case
The AFF’s politics of recognition of humanity reinscribes oppression by tying
subjecthood to suffering
Tuck and Yang 14 [Eve, & K.W., 2014, “R-Words: Refusing Research.” In n D. Paris & M. T. Winn (Eds.)
Humanizing research: Decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities (pp. 223-248).
Thousand Oakes, CA: Sage Publications. Pp. 228]
The costs of a politics of recognition that is rooted in naming pain have been¶ critiqued by recent
decolonizing and feminist scholars (Hartman, 1997, 2007;¶ Tuck, 2009). In Scenes of Subjection, Sadiya
Hartman (1997) discusses how recognizing¶ the personhood of slaves enhanced the power of the
Southern slaveowning¶ class. Supplicating narratives of former slaves were deployed effectively¶ by
abolitionists, mainly White, well-to-do, Northern women, to generate portraits¶ of abuse that ergo
recognize slaves as human (Hartman, 2007). In response, new¶ laws afforded minimal standards of
existence, “making personhood coterminous¶ with injury” (Hartman, 1997, p. 93), while
simultaneously authorizing necessary¶ violence to suppress slave agency. The slave emerges as
a legal person only when¶ seen as criminal or “a violated body in need of limited forms of
protection”¶ (p. 55). Recognition “humanizes” the slave, but is predicated upon her or his¶ abjection.
You are in pain, therefore you are. “[T]he recognition of humanity¶ require[s] the event of excessive
violence, cruelty beyond the limits of the¶ socially tolerable, in order to acknowledge and protect the
slave’s person” (p. 55).¶ Furthermore, Hartman describes how slave-as-victim as human accordingly¶
establishes slave-as-agent as criminal. Applying Hartman’s analysis, we note how¶ the agency of
Margaret Garner or Nat Turner can only be viewed as outsider¶ violence that humane society must
reject while simultaneously upholding the¶ legitimated violence of the state to punish such outsider
violence. Hartman asks,¶ “Is it possible that such recognition effectively forecloses agency as the object
of¶ punishment . . . Or is this limited conferral of humanity merely a reinscription of¶ subjugation and
pained existence?” (p. 55).
The attempt to overcome the conditions of modernity, the founding original violences
which constitutes our current epistemologies is the logic of settler colonialism. It
operates on a fetishization of woundedness.
Tuck and Yang 14 [Eve, & K.W., 2014, “R-Words: Refusing Research.” In n D. Paris & M. T. Winn (Eds.)
Humanizing research: Decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities (pp. 223-248).
Thousand Oakes, CA: Sage Publications. Pp. 228-9]
As numerous scholars have denoted, many social science disciplines emerged¶ from the need to provide justifications for social hierarchies
undergirded by¶ White supremacy and manifest destiny (see also Gould, 1981; Selden, 1999;¶ Tuck & Guishard, forthcoming). Wolfe (1999)
has explored how the contoured¶ logic of settler colonialism (p. 5) can be mapped onto the microactivities of¶ anthropology; Guthrie (1976)
traces the roots of psychology to the need to “scientifically”¶ prove the supremacy of the White mind. The
origins of many social¶
in maintaining logics of domination, while sometimes¶ addressed in graduate schools, are regularly
thought to be just errant or inauspicious¶ beginnings—much like the ways in which the genocide of Indigenous¶
peoples that afforded the founding of the Unites States has been reduced to an¶ unfortunate byproduct of
the birthing of a new and great nation. Such amnesia¶ is required in settler colonial societies, argues Lorenzo
Veracini, because settler colonialism is “characterized by a persistent drive to supersede the conditions of¶
science disciplines
its operation,” (2011, p. 3); that is, to make itself invisible, natural, without origin¶ (and without end), and
inevitable. Social science disciplines have inherited¶ the persistent drive to supersede the conditions of their
operations from settler¶ colonial logic, and it is this drive, a kind of unquestioning push forward, and not¶ the origins of the
disciplines that we attend to now. We are struck by the pervasive silence on questions regarding the contemporary¶
rationale(s) for social science research. Though a variety of ethical and¶ procedural protocols require researchers to compose
statements regarding the¶ objectives or purposes of a particular project, such protocols do not prompt¶ reflection upon the
underlying beliefs about knowledge and change that too often¶ go unexplored or unacknowledged. The rationale for
conducting social science¶ research that collects pain narratives seems to be self-evident for many scholars,¶ but when looked at more
closely, the rationales may be unconsidered, and somewhat¶ flimsy. Like a maritime archaeological site, such rationales might be best¶
examined in situ, for fear of deterioration if extracted. Why do researchers collect¶ pain narratives? Why does the academy
want them? An initial and partial answer is because settler colonial ideology believes that,¶ in fiction author Sherril
Jaffe’s words, “scars make your body more interesting,”¶ (1996, p. 58). Jaffe’s work of short, short of fiction bearing that
sentiment as title¶ captures the exquisite crossing of wounds and curiosity and pleasure. Settler¶ colonial ideology, constituted
by its conscription of others, holds the wounded¶ body as more engrossing than the body that is not
wounded (though the person¶ with a wounded body does not politically or materially benefit for being
more¶ engrossing). In settler colonial logic, pain is more compelling than privilege,¶ scars more
enthralling than the body unmarked by experience. In settler colonial¶ ideology, pain is evidence of
authenticity, of the verifiability of a lived life.¶ Academe, formed and informed by settler colonial
ideology, has developed the¶ same palate for pain. Emerging and established social science researchers set out¶ to
document the problems faced by communities, and often in doing so, recirculate¶ common tropes of
dysfunction, abuse, and neglect.
White use of countergazing is bad it allows white people to think they’re helping when
in reality they are just taking away ground from people of color- it reinforces the
white savior complex
Alcoff 89
Linda Alcoff, ”The Problem of Speaking for Others”, last date cited 1989,
http://www.alcoff.com/content/speaothers.html//SRawal
The recognition that there is a problem in speaking for others has followed from the widespread acceptance of two claims. First, there
has been a
growing awareness that where one speaks from affects both the meaning and truth of what one says,
and thus that one cannot assume an ability to transcend her location. In other words, a speaker's location (which
I take here to refer to her social location or social identity) has an epistemically significant impact on that speaker's claims,
and can serve either to authorize or dis-authorize one's speech. The creation of Women's Studies and African American Studies
departments were founded on this very belief: that both the study of and the advocacy for the oppressed must come to be
done principally by the oppressed themselves, and that we must finally acknowledge that systematic
divergences in social location between speakers and those spoken for will have a significant effect on
the content of what is said. The unspoken premise here is simply that a speaker's location is epistemically salient. I shall explore this issue further in
the next section. The second claim holds that not only is location epistemically salient, but certain privileged locations are discursively
dangerous. In particular, the practice of privileged persons speaking for or on behalf of less privileged persons
has actually resulted (in many cases) in increasing or reenforcing the oppression of the group spoken for. This was
part of the argument made against Anne Cameron's speaking for Native women: Cameron's intentions were never in question, but
the effects of her writing were argued to be harmful to the needs of Native authors because it is
Cameron rather than they who will be listened to and whose books will be bought by readers interested
in Native women. Persons from dominant groups who speak for others are often treated as
authenticating presences that confer legitimacy and credibility on the demands of subjugated speakers;
such speaking for others does nothing to disrupt the discursive hierarchies that operate in public spaces. For this reason , the work of privileged
authors who speak on behalf of the oppressed is becoming increasingly criticized by members of those
oppressed groups themselves.
