Case
Thesis-Level
General
Black Nationalism fails — it can’t escape the structures of the status quo.
Myers 08 — John Myers, Professor of Sociology at Rowan University, Ph.D. in Sociology from Fordham
University, 2008 (“African Americans: From Segregation to Modern Institutional Discrimination and
Racism,” Dominant-Minority Relations In America: Convergence In The New World, Published by Pearson
Press, ISBN: 0205706258, pg. 223)
Given this gloomy situation, it should not be surprising to find significant strength in pluralistic,
nationalistic thinking, as well as resentment and anger in the African American community. Black
Nationalism and Black Power remain powerful ideas, but their goals of development and autonomy for
the African American community remain largely rhetorical sloganeering without the resources to bring
them to actualization.
The situation of the African American community in the early 21st Century might be characterized as
structural pluralism combined with inequality. The former characterization testifies to the failure of
assimilation and the latter to the continuing effects, in the present, of a colonized origin. The problems
that remain are less visible (Or perhaps just better hidden from the average white middle-class
American) than those of previous eras. Responsibility is more diffused, the moral certainties of
opposition to slavery or to Jim Crow laws are long gone, and contemporary racial issues must be
articulated and debated in an environment of subtle prejudice and low levels of sympathy for the
grievances of African Americans. Urban poverty, modern institutional discrimination, and modern racism
are less dramatic and more difficult to measure than an overseer's whip, a lynch mob, or a sign that says
"Whites Only," but they can be just as real and just as deadly in their consequences.
Racist policies won’t convince black American to leave and reformism is a better
method
Walker ’13 (S. Jay Walker – was the Chair of the Black Studies Program at Dartmouth; Oct 22, 2013;
Black Separatism and Social Reality: Rhetoric and Reason; “Forward II”; XV)//CC
For despair and the peak of black separatist sentiment go hand in hand. It is always at those hours which
look bleakest for black America the killings of King and Robert Kennedy and the election of Nixon, the
aftermath of the "Red Summers" following World War I, the betrayal of Reconstruc-tion, the apparent
failure of the Abolitionist movement just before the Civil War — When the unexamined "anyplace but
here" becomes most attractive. It is upon examination of the idea that it loses force. Yet it never
completely dies, nor is it completely valueless. For if black separatism reminds black that we are exactly
that, Americans, and that we have no home in Africa, and if it reminds us that some of the systems and
ideologies prepared for us by other blacks are not precisely what we want, it also reminds of what we do
want and reminds us that as blacks we have a common cause and a common identity that can be turned
into a tool for achieving it. That tool is the recognition of our roots here, the recogni-tion of the
strength, the dignity, and the discipline with which our grandparents and parents struggled to put us
within striking reach of equality. It is the realization of the oneness of the desire of human beings to be
respected for what they are and the responsibility of human beings to respect others for what they are.
Few black Americans, I suspect, are given to Fourth of July panegyrics, and still fewer to wearing
American flag lapel pins a la Nixon. But very, very few have given up, or have any intention of giving up
on this country, for the simple reason that it is ours. We are here, we are going to stay here. and thus
our task is to make this place closer to what it should be — more free, more just, more humane. We are
not "trying to crawl back on the plantation," if plantation it is. We have never left it. We are simply
determined now to make part of it truly our own.
Cap Turn
Focus on Black Nationalism distracts from struggles to end capitalism — any
concessions can cause a collapse of class politics — we access the larger internal link
to racial oppression.
Smith 07 — Sharon Smith, Socialist Author and Journalist, Editor of the Journal of International
Socialism, Author of Women and Socialism: Essays on Women's Liberation, 2007 (“Mistaken identity:
can identity politics liberate the oppressed?,” International Socialism, April 4th, Accessible Online at
http://isj.org.uk/mistaken-identity-can-identity-politics-liberate-the-oppressed/, Accessed On 07-21-15)
there was a strong working class component to the
main black nationalist movements, and there was no room for doubting that the enemy was the state.
These factors led to much greater political clarity among black activists. That kind of clarity is all but absent today. Mainstream black
leaders—even black politicians—are able to use the language of black nationalism to justify doing nothing, or worse yet,
Black nationalism today bears little resemblance to that which existed in the 1960s. Then,
to advance anti-working class policies. In its most backward forms nationalism has played a destructive
role, rationalising deep divisions even between blacks and other oppressed groups in society. This was played out
most dramatically during the Los Angeles rebellion in 1992, when among a significant layer of those who rebelled anger was deflected toward Koreans, who own a large number of small shops
in South Central Los Angeles. In another recent instance, when Latinos claimed they were under-represented in Congress due to discriminatory voting policies, a group of black politicians
black nationalists today place little or no
importance on building a movement, or on strategies for far reaching social change. If anything, the
rising influence of ‘Afrocentrism’ among a section of black intellectuals has represented a step further
away from challenging the status quo. Afrocentrism involves the complete and permanent separation
between African history, philosophy and culture from all other civilisations. Afrocentric theorist Molefi Asante has argued for
argued that some groups of Latinos, such as Cuban-Americans, are not genuinely oppressed. For the most part,
‘every topic, economics, law communication, science, religion, history, literature, and sociology to be reviewed through Afrocentric eyes’. But, as Manning Marable argued about Afrocentrism:
Vulgar Afrocentrists deliberately ignored or obscured the historical reality of social class stratification
within the African diaspora. They essentially argued that the interests of all black people—from Joint Chiefs of Staff
Chairman General Colin Powell to conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, to the black unemployed, homeless and hungry of America’s decaying urban ghettoes—were
philosophically, culturally and racially the same. Even the scholarly Afrocentric approach…[did not]
speak to historical materialism, except to attack it. As such, vulgar Afrocentrism was the perfect social
theory for the upwardly mobile black petty bourgeoisie . As Marable argues, the audience for Afrocentrist theory
and other forms of cultural nationalism is to be found mainly among the black middle class in the US, which has
grown significantly since the end of the movements of the 1960s. In 1990 more than 15 percent of black households earned above $50,000, while thousands of upper middle class black
families earn over $100,000 annually. For this section of blacks, the economic aspects of oppression—poverty, unemployment and police brutality—which daily plague the majority of the black
while no black organisations have been built
specifically on the basis of identity politics, many of the same assumptions have filtered through and
gained acceptance among anti-racists, white and black. As Ambalavaner Sivanandan wrote in an argument against those in the Labour left
population can be viewed as consequences of racism, rather than the other way round. Thus,
influenced by Marxism Today’s attack on class politics in Britain: By personalising power, ‘the personal is the political’ personalises the enemy: the enemy of the black is the white as the enemy
of the woman is the man. And all whites are racist like all men are sexist. Thus racism is the combination of power plus prejudice… Hence the fight against racism became reduced to a fight
against prejudice, the fight against institutions and practices to a fight against individuals and attitudes.49 Sivanandan goes on to list a series of cases which demonstrate this point. In one case,
people participating in Racial Awareness Training (RAT) classes were so worried about being insensitive that some were afraid to ask for black coffee. And as Sivanandan argues brilliantly, the
tendency of this sort of approach has been to shift the terrain of the struggle against racism away from movements and towards individual lifestyle. This pattern, of course, closely resembles
that of identity politics: Carried to its logical conclusion, just to be black, for instance, was politics enough: because it was in one’s blackness that one was aggressed, just to be black was to
make a statement against such aggression. If, in addition, you ‘came out’ black, by wearing dreadlocks say, then you could be making several statements… Equally, you could make a statement
by just being ethnic, against Englishness, for instance; by being gay, against heterosexism; by being a woman, against male domination. Only the white straight male, it would appear, had to go
find his own politics of resistance somewhere out there in the world (as a consumer perhaps?) Everyone else could say: I am, therefore I resist. At times Marable also argues forcefully against
the concepts of identity politics. In a recent issue of the journal Race and Class, for example, he called for ‘dismantling the narrow politics of racial identity and selective self interest’. And he
argued that this requires that ‘the black leadership reaches out to other oppressed sectors of society, creating a common programme for economic and social justice.’52 Yet at other times
both these writers accept some of the fundamental assumptions of identity politics, demonstrating the extent to which such ideas have gained acceptance within the left. As Alex Callinicos
argued about Sivanandan: although he is very critical of the political conclusions drawn by Marxism Today, Sivanandan accepts its analysis of the emergence of a new ‘post-Fordist’ economy
based on the destruction of the mass production industries and the working class these rested on. He merely argues that the effect of these changes is to shift the locus of resistance to the
new ‘underclass’ which now bears the brunt of exploitation… This is… a remarkably pessimistic analysis.53 Marable’s drift into the terrain of identity politics has been more dramatic. In his
article, ‘A New American Socialism’, which appeared recently in The Progressive, Marable attacks white socialists in the US for not having had more success in recruiting blacks to socialist
organisations. He wrote: The left must ask itself why most socialist organisations… have consistently failed to attract black, Latino, and Asian-American supporters… The left should be
challenged to explain why the majority of the most militant and progressive students of colour in the hip-hop contemporary culture of the 1990s have few connections with erstwhile white
radicals, and usually perceive Marxism as just another discredited ‘white ideology’.54 Marable answers this question by arguing that, ‘No American socialist organisation has ever been able to
attract substantial numbers of African-Americans and other people of colour, unless, from the very beginning, they were well represented inside the leadership and planning of that body’ [his
emphasis].55 Here Marable is rewriting history. Some of the most important struggles against racism in this century were built by the Communist Party (CP) in the 1930s—which began as a
predominantly white organisation. There was nothing extraordinary about the CP in this respect. Socialists of all races have traditionally been at the forefront in fighting racism. When nine
young black men, known as the Scottsboro Boys, were sentenced to death on a trumped up rape charge in Alabama in 1931, the mainstream black organisations shunned their case. A leader
of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) even argued that his group did not want to be identified with a ‘gang of mass rapists’. Yet the mainly white
Communist Party built an international campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys, and during the course of the 1930s united thousands of black and white workers around various anti-racism
campaigns. Because the CP took fighting racism seriously, black membership in the party climbed to 5,000 by 1939.56 The contradictions in Marable’s analysis demonstrate why
it is not
enough to break halfway with identity politics. While in one breath he attacks identity politics using class arguments, in the next he attacks socialists
using identity politics arguments.
Without a sharp break from identity politics, it is all too easy to lose sight of the
source of oppression—capitalism—and to forget that all those who are oppressed and exploited by
the system have a common interest in ending it.
Capitalism causes extinction — environmental collapse guarantees inevitable crisis.
Smith 13 — Richard Smith, Economics Author and Writer, Ph.D. in Economic History from the
University of California, Los Angeles, 2013 (“'Sleepwalking to Extinction': Capitalism and the Destruction
of Life and Earth,” Common Dreams, November 15th, Accessible Online at
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2013/11/15/sleepwalking-extinction-capitalism-anddestruction-life-and-earth, Accessed On 07-21-15)
Capitalism is, overwhelmingly, the main driver of planetary ecological collapse
From climate change to natural resource overconsumption to pollution, the engine that has powered
three centuries of accelerating economic development, revolutionizing technology, science, culture and
human life itself is, today, a roaring out-of-control locomotive mowing down continents of forests,
sweeping oceans of life, clawing out mountains of minerals, pumping out lakes of fuels, devouring the
planet’s last accessible natural resources to turn them into “product,” while destroying fragile global
ecologies built up over eons of time. Between 1950 and 2000 the global human population more than
doubled from 2.5 to 6 billion. But in these same decades, consumption of major natural resources
soared more than sixfold on average, some much more. Natural gas consumption grew nearly
twelvefold, bauxite (aluminum ore) fifteenfold. And so on. At current rates, Harvard biologist E.O.
Wilson says that “half the world’s great forests have already been leveled and half the world’s plant and
animal species may be gone by the end of this century.”
Corporations aren’t necessarily evil, though plenty are diabolically evil, but they can’t help themselves.
They’re just doing what they’re supposed to do for the benefit of their shareholders. Shell Oil can’t help
but loot Nigeria and the Arctic and cook the climate. That’s what shareholders demand. BHP Billiton, Rio
Tinto and other mining giants can’t resist mining Australia’s abundant coal and exporting it to China and
India. Mining accounts for 19% of Australia’s GDP and substantial employment even as coal combustion
is the single worst driver of global warming. IKEA can’t help but level the forests of Siberia and Malaysia
to feed the Chinese mills building their flimsy disposable furniture (IKEA is the third largest consumer of
lumber in the world). Apple can’t help it if the cost of extracting the “rare earths” it needs to make
millions of new iThings each year is the destruction of the eastern Congo — violence, rape, slavery,
forced induction of child soldiers, along with poisoning local waterways. Monsanto and DuPont and
Syngenta and Bayer Crop Science have no choice but to wipe out bees, butterflies, birds, small farmers
and extinguish crop diversity to secure their grip on the world’s food supply while drenching the planet
in their Roundups and Atrazines and neonicotinoids.
This is how giant corporations are wiping out life on earth in the course of a routine business day. And
the bigger the corporations grow, the worse the problems become.
In Adam Smith’s day, when the first factories and mills produced hat pins and iron tools and rolls of cloth
by the thousands, capitalist freedom to make whatever they wanted didn’t much matter because they
didn’t have much impact on the global environment. But today, when everything is produced in the
millions and billions, then trashed today and reproduced all over again tomorrow, when the planet is
looted and polluted to support all this frantic and senseless growth, it matters — a lot.
The world’s climate scientists tell us we’re facing a planetary emergency. They’ve been telling us since
the 1990s that if we don’t cut global fossil fuel greenhouse gas emissions by 80-90% below 1990 levels
by 2050 we will cross critical tipping points and global warming will accelerate beyond any human
power to contain it. Yet despite all the ringing alarm bells, no corporation and no government can
oppose growth and, instead, every capitalist government in the world is putting pedal to the metal to
accelerate growth, to drive us full throttle off the cliff to collapse.
Marxists have never had a better argument against capitalism than this inescapable and apocalyptic
“contradiction.” Solutions to the ecological crisis are blindingly obvious but we can’t take the necessary
steps to prevent ecological collapse because, so long as we live under capitalism, economic growth has
to take priority over ecological concerns.
AT: Circumvention
Plan restores strong language – that’s sufficient to end circumvention.
Granick ‘14
Jennifer Granick is the Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. Jennifer was the Civil Liberties
Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Jennifer practices, speaks and writes about computer crime and security,
electronic surveillance, consumer privacy, data protection, copyright, trademark and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. From
2001 to 2007, Jennifer was Executive Director of CIS and taught Cyberlaw, Computer Crime Law, Internet intermediary liability,
and Internet law and policy. Before teaching at Stanford, Jennifer earned her law degree from University of California, Hastings
College of the Law and her undergraduate degree from the New College of the University of South Florida. “USA Freedom Act:
Oh, Well. Whatever. Nevermind.” – Just Security - May 21, 2014 http://justsecurity.org/10675/usa-freedom-act-oh-wellwhatever-nevermind/
The initially promising USA Freedom Act could have ended the previously secret government practices of collecting
Americans’ calling records, internet transactional information and who knows what else in bulk. Today’s version would allow
broad collection to continue under the guise of reform. The initial version of the bill would have
reinforced existing statutory language requiring a showing of “relevance to an authorized investigation”
before agents can get an order requiring production of business records, dialing and routing information, and other
data, and would have added other limits to ensure massive collection would stop. It also would have implemented
mild reforms
to content surveillance under section 702 of the F ISA A mendments A ct, stopping “back door” searches
for Americans’ communications. Last week, a Managers’ Amendment watered those provisions down,
substituting new language that would allow agents to use a “specific selection term” as the “basis for production”.
The bill defined “specific selection term” as something that “uniquely describe[s] a person, entity, or
account.” Given the intelligence community’s success at getting FISA judges to reinterpret obvious language—e.g. “relevance”—in counter-intuitive ways,
people wondered what this new language might mean. There’s deep public mistrust for the intelligence community and for the FISA court, which conspired to allow
bulk collection under spurious legal justifications for years. Worse, there’s deep public mistrust for the law itself, since the intelligence community’s “nuanced”
definitions of normal words have made the public realize that they do not understand the meaning of words like “relevance”, “collection”, “bulk”, or “target”.
Court ruling on Section 215 covers other bulk surveillance programs — it will be
enforced.
Ackerman 15 — Spencer Ackerman, national security editor for Guardian US, former senior writer for
Wired, won the 2012 National Magazine Award for Digital Reporting, 2015 (“Fears NSA will seek to
undermine surveillance reform,” The Guardian, June 1st, Available Online at
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/01/nsa-surveillance-patriot-act-congress-secret-law,
Accessed 06-08-2015)
Jameel Jaffer, the deputy legal director of the ACLU, expressed confidence that the second circuit court
of appeals’ decision last month would effectively step into the breach. The panel found that legal
authorities permitting the collection of data “relevant” to an investigation cannot allow the government
to gather data in bulk – setting a potentially prohibitive precedent for other bulk-collection programs.
“We don’t know what kinds of bulk-collection programs the government still has in place, but in the past
it’s used authorities other than Section 215 to conduct bulk collection of internet metadata, phone
records, and financial records. If similar programs are still in place, the ruling will force the government
to reconsider them, and probably to end them,” said Jaffer, whose organization brought the suit that
the second circuit considered.
Turns
Revolutionary black resistance generates backlash from the right and the left—it
materially reverses efforts towards racial justice
Shelby 07 – Tommie Shelby is the Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy
at Harvard University. (“We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity”)
Even if it were possible to effectively mobilize a multicorporatist Black Power program without running
afoul of democratic values or compromising broader egalitarian concerns, this form of black solidarity
may not be pragmatically desirable because of factors that are exogenous to black communities. Thus
far I have discussed this program without much consideration for how other ethnoracial groups would
be likely to respond to its institutional realization. It is reasonable to assume that Black Power politics
would engender a countermobilization on the part of nonblacks, and not just whites, seeking to
protect their own interests. Indeed, if Carmichael and Hamilton were correct about the essentially
ethnic basis of American politics, we should fully expect this kind ofresistance. With increased political
centralization and organizational autonomy, openly aimed at advancing black interests, we would also
likely see a rise in white nationalism, where some whites increase their collective power through
greater group self-organization and solidarity, as they have often done in the past and, to some extent,
continue to do even now.51 Such resistance would not come solely from racists, however.
Some potential allies would also be alienated by this nationalist program and may
consequently become(further) disillusioned with the ideal of racial integration, indifferent to black
problems, or disaffected from black people. Nonblacks would naturally view their relegation to
"supporting roles" within black political organizations as a sign that their help in the struggle for racial
justice is unneeded or unwanted; that their commitment to racial justice is in question; that blacks are
more concerned with advancing their group interests than with fighting injustice; or that blacks do not
seek a racially integrated society. Moreover, because those who have status and exercise power within
institutions generally have a stake in preserving these institutional structures, even if they no longer
serve the goals for which they were initially established, nonblacks have well-founded reasons to worry
that black political organizations may, through sheer inertia or opportunism, become ends in
themselves. Thus, although institutional autonomy might increase the organizational independence of
blacks, the overall power of the group could be reduced because of isolation from other progressive
forces. This situation would be particularly disastrous for blacks who live in minorityblack electoral districts, for they cannot elect effective political representation without the support of
like-minded nonblack citizens.
Turn: the tenants of Black Nationalism reify racism and bigotry
Robinson 01 (Dean E. Robinson, Ph.D. from Yale University Kellogg Scholar and University of
Massachusetts at Amherst Associate Professor, “Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought”
Accessed from Google Books//ekr)
Rather, I will argue that the
most politically consequential feature of black nationalism is its apparent inability to
diverge from what could be considered the "normal" politics of its day. By accepting the notion that black
people constitute an organic unit, and by focusing on the goal of nation building or separate political and
economic development, black nationalism inadvertently helps to reproduce some of the thinking and
practices that created black disadvantage in the first place. Most white Americans have long thought blacks
to be essentially different; and they have used that idea to justify expelling blacks, restricting black
movement, and limiting the range of rights, privileges, and opportunities avail- able to black people. It stands to
reason, then, that most attempts by black people to identify their differences from the majority population
and pursue political and economic autonomy on that basis, conform to one of the oldest American political fantasies —
what Ralph Ellison calls the desire to "get shut" of the Negro in America — to "banish (blacks) from the nation's bloodstream,
from its social structure, and from its conscience and historical consciousness. "4
Their form of Black Nationalism engages in a form of respectability politics that erases
African culture
Robinson 01 (Dean E. Robinson, Ph.D. from Yale University Kellogg Scholar and University of
Massachusetts at Amherst Associate Professor, “Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought”
Accessed from Google Books//ekr)
Marcus Garvey thought that the solution to the problem Of black inequality required a powerful black
nation in Africa. And so, beginning in 1918, he faced off against the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People and rejected the goal of "social equality." He also rejected trade
unionism as a vehicle for black advancement, as well as more radical alternatives. Instead, he offered an
aggressive black- politics-as-business-enterprise, and he sold his entire scheme with a militantly problack rhetoric. By so doing, Garvey anticipated the style of much of the black nationalism that would
follow — its principled rejection of American identity, and its notion that black enterprise could
somehow lay the foundation for separate statehood. Yet, despite his own and his followers' militancy,
and the U.S. intelligence agencies' assumption that his UNIA posed a threat to the political order,
Garvey's theories and strategies hardly escaped the conventions of his era, particularly those concerning
racial purity, gender, capitalism, social Darwinism, and, most importantly, the idea that the United
States was the domain of Protestant Anglo-Saxons. Garvey's failure to articulate an alternative "African"
culture proved to be an important paradox. He was militantly pro-African, in a pro-European or
"Eurocentric" kind Of way. Most significantly, his plan to build power through enterprise failed as a
short- term and as a long-term strategy. Nevertheless, his flamboyance, militantly pro-black rhetoric,
and ambitious business ventures attracted hundreds of thousands of members and several times more
supporters. Garvey's nationalism embodied the past and anticipated the future. Black nationalists who
preceded him, men like James T. Holly and Martin Delany in the antebellum period and Bishop Henry
Turner in the 1880s and 1890s, worked to relocate the black population outside the boundaries of the
United States. They shared with Garvey a certain orientation toward Western culture and capitalism,
operating out of what we today would call a "Eurocentric" framework. They focused on the ideals of
"manhood," "African nationality," Christianity, and civilization. The notion of "manhood" referred to a
nineteenth-century self- concept developed by the middle class to stress "its gentility and
respectability." But manhood was not only a gendered term, it also applied exclusively to the white race'
Black nationalists of what Moses calls the classical period (roughly 1850—1925) assumed that the
proper practice Of Christianity and the establishment of civilization were both means and ends to
manhood and African nationality. Neither Garvey nor the black nationalists who preceded him had any
intention of reclaiming African culture, as some 1960s "modern" nationalists would. They wanted to be
rid of it.
“Nationalism” PIC
1NC — “Nationalism” PIC
[THE FIRST/NEXT OFF CASE IS THE “NATIONALISM” PIC]
We endorse the entirety of the 1AC with the term “invented community” as an
alternative to the concept of “nationalism.”
The concept of nationalism is violent and gendered — “invented community” solves,
while avoiding problematic framing.
McClintock 96 — Anne McClintock, Simone de Beauvoir Professor of English and Women’s and
Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Ph.D. in English Literature from Columbia
University, M.Phil. