,
hip-hop and dreadlocks, and so on, it is possible to witness the cultural operation of this rhetoric of
equality which appreciates difference on the basis Of an oblique blindness to inequality and material
opportunity. The recognition of this contradiction, in which fetishised and celebrated 'objects' of culture
come to do duty for obscured social relations between really existing people, is a first, but insufficient,
step towards a cultural politics. While it is certainly necessary to take part in the fight against the ways
inequalities are Obscured by pluralist multiculturalism and its restricted notions of identity, we also
need to take up a more militant and Organised project which goes beyond this first Step Of learning to
'think through the ways in which culture may be rearticulated as a site for alternative histories and
memories that provide the grounds to imagine subject, community, and practice in new ways' (Lowe
1996:96). It is also possible that the isolated announcement that culturalism enacts an exclusion of
material reality is itself in danger of reinforcing that very exclusion, especially where the prescribed
action is also culturalist, however strategic. What is missing here is how a culturalist politics cannot just
recognise real material issues but must actually attempt to do something about them. In groups
together 'testimony, personal narrative, oral history, literature, film, visual arts, and other cultural forms
as sites through which subject, community, and struggle are stratified and mediated' as 'oppositional
narratives'. These 'are crucial to the imagination and rearticulation Of new forms Of political
subjectivity, collectivity, and practice' (Inwe 1996: 158). Very good. But this 'alternative politicization',
on its own, is in danger Of operating only an administrative change at the helm of the institutions of
cultural management (dusky brethren curating the new museums, a few postcolonial superstars on the
conference circuit, feted rap and sports personalities, but between these examples and the material
reality of cultural operation exists the same difference between the service personnel Of a five Star
hotel and the international jet-setting guests). Lowe's occasional references to the formation of a 'new'
workforce 'within the global reorganization of capitalism' Which is 'linked to an emergent political
formation, organizing across race, class, and national boundaries' are offered in programmatic terms
only at the end of the book and not in detail. The call remains for 'alternative forms of cultural practice
that integrate yet move beyond those of cultural nationalism' (Lowe 1996: 1 71); for 'oppositional and
contestatory' immigrant cultures, provoking contradictions which may be 'critically politicized in cultural
forms and so as to be 'utilized in the formation Of alternative social practices'; as part of a 'process
based on strategic alliances between different sectors, not on their abstract identity' (Lowe 1996: 172);
and to 'propose, enact, and embody subjects and practices not contained by the narrative Of American
citizenship' (Lowe 1996: 176). While the 'explicit dimension' of 'Rap's cultural politics lie in its lyrical
expression', Tricia Rose reminds us that alongside this, there are other important factors. It is the
struggle over public space, meanings and interpretations that is critical in 'contemporary cultural
politics' (Rose 1994: 124). It is crucial to add that the struggle of black Americans to claim public Space is
not one — however large a percentage Of the Billboard top 40 chart may be claimed by Def Jam, and
however much rap provides the soundtrack for urban lives — that is easily won. The key problem here,
as in — to use Rose's own formulation — the case With cultural production in general, is that there is
more than one context, more than one public, more than one interpretation and more than one
struggle, many reactions, many things to say. This is the contradictory nature Of the cultural industry —
at the very same time as a struggle for meaning and space opens possibilities Of articulation that were
previously closed, the extension of 'saying' into public space in a larger context can risk closing off other
possibilities, or engaging a ventriloquy which speaks on behalf Of Others. That Apache Indian becomes
the sole representative Of bhangra is a case in point: bhangra, South Asian musics, even Apache himself,
are much too complex to be glossed in this, albeit understandable in the context, fashion. The
contradiction which is to be kept in mind is that progressive sounds in one space may become the
agents Of imperialism (and sales projections for Nike) in another. The nature of commodity fetishism
and the ever multiplying fragmentation of 'culture' and social relations into a million products in the
market is what requires critical analysis. Difference is selling well on the display tables of tourism,
technology, television and tele-marketing. Difference is in style. Yet if we recall the ways these
commodities (souvenirs, identities, band Width, melody — anything that can in the culture-vulture
tradehouse hall) are, as Marx explained, congealed social relations between people in, however
refracted, communication with each other, we can begin to reconsider difference as something to be
reclaimed, not as identity-product, but as a grounding for solidarity and unity and a possible way beyond
the culture industry.
Cap’s the root cause of racial oppression and makes extinction inevitable
Peter Mclaren 4, Education and Urban Schooling Division prof, UCLA—and Valerie ScatamburloD'Annibale; University of Windsor, Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 36, No. 2, 2004,
www.freireproject.org/articles/node%2065/RCGS/class_dismissed-val-peter.10.pdf
For example, E. San Juan (2003) argues that race relations and race conflict are necessarily structured by
the larger totality of the political economy of a given society, as well as by modifications in the structure
of the world economy. He further notes that the capitalist mode of production has articulated ‘race’
with class in a peculiar way. He too is worth a substantial quotation:¶ While the stagnation of rural life
imposed a racial or castelike rigidity to the peasantry, the rapid accumulation of wealth through the ever
more intensifying exploitation of labor by capital could not so easily ‘racialize’ the wage-workers of a
particular nation, given the alienability of labor power—unless certain physical or cultural characteristics
can be utilized to divide the workers or render one group an outcast or pariah removed from the
domain of ‘free labor.’ In the capitalist development of U.S. society, African, Mexican, and Asian
bodies—more precisely, their labor power and its reproductive efficacy—were colonized and racialized;
hence the idea of ‘internal colonialism’ retains explanatory validity. ‘Race’ is thus constructed out of raw
materials furnished by class relations, the history of class conflicts, and the vicissitudes of
colonial/capitalist expansion and the building of imperial hegemony. It is dialecticallyaccented and
operationalized not just to differentiate the price of wagelabor within and outside the territory of the
metropolitan power, but alsoto reproduce relations of domination–subordination invested with an
auraof naturality and fatality. The refunctioning of physical or cultural traits as ideological and political
signifiers of class identity reifies social relations. Such ‘racial’ markers enter the field of the alienated
laborprocess, concealing the artificial nature of meanings and norms, and essentializing or naturalizing
historical traditions and values which are contingent on mutable circumstances. ¶ For San Juan, racism
and nationalism are modalities in which class struggles articulate themselves at strategic points in
history. He argues thatracism arose with thecreation and expansion of the capitalist world economy. He
maintains, rightly in our view, that racial or ethnic group solidarity is given ‘meaning and value in terms
of theirplace within the social organization ofproduction and reproduction of the ideological-political
order; ideologies of racism as collective social evaluation of solidarities arise to reinforce structural
constraints which preserve the exploited and oppressed position of these “racial” solidarities’.¶ It is
remarkable, in our opinion, that so much of contemporary social theory has largely abandoned the
problems of labor, capitalist exploitation, and class analysis at a time when capitalism is becoming more
universal, more ruthless and more deadly. The metaphor of a contemporary ‘tower of Babel’ seems
appropriate here—academics striking radical poses in the seminar rooms while remaining oblivious to
the possibility that their seemingly radical discursive maneuvers do nothing to further the struggles
‘against oppression and exploitation which continue to be real, material, and not merely “discursive”
problems of the contemporary world’ (Dirlik, 1997, p. 176). Harvey (1998, pp. 29–31) indicts the new
academic entrepreneurs, the ‘masters of theory-in-and-for-itself’ whose ‘discourse radicalism’ has
deftly side-stepped ‘the enduring conundrums of class struggle’ and who have, against a ‘sobering
background of cheapened discourse and opportunistic politics,’ been ‘stripped of their self-advertised
radicalism.’ For years, they ‘contested socialism,’ ridiculed Marxists, and promoted ‘their own
alternative theories of liberatory politics’ but now they have largely been ‘reduced to the role of
supplicants in the most degraded form of pluralist politics imaginable.’ As they pursue the politics of
difference, the ‘class war rages unabated’ and they seem ‘either unwilling or unable to focus on the
unprecedented economic carnage occurring around the globe.’¶ Harvey’s searing criticism suggests that
post-Marxists have been busy fiddling while Rome burns and his comments echo those made by Marx
(1978, p. 149) in his critique of the Young Hegelians who were, ‘in spite of their allegedly
“worldshattering” statements, the staunchest conservatives.’ Marx lamented that the Young Hegelians
were simply fighting ‘phrases’ and that they failed to acknowledge that in offering only counter-phrases,
they were in no way ‘combating the real existing world’ but merely combating the phrases of the world.
Taking a cue from Marx and substituting ‘phrases’ with ‘discourses’ or ‘resignifications’ we would
contend that the practitioners of difference politics who operate within exaggerated culturalist
frameworks that privilege the realm of representation as the primary arena of political struggle question
some discourses of power while legitimating others. Moreover, because they lack a class perspective,
their gestures of radicalism are belied by their own class positions.10 As Ahmad (1997a, p. 104) notes:¶
One may speak of any number of disorientations and even oppressions, but one cultivates all kinds of
politeness and indirection about the structure of capitalist class relations in which those oppressions are
embedded. To speak of any of that directly and simply is to be ‘vulgar.’ In this climate of Aesopian
languages it is absolutely essential to reiterate that most things are a matter of class. That kind of
statement is … surprising only in a culture like that of the North American university … But it is precisely
in that kind of culture that people need to hear such obvious truths. ¶ Ahmad’s provocative observations
imply that substantive analyses of the carnage wrought by ‘globalized’ class exploitation have, for the
most part, been marginalized by the kind of radicalism that has been instituted among the academic Left
in North America. He further suggests that while various post-Marxists have invited us to join their
euphoric celebrations honoring the decentering of capitalism, the abandonment of class politics, and the
decline of metanarratives (particularly those of Marxism and socialism), they have failed to see that the
most ‘meta of all metanarratives of the past three centuries, the creeping annexation of the globe for
the dominance of capital over laboring humanity has met, during those same decades, with stunning
success’ (Ahmad, 1997b, p. 364). As such, Ahmad invites us to ask anew, the proverbial question: What,
then, must be done? To this question we offer no simple theoretical, pedagogical or political
prescriptions. Yet we would argue that if social change is the aim, progressive educators and theorists
must cease displacing class analysis with the politics of difference. ¶ Conclusion … we will take our
stand against the evils [of capitalism, imperialism, and racism] with a solidarity derived from a
proletarian internationalism born of socialist idealism. —National Office of the Black Panther Party,
February 1970¶ For well over two decades we have witnessed the jubilant liberal and conservative
pronouncements of the demise of socialism. Concomitantly, history’s presumed failure to defang
existing capitalist relations has been read by many self-identified ‘radicals’ as an advertisement for
capitalism’s inevitability. As a result, the chorus refrain ‘There Is No Alternative’, sung by liberals and
conservatives, has been buttressed by the symphony of post-Marxist voices recommending that we give
socialism a decent burial and move on. Within this context, to speak of the promise of Marx and
socialism may appear anachronistic, even naïve, especially since the post-al intellectual vanguard has
presumably demonstrated the folly of doing so. Yet we stubbornly believe that the chants of T.I.N.A.
must be combated for they offer as a fait accompli, something which progressive Leftists should refuse
to accept—namely the triumph of capitalism and its political bedfellow neo-liberalism, which have
worked together to naturalize suffering, undermine collective struggle, and obliterate hope. We
concur with Amin (1998), who claims that such chants must be defied and revealed as absurd and
criminal, and who puts the challenge we face in no uncertain terms: humanity may let itself be led by
capitalism’s logic to a fate of collective suicide or it may pave the way for an alternative humanist
project of global socialism.¶ The grosteque conditions that inspired Marx to pen his original critique of
capitalism are present and flourishing. The inequalities of wealth and the gross imbalances of power
that exist today are leading to abuses that exceed those encountered in Marx’s day (Greider, 1998, p.
39). Global capitalism has paved the way for the obscene concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer
hands and created a world increasingly divided between those who enjoy opulent affluence and those
who languish in dehumanizing conditions and economic misery. In every corner of the globe, we are
witnessing social disintegration as revealed by a rise in abject poverty and inequality. At the current
historical juncture, the combined assets of the 225 richest people is roughly equal to the annual income
of the poorest 47 percent of the world’s population, while the combined assets of the three richest
people exceed the combined GDP of the 48 poorest nations (CCPA, 2002, p. 3). Approximately 2.8
billion people—almost half of the world’s population—struggle in desperation to live on less than two
dollars a day (McQuaig, 2001, p. 27). As many as 250 million children are wage slaves and there are
over a billion workers who are either un- or under-employed. These are the concrete realities of our
time—realities that require a vigorous class analysis, an unrelenting critique of capitalism and an
oppositional politics capable of confronting what Ahmad (1998, p. 2) refers to as ‘capitalist universality.’
They are realities that require something more than that which is offered by the prophets of ‘difference’
and post-Marxists who would have us relegate socialism to the scrapheap of history and mummify
Marxism along with Lenin’s corpse. Never before has a Marxian analysis of capitalism and class rule
been so desperately needed. That is not to say that everything Marx said or anticipated has come true,
for that is clearly not the case. Many critiques of Marx focus on his strategy for moving toward socialism,
and with ample justification; nonetheless Marx did provide us with fundamental insights into class
society that have held true to this day. Marx’s enduring relevance lies in his indictment of capitalism
which continues to wreak havoc in the lives of most. While capitalism’s cheerleaders have attempted to
hide its sordid underbelly, Marx’s description of capitalism as the sorcerer’s dark power is even more
apt in light of contemporary historical and economic conditions. Rather than jettisoning Marx,
decentering the role of capitalism, and discrediting class analysis, radical educators must continue to
engage Marx’s oeuvre and extrapolate from it that which is useful pedagogically, theoretically, and,
most importantly, politically in light of the challenges that confront us.
The alternative is to reconceptualize democracy as a starting point for unique forms of
civic engagement - rejecting the aff's consumptive scholarship is a pre-requisite to
fostering radical imagination in public spheres
Henry Giroux January 13, 2014"Reclaiming the Radical Imagination: Challenging Casino Capitalism's
Punishing Factories "http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21113-disimagination-machines-andpunishing-factories-in-the-age-of-casino-capitalism Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV
Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and
a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University.
In my view, the American public is no longer offered the guidance, opportunities and modes of civic
education that cultivate their capacity for critical thinking and engaged citizenship. As public values are
written out of the vocabulary circulating within important pedagogical spheres such as public and higher
education, for example, a mode of civic illiteracy and moral irresponsibility emerges in which it becomes
difficult for young people and the broader American public to translate private troubles into public
concerns. When civic literacy declines and the attacks on civic values intensify, the commanding
institutions of society are divorced from matters of ethics, social responsibility and civic engagement.
One consequence is the emergence of a kind of anti-politics in which the discourses of privatization,
possessive individualism and crass materialism inundate every aspect of social life, making it easy for
people to lose their faith in the critical function of civic education and the culture of an open and
substantive democracy. The very essence of politics has been emptied of any substantive meaning and is
now largely employed as a form of anti-politics legitimating a range of anti-democratic policies and
practices ranging from attacks on women’s reproduction rights and the voting rights act to a war on
unions, public servants, public school teachers, young people immigrants and poor minorities. As public
spaces are transformed into spaces of consumption, the formative cultures that provide the
preconditions for critical thought and agency crucial to any viable notion of democracy are eviscerated.
The conditions for encouraging the radical imagination has been transformed into the spectacle of
illiteracy, repression, state violence, massive surveillance, the end of privacy, and the ruthless
consolidation of power by the ultrarich and powerful financial interest. The imagination is under intense
assault and increasingly is relegated to the dead zone of casino capitalism, where social and civil death
has become the norm. Under such circumstances, civil society along with critical thought cannot be
sustained and become short-lived, fickle and ephemeral. At the same time, it becomes more difficult for
individuals to comprehend what they have in common with others and what it means to be held
together by shared responsibilities rather than shared fears and competitive struggles. As the dominant
culture is emptied out of any substantive meaning and filled with the spectacles of the entertainment
industry, the banality of celebrity culture, and a winner-take-all consumer mentality, the American
people lose both the languages and the public spheres in which they can actually "think" politics; can, in
Tony Judt’s words, "respond energetically or imaginatively to new challenges"; and can collectively
organize to influence the commanding ideologies, social practices, and institutions that bear down daily
on their lives.[19] Numbed into a moral and political stupor, large segments of the American public and
media have not only renounced the political obligation to question authority but also the moral
obligation to care for the fate and well-being of others. In a market-driven system in which economic
and political decisions are removed from social costs, the flight from responsibility and critical thought is
further accentuated by a toxic fog that resembles a moral coma. In such instances, as Wendy Brown has
noted, depoliticization works its way through the social order, removing social relations from the
configurations of power that shape them and substituting "emotional and personal vocabularies for
political ones in formulating solutions to political problems." [20] As private interests trump the public
good, public spaces are corroded, and short-term personal advantage replaces any larger notion of civic
engagement and social responsibility. Missing from the neoliberal market society are those public
spheres - from public and higher education to the mainstream media and digital screen culture - where
people can develop what might be called the civic imagination. In my judgment, for-profit spheres are
increasingly replacing the spaces in which the civic and radical imagination enables individuals to
understand and hold accountable the larger historical, social, political and economic forces that bear
down on their lives. The rules of commerce now dictate the meaning of what it means to be educated.
Yet, spaces that promote a radical imaginary are crucial in a democracy because they are foundational
for developing those formative cultures necessary for young and old alike to develop the knowledge,
skills and values central to democratic forms of education, engagement, and agency. What is particularly
troubling in American society is the growing absence of a formative culture necessary to construct
questioning agents who are capable of dissent and collective action in an imperiled democracy. Matters
of justice, equality, and political participation are foundational to any functioning democracy, but it is
important to recognize that they have to be rooted in a vibrant formative culture in which democracy is
understood not just as a political and economic structure but also as a civic force enabling justice,
equality and freedom to flourish.
Case
Trends lines and historical anecdotes disprove the pessimistic thesis of the 1AC- the
myopia of Hands-Up-Don’t-Shoot abandons progressive strategies of truth and hope
that are key to solve their impacts
Larry Elder January 2, 2015 “Hands Up, Don't Shoot' Activists -- and Historical
Ignorance”http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/01/02/hands_up_dont_shoot_activists_-_and_historical_ignorance_125117.html Elder earned his B.A.. in political science in 1974 from Brown
University. He then earned his J.D. from University of Michigan Law School in 1977.[5] After graduation,
he worked with a law firm in Cleveland, Ohio, where he practiced litigation.
What to say about "activists" pushing the "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" "movement," even as police
shootings of blacks are actually down 75 percent over the last 45 years? Some protestors, many old
enough to know better, say ridiculous things about race relations, like "things have gone backward."
Time for perspective. Booker T. Washington was born a slave. In his autobiography, "Up From Slavery,"
written in 1901 -- just a mere 36 years after the Civil War -- Washington wrote: "As a rule, not only did
the members of my race entertain no feelings of bitterness against the whites before and during the
war, but there are many instances of Negroes tenderly caring for their former masters and mistresses
who for some reason have become poor and dependent since the war. I know of instances where the
former masters of slaves have for years been supplied with money by their former slaves to keep them
from suffering. ... One sends him a little coffee or sugar, another a little meat, and so on. Nothing that
the coloured people possess is too good for the son of 'old Mars' Tom,' who will perhaps never be
permitted to suffer while any remain on the place who knew directly or indirectly of 'old Mars' Tom.'...
"From some things that I have said one may get the idea that some of the slaves did not want freedom.
This is not true. I have never seen one who did not want to be free, or one who would return to slavery.
"I pity from the bottom of my heart any nation or body of people that is so unfortunate as to get
entangled in the net of slavery. I have long since ceased to cherish any spirit of bitterness against the
Southern white people on account of the enslavement of my race. No one section of our country was
wholly responsible for its introduction, and, besides, it was recognized and protected for years by the
General Government. Having once got its tentacles fastened on to the economic and social life of the
Republic, it was no easy matter for the country to relieve itself of the institution. Then, when we rid
ourselves of prejudice, or racial feeling, and look facts in the face, we must acknowledge that,
notwithstanding the cruelty and moral wrong of slavery, the ten million Negroes inhabiting this
country, who themselves or whose ancestors went through the school of American slavery, are in a
stronger and more hopeful condition, materially, intellectually, morally, and religiously, than is true of
an equal number of black people in any other portion of the globe. ... "This I say, not to justify slavery -on the other hand, I condemn it as an institution, as we all know that in America it was established for
selfish and financial reasons, and not from a missionary motive -- but to call attention to a fact, and to
show how Providence so often uses men and institutions to accomplish a purpose." As for the future,
Washington said: "When a Negro girl learns to cook, to wash dishes, to sew, to write a book, or a Negro
boy learns to groom horses, or to grow sweet potatoes, or to produce butter, or to build a house, or to
be able to practice medicine, as well or better than some one else, they will be rewarded regardless of
race or colour. In the long run, the world is going to have the best, and any difference in race, religion, or
previous history will not long keep the world from what it wants." Nelson Mandela was beaten and
imprisoned for almost three decades. When released at last, some supporters criticized him for showing
too much grace and forgiveness toward his enemies. But Mandela's attitude toward forgiveness set the
tone for the nation. After his death, a South African wrote: "History now shows (Mandela) did lead
South Africa back from the abyss. But he did more, and it was this that sealed his reputation forever.
He showed the world and his countrymen -- black, white, rich, poor -- that revenge is not the answer
to years of injustice (emphasis added). Who among us, in coming out of prison after 27 years, would
have had the generosity to turn away from settling scores? Who among us would have refused to
avenge ourselves on those who had treated us with such cruelty? "But he did. Nelson Mandela sat
down with his enemies and forgave them and moved on. And in doing so, he rescued his country, and
he rescued each one of us, and gave us hope that there could be a future for our beautiful, fractured
land. And for the greater earth that we all share." Washington, born a slave, and Mandela, held captive
for nearly 28 years, demonstrate the power of forgiveness -- and of looking ahead. And these men
forgave their actual oppressors. My mother, born in the Jim Crow South, used to say, "The truth will not
set you free -- if delivered without hope." The "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" "movement" is neither truthful
nor hopeful.
Suicide ethics are counterproductive to rehabilitation. Positive self-love is mutually
exclusive with death, and a most coherent and productive response to the illness of
the status quo.
Sullivan 2012 (Shannon Sullivan, Professor of Philosophy, Women's Studies, and African American
Studies, Philosophy Department Head at Penn State University, “On the Need for a New Ethos of White
Antiracism,” PhiloSOPHIA, Vol 2, Issue 1, Muse)
This is not something that most “good” white people want to hear. Wise recounts a story that
underscores this point, as well as confirms Marcano’s insight into the lack of trust across race lines.
When giving a presentation on whiteness to a predominantly white college audience, a young white
woman asked Wise how his work was received by black people and admitted that she didn’t think she
could do the same sort of work because black people wouldn’t trust her. Wise replied that while there
occasionally was some mistrust, he never felt hated or resented once black people had seen him work
and “walk the walk,” not just “talk the talk.” At that point, an extremely agitated black woman raised
her hand and responded, “Make NO mistake . . . we do hate you and we don’t trust you, not for one
minute!” (Wise 2005, 97). The young white woman was so distressed that she nearly fell apart. The
black woman’s response apparently confirmed all her worst fears as a “good” white person. Wise,
however, calmly replied to the black woman that he was sorry to hear this, but it was okay since he
ultimately wasn’t fighting racism for the sake of nonwhite people. Upon hearing this, the entire
audience snapped to attention as if a bomb had been dropped in the room, and even the agitated black
woman looked puzzled. So Wise (2005, 98) continued, “I mean no disrespect by saying that. . . . It’s just
that I don’t view it as my job to fight racism so as to save you from it. That would be paternalistic. . . . I
fight [racism] because it’s a sickness in my community, and I’m trying to save myself from it.”¶ On a
dominant understanding of morality, Wise’s reply appears to selfishly care for himself and his racial
group more than he cares about the black woman and other black people. This is why his audience was
shocked by his reply to the black woman’s mistrust. In addition to being uncaring and selfish, Wise
doesn’t prioritize the establishment of close, trusting relationships between himself and other people of
color as a goal, or even a means of his activist work. On a conventional understanding of how white
antiracism should operate, the distance Wise allows between himself and people of color makes his
activism ineffective at best, and scandalous at worst. But we can view Wise’s reply and his activist work
through the lens of a different ethos, one that encourages white people’s “selfish” attention to their
own race and understands the importance [End Page 34] of white self-love to their work for racial
justice. Wise is fighting for white people’s racial health, rather than their racial goodness, and he sees
that their improved health will make them better able to join with communities of color in a relationship
of genuine respect, rather than paternalistic domination.¶ “Selfishly” cleaning up their own house is one
of the best ways that white people today can contribute to racial justice and transform the meaning and
effects of whiteness. In Lucius Outlaw’s (2004) terms, it is the way that whiteness can be
“rehabilitated,” or returned to a condition of good health . I’m not sure that whiteness has ever been
very healthy, as I think Outlaw would agree, so the return here is very much in question. But the sickness
and need for better health are not. White people have been ill from white domination for centuries. If
they are to recover, they need answers to the question of what a healthier whiteness might be, answers,
in Outlaw’s (2004, 161) words, “that must be taken up and lived by folks who identify as ‘white.’” This is
not work white people can ask or demand that people of color do for them, which is not to say that
white people don’t have a great deal to learn about themselves from nonwhite people.14 While they
cannot do it in a white solipsistic vacuum, white people need to develop a new ethos for their white
identities. No one else can live their whiteness for them. So what will they—we, I—do with it? I think the
best answers to this question will be ones that emerge apart from the dominance of white guilt and
shame. By developing a bestowing self-love that helps transform whiteness , white people can make
positive and ongoing contributions to struggles for racial justice.15
Artifacts designed to convey a the depth structural racism render an illusion of
particularity that essentializes resistance strategies- crowds out all other forms of
engagement
Ben Pitcher 2014 “Consuming Race” pg. 144-6 Pitcher is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the
University of Westminster, London
This book has explored some of the ways in which we are all of us involved in the production and
reproduction of racial meanings in acts of everyday consumption. It has suggested that race is very
much a part of the ordinary business of being a human being in the contemporary world. An
engagement with race on the terms set out in this book undermines racial essentialisms, working
against investments in race as the property of particular groups and individuals. As I have shown, racial
meanings can — as everybody already knows - be divisive and destructive by elaborating harmful
distinctions between groups and individuals: racial meanings can produce raeisms, practices of
discrimination and inequality. Yet as I have also shown, the meanings of race exceed racism. As a
mechanism of desire, understanding, exploration and transformation, race is also a creative resource
that we use to navigate our way through our contemporary cultures. To engage with race does not
make you a racist, any more than engaging with gender makes you a sexist. The analogy with gender is a
useful one, and not only because, like race, it has historically tended to be indexed to and guaranteed by
ideas about biological essence. Certainly, we can (and should) use gender to talk about inequality, but
we also can (and should) use gender to talk in broader terms about the production of human
differences, differences that it makes absolutely no sense to think about in terms of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ or
‘good’ or ‘bad’. As poststructuralist feminist theory so adeptly shows, we can (and should) also use
gender to talk about challenging, redefining and reworking those differences, in the name of freer,
fairer, alternative or more interesting futures. The ‘end’ of gender is hypothetically possible, but we only
get there by ‘doing’ gender in gendered cultures, not through fantasy mechanisms of transcendence and
overcoming. I would make precisely the same points about race: we can (and should) talk about race in
critical, descriptive and transformative terms; there is no reason why we should confine ourselves only
to the first of these, because in fact these terms are all implicated in and require one another. One
way that it might be useful to think about this is in relation to what is often conceived of in discussions
of racism as the determining force of racial histories. Because of the resilient way in which race
continues to be a part of our cultures, it is common to think about race in terms of a kind of stubborn
‘weight’ of history. Histories of race can be afforded a real force and agency that is used to explain race’s
persistence in the con- temporary world. In such analyses, it is as if racial histories quantify race, turning
it into a heavy object inexorably bearing down upon and patterning human culture. Race as a
determining force is often present, too, in the language of ‘structure’ and ‘institutions’ that anti-racists
often deploy to describe race’s apparent ‘depth’ of cultural embeddedness, the way in which racist
cultures cannot simply be changed like an individual might change their mind. These metaphors of
weight and structural depth can all provide some useful ways of thinking about the cultural politics of
race, but it is nevertheless important that we hold on to the fact that they are metaphors, and be
careful that they do encourage us to think about race as an entity or phenomenon beyond human
intervention. Whether intentionally or otherwise, there is often a curious tendency to evasion in antiracist pronouncements that, intent on stressing the seriousness and profundity of race, seem to close
the subject off to thinking in any detail about how it actually gets made and remade (how, in other
words, that historical weight and depth is manifested). We get a portentous sense of the importance of
race, but not much of a grasp of how and why it has this status, potentially leaving us with the feeling
that we probably can’t do very much about it. This book has tried to make an argument that helps to fill
in some of those conceptual gaps, and refuse the fatalism that can accompany such a strong sense of
racial determination. I have tried in this book’s examples to show some of the ways iI1 which we are all
enmeshed and invested in the production of racial meanings. Race is implicated in multiple aspects of
our social and cultural lives. The metaphor of ‘depth’ might be better conceived as ‘breadth’, for as I
have been arguing, race is not a ‘narrow’ thing (to do with just racism), but is dispersed right across the
realm of human experience. The advantage of this recognition — which is an acknowledgement that we
are necessarily involved in race, but that this does not necessarily make us racists — is that it gives us an
idea of how we might productively engage with the subject. From this perspective, race is no longer an
inaccessible and unfathomable thing, reaching up from the depths of history to be treated with a fearful
reverence. Race is something that touches and entangles us all. The cultural politics of race become an
active and ongoing question of and for the present, of living relationships not dead relationships. This
does not mean we can vanish racism in a utopian gesture of wishing it away, but it does mean we can
examine in a more clear-sighted way the terrain of racial practice.” This terrain, as I have been arguing,
is a complex and complicated one. It does not have the false clarity derived from counterposing racism
and anti-racism as a description of race. Every single cultural reference and preference — from a choice
of clothing to a taste in literature to a taste in men to the act of typing a Search term into a web browser
— is potentially an act of consuming race, and can be scrutinized as such. Every single cultural move
potentially positions us within and contributes to the activity of racial formation. To see what race is,
and what it does, we need to open our eyes to it and start looking everywhere about us, the space of
our desire and pleasure as well as our responsibility. We may have arrived, at the end of this book, with
a renewed orientation towards the injustices and inequalities of race, but this has only been made
possible by what I would suggest is a necessary detour through a series of themes in which injustice and
inequality are not necessarily the first, most obvious, or indeed most significant elements. It is a detour
that helps us to understand that anti-racism is not only to do with taking a stance on some setpiece act
of racism (important as this may be), but a complicated process that we all of us live through, day by
day, as we go about the practice of being human beings. At a historical moment when anti-racist
hegemony prompts for many the suggestion that we might have got ‘beyond’ race, it is useful to be
reminded how racial meanings are, in truth, absolutely everywhere we look.
2NC
2NC OV
Their arg that their personal experience determines the validity of their argument is
solipsism—it stifles dialogue and is reductionist
David Bridges, Centre for Applied Research in Education, University of East Anglia, 2001, The Ethics of
Outsider Research, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 35, No. 3
First, it
is argued that only those who have shared in, and have been part of, a particular experience can
understand or can properly understand (and perhaps `properly' is particularly heavily loaded here) what it is like. You need to be a
woman to understand what it is like to live as a woman; to be disabled to understand what it is like to live as a disabled person etc. Thus
Charlton writes of `the innate inability of able-bodied people, regardless of fancy credentials and awards, to understand the disability
experience' (Charlton, 1998, p. 128).¶ Charlton's choice of language here is indicative of the rhetorical character which these arguments tend to
assume. This arises perhaps from the strength of feeling from which they issue, but it warns of a need for caution in their treatment and
acceptance. Even if able-bodied people have this `inability' it is difficult to see in what sense it is `innate'. Are all credentials `fancy' or might
some (e.g. those reflecting a sustained, humble and patient attempt to grapple with the issues) be pertinent to that ability? And does Charlton
really wish to maintain that there is a single experience which is the experience of disability, whatever solidarity disabled people might feel for
each other?¶ The understanding that any of us have of our own conditions or experience is unique and special, though recent work on
personal narratives also shows that it is itself multi-layered and inconstant, i.e. that we have and can provide many different understandings
even of our own lives (see, for example, Tierney, 1993). Nevertheless, our own understanding has a special status: it provides among other
things a data source for others' interpretations of our actions; it stands in a unique relationship to our own experiencing; and no one else can
have quite the same understanding. It is also plausible that people who share certain kinds of experience in common stand in a special position
in terms of understanding those shared aspects of experience. However,
once this argument is applied to such broad
categories as `women' or `blacks', it has to deal with some very heterogeneous groups; the different social,
personal and situational characteristics that constitute their individuality may well outweigh the shared
characteristics; and there may indeed be greater barriers to mutual understanding than there are
gateways.¶ These arguments, however, all risk a descent into solipsism: if our individual understanding is so
particular, how can we have communication with or any understanding of anyone else? But, granted
Wittgenstein's persuasive argument against a private language (Wittgenstein, 1963, perhaps more straightforwardly presented in Rhees, 1970),
we cannot in these circumstances even describe or have any real understanding of our own condition in
such an isolated world. Rather it is in talking to each other, in participating in a shared language, that we
construct the conceptual apparatus that allows us to understand our own situation in relation to others,
and this is a construction which involves under- standing differences as well as similarities.¶ Besides, we have good reason to treat
with some scepticism accounts provided by individuals of their own experience and by extension accounts provided
by members of a particular category or community of people. We know that such accounts can be riddled with special
pleading, selective memory, careless error, self-centredness, myopia, prejudice and a good deal more. A lesbian
scholar illustrates some of the pressures that can bear, for example, on an insider researcher in her own community:¶
As an insider, the lesbian has an important sensitivity to offer, yet she is also more vulnerable than the non-lesbian
researcher, both to the pressure from the heterosexual world--that her studies conform to previous works and describe lesbian reality in terms
of its relationship with the outside-- and to
pressure from the inside, from within the lesbian community itself--that
her studies mirror not the reality of that community but its self-protective ideology. (Kreiger, 1982, p. 108)¶ In other words,
while individuals from within a community have access to a particular kind of understanding of their
experience, this does not automatically attach special authority (though it might attach special interest) to their
own representations of that experience. Moreover, while we might acknowledge the limitations of the understanding which someone from outside a community (or someone other than the individual who is the focus of the research) can
develop, this does not entail that they cannot develop and present an understanding or that such
understanding is worthless. Individuals can indeed find benefit in the understandings that others offer of
their experience in, for example, a counselling relationship, or when a researcher adopts a supportive role with teachers engaged in reflection
on or research into their own practice. Many have echoed the plea of the Scottish poet, Robert Burns (in `To a louse'):¶ O wad some Pow'r the
giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us!3¶ --even
if they might have been horrified with what such power
revealed to them. Russell argued that it was the function of philosophy (and why not research too?) `to suggest many possibilities which
enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom . . .It keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an
unfamiliar aspect' (Russell, 1912, p. 91). `Making the familiar strange', as Stenhouse called it, often requires the assistance of someone
unfamiliar with our own world who can look at our taken-for-granted experience through, precisely, the eye of a stranger. Sparkes (1994)
writes very much in these terms in describing his own research, as a white, heterosexual middle- aged male, into the life history of a lesbian PE
teacher. He describes his own struggle with the question `is
it possible for heterosexual people to undertake research
into homosexual populations?' but he concludes that being a `phenomenological stranger' who asks `dumb
questions' may be a useful and illuminating experience for the research subject in that they may have to return to first
principles in reviewing their story. This could, of course be an elaborate piece of self-justification, but it is interesting that someone like Max
Biddulph, who writes from a gay/bisexual stand- point, can quote this conclusion with apparent approval (Biddulph, 1996).¶ People
from
outside a community clearly can have an understanding of the experience of those who are inside that
community. It is almost certainly a different understanding from that of the insiders. Whether it is of any value will depend
among other things on the extent to which they have immersed themselves in the world of the other and portrayed it in its richness and
complexity; on the empathy and imagination that they have brought to their enquiry and writing; on whether their stories are honest,
responsible and critical (Barone, 1992). Nevertheless, this value will also depend on qualities derived from the researchers' exter- nality: their
capacity to relate one set of experiences to others (perhaps from their own community); their outsider perspective on the structures which
surround and help to define the experience of the community; on the reactions and responses to that community of individuals and groups
external to it.4¶ Finally, it must surely follow that if we hold that a researcher, who (to take the favourable case) seeks honestly, sensitively and
with humility to understand and to represent the experience of a community to which he or she does not belong, is incapable of such
understanding and representation, then how can he or she understand either that same experience as mediated through the research of
someone from that community? The argument which excludes the outsider from under- standing a community
through the effort of their own research, a fortiori excludes the outsider from that understanding through the secondary source in the form of
the effort of an insider researcher or indeed any other means. Again, the point
can only be maintained by insisting that a
particular (and itself ill-defined) understanding is the only kind of understanding which is worth having.¶
The epistemological argument (that outsiders cannot understand the experience of a community to which they do not belong)
becomes an ethical argument when this is taken to entail the further proposition that they ought not therefore attempt to research
that community. I hope to have shown that this argument is based on a false premise. Even if the premise were
sound, however, it would not necessarily follow that researchers should be prevented or excluded from
attempting to under- stand this experience, unless it could be shown that in so doing they would cause some harm. This is
indeed part of the argument emerging from disempowered communities and it is to this that I shall now turn.
No reason ballot key – neg on presumption
A Reasonability
Makes judge intervention inevitable – either you defend a policy action or you don’t –
allowing leeway makes predictable ground of what is topical impossible.
Clear definition of terms is key
Resnick, assistant professor of political science – Yeshiva University, ‘1
(Evan, “Defining Engagement,” Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 54, Iss. 2)
In matters of national security, establishing a
clear definition of terms is a precondition for effective policymaking.
Decisionmakers who invoke critical terms in an erratic, ad hoc fashion risk alienating their constituencies. They also
risk exacerbating misperceptions and hostility among those the policies target. Scholars who commit the same error
undercut their ability to conduct valuable empirical research. Hence, if scholars and policymakers fail rigorously to define
"engagement," they undermine the ability to build an effective foreign policy.
PIC
Vote negative to endorse the suicide of whiteness without the involvement of
physicians
The creation of more medicalized control cause mass violence – short-circuits the
entire case
Enoch 4 (Simon Enoch, Ryerson university. 2004, http://www.foucault-studies.com/no1/enoch.pdf,
7/10/09)
We do not endorse Holocaust Trivialization
Finally, what is perhaps the most disconcerting and destabilizing aspect of Foucault’s conception of thanato-politics is his insistence that
this murderous potential always remains latent within the management and regulation of life processes that constitute modern biopolitics. Thus, to dismiss the actions of Nazi doctors as an “aberration” or as a “lethal outbreak of anachronistic
barbarism,” is to view these events as a singular anomaly in the otherwise progressive trajectory of
modernity, rather than a potential inherent within modernity itself.80 However, Foucault’s analysis cautions against
such an interpretation. The surfacing of a thanato-politics from a regime of bio-politics should not be construed as
uniquely peculiar to Nazism, rather it should be viewed as a potential latent in any bio-political regime,
regardless of its outward political appearance.81 Thanato-politics is the counterpart “of a power that exerts a
positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise
controls and comprehensive regulations.”82 While Nazism perhaps represents the most grotesque
manifestation of the thanato-politics latent within the regulatory and disciplinary techniques of modern biopower, Foucault reminds us that; They used and extended mechanisms already present in most other
societies. More than that: in spite of their own internal madness, they used to a largeextent the ideas and devices of our political
rationality.83 Similarly, Nazi medicine should not be viewed as a perversion of mainstream scientific canons, but
as extending the underlying rationality of modern science itself. As Mario Biagioli observes, much of the scholarship on
Nazi medicine tends to present Nazi scientific practices as a major anomaly in the history of science or as a deviation from proper medical
practice.84 However, Biagioli argues that such a view constitutes a “dangerous naivety” that prevents us from viewing “normal” medical
science as implicated in the Final Solution.85 Indeed, as Lerner has shown, The biologizing of prejudice, discrimination, and
ultimately the call for genocide was invented and promoted by “normal scientists,” and indeed by leaders
within their professions. Not only can these scientists, in hindsight, be regarded as among the top professionals in their fields at the
time of their work: they also saw themselves with some justification as having the same status as such people as Pasteur, Koch, and
Lister.86 Similarly, Lifton’s interviews with the assistants of Dr. Josef Mengele illustrates the degree to which practices that we now
consider irrational were once regarded as scientifically legitimate. As Lifton explains, Mengele’s assistant considered the scientific method
employed at the camps, [M]ore or less standard for the time, the norm for anthropological work. She recognized it as the same approach
she had been trained in at her Polish university under a distinguished anthropologist with German, pre-Nazi academic connections.87
Furthermore, as Milchman and Rosenberg demonstrate, the “myth of modern medicine” with its utopian designs
towards the engineering of the healthy society through the eradication of disease and death pervades the
Nazi bio- medical vision.88 Rather than constituting a radical break with the modern tenets of medical science, Nazi medicine
extended the same methods and rationality of mainstream medicine, albeit to a terrifying degree. To label such
practices as “bad science,” fraudulent, or methodologically incompetent in hindsight is to disregard Foucault’s emphasis on the historically
contingent nature of all forms of knowledge, medical science included. Indeed, that such practices were viewed as rational and legitimate
at the time, employed by eminent scientific professionals, calls into question the very legitimacy and rationality of scientific practices
conducted in our own present. Thus, Foucault exposes what Milchman and Rosenberg deem “the dark side of modernity,”
revealing the potential for genocidal practices not as a result of deviations from the values of reason and
rationality that constitute modernity, but inherent within modernity itself. Foucault thereby alerts us to the dangers
within the purported rational and progressive practices and techniques that characterize modernity.89 While the surfacing of this
murderous potential ensconced within modernity is neither inevitable or inescapable, Foucault’s insistence
that we recognize and interrogate this potential forces us to realize that “modernity is not a one-way trip to
freedom,” and that we must maintain a vigilant pessimism in regards to the truth claims of modernity in
order to forestall potential future holocausts.
A2 Accessibility
The law is produced and maintained by the production of cultural narratives and
assumptions---engagement with legal structures is vital to alter those cultural norms--this turns their offense because it’s directly in the interests of the powerful for law to
be seen as narrow and exclusionary---the more activists refuse to engage with the
legal system, the more the powerful consolidate their control. This proves there’s a
topical version of the aff, and only that version solves their offense.
Linda H. Edwards 13, the E.L. Cord Foundation Professor of Law, William S. Boyd School of Law,
University of Nevada Las Vegas, Fall/Winter 2013, “Where Do the Prophets Stand? Hamdi, Myth, and
the Master's Tools,” Connecticut Public Interest Law Journal, 13 Conn. Pub. Int. L.J. 43, p. lexis
I. Introduction
Imagine an ancient walled city. Inside the walls, the city's inhabitants busily go about their work. They have routines. They have a
common language. They do not always agree with each other, but they meet in common places and use accepted methods and
procedures to decide the city's issues. Outside the wall stands a small group of prophets . The prophets
have messages for the city's people, and they are trying to be heard over the city's walls. Occasionally a few
city dwellers become aware that someone is shouting from outside the walls, but the words fall strangely on
city dwellers' ears . The distant voices, barely audible, are lost among the background sounds of ongoing city life. Occasionally, a city
leader looks over the walls, notices the prophets, and lobs a verbal assault in their direction, but city life is unaffected. Year after year, the
prophets speak, and year after year, the city ignores them.¶ Does this image of the ancient walled city and the
prophets excluded from it describe the relationship of oppositionists with law? Have people like Patricia Williams, Robin
West, Kimberle Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, Mari Matsuda, and the late Derrick Bell been standing outside the gates for over thirty years,
critiquing the city of law and the work of its inhabitants? Many traditionalist n1 leaders seem to think so. Inside the city, they have been going
about their work unaffected, n2 using the same language and methods they learned from their mentors. Occasionally a traditionalist defender
reacts to the prophets, usually with name-calling derision. Consider this from Richard Posner:¶ [*44] ¶ What is most arresting about critical race
theory is that . . . it turns its back on the Western tradition of rational inquiry, forswearing analysis for narrative. Rather than marshal logical
arguments and empirical data, critical race theorists tell stories - fictional, science-fictional, autobiographical, anecdotal - designed to expose
the pervasive and debilitating racism of America today. By repudiating reasoned argumentation, the storytellers reinforce stereotypes about
the intellectual capacities of nonwhites. n3¶ Posner goes on, using terms like "lunatic core," "postmodernist virus," "loony Afrocentrism," and
"goofy ideas and irresponsible dicta." n4 He calls critical race theorists "whiners and wolf-criers," coming across as "labile and intellectually
limited." n5 He says, "Their grasp of social reality is weak; their diagnoses are inaccurate; their suggested cures . . . are tried and true failures.
Their lodgment in the law schools is a disgrace to legal education, which lacks the moral courage and the intellectual self-confidence to
pronounce a minority movement's scholarship bunk." n6 Having hurled his attack over the city walls, he goes back to his own work, unaffected
by oppositionist critique.¶ Posner and other traditionalists thus maintain
that oppositionists stand outside the gates of
law . If they are on law faculties, they should not be. n7 Whether this view is accurate depends, in large part, on what we mean by law. Some
of history's best scholars and judges have been tramping around in that field for a long time, so one might wonder how much ground remains
untrod. Still, we need to find some new territory, because we are far from a satisfactory answer. What's worse is that we
do not seem
able to have a productive conversation, as Posner demonstrates. The loudest traditionalist voices ridicule both
critical theory's narrative methods , n8 and critical theorists themselves . n9 To the traditionalist eye,
critical theorists repudiate traditional legal discourse as nothing more than domination and power
politics. n10 It is as if the two camps are speaking [*45] different languages. In fact, in some important ways,
they are.¶ The twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Peter Goodrich's Legal Discourse: Studies in Linguistics, Rhetoric and Legal
Analysis n11 offers an appropriate opportunity to revisit this topic. This article's modest goal is to suggest that narrative
theory and cognitive science n12 can help traditionalists better understand the language of critical theory n13 -
specifically, why critical theory insists on telling stories and why those narrative critiques are legitimately a part of law. n14 Since
the
article's primary goal is to speak to traditionalists , it begins by using what Posner wants-logical argument-to
"reason" its way to the conclusion that critical theory critiques law from the inside. A key part of that deductive
argument is the premise that cultural myths and other master stories operate at a largely hidden and unconscious
level beneath the language of traditional law talk. To explain and demonstrate that premise, the article offers a short course
in myth and then looks at the role of one myth-the myth of redemptive violence-in legal decision-making. The article explains the myth and
how it is pervasively reinforced through movies, video games, and other media and then shows how it affected the deliberations in Hamdi v.
Rumsfeld, the saga of an American citizen imprisoned without due process by his own government. n15¶ Deductive argument cannot be the
end of the matter, however, because naive reliance on "reason" is actually the antithesis of this article's primary point and certainly
inconsistent with critical theory itself. What
we mean by "law" is not a matter of some seemingly preordained
logical structure- [*46] this one or any other. Rather, it is a matter of human choice, and as with all matters of
human choice, it is driven by contested values, frames, power, and politics . This article, therefore, offers some nondeductive reasons for choosing to define "law" broadly enough to include critical theory's critiques. First, though, a deductive argument:¶ II.
Defining "Law" Deductively: A Four-step Dance¶ A. Step One: Law includes legal outcomes and the articulated reasons for those outcomes.¶ To
start simply, law includes constitutions, statutes, regulations, and judicial decisions. Traditional law talk interprets and applies these texts using
a cadre of traditional methods: semantic interpretation of authoritative text; reliance on canons of statutory construction; the use of careful or
creative analogies; and the support of relevant social policy, economic theory, or moral principle. n16 These methods have long been treated as
legitimately part of "law" because they claim to account for legal results, shaping how the law is applied and how it may change. When lawyers
and judges use these methods, no one would dispute that they are using the methods of the law. When Richard Posner finishes his tirade
against critical race theory and returns to his normal daily work, these are his tools. n17¶ B. Step Two: These tools are the stated reasons for
legal decisions, but they do not fully or fundamentally account for legal outcomes.¶ As both oppositionists and rhetoricians have pointed out,
legal results are not simply the result of adherence to authority or policy. n18 Rather, they are the product
of underlying values and assumptions about human nature [*47] and the world, what Peter Goodrich calls
"preconstructions, preferred meanings, rhetorical and ideological dimensions." n19 Among these preconstructions are the
cultural myths, n20 metaphors, and meta-narratives that frame the way those in power see the world. Far
more effectively than authorities or policies, these implicit but largely unrecognized n21 frames (values, assumptions, social and political
structures) account for where we are and how we got here. n22 Thus, myths and other frames operate silently but powerfully beneath
traditional law talk about objective reasons.¶ C. Step Three: If
cultural myths and other preconstructions guide and constrain
legal decisions (step two), then surely these preconstructions are also part of law .¶ It would be a curious position to
say that law includes the reasons that claim- perhaps inaccurately-to account for legal results but not the actual, though unstated, reasons for
those same legal results. n23 Powerful forces cultivate these preconstructions and are simultaneously captured by them, as will be discussed
below. Their
problematic operation is or should be a target of oppositionist critique of law . n24 Dominant
myths and other such frames have been instrumental in building and maintaining the master's house and are
among the master's most important tools. n25 Therefore, logically, they are part of "law," just as the unseen foundation is part
of a house.¶ D. Step Four: If myths and other stories are part of law when used implicitly by the masters in
making law (step three), they are surely part of law when used explicitly by those who critique law .¶ Quite
rightly, early oppositional critique used those same tools-especially stories-to challenge the way the world looks to those
inhabiting the halls of power. n26 The turn to narrative was part of the early brilliance of critical theory, made at a time when few others had
realized the significance of narrative in law. Are these myths, metaphors, and outsider stories part of law? If
narrative is part of law
when it is used by the dominant group to justify particular legal results (step three), it is surely also part of
law when used by critical theory to critique those same results. It would seem, then, that Goodrich is right. n27
Oppositional critique is within law, not external to it.¶ The key difference between traditional law-talk and oppositionist critique is that those
controlling myths, metaphors, and meta-narratives are kept implicit in traditional law-talk. We don't speak of those things. We confine the
discourse to rationalist, scientific, putatively objective language. As oppositionists and rhetoricians have pointed out, it is in the interests of
those in power to limit law to this "self-protective" view. But to oppositionists and at least some rhetoricians, such traditional law talk is [*49]
only an attempt to justify a result chosen for other and often unstated reasons. n28 In a way comparable to a psychoanalyst looking for what
lies beneath an explicit behavior, oppositionists try to look deeper to ask what is really going on. Is that permissible in the discourse
community? Can such things be said inside the wall? Law
is clearly, even in the most traditionalist view, the product of argument .
I will contend here that justificatory argument in rationalist objectivist language is half of an argument with
oppositionist critique constituting the other half. For law to progress, for it to live in dynamic tension, we
need both sides of the argument inside the wall . The rationalists are free to deny and refute oppositionist critique, but not to
silence or exile it.¶ Like any deductive argument, this little four-step dance is subject to challenge at several key points. It might be vulnerable in
step two, for instance, in the face of skepticism about admitting a legal role for the myths and other frames that support the power of the
dominant group. It is certainly vulnerable in step three, for one could fairly say that once we include in "law" the largely unconscious cultural
frames that operate within us, then law includes everything and the question loses its meaning. Perhaps these more foundational but
unconscious myths and other frames are not part of law because their effects are ubiquitous, defining, and constraining our views of the world
in every part of life. One might argue, then, that oppositionist critique both originates from outside law and critiques something other than law.
n29 With these two legitimate challenges on the table, it is fair to require me to say more about the legal role of myths and other frames and
about what is at stake when we choose a definition for law.
1NR
Alt
Now
The alternative is to reconceptualize democracy as a starting point for unique forms of
civic engagement- developing a new political language that posits democracy as an
axiom for collective resistance solves- that’s Giroux 14- student intellectuals are key to
displace the consumptive nature of pedagogical spaces like debate which is conceded
warrant/link
Here more evidence on that
Nixon ‘11
(Rob, Rachel Carson Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Slow Violence and the
Environmentalism of the Poor, pgs. 14-16)
How do we bring home-and bring emotionally to life-threats that take time to wreak their havoc, threats that
never materialize in one spectacular, explosive, cinematic scene? Apprehension is a critical word here, a
crossover term that draws together the domains of perception, emotion, and action. To engage slow
violence is to confront layered predicaments of apprehension: to apprehend-to arrest, or at least mitigate-often
imperceptible threats requires rendering them apprehensible to the senses through the work of
scientific and imaginative testimony. An influential lineage of environmental thought gives primacy to
immediate sensory apprehension, to sight above all, as foundational for any environmental ethics of place. George
Perkins Marsh, the mid-nineteenth-century environmental pioneer, argued in Man and Nature that "the power
most important to cultivate and at the same time, hardest to acquire, is that of seeing what is before him." Aldo
Leopold similarly insisted that "we can be ethical only toward what we can see.'?' But what happens when
we are unsighted, when what extends before us-in the space and time that we most deeply inhabit-remains
invisible? How, indeed, are we to act ethically toward human and biotic communities that lie beyond our sensory
ken? What then, in the fullest sense of the phrase, is the place of seeing in the world that we now inhabit? What,
moreover, is the place of the other senses? How do we both make slow violence visible yet also challenge the
privileging of the visible? Such questions have profound consequences for the apprehension of slow
violence, whether on a cellular or a transnational scale. Planetary consciousness (a notion that has undergone a
host of theoretical formulations) becomes pertinent here, perhaps most usefully in the sense in which Mary
Louise Pratt elaborates it, linking questions of power and perspective, keeping front and center the often
latent, often invisible violence in the view. Who gets to see, and from where? When and how does such
empowered seeing become normative? And what perspectives-not least those of the poor or women or the
colonized-do hegemonic sight conventions of visuality obscure? Pratt's formulation of planetary
consciousness remains invaluable because it allows us to connect forms of apprehension to forms of
imperial violence." Against this backdrop, 1want to introduce the third central concern of this book. Alongside
slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor, the chapters that follow are critically concerned with the
political, imaginative, and strategic role of environmental writer-activists. Writer-activists can help us
apprehend threats imaginatively that remain imperceptible to the senses, either because they are
geographically remote, too vast or too minute in scale, or are played out across a time span that exceeds the
instance of observation or even the physiological life of the human observer. In a world permeated by insidious,
yet unseen or imperceptible violence, imaginative writing can help make the unapparent appear, making
it accessible and tangible by humanizing drawn-out threats inaccessible to the immediate senses. Writing
can challenge perceptual habits that downplay the damage slow violence inflicts and bring into imaginative
focus apprehensions that elude sensory corroboration. The narrative imaginings of writer-activists may thus offer
us a different kind of witnessing: of sights unseen. To allay states of apprehension-trepidations, forebodings,
shadows cast by the invisible-entails facing the challenge, at once imaginative and scientific, of giving the
unapparent a materiality upon which we can act. Yet poor communities, often disproportionately exposed
to the force fields of slow violence-be they military residues or imported e-waste or the rising tides of climate
change-are the communities least likely to attract sustained scientific inquiry into causes, effects, and
potential redress. Such poor communities are abandoned to sporadic science at best and usually no
science at all; they are also disproportionately subjected to involuntary pharmaceutical experiments.
Indeed, when such communities raise concerns, they often become targets of well-funded antiscience by
forces that have a legal or commercial interest in manufacturing and disseminating doubt." Such embattled
communities, beset by officially unacknowledged hazards, must find ways to broadcast their inhabited fears,
their lived sense of a corroded environment, within the broader global struggles over apprehension. It is
here that writers, filmmakers, and digital activists may play a mediating role in helping counter the layered
invisibility that results from insidious threats, from temporal protractedness, and from the fact that the
afflicted are people whose quality of life-and often whose very existence-is of indifferent interest to the corporate
media.
Using the events in Ferguson a dialogical starting point for radical democratic vision
solves 100% of the case
Henry A. Giroux August 18, 2014 "The Militarization of Racism and Neoliberal Violence"
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/25660-the-militarization-of-racism-and-neoliberal-violence
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in
the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson
University.
The recent killing of an unarmed 18-year-old African-American, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri,
by a white police officer has made visible how a kind of racist, military metaphysics now dominates
American life. His subsequent demonization by the media only confirms its entrance into the public
consciousness as a form of vicious entertainment. The police have been turned into soldiers who view
the neighborhoods in which they operate as war zones. Outfitted with full riot gear, submachine guns,
armored vehicles, and other lethal weapons imported from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan,
their mission is to assume battle-ready behavior. Is it any wonder that violence rather than painstaking,
neighborhood police work and community outreach and engagement becomes the norm for dealing
with alleged "criminals," especially at a time when more and more behaviors are being criminalized? But
I want to introduce a caveat. I think it is a mistake to simply focus on the militarization of the police and
their racist actions in addressing the killing of Michael Brown. What we are witnessing in this brutal
killing and mobilization of state violence is symptomatic of the neoliberal, racist, punishing state
emerging all over the world, with its encroaching machinery of social death. The neoliberal killing
machine is on the march globally. The spectacle of neoliberal misery is too great to deny any more and
the only mode of control left by corporate-controlled societies is violence, but a violence that is waged
against the most disposable such as immigrant children, protesting youth, the unemployed, the new
precariat and black youth. Neoliberal states can no longer justify and legitimate their exercise of ruthless
power and its effects under casino capitalism. Given the fact that corporate power now floats above and
beyond national boundaries, the financial elite can dispense with political concessions in order to pursue
their toxic agendas. Moreover, as Slavoj Žižek argues "worldwide capitalism can no longer sustain or
tolerate . . . global equality. It is just too much." (1) Moreover, in the face of massive inequality,
increasing poverty, the rise of the punishing state, and the attack on all public spheres, neoliberalism
can no longer pass itself off as synonymous with democracy. The capitalist elite, whether they are hedge
fund managers, the new billionaires from Silicon Valley, or the heads of banks and corporations, is no
longer interested in ideology as their chief mode of legitimation. Force is now the arbiter of their power
and ability to maintain control over the commanding institutions of American society. Finally, I think it is
fair to say that they are too arrogant and indifferent to how the public feels.¶ Neoliberal capitalism has
nothing to do with democracy and this has become more and more evident among people, especially
youth all over the globe. As Žižek has observed, "the link between democracy and capitalism has been
broken." (2) The important question of justice has been subordinated to the violence of unreason, to a
market logic that divorces itself from social costs, and a ruling elite that has an allegiance to nothing but
profit and will do anything to protect their interests. This is why I think it is dreadfully wrong to just talk
about the militarization of local police forces without recognizing that the metaphor of "war zone" is apt
for a global politics in which the social state and public spheres have been replaced by the machinery of
finance, the militarization of entire societies not just the police, and the widespread use of punishment
that extends from the prison to the schools to the streets. Some have rightly argued that these tactics
have been going on in the black community for a long time and are not new. Police violence certainly
has been going on for some time, but what is new is that the intensity of violence and the level of
military-style machinery of death being employed is much more sophisticated and deadly. For instance,
as Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers point out, the militarization of the police in the United States is a
recent phenomenon that dates back to 1971. They write:¶ The militarization of police is a more recent
phenomenon [and marks] the rapid rise of Police Paramilitary Units (PPUs, informally SWAT teams)
which are modeled after special operations teams in the military. PPUs did not exist anywhere until
1971when Los Angeles under the leadership of the infamous police chief Daryl Gates, formed the first
one and used it for demolishing homes with tanks equipped with battering rams. By 2000, there were
30,000 police SWAT teams [and] by the late 1990s, 89% of police departments in cities of over 50,000
had PPUs, almost double the mid-80s figure; and in smaller towns of between 25,000 and 50,000 by
2007, 80% had a PPU quadrupling from 20% in the mid-80s. [Moreover,] SWAT teams were active with
45,000 deployments in 2007 compared to 3,000 in the early 80s. The most common use . . . was for
serving drug search warrants where they were used 80% of the time, but they were also increasingly
used for patrolling neighborhoods. (3)¶ At the same time, the impact of the rapid militarization of local
police forces on poor black communities is nothing short of terrifying and symptomatic of the violence
that takes place in advanced genocidal states. For instance, according to a recent report entitled
"Operation Ghetto Storm," produced by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, "police officers, security
guards, or self-appointed vigilantes extra judicially killed at least 313 African-Americans in 2012. . . . This
means a black person was killed by a security officer every 28 hours. The report suggests that "the real
number could be much higher." (4)¶ The emergence of the warrior cop and the surveillance state go
hand in hand and are indicative not only of state sanctioned racism but also of the rise of an
authoritarian society and the dismantling of civil liberties. Brutality mixed with attacks on freedom
dissent, and peaceful protest harbors memories of past brutal regimes such as the dictatorships in Latin
America in the 1970s and 1980s. The events in Ferguson speak to a history of representation in both the
United States and abroad that Americans have chosen to forget at their own risk. In spite of his generally
right-wing political views, Rand Paul got it right in arguing that "When you couple this militarization of
law enforcement with an erosion of civil liberties and due process that allows the police to become
judge and jury - national security letters, no-knock searches, broad general warrants, pre-conviction
forfeiture - we begin to have a very serious problem on our hands." What he does not name is the
problem, as Danielle LaSusa has observed, which is a society that is not simply on the precipice of
authoritarianism, but has fallen over the edge. Truly, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, we live in "dark
times." Under the regime of neoliberalism, the circle of those considered disposable and subject to state
violence is now expanding. The heavy hand of the state is not only racist; it is also part of an
authoritarian mode of governance willing to do violence to anyone who threatens neoliberal
capitalism, white Christian fundamentalism, and the power of the military-industrial-academicsurveillance state. The United States' embrace of murderous weapons to be used on enemies abroad
has taken a new turn and now will be used on those considered disposable at home. As the police
become more militarized, the weapons of death become more sophisticated and the legacy of killing
civilians becomes both an element of domestic as well as foreign policy. Amid the growing intensity of
state terrorism, violence becomes the DNA of a society that refuses to deal with larger structural issues
such as massive inequality in wealth and power, a government that now unapologetically serves the rich
and powerful corporate interests, and makes violence the organizing principle of governance. (5)¶ The
worldwide response to what is happening in Ferguson sheds a light on the racist and militarized nature
of American society so as to make its claim to democracy seem both hypocritical and politically insipid.
At the same time, such protests make visible what the artist Francisco Goya called the sleep of reason, a
lapse in witnessing, attentiveness, and the failure of conscience, which lie at the heart of neoliberal's
ongoing attempt to depoliticize the American public. Political life has come alive once again in the
United States, moving away from its withdrawal into consumer fantasies and privatized obsessions. The
time has come to recognize that Ferguson is not only about the violence and consolidation of white
power and racism in one town; it is also symptomatic of white power and the deep-seated legacy of
racism in the country as a whole, which goes along with what the United States has become under the
intensifying politics of market fundamentalism, militarism and disposability.¶ Ferguson prompts us to
rethink the meaning of politics and to begin to think not about reform but a major restructuring of our
values, institutions and notions of what a real democracy might look like. We need to live in a country
in which we are alarmed rather than entertained by violence. It is time for the American people to unite
around our shared fate as stakeholders in a radical democracy, rather than being united around our
shared fears and the toxic glue of state terrorism and everyday violence. Ferguson points to some
nefarious truths about our past and present. But the public response points in another more hopeful
direction. What Ferguson has told us is that the political and moral imagination is still alive, thirsting for
justice, and unwilling to let the dark clouds of authoritarianism put the lights out for good. But for that
to happen we must move from moral outrage to collective struggles as part of a wider effort to
dismantle the mass incarceration society, the surveillance state and the military-industrial-academic
complex. How many more children, black youth, immigrants and others have to die before the struggle
deepens?
A2 Permutation
Reformism DA—even if they destabilize race—cap ensures a constant reshuffling of
artificial divisions—perm is deck chairs
Dave Hill, teaches at Middlesex University and is Visiting Professor of Critical Education Policy and
Equality Studies at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Culturalist and Materialist Explanations of Class
and "Race", Cultural Logic 2009 http://clogic.eserver.org/2009/Hill.pdf
In contrast to both Critical Race Theorists and revisionist socialists/left liberals/equivalence theorists,
and those who see caste as the primary form of oppression, Marxists would agree that objectivelywhatever our “race” or gender or sexuality or current level of academic attainment or religious
identity, whatever the individual and group history and fear of oppression and attack- the
fundamental objective and material form of oppression in capitalism is class oppression. Black and
Women capitalists, or Jewish and Arab capitalists, or Dalit capitalists in India, exploit the labour power
of their multi-ethnic men and women workers, essentially (in terms of the exploitation of labour power
and the appropriation of surplus value) in just the same way as do white male capitalists, or uppercaste capitalists. But the subjective consciousness of identity, this subjective affirmation of one
particular identity, while seared into the souls of its victims, should not mask the objective nature of
contemporary oppression under capitalism – class oppression that, of course, hits some “raced” and
gendered and caste and occupational sections of the working class harder than others. Martha Gimenez
(2001:24) succinctly explains that “class is not simply another ideology legitimating oppression.”
Rather, class denotes “exploitative relations between people mediated by their relations to the
means of production.” Apple’s “parallellist,” or equivalence model of exploitation (equivalence of
exploitation based on “race,” class and gender, his “tryptarchic” model of inequality) produces valuable
data and insights into aspects of and the extent and manifestations of gender oppression and “race”
oppression in capitalist USA. However, such analyses serve to occlude the class-capital relation, the
class struggle, to obscure an essential and defining nature of capitalism, class conflict. Objectively,
whatever our “race” or gender or caste or sexual orientation or scholastic attainment, whatever the
individual and group history and fear of oppression and attack, the fundamental form of oppression in
capitalism is class oppression. While the capitalist class is predominantly white and male, capital in
theory and in practice can be blind to colour and gender and caste – even if that does not happen very
often. African Marxist-Leninists such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o (e.g., Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Ngugi wa Mirii,
1985) know very well that when the white colonialist oppressors were ejected from direct rule over
African states in the 1950s and 60s, the white bourgeoisie in some African states such as Kenya was
replaced by a black bourgeoisie, acting in concert with transnational capital and/or capital(ists) of the
former colonial power. Similarly in India, capitalism is no longer exclusively white. It is Indian, not
white British alone. As Bellamy observes, the diminution of class analysis “denies immanent critique of
any critical bite,” effectively disarming a meaningful opposition to the capitalist thesis (Bellamy,
1997:25). And as Harvey notes, neoliberal rhetoric, with its foundational emphasis upon individual
freedoms, has the power to split off libertarianism, identity politics, multiculturalism, and eventually
narcissistic consumerism from the social forces ranged in pursuit of justice through the conquest of
state power. (Harvey, 2005:41) To return to the broader relationship between “race,” gender, and social
class, and to turn to the USA, are there many who would deny that Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell
have more in common with the Bushes and the rest of the Unites States capitalist class, be it white,
black or Latina/o, than they do with the workers whose individual ownership of wealth and power is an
infinetismal fraction of those individual members of the ruling and capitalist class? The various
oppressions, of caste, gender, “race,” religion, for example, are functional in dividing the working class
and securing the reproduction of capital; constructing social conflict between men and women, or
black and white, or different castes, or tribes, or religious groups, or skilled and unskilled, thereby
tending to dissolve the conflict between capital and labor, thus occluding the class-capital relation,
the class struggle, and to obscure the essential and defining nature of capitalism, the labor-capital
relation and its attendant class conflict.
Footnoting DA ---locating class alongside identity strips class of its concrete,
socioeconomic nature
McLaren, Distinguished Fellow – Critical Studies @ Chapman U and UCLA urban schooling prof, and
Scatamburlo-D’Annibale, associate professor of Communication – U Windsor, ‘4
(Peter and Valerie, “Class Dismissed? Historical materialism and the politics of ‘difference’,” Educational
Philosophy and Theory Vol. 36, Issue 2, p. 183-199)
In stating this, we need to include an important caveat that differentiates our approach from those
invoking the well-worn race/class/gender triplet which can sound, to the uninitiated, both radical and
vaguely Marxian. It is not. Race, class and gender, while they invariably intersect and interact, are not
co-primary. This ‘triplet’ approximates what the ‘philosophers might call a category mistake.’ On the
surface the triplet may be convincing—some people are oppressed because of their race, others as a
result of their gender, yet others because of their class—but this ‘is grossly misleading’ for it is not that
‘some individuals manifest certain characteristics known as “class” which then results in their
oppression; on the contrary, to be a member of a social class just is to be oppressed’ and in this regard
class is ‘a wholly social category’ (Eagleton, 1998, p. 289). Furthermore, even though ‘class’ is usually
invoked as part of the aforementioned and much vaunted triptych, it is usually gutted of its practical,
social dimension or treated solely as a cultural phenomenon—as just another form of ‘difference.’ In
these instances, class is transformed from an economic and, indeed, social category to an exclusively
cultural or discursive one or one in which class merely signifies a ‘subject position.’ Class is therefore cut
off from the political economy of capitalism and class power severed from exploitation and a power
structure ‘in which those who control collectively produced resources only do so because of the value
generated by those who do not’ (Hennessy & Ingraham, 1997, p. 2). Such theorizing has had the effect
of replacing an historical materialist class analysis with a cultural analysis of class. As a result, many
post-Marxists have also stripped the idea of class of precisely that element which, for Marx, made it
radical—namely its status as a universal form of exploitation whose abolition required (and was also
central to) the abolition of all manifestations of oppression (Marx, 1978, p. 60).
With regard to this issue, Kovel (2002) is particularly insightful, for
he explicitly addresses an issue which continues to vex the Left—namely the priority given to different categories of what he calls ‘dominative splitting’—those categories of ‘gender, class, race, ethnic and national exclusion,’ etc. Kovel argues that we need to ask the question of priority
with respect to what? He notes that if we mean priority with respect to time, then the category of gender would have priority since there are traces of gender oppression in all other forms of oppression. If we were to prioritize in terms of existential significance, Kovel suggests that we
would have to depend upon the immediate historical forces that bear down on distinct groups of people—he offers examples of Jews in 1930s Germany who suffered from brutal forms of anti-Semitism and Palestinians today who experience anti-Arab racism under Israeli domination. The
question of what has political priority, however, would depend upon which transformation of relations of oppression are practically more urgent and, while this would certainly depend upon the preceding categories, it would also depend upon the fashion in which all the forces acting in a
, the priority would have to be given to class since class relations
entail the state as an instrument of enforcement and control, and it is the state that shapes and
organizes the splits that appear in human ecosystems. Thus class is both logically and historically distinct
from other forms of exclusion (hence we should not talk of ‘classism’ to go along with ‘sexism’ and
‘racism,’ and ‘species-ism’). This is, first of all, because class is an essentially man-made category,
without root in even a mystified biology. We cannot imagine a human world without gender
concrete situation are deployed. As to the question of which split sets into motion all of the others
distinctions—although we can imagine a world without domination by gender. But a world without class
is eminently imaginable—indeed, such was the human world for the great majority of our species’ time
on earth, during all of which considerable fuss was made over gender. Historically, the difference arises
because ‘class’ signifies one side of a larger figure that includes a state apparatus whose conquests and
regulations create races and shape gender relations. Thus there will be no true resolution of racism so
long as class society stands, inasmuch as a racially oppressed society implies the activities of a classdefending state. Nor can gender inequality be enacted away so long as class society, with its state,
demands the super-exploitation of women's labor. (Kovel, 2002, pp. 123–124) Contrary to what many
have claimed, Marxist theory does not relegate categories of ‘difference’ to the conceptual mausoleum;
rather, it has sought to reanimate these categories by interrogating how they are refracted through
material relations of power and privilege and linked to relations of production. Moreover, it has
emphasized and insisted that the wider political and economic system in which they are embedded
needs to be thoroughly understood in all its complexity. Indeed, Marx made clear how constructions of
race and ethnicity ‘are implicated in the circulation process of variable capital.’ To the extent that
‘gender, race, and ethnicity are all understood as social constructions rather than as essentialist
categories’ the effect of exploring their insertion into the ‘circulation of variable capital (including
positioning within the internal heterogeneity of collective labor and hence, within the division of labor
and the class system)’ must be interpreted as a ‘powerful force reconstructing them in distinctly
capitalist ways’ (Harvey, 2000, p. 106). Unlike contemporary narratives which tend to focus on one or
another form of oppression, the irrefragable power of historical materialism resides in its ability to
reveal (1) how forms of oppression based on categories of difference do not possess relative autonomy
from class relations but rather constitute the ways in which oppression is lived/experienced within a
class-based system; and (2) how all forms of social oppression function within an overarching capitalist
system. This framework must be further distinguished from those that invoke the terms ‘classism’
and/or ‘class elitism’ to (ostensibly) foreground the idea that ‘class matters’ (cf. hooks, 2000) since we
agree with Gimenez (2001, p. 24) that ‘class is not simply another ideology legitimating oppression.’
Rather, class denotes ‘exploitative relations between people mediated by their relations to the means of
production.’ To marginalize such a conceptualization of class is to conflate an individual's objective
location in the intersection of structures of inequality with people's subjective understandings of who
they really are based on their ‘experiences.’
All links are DA’s to the perm
H-U-D-S Link
Hands-Up-Don’t-Shoot directly trades off with class solidarity- historical analysis
proves we control the root cause debate
Luciana Bohne 12-3-2014 “Race”: a Political Weapon, Counter Punch,
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/03/race-a-political-weapon/ Co-founder of Film Criticism, a
journal of cinema studies, and teaches at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania.
According to a widely circulated statistic, the police kill a young black man every twenty-eight hours in
America. Without doubt, the police have a problem with race. Moreover, the justice system appears to
have a problem, too, as proven by the Grand Jury’s failed indictment of Darren Wilson in the killing this
summer of young Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The failed indictment does not mean that
Wilson is innocent; only that he will not be brought to trial. This is a terrible perversion of the path to
justice. It suggests deliberate prevention of trial on the nearly 100% certainty that Wilson would be
found guilty if tried. I am disturbed, however, by the well-intentioned flagellants among the white, nonracist community virtually calling for “America’s” white male blood, metaphorically speaking. I am
disturbed because this is the wrong response to the judicial outrage in Ferguson. We should be calling
for ruling-class blood, not dividing ourselves into blacks and whites. Isn’t this division a benefit that
our divide-and-rule oppressors hardly deserve? Let us not play with the cards in their deck. To begin
with, is “America” racist? Real, existing Americans voted for a black candidate for president, one,
moreover, who ticked off only the “African American” category on race in the US Census of 2010. In
choosing the less privileged racial group than white, Obama adhered to the principle of “hypo descent,”
which the US has traditionally used to determine the race of a child born of a mixed-race union. We
have a black political class in the Congress; a black Supreme Court justice; two blacks have been
secretary of state (one a woman). We have not one institution in which blacks don’t figure more or less
prominently. Mixed marriages have been legal since 1967. In 2008, about 14% of all first marriages were
mixed race; 9% of whites, 16% of blacks, 26% of Hispanics, and 31% of Asians were interracially married.
Nonetheless, racism persists in the black communities, mainly among the poor. We know that black
Americans suffer oppression and injustice at a rate far greater than that of any other group. According
to the 2010 US Census, 38.2% of black children lived in poverty, the highest rate of any group. According
to the Institute of Medicine in 2002, more than 4 million black Americans died prematurely between
1940 and 1999 because of health-care disparity and, at least in part, physicians’ prejudice. 26% of 34
million black Americans live below the poverty line. There seems to be something definitely racist about
American institutions. Let us not even mention the appalling incarceration rates of black men. Thus,
pointing to the white man in the street or in your bed as the culprit is a little myopic. Does he run the
police, the courts, and the Pentagon? Racism is not an individual psychosis, specific to generic “white
man.” Racism is the weapon of the powerful. They invented “race.” The psychotic history of that
invention is inextricably tied to that of capitalism and imperialism. The age of capital gave us “scientific
racism.” This pseudo-science twins American racism to its European original. One of our founding
fathers, Thomas Jefferson, a naturalist, proposed, based on “observation,” that blacks slept more
because their minds were empty. Indeed, the 18th century into which the US was born developed the
discourse of race, mainly as a justification for colonial imperialism. Francois Bernier, French physician to
Moghul Emperor Shah Jahan, is considered the first thinker since classical Greece to have classified
people by race. Aristotle, of course, classified as “barbarians” those races, which lived outside the
polis—the Greek city-state, organized around written laws. In 1684, Bernier published Nouvelle division
de la terre par les différentes espèces ou races qui l’habitent (“New Division of the Earth according to
Different Species or Races which Inhabit it”). The 18th century continued the discourse of “race,” as a
scientific category. Botanist Carl Linnaeus color-coded people by races—red (H. sapiens americanus) ,
white (H. sapiens Europeans) , yellow (H. sapiens asiaticus), and black (H. Sapiens afer). According to
Linnaeus, the European breed was the superior of the four. The science expanded to become the
propaganda for European and American imperialism. The alleged superiority of the European and the
Euro-American was the result of no neutral science. As European imperialism took off in the 18th
century and Euro-Americans “pacified” the native nations, science came up with all sorts of studies to
prove that the looters of the world were on a “civilizing mission” to lift up the inferior races of the world
from their obscurantist primitivism. Resistance was met with genocide in the Americas. Samuel J.
Morton (1799-1851), American and Scottish educated physician and natural scientist, may well be the
father of “scientific racism.” He founded the discipline of ethnography and advanced the theory of
phrenology. According to Morton, size of brain mattered, whites possessing the largest cranium; blacks
the smallest (or vice-versa if evidence contested). The abuses of the pseudo-science of “craniometry”
was historically researched by paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould in The Mismeasure of Man, just as the
theory resurfaced in The Bell Curve, a racist apology for the Reagan administration’s attacks on the
welfare state by blaming black poverty on poverty of black intellect. In keeping with the politicized
science of the day, the first American census (1790) categorized people by race, but the categories have
changed twenty-four times since then. Today, the US Census defines race as a social construct and
provides a dazzling array of choices and permutations, making the category practically null. You can be
an African American of European descent with a Hawaian component and a Native American culture.
Scientifically, of course race does not exist. Genes cannot identify race. The human Genome Project has
proven that biologically we are a single human race (“species” would be more accurate). Go tell it on
the mountain because pernicious elements in American society continue to use race as though there is
more than one. The truth is that racism is a powerful tool of social control and an arm of US expansionist
propaganda. Racism is political. Superficially reforming existing institutions cannot eradicate it. It must
be made clear who the promoters of racism are and for what purpose they promote it. Racism is the
legacy of colonialism and slavery, but this does not explain why it persists so fundamentally in American
institutions today. Unless one is prepared to call the US imperialist. Imperialism impoverishes people
abroad by stealing their resources, under developing their industries, destroying their labor unions, their
laws for environmental protection, and flooding their markets with goods they once made themselves.
It impoverishes people at home. The wars for expansion cost, and the people pay. Look at the US: has it
not been third- worldized? Is it not, therefore, likely that at a certain point the people will rise up, go on
strike, boycott, sabotage, interfere with profits? Very likely. But not if they are racially divided and
racially afraid. Enter racism—the imperialist’s trump card. Let’s have two, three Fergusons. Let white
racists hit and run. Let non-racists beat their breasts. Let the police put on a horror show. Let black
separatism rise; they can be picked off like the Black Panthers were. Let’s have separatism by all means:
white non-racists fighting racism on white turf; blacks on black turf. Separate but equal, ha-ha. Let there
be race war so the class war can go on. But we have an alternative: class solidarity in resistance.