White subjectivity cant countergaze- im looking at you george
Yancy 12 (George, “How Can You Teach Me If You Don’t Know Me? Embedded Racism and White Opacity,” Philosophy of Education
Archive, P. 49-51. Yancy is a professor of philosophy who works primarily in the areas of critical philosophy of race and critical whiteness
studies // EMS).
As Black, I am the “looked at.” As white, she is the bearer of the “white look.” But note that I have not
given my consent to have my body transformed, to have it reshaped, and thrown back to me as
something I am supposed to own, as a meaning I am supposed to accept. Then again, who does? She clutches her
purse, eagerly anticipating the arrival of her floor, “knowing” that this Black predator will soon strike. As she clutches her purse, I am reminded
of the sounds of whites locking their car doors as they catch a glimpse of my Black body as I walk by (click, click). She fears that a direct look
might incite the anger of the Black predator. She fakes a smile. By her smile she hopes to elicit a spark of decency from me. But I don’t return
the smile. I fear that it might be interpreted as a gesture of sexual advance. After
all, within the social space of the elevator,
which has become a hermeneutic transac- tional space within which all of my intended meanings get
falsified, it is as if I am no longer in charge of what I mean/intend. What she “sees” or “hears” is
governed by a racist epistemology of certitude that places me under erasure. Her alleged literacy
regarding the semiotics of my Black body is actually an instance of profound illiteracy. Her gaze upon
my Black body might be said to function like a camera obscura. Her gaze consists of a racist socioepistemic aperture, as it were, through which the (white) light of “truth” casts an inverted/distorted
image. It is through her gaze that I become hyper-vigilant of my own embodied spatiality. On previous
occasions, particularly when alone, I have moved my body within the space of occasions, my “being-in” the space of the elevator is familiar; my
bodily movements, my stance, are indicative of what it means to inhabit a space of familiarity.¶ The
movement away from the
familiar is what is effected vis-à-vis the white woman’s gaze. My movements become and remain the elevator in a noncalculative fashion, paying no particular attention to my bodily comportment, the movement of my hands, my eyes, the position of my feet. On
such ¶ stilted. I dare not move suddenly. The apparent racial neutrality of the space within the elevator (when I am standing alone) has
become one filled with white normativity. I feel trapped. I no longer feel bodily expansiveness within
the elevator, but constrained. I now begin to calculate, paying almost neurotic attention to the
proxemic positioning of my body, making sure that this “black object,” what now feels like an
appendage, a weight, is not too close, not too tall, not too threatening. So, I genuflect, but only slightly, a
movement that feels like an act of worship. My lived body comes back to me like something ontologically
occurrent, something merely there in its facticity. Notice that she need not speak a word to render my Black body
“captive.” She need not scream “Rape!” She need not call me “Nigger!” Indeed, it is not a necessary requirement that she hates me in order for
her to script my body in the negative ways that she does.
White America has bombarded me and other Black males
with the “reality” of our dual hyper-sexualization: “you are a sexual trophy and a certain rapist.” Fanon,
aware of the horrible narrative myths used to depict Black bodies, notes that the Negro is the genital and is the incarnation of evil, being that
which is to be avoided and yet desired. Ritualistically enacting
her racialized and racist consciousness/embodiment,
she reveals her putative racist narrative competence. “One cannot decently ‘have a hard on’ everywhere,” as Fanon says,
but within the white imaginary, I apparently fit the bill. To put a slight interpretive inflection on Fanon here, as the insatiable, ever desiring
Black penis, a walking, talking, hard-on, I am believed eager to introduce white women into a sexual universe for which the white male “does
not have the key, the weapons, or the attributes.Ӧ I am often reminded of my purpose, my inner racial teleology, that is, my essence, through
popular culture. I sit in movie theaters waiting for “me” to appear on screen, waiting to see “my body” appear before me. For example, in the
movie White Chicks (2004), I am the character Latrell Spencer who reminds white women: “You know what they say: when you go Black, you’re
going to need a wheelchair.” I am the sadistic Black body in search of masochistic white female bodies. I also saw myself in the movie The
Heartbreak Kid (2007), where a white woman who plays Ben Stiller’s wife pleads with him while having sex. She shouts, “Fuck me like a Black
guy!”10 One, of course, feels sorry for Stiller’ s character as he really tries, with pronounced gyrations, “to have sex with her like a Black guy.”
But he does so to no avail. And in Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo (1999), I was the Black man who entered a closet with a white woman who was
blind. After having sex with her, not only does she miraculously gain sight, but she says: “You’re Black? I knew it!”11 Here, the Black male penis
reveals its multiple talents: not only is it capable of temporarily crippling white women and confining them to wheelchairs and rendering
extreme pleasure, but the Black penis is also capable of healing the blind.¶ The
white gaze has fixed me. Like looking into
Medusa’s eyes, I have been made into stone, stiff, forever erect. It is as if Viagra runs naturally through my veins. In
fact, I have become a phantasm. So fictive has the Black body become, that its very material presence
has become superfluous. There are times when the Black body is not even needed to trigger the right
response. All that is needed is the imago. Fanon observes, “A [white] prostitute told me that in her early days the mere thought of going to
bed with a Negro brought on an orgasm.”12 While actual Black bodies suffered during the spectacle of lynchings,
one wonders to what extent the Black body as phantasmatic object was the fulcrum around which the
spectacle was animated.¶ Within the lived and consequential semiotic space of the elevator, the white
woman has “taken” my body from me, sending an extraneous meaning back to me, an extraneous
thing, something foreign. What then am I to do? Within this racially saturated field of visibility, I have somehow become
this “predator-stereotype” from which it appears hopeless to escape. The white woman thinks that
her act of “seeing” me is an act of “knowing” what I am, of knowing what I will do next, that is, hers is believed to
be simply a process of unmediated/uninterpreted perception. How- ever, her coming to “see” me as she
does is actually a cultural achievement. It is an achievement that not only distorts my Black body, but also distorts her
white body. I am, as it were, a phantom, indeed, a “spook,” that lives between the interstices of my
physical, phenotypically dark body and the white woman’s gesticulatory performances. She performs,
ergo, I become the criminal.¶
The affirmative’s denial of self and underlying assumptions of subjectivity brackets in a view from
nowhere that locks in the invisibility of whiteness and the hyper-visibility of the black body; their
“neutral” gaze upon universal subjects ignores that modernity always already defines the black body
as object, solidifying white agency and subjectivity while destroying those of blackened bodies.
Yancy ‘5 [George, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University and Coordinator of the Critical Race Theory
Speaker Series, “Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body”, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 19.4 (2005) 215-241, Muse]
I write out of a personal existential context. This context is a profound source of knowledge connected to my "raced" body. Hence, I write from a place of lived embodied
experience, a site of exposure. In
philosophy, the only thing that we are taught to "expose" is a weak argument, a fallacy, or someone's "inferior" reasoning
embodied self is bracketed anddeemed irrelevant to theory, superfluous and cumbersome in one's search for
truth. It is best, or so we are told, to reason from nowhere. Hence, the white philosopher/author presumes to speak for
all of "us" without the slightest mention of his or her "raced" identity. Self-consciously writing as a white male philosopher, Crispin
Sartwell observes: Left to my own devices, I disappear as an author. That is the "whiteness" of my authorship. This whiteness of authorship is, for us, a form
of authority; to speak (apparently) from nowhere, for everyone, is empowering, though one wields power here only by becoming lost to oneself. But
power. The
such an authorship and authority is also pleasurable: it yields the pleasure of self-forgetting or [End Page 215] apparent transcendence of the mundane and the particular, and
To theorize the Black body one must "turn to the
[Black] body as the radix for interpreting racial experience" (Johnson [1993, 600]).1 It is important to note
that this particular strategy also functions as a lens through which to theorize and critique whiteness; for the Black body's "racial"
the pleasure of power expressed in the "comprehension" of a range of materials. (1998, 6)
experience is fundamentally linked to the oppressive modalities of the "raced" white body. However, there is no denying that my own "racial" experiences or the social
performances of whiteness can become objects of critical reflection. In this paper, my objective is to describe and theorize situations where the
Black body's
subjectivity, its lived reality, is reduced to instantiations of the white imaginary, resulting in what I refer to as "the phenomenological return of
the Black body."2 These instantiations are embedded within and evolve out of the complex social and historical interstices of whites' efforts at self-construction through complex
acts of erasure vis-à-vis Black people. These acts of self-construction, however, are myths/ideological constructions predicated upon maintaining white power. As James Snead
has noted, "Mythification is the replacement of history with a surrogate ideology of [white] elevation or [Black] demotion along a scale of human value" (Snead 1994, 4). How I
understand and theorize the body relates to the fact that the body—in this case, the Black body—is capable of undergoing a sociohistorical process of "phenomenological
return" vis-à-vis white embodiment. The
body's meaning—whether phenotypically white or black—its ontology, its modalities of aesthetic performance, its
comportment, its "raciated" reproduction, is in constant contestation. The hermeneutics of the body, how it is
understood, how it is "seen," its "truth," is partly the result of a profound historical,ideological construction. "The body" is
positioned by historical practices and discourses. The body is codified as this or that in terms of meanings that
are sanctioned, scripted, and constituted through processes of negotiation that are embedded within and serve
various ideological interests that are grounded within further power-laden social processes. The historical plasticity of the body, the fact that it is a site of contested
meanings, speaks to the historicity of its "being" as lived and meant within the interstices of social semiotics. Hence: a) the body is less of a thing/being than a shifting/changing
historical meaning that is subject to cultural configuration/reconfiguration. The point here is to interrogate the "Black body" as a "fixed and material truth" that preexists "its
relations with the world and with others"3 ; b) the
body's meaning is fundamentally symbolic (McDowell 2001, 301), and its meaning is congealed
through symbolic repetition and iterationthat emits certain signs and presupposes certain norms; and, c) the body is a
battlefield, one that is fought over again and again across particular historical moments and within particular social spaces. "In other words, the concept of the body provides
only the illusion of self-evidence, facticity, 'thereness' for something [End Page 216] fundamentally ephemeral, imaginary, something made in the image of particular social
groups" (301). On this score, it
is not only the "Black body" that defies the ontic fixity projected upon it through the white
gaze, and, hence, through the episteme of whiteness, but the white body is alsofundamentally symbolic,
requiring demystification of its status as norm, the paragon of beauty, order, innocence, purity, restraint, and
nobility. In other words, given the three suppositions above, both the "Black body" and the "white body" lend themselves to processes of interpretive fracture and to
strategies of interrogating and removing the veneer of their alleged objectivity. To have one's dark body invaded by the white gaze and then to have that body returned as
distorted is a powerful experience of violation. The experience presupposes an anti-Black lived context, a context within which whiteness gets reproduced and the white body as
norm is reinscribed.The late writer, actor, and activist Ossie Davis recalls that at the age of six or seven two white police officers told him to get into their car. They took him
down to the precinct. They kept him there for an hour, laughing at him and eventually pouring cane syrup over his head. This only created the opportunity for more laughter, as
they looked upon the "silly" little Black boy. If he was able to articulate his feelings at that moment, think of how the young Davis was returned to himself: "I am an object of white
laughter, a buffoon." The young Davis no doubt appeared to the white police officers in ways that they had approved. They set the stage, created a site of Black buffoonery, and
enjoyed their sadistic pleasure without blinking an eye. Sartwell notes that "the [white] oppressor seeks to constrain the oppressed [Blacks] to certain approved modes of
visibility (those set out in the template of stereotype) and then gazes obsessively on the spectacle he has created" (1998, 11). Davis notes that he "went along with the game of
black emasculation, it seemed to come naturally" (Marable 2000, 9). After that, "the ritual was complete" (9). He was then sent home with some peanut brittle to eat. Davis knew
at that early age, even without the words to articulate what he felt, that he had been violated. He refers to the entire ritual as the process of "niggerization." He notes: The culture
had already told me what this was and what my reaction to this should be: not to be surprised; to expect it; to accommodate it; to live with it. I didn't know how deeply I was
scarred or affected by that, but it was a part of who I was. (9) Davis, in other words, was made to feel that he had to accept who he was, that "niggerized" little Black boy, an
the trick of white ideology; it is to give the appearance of
fixity, where the "look of the white subject interpellates the black subject as inferior, which, in turn, bars the
black subject from seeing him/herself without the internalization of the white gaze" (Weheliye 2005, 42). On this score, it
is white bodies that are deemed agential. They configure "passive" [End Page 217] Black bodies according to their
will. But it is no mystery; for "the Negro is interpreted in the terms of the white man. White-man psychology is applied and it is no wonder that the result often shows the Negro
insignificant plaything within a system of ontological racial differences. This, however, is
in a ludicrous light" (Braithwaite 1992, 36). While walking across the street, I have endured the sounds of car doors locking as whites secure themselves from the "outside
world," a trope rendering my Black body ostracized, different, unbelonging. This outside world constitutes a space, a field, where certain Black bodies are relegated. They are
rejected, because they are deemed suspicious, vile infestations of the (white) social body. The locks on the doors resound: Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click.
ClickClickClickClickClickClickClick! Of course, the clicking sounds are always already accompanied by nervous gestures, and eyes that want to look, but are hesitant to do so.
The cumulative impact of the sounds is deafening, maddening in their distorted repetition. The clicks begin to function as coded sounds, reminding me that I am dangerous; the
sounds create boundaries, separating the white civilized from the dark savage, even as I comport myself to the contrary. The clicking sounds mark me, they inscribe me, they
materialize my presence in ways that belie my intentions. Unable to stop the clicking, unable to establish a form of recognition that creates a space of trust and liminality, there
are times when one wants to become their fantasy, to become their Black monster, their bogeyman, to pull open the car door: "Surprise. You've just been carjacked by a ghost,
a fantasy of your own creation. Now, get the fuck out of the car." I have endured white women clutching their purses or walking across the street as they catch a glimpse of my
approaching Black body. It is during such moments that my body is given back to me in a ludicrous light, where I live the meaning of my body as confiscated. Davis too had the
meaning of his young Black body stolen. The surpluses being gained by the whites in each case are not economic. Rather, it is through existential exploitation that the surpluses
extracted can be said to be ontological—"semblances of determined presence, of full positivity, to provide a sense of secure being" (Henry 1997, 33). When I was about
seventeen or eighteen, my white math teacher initiated such an invasion, pulling it off with complete calm and presumably self-transparency. Given the historical construction of
whiteness as the norm, his own "raced" subject position was rendered invisible. After all, he lived in the real world, the world of the serious man, where values are believed
anterior to their existential founding. As I recall, we were discussing my plans for the future. I told him that I wanted to be a pilot. I was earnest about this choice, spending a
great deal of time reading about the requirements involved in becoming a pilot, how one would have to accumulate a certain number of flying hours. I also read about the
dynamics of lift and drag that affect a plane in flight. After no doubt taking note of my firm commitment, he looked at me and implied that I should be realistic (a code word for
realize that I am Black) about my goals. He said that I should become a carpenter or a bricklayer. I was exposing myself, telling a trusted teacher what I wanted to be, and he
returned me to myself as something [End Page 218] that I did not recognize. I had no intentions of being a carpenter or a bricklayer (or a janitor or elevator operator for that
matter). The situation, though, is more complex. It is not that he simply returned me to myself as a carpenter or a bricklayer when all along I had this image of myself as a pilot.
Rather, he returned me to myself as a fixed entity, a "niggerized" Black body whose epidermal logic had already foreclosed the possibility of being anything other than what was
befitting its lowly station. He was the voice of a larger anti-Black racist society that "whispers mixed messages in our ears" (Marable 2000, 9), the ears of Black people who
struggle to think of themselves as a possibility. He mentioned that there were only a few Black pilots and that I should be more realistic. (One can only imagine what his
response would have been had I said that I wanted to be a philosopher, particularly given the statistic that Black philosophers constitute about 1.1% of philosophers in the
United States). Keep in mind that this event did not occur in the 1930s or 1940s, but around 1979. The message was clear. Because I was Black, I had to settle for an
occupation suitable for my Black body,4 unlike the white body that would no doubt have been encouraged to become a pilot. As with Davis, having one's Black body returned as
a source of impossibility, one begins to think, to feel, to emote: "Am I a nigger?" The internalization of the white gaze creates a doubleness within the psyche of the Black,
leading to a destructive process of superfluous self-surveillance and self-interrogation. This was indeed a time when I felt ontologically locked into my body. My body was
indelibly marked with this stain of darkness. After all, he was the white mind, the mathematical mind, calculating my future by factoring in my Blackness. He did not "see" me,
though. Like Ellison's invisible man, I
occupied that paradoxical status of "visible invisibility." Within this dyadic space, my
Black body phenomenologically returned to me as inferior. To describe the phenomenological return of the Black body is to disclose how it is
returned as an appearance to consciousness, my consciousness. The (negatively) "raced" manner in which my body underwent a phenomenological return, however,
presupposes a thick social reality that has always already been structured by the ideology and history of whiteness. More specifically, when
my body is returned
to me, the white body has already been constituted over centuries as the norm, both in European and AngloAmerican culture, and at several discursive levels from science to philosophy to religion. In the case of my math teacher, his whiteness
was invisible to him as my Blackness was hyper-visible to both of us. Of course, his invisibility to his own normative here is a function
of my hyper-visibility. It is important to keep in mind that white Americans, more generally, define themselves around the "gravitational pull," as it were, of the Black.5
The not of white America is the Black of white America. This not is essential, as is the invisibility of the negative relation through which whites are constituted. All of embodied
beings have their own "here." My white math teacher's racist social performances (for example, his "advice" to me), within the context of a [End Page 219] white racist historical
imaginary and asymmetric power relations, suspends and effectively disqualifies my embodied here. What was the message communicated? Expressing my desire to be, to
take advantage of the opportunities for which Black bodies had died in order to secure, my ambition "was flung back in my face like a slap" (Fanon 1967, 114). Fanon writes:
The white world, the only honorable one, barred me from all participation. A man was expected to behave like a man. I was expected to behave like a black man—or at least like
a nigger. I shouted a greeting to the world and the world slashed away my joy. I was told to stay within bounds, to go back where I belonged. (114–15) According to philosopher
Bettina Bergo, drawing from the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, "perception and discourse—what we see and the symbols and meanings of our social imaginaries—prove
inextricably the one from the other" (2005, 131). Hence, the white math teacher's perception, what he "saw," was inextricably linked to social meanings and semiotic
There is nothing passive about the white gaze.
There are racist sociohistorical and epistemic conditions of emergence that construct not only the Black body,
but the white body as well. So, what is "seen" when the white gaze "sees" "my body" and it becomes
something alien to me?
constructions and constrictions that opened up a "field of appearances" regarding my dark body.
K
The 1ac demand for a racial wakeup calls upon an appeal for the humanity in police or
instittutional actorswhich assumes that they can change their racism
Wilderson 07- [Frank B. Wilderson, Assistant professor of African American Studies and Drama at UC
Irvine, Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, 5-7]
When I was a young student at Columbia University in New York there was a Black woman who used to
stand outside the gate and yell at Whites, Latinos, and East- and South Asian students, staff, and faculty
as they entered the university. She accused them of having stolen her sofa and of selling her into
slavery. She always winked at the Blacks, though we didn’t wink back. Some of us thought her outbursts
too bigoted and out of step with the burgeoning ethos of multiculturalism and “rainbow coalitions” to
endorse. But others did not wink back because we were too fearful of the possibility that her isolation
would become our isolation, and we had come to Columbia for the express, though largely assumed and
unspoken, purpose of foreclosing upon that peril. Besides, people said she was crazy. Later, when I
attended UC Berkeley, I saw a Native American man sitting on the sidewalk of Telegraph Avenue. On the
ground in front of him was an upside down hat and a sign informing pedestrians that here was where they
could settle the “Land Lease Accounts” that they had neglected to settle all of their lives. He too, so went
the scuttlebutt, was “crazy.” Leaving aside for the moment their state of mind, it would seem that the
structure, that is to say the rebar, or better still the grammar of their demands—and, by extension, the
grammar of their suffering—was indeed an ethical grammar. Perhaps their grammars are the only ethical
grammars available to modern politics and modernity writ large, for they draw our attention not to the way
in which space and time are used and abused by enfranchised and violently powerful interests, but to the
violence that underwrites the modern world’s capacity to think, act, and exist spatially and temporally . The
violence that robbed her of her body and him of his land provided the stage upon which other violent and
consensual dramas could be enacted. Thus, they would have to be crazy, crazy enough to call not merely
the actions of the world to account but to call the world itself to account, and to account for them no less !
The woman at Columbia was not demanding to be a participant in an unethical network of distribution:
she was not demanding a place within capital, a piece of the pie (the demand for her sofa
notwithstanding). Rather, she was articulating a triangulation between, on the one hand, the loss of her
body, the very dereliction of her corporeal integrity, what Hortense Spillers charts as the transition from
being a being to becoming a “being for the captor” (206), the drama of value (the stage upon which
surplus value is extracted from labor power through commodity production and sale); and on the other,
the corporeal integrity that, once ripped from her body, fortified and extended the corporeal integrity of
everyone else on the street. She gave birth to the commodity and to the Human, yet she had neither
subjectivity nor a sofa to show for it. In her eyes, the world—and not its myriad discriminatory practices,
but the world itself—was unethical. And yet, the world passes by her without the slightest inclination to
stop and disabuse her of her claim. Instead, it calls her “crazy.” And to what does the world attribute the
Native American man’s insanity? “He’s crazy if he thinks he’s getting any money out of us?” Surely, that
doesn’t make him crazy. Rather it is simply an indication that he does not have a big enough gun. What
are we to make of a world that responds to the most lucid enunciation of ethics with violence? What are
the foundational questions of the ethico-political? Why are these questions so scandalous that they are
rarely posed politically, intellectually, and cinematically—unless they are posed obliquely and
unconsciously, as if by accident? Return Turtle Island to the “Savage.” Repair the demolished subjectivity
of the Slave. Two simple sentences, twelve simple words, and the structure of U.S. (and perhaps global)
antagonisms would be dismantled. An “ethical modernity” would no longer sound like an oxymoron. From
there we could busy ourselves with important conflicts that have been promoted to the level of
antagonisms: class struggle, gender conflict, immigrants rights. When pared down to twelve words and
two sentences, one cannot but wonder why questions that go to the heart of the ethico-political, questions
of political ontology, are so unspeakable in intellectual meditations, political broadsides, and even
socially and politically engaged feature films.
The 1AC is a form of phallacized whiteness that posits a disruption that eradicates
difference in the name of education
Winnubst 06 [Shannon Winnubest, Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at The Ohio State
University, “Queering Freedom” page 37-43]
Cultures of phallicized whiteness are grounded in the constitutive and categorical exclusion
of useless expenditure. While Locke attempts to maintain the absolute reign of utility by
reasserting a different kind of ‘use’ in the functions of money as capital, the fundamental
tension between systems of value based in utility and those grounded in endless expenditure
threatens utility’s domination. This tension worsens as politics of race, sexual differ- ence,
and sexuality compound this nascent politics of class (and, less explic- itly, religion) that we
find in Locke’s texts. While money appears in Locke’s texts to be the inevitable outgrowth of
utility’s preference for future-oriented labor, cultivated land, and private property, it also
introduces an order of value that may not be reducible to the final judgment of utility. The
intro- duction of money appears to render utility’s closed system rather fragile, a phenomenon
and tension that will resurface repeatedly across the following chapters. The sort of worldview
that we find in Locke is thereby one dominated by the twin logics of property and utility. Labor,
which man must undertake due to an ontological lack, connects these twin logics: it encloses
the world and one’s self into units of private property and then, elevated into the form
of money, invites reason to overstep utility’s boundary and hoard more property than
one can use. Labor initiates the twin expressions of the logic of the limit: enclosure and
prohibition. We ought not own more than we can use; yet, true to the dynamic of desire
grounded in lack, we are drawn toward transgressing the fundamental prohibition of waste
proclaimed by nature’s law, reason. Labor develops into a system of expression that appears
to twist the dynamics of scarcity and abundance beyond the reach of utility, while
simultaneously using utility to judge all acts within it: one’s labor must be deemed useful if
one is to enter into the desired life of propertied abundance, a possibility that will always be
scarce in advanced capitalist cultures of phallicized whiteness. Locke’s normative model for
the liberal individual thereby becomes he who is bound by his ability to labor within a concept
of the future sufficient to stake out a piece of land as property. While Cynthia Willett gives
Locke credit for trying to articulate a middle-class resistance to “the leisure class and its idle
games,” she nonetheless argues that Locke remains entrapped by a conception of rationality
“in terms of the English middle-class appreciation for the market value of productive labor
and property” (2001, 71). Not only are his concepts of rationality shaped by these historical
preferences, but his concepts of man’s condition—man’s desire, destiny, labor, and
individuality— all carry these historical preferences into universalized discourses that continue to serve as the bedrock of many of our cultural assumptions and prac- tices. Although
Locke’s politics were moderately progressive for the late seventeenth century, the lasting
damage of these concepts still haunts our political quandaries and the very
frameworks through which we continue to seek redress. The logic of limit as
enclosure, as the ways that the state of society becomes demarcated from—and always
preferred over, even while roman- ticizing—the state of nature, continuously rewrites itself
in several registers across the political histories of the U.S. It fundamentally grounds our understanding of the individual as the person who is clearly demarcated from nature. The
individual becomes that ‘civilized’ man who takes his natural origin, as an enclosed body that
is a product of God’s labor, and produces private property that is enclosed into durable forms
which persist into and even control the future. From this critical enclosure of the world and
the self, written in the register of property, other modern epistemologies and political projects
easily attach themselves to this clear and distinct unit, the individual. (Adam Smith, for
example, quickly comes to mind.) The indi- vidual, carved out of nature through productive
labor and conceiving the world and himself on the model of appropriating private property,
emerges as the cornerstone of political theories and practices in cultures of phallicized
whiteness. The individual thereby comes to function as an ahistorical unit defined by its
productive labor’s distancing relation to the state of nature, not by any historico-political
forces. (With his unhistorical thinking, Locke acts per- fectly as a liberal individual.) Classical
liberalism writes the individual as the (allegedly) neutral substratum of all political
decisions, positioning it as sep- arable from historico-political forces. In carving the
individual out of both the natural and socio-historico-political landscapes, modern political
and epistemological projects turn around Locke’s fundamental metaphors of en- closure. The
individual, that seat of political and personal subjectivity, is enclosed and thus cut off from all
other forces circulating in the social envi- ronment. The individual effectively functions as a
piece of private property, with the strange twist of owning itself, impervious to all
intruders and pro- tected by the inherent right of ownership, derived from the
ontological right to one’s own enclosed body. History then is reduced to a collection of
what Kelly Oliver has aptly called “discrete facts that can be known or not known, written in
history books, and [that] are discontinuous with the present” (2001, 130). History is that
collection of events that occurred in the past and is now tightly sealed in that past. History is
simply what has happened, with no fundamental effect or influence upon what is happening
now or might happen in the future. Historicity is unthought and unthinkable here. The modern
rational self—the liberal individual—exists in a temporally and historically sealed vacuum,
made possible by the clear disjunction between past, present, and future. Cartesian concepts
of time as discrete moments that do not enter into contact or affect one another dominate this
conception of the individ- ual.10 The logic of the limit thereby demarcates the past
sharply and neatly from the present, turning each into objects about which we can
develop concepts, facts, and truths. The future, that temporal horizon initiated by
preferred forms of complex labor, becomes the sole focus of intention and desire. But the
future never arrives. Therefore, if historicity and ‘the historical’ mean reading present
ideas, values, or concepts as undergoing a constant shaping and reshaping by
material forces, this divorce of the past from the present effectively renders all
temporal zones—past, present, future, and all permutations—ahistorical. Existence
itself is radically dehistoricized. And the individual, that bastion of political activity and
value, accordingly resides in a historical vacuum, untouched by historical forces—the very
realm of whiteness. This ahistorical view of history perpetuates the modern project of clas-
sical liberalism and its damages, creating a particular kind of individual. The individual
becomes the locus of identity, selfhood, and subjectivity in the modern political project.
Demarcated from historical existence, it also re- quires careful delineation from other bodies,
whether persons, institutions, history, or social attitudes. This concept of the individual
develops with a pronounced insistence on its neutrality, rendering specific attributes of the
individual merely particular qualities that function, again, on the model of private property:
characteristics such as race, gender, religion, or nationality remain at a distance from this
insistently neutral individual. (I use the pro- noun “it” to emphasize the function of this alleged
neutrality, a dynamic that is central to the valorization of the white propertied Christian male
as the subject of power in phallicized whiteness.) This insular existence, under- scored by its
ahistorical status, is further ensured by claims of radical auton- omy, whereby the individual
is the source, site, and endpoint of all actions, desires, thoughts, and behaviors: we choose
what we do. And we choose it, of course, because we are rational: Kantian ethics become
the proper bookend to Locke’s initiating of “high modernity’s”11 schemas. This demarcation
of the individual then carves the critical division between internal and external, and its
political-psychic counterpart, that between self and Other. The self is located squarely and
exclusively in one’s rational faculties, the natural law that, according to Locke, civilizes us into
economies of labor, utility, and a strange mix of scarcity and abundance. The modern rational
self is radically self-contained—enclosed. It is a sovereign self, unaffected by and
independent from any thing or force external to it, whether materiality or the Other. Assuming
it exercises rationality appropriately, this self is radically autonomous, choosing its own place
in the world. (Pointing to America, Locke insists that civilized men are free to leave society.)
It does not heed any call of the Other. It is effectively autog- enous, existing in a pre-Hegelian
philosophical world.12 Utility and its epistemological counterpart, instrumentality,
subsequently become the operative conceptions of power in this schema of the liberal
individual as the self. Autonomous, autogenous, and ahistorical, the modern rational
individual is in full control of its self. Its power is thereby something that it owns and
wields, as it chooses. Power is not some force that might shape the individual without
its assent or, at a minimum, its acknowledg- ment. It is something that an individual,
even if in the form of an individual state, wields intentionally. It can still use this power
legitimately or illegiti- mately, but that is a matter of choice. The individual controls power and
the ways that it affects the world: this is its expression of freedom. Accordingly, the role of
the law becomes to vigilantly protect this ahistorical unit, the individual, from the
discriminations and violences of historical vicissitudes. The role of the law is to protect the
individual’s power, the seat of its freedom. We are far from Foucaultian ideas that perhaps
power and history constitute the ways we view and experience the world, shaping our
categories and embedding us in this very notion of the individual as autonomous, autogenous, and ahistorical. The liberal individual, untouched by material, po- litical, and
historical conditions, is a neutral substratum that freely wields its power as it chooses: this is
the liberal sovereignty and mastery of freedom. Because the individual is this neutral
substratum, differences may or may not attach themselves to it. But those differences are
cast into that incon- sequential space of material conditions along with history and the Other.
The odd twist of self-ownership surfaces more fully here. Following Locke’s metaphors of
enclosure, the individual is enclosed and sealed off not only from all historical and social
forces in the environment, but also from the very attributes of difference within itself. While
specific attributes that con- stitute “difference” in North American culture continuously shift,
with new categories emerging and old ones receding, the particular vector of difference that
matters depends on our historical location, and all its complexities.13 Consequently, these
attributes do not fundamentally affect the neutrality of the modern individual. These
differences occur at the level of the body and history, realms of existence that do not touch
the self-contained individual. The neutral individual relates to these differences through the
models of enclosure and ownership. It experiences these discrete parts of itself (e.g., race,
gender, religion, nationality) as one owns a variety of objects in econ- omies of (scarce)
private property: one chooses when one wishes to purchase, own, display, or wear such
objects as one freely desires. The unnerving in- fluence of power surfaces, however, as we
realize that this free choice be- comes the exclusive power of the subject position valorized
in cultures of phallicized whiteness, the white propertied Christian (straight) male14 who
determines when, how, and which differences matter. Neutrality thus functions as the
conceptual glue of the modern political project of classical liberalism. It allows the model of
ownership to take hold as the dominant conception of selfhood: one’s true self resides in a
neutral space and from that space one owns one’s power, one’s freedom, and one’s
attributes. Just as the capitalist fantasy still convinces us today that we choose and control
our private property, the neutral individual also resides in a self- enclosed, self-contained
space that hovers above these matters. Just as the kind of car an American drives today
supposedly does not affect the kind of person that he or she is, so too the rational and
therefore neutral individual resides in a space that transcends material conditions and their
entrapments. Differences between individuals, whether of race or religion or gender or
nationality or sexuality, become a mere matter of ownership—i.e., what one has and has not
chosen to own. And as the inherent rights of private property imply, one consequently has
the right to protect or dispense with one’s prop- erty: the individual is free to choose how to
wield its power and how to respond to these (inconsequential) differences. Not to have this
ability—i.e., not to be able to choose and control when and how one’s gender, race,
nationality, sexuality, or religion matters—signifies a lack of individualism, a lack of power, a
lack of civility.15 The individual thus becomes the proprietor of its differences and the various,
discrete rights obtaining to them. The logic of enclosure and de- marcation, expressing the
logic of the limit here, grounds the conceptions of difference itself in these schemas of
classical liberalism. One owns—en- closes—one’s differences and, additionally, the
differences themselves are dis- crete—demarcated—from one another. The language of
rights derives from the overarching model of ownership, just as we find it developed out of
the fundamental right to one’s own enclosed body in Locke’s text. The modern project of
liberal individualism thereby reads difference as that which is, can be, or ought to be
demarcated, delimited, enclosed—and owned. When I turn to contemporary debates around
affirmative action below, I will return to several dynamics that have emerged here. First of all,
the liberal individual exists as a neutral substratum to which differences, caused by history
and materiality (the body), attach themselves. Equality conse- quently resides in that neutral
substratum of the individual and we access it only by stripping away the merely historical
attributes of difference: equality and neutrality mutually constitute one another.
Consequently, those who cannot abstract from merely historical attributes of difference (e.g.,
race and gender) will be read as unequal to those for whom these historical differences do
not matter. Secondly, freedom is understood as the expression of power, over which one has
conscious and rational control. Power, framed as a tool that one wields, is derived from the
model of instrumental reason. And, finally, the liberal individual experiences differences such
as race, gender, religion, and nationality as attributes that it owns. It consequently exercises
rights over them such as those derived from the inherent right of ownership that Locke locates
in the natural imperative to labor: the language of rights assumes, thrives in, and thereby
perpetuates an economy of scarcity, the economy in which debates around affirmative action
are firmly entrenched. Each of these colludes to give phallicized whiteness the necessary
tools to maintain the white propertied Christian (straight) male as the valorized subject in
power. Functioning through the rhetoric of neutrality, this specific subject disavows its
historical and material conditioning and thereby gains the power to determine when, how,
and which differences matter. Grounded in the fundamental value of neutrality, difference
should not matter; hence, for example, contemporary rhetorics of color-blindness dominate
discourses about the desired endpoint of a ‘just’—and therefore raceless—society.17
However, in those circumstances in which difference insists on its existence (i.e.,
circumstances in which ‘minorities’ or the disenfranchised insist on their rights, voices, and
even votes), the decisions about when, how, and which differences matter will remain in the
power of the neutral individual, the subject in power—and the one who is free.
The AFFs politics of a wake up call for the oppressors will be a structural adjustment
of the black body that forecloses black liberation and encourages the white savior
complex. If we win their scholarship produces this structural violence that is a reason
to vote negative
Wilderson 2010- Frank B Wilderson III- Professor at UC irvine- Red, White and Black- p. 8-10
I have little interest in assailing political conservatives. Nor is my ar- gument wedded to the
disciplinary needs of political science, or even sociology, where injury must be established,
first, as White supremacist event, from which one then embarks on a demonstration of intent,
or racism; and, if one is lucky, or foolish, enough, a solution is proposed. If the position of the
Black is, as I argue, a paradigmatic impossibility in the Western Hemisphere, indeed, in the
world, in other words, if a Black is the very antithesis of a Human subject, as imagined by
Marxism and psy- choanalysis, then his or her paradigmatic exile is not simply a function of
repressive practices on the part of institutions (as political science and sociology would have
it). This banishment from the Human fold is to be found most profoundly in the emancipatory
meditations of Black people's staunchest "allies," and in some of the most "radical" films.
Here—not in restrictive policy, unjust legislation, police brutality, or conservative
scholarship—is where the Settler/Master's sinews are most resilient. The polemic animating
this research stems from (1) my reading of Native and Black American meta-commentaries
on Indian and Black subject positions written over the past twenty-three years and ( 2 ) a
sense of how much that work appears out of joint with intellectual protocols and political ethics
which underwrite political praxis and socially engaged popular cinema in this epoch of
multiculturalism and globalization. The sense of abandonment I experience when I read the
meta-commentaries on Red positionality (by theorists such as Leslie Silko, Ward Churchill,
Taiaiake Alfred, Vine Deloria Jr., and Haunani-Kay Trask) and the meta-commentaries on
Black positionality (by theorists such as David Marriott, Saidiya Hartman, Ronald Judy,
Hortense Spillers, Orlando Patterson, and Achille Mbembe) against the deluge of
multicultural positivity is overwhelming. One suddenly realizes that, though the semantic field
on which subjec- tivity is imagined has expanded phenomenally through the protocols of
multiculturalism and globalization theory, Blackness and an unflinching articulation of
Redness are more unimaginable and illegible within this expanded semantic field than they
were during the height of the F B I ' S repressive Counterintelligence Program ( C O I N T E
L P R O ) . On the seman- tic field on which the new protocols are possible, Indigenism can
indeed lO become partially legible through a programmatics of structural adjust- ment (as fits
our globalized era). In other words, for the Indians' subject position to be legible, their positive
registers of lost or threatened cultural identity must be foregrounded, when in point of fact the
antagonistic register of dispossession that Indians "possess" is a position in relation to a
socius structured by genocide. As Churchill points out, everyone from Armenians to Jews
have been subjected to genocide, but the Indigenous position is one for which genocide is a
constitutive element, not merely an historical event, without which Indians would not,
paradoxically, "exist." 9 Regarding the Black position, some might ask why, after claims successfully made on the state by the Civil Rights Movement, do I insist on positing an
operational analytic for cinema, film studies, and political theory that appears to be a
dichotomous and essentialist pairing of Masters and Slaves? In other words, why should we
think of today's Blacks in the United States as Slaves and everyone else (with the exception
of Indians) as Masters? One could answer these questions by demonstrat- ing how nothing
remotely approaching claims successfully made on the state has come to pass. In other
words, the election of a Black president aside, police brutality, mass incarceration,
segregated and substandard schools and housing, astronomical rates of H I V infection, and
the threat of being turned away en masse at the polls still constitute the lived expe- rience of
Black life. But such empirically based rejoinders would lead us in the wrong direction; we
would find ourselves on "solid" ground, which would only mystify, rather than clarify, the
question. We would be forced to appeal to "facts," the "historical record," and empirical
markers of stasis and change, all of which could be turned on their head with more of the
same. Underlying such a downward spiral into sociology, political sci- ence, history, and
public policy debates would be the very rubric that I am calling into question: the grammar of
suffering known as exploitation and alienation, the assumptive logic whereby subjective
dispossession is arrived at in the calculations between those who sell labor power and those
who acquire it. The Black qua the worker. Orlando Patterson has already dispelled this faulty
ontological grammar in Slavery and Social Death, where he demonstrates how and why work,
or forced labor, is not a constituent element of slavery. Once the "solid" plank of "work" is
removed from slavery, then the conceptually coherent notion of "claims against the state"—
the proposition that the state and civil society are elastic enough to even contemplate the
possibility of an emancipatory project for the Black position—disintegrates into thin air. The
imaginary of the state and civil society is parasitic on the Middle Passage. Put an- other way,
No slave, no world. And, in addition, as Patterson argues, no slave is in the world. If, as an
ontological position, that is, as a grammar of suffering, the Slave is not a laborer but an antiHuman, a position against which Hu- manity establishes, maintains, and renews its
coherence, its corporeal in- tegrity; if the Slave is, to borrow from Patterson, generally
dishonored, perpetually open to gratuitous violence, and void of kinship structure, that is,
having no relations that need be recognized, a being outside of re- lationality, then our
analysis cannot be approached through the rubric of gains or reversals in struggles with the
state and civil society, not unless and until the interlocutor first explains how the Slave is of
the world. The onus is not on one who posits the Master/Slave dichotomy but on the one who
argues there is a distinction between Slaveness and Blackness. How, when, and where did
such a split occur? The woman at the gates of Columbia University awaits an answer.
The alternative is an unflinching paradigmatic analysis that poses the question of
whether civil society is ethical
Wilderson 10 [Frank, Professor of African American Studies and Drama at UC Irvine, Ph.D. in
Rhetoric/Film Studies from UC Berkeley, “Red, White, & Black”, pp ix-]
STRANGE AS it might seem, this book project began in South Africa. During the last years
of apartheid I worked for revolutionary change in both an underground and above-ground
capacity, for the Charterist Movement in general and the ANC in particular. During this period,
I began to see how essential an unflinching paradigmatic analysis is to a movement dedicated
to the complete overthrow of an existing order. The neoliberal compromises that the radical
elements of the Chartist Movement made with the moderate elements were due, in large part,
to our inability or unwillingness to hold the moderates' feet to tthe fire of a political agenda
predicated on an unflinching paradigmatic analysis. Instead, we allowed our energies and
points of attention to be displaced by and onto pragmatic considerations. Simply put, we
abdicated the power to pose the question—and the power to pose the question is the greatest
power of all. Elsewhere, I have written about this unfortunate turn of events (Incognegro: A
Memoir of Exile and Apartheid), so I'll not rehearse the details here. Suffice it to say, this
book germinated in the many political and academic discussions and debates that I was
fortunate enough to be a part of at a historic moment and in a place where the word revolution
was spoken in earnest, free of qualifiers and irony. For their past and ongoing ideas and
interventions, I extend solidarity and appreciation to comrades Amanda Alexander, Franco
Barchiesi, Teresa Barnes, Patrick Bond, Ashwin Desai, Nigel Gibson, Steven Greenberg,
Allan Horowitz, Bushy Kelebonye (deceased), Tefu Kelebonye, Ulrike Kistner, Kamogelo
Lekubu, Andile Mngxitama, Prishani Naidoo, John Shai, and S'bu Zulu.
The 1ac’s wake up call allows civil society to reimagine itself which will always
position blackness as social death - Social death is a condition of existence and not
some avoidable impact—how we relate to this condition is all that is important
Wilderson 02 - The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal-Presented a t #Imprisoned
Intellectuals # Conference Brown University]
Civil society is not a terrain intended for the Black subject. It is coded as waged and wages
are White. Civil society is the terrain where hegemony is produced, contested, mapped. And
th e invitat ion to p articipate in hegemony's gestures of influence, leadership, and consent
is not ext ended to t he unwaged. We live in the world , but ex ist out side of civil s ociety.
This structurally impossible position is a paradox, because the Black subject, the slave, is
vital to political economy: s/he kick-starts capital at its genesis and rescues it from its overaccumulation crisis at its end. But Marxism has no account of this phenomenal birth and lifesaving role played by the Black subject: from Marx and Gr amsci we have con sistent s
ilence. In taking Foucau lt to ta sk for a ssum ing a univ ersal s ubject in r evolt ag ainst d
iscipline, in the same s pirit in which I have t aken Gr amsci to ta sk for as suming a u niversal
sub ject, the subject of civil societ y in revolt a gainst capita l, Joy Jam es writes : The U.S.
carceral network kills, however, and in its prisons, it kills more blacks than any other ethnic
group. American prisons constitute an "outside" in U.S. political life. In fact, our society
displays waves of concentric outside circles with increasing distances from bourgeois selfpolicing. The state routinely polices the14 unassim ilable in the hell of lockdow n, deprivat ion
tanks , control units , and holes for political prisoners (Resisting State Violence 1996: 34 )
But this peculiar preoccupation is not Gramsci's bailiwick. His concern is with White folks; or
with folks in a White (ned) enough subject position that they are confronted by, or threat ened
by th e remova l of, a wag e -- be it monetary or social. But Black subjectivity itself
disarticulates the Gramscian dream as a ubiquitous emancipatory strategy, because
Gramsci, like most White activists, and radical American movements like the prison abolition
movement, has no theory of the unwaged, no solidarity with the slave If we are to take Fanon
at his word when he writes, #Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the
world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder # (37) then we must accept the fact that
no other body functions in the Imaginary, the Symbolic, or the Real so completely as a
repository of complete disorder as the Black body. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction
at the level of the Real, for in its magnetizing of bullets the Black body functions as the map
of gratuitous violence through which civil society is possible: namely, those other bodies for
which violence is, or can be, contingent. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the
level of the Symbolic, for Blackness in America generates no categories for the chromosome
of History, no data for the categories of Immigration or Sovereignty; it is an experience
without analog # a past, without a heritage. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction
at the level of t he Imaginary for #whoever says #rape # says Black, # (Fanon) , whoever
says #prison # says Black, and whoever says #AIDS # says Black (Sexton) # the #Negro
is a phobogenic object # (Fanon). Indeed &a phobogenic object &a past without a heritage
&the map of gratuitous violence &a program of complete disorder. But whereas this
realization is, and should be cause for alarm, it should not be cause for lament, or worse,
disavowal # not at least, for a true revolutionary, or for a truly revolutionary movement
such as prison a bolition. 15 If a social movement is to be neither social democratic, nor
Marxist, in terms of the structure of its political desire then it should grasp the invitation to
assume the positionality of subjects of social death that present themselves; and, if we are
to be honest with ourselves we must admit that the “Negro “ has been inviting Whites,
and as well as civil society #s junior partners, to the dance of social death for hundreds of
years, but few have wanted to learn the steps. They have been, and remain today # even
in the most anti-racist movements, like the prison abolition movement # invested elsewhere.
This is not to say that all oppositional political desire today is pro-White, but it is to say that it
is almost always “anti-Black” which is to say it will not dance with death. Black liberation, as
a prospect, makes radicalism more dangerous to the U.S. Not because it raises the
specter of some alternative polity (like socialism, or community control of existing
resources) but because its condition of possibility as well as its gesture of resistance
functions as a negative dialectic: a politics of refusal and a refus al to affirm , a program of
complete disorder. One mus t embrace its disorder, its in coherence and allow oneself to
be elaborated by it, if indeed one's politics are to be underwritten by a desire to take this
country down. If this is not the desire which underwrites one #s politics then through what
strategy of legitimation is the word #prison # being linked t o the wo rd #abolition #? Wh at
ar e this movem ent #s lines of po litical a ccount abilit y? There #s nothing foreign,
frightening, or even unpracticed about the embrace of disorder and incoherence. The desire
to be embraced, and elaborated, by disorder and incoherence is not anathema in and of itself:
no one, for example, has ever been known to say #gee-whiz, if only my orgasms would end
a little sooner, or maybe not come at all. # But few so-called radicals desire to be embraced,
and elaborated, by the disorder and incoherence of Blackness # and the state of politica l
movemen ts in A merica to day is ma rked by t his very N egroph obogen isis: #gee-whiz, if
only Black rage could be more coherent, or maybe not come at all. # Perhaps there #s
something more terrifying about the joy of Black, then there is about the joy of sex (unless
one is talking sex wit h a Negr o). Perhaps coalitions today p refer to remain in- orgas mic
in the fa ce of civilsociety # with hegemony as a handy prophylactic, just in case. But if,
through this stasis, or paralysis , they tr y to do t he work of pr ison a bolit ion # that work
will fail; because it is always work from a position of coherence (i.e. the worker) on behalf of
a position of incoherence, the Black subject, or prison slave. In this way, social formations on
the Left remain blind to the contradictions of coalitions bet ween worker s and s laves. T hey
remain coalitions opera ting with in the logic of civil society; and function less as revolutionary
promises and more as crowding out scenarios of Black antagonisms # they simply feed our
frustration. Whereas the positionality of the worker # be s/he a factory worker demanding a
monetary wage or an immigrant or White woman demanding a social wage # gestures
toward the reconfiguration of civil society, the positionality of the Black subject # be s/he a
prison-slave or a prison-slave-in-waiting # gestures toward the disconfiguration of civil
society: from the coherence of civil society, t he Black subject beckons with the in
coherence of civil war. A civil war which reclaims Blackness not as a positive value, but as
a politically enabling site, to quote Fanon, of “absolute dereliction“: a scandal which rends
civil society asunder. Civil war, then, becomes that unthought, but never forgotten
understudy of hegemony. A Black specter waiting in the wings, an endless antagonism that
cannot be satisfied (via reform or reparation) but must nonetheless be pursued to the death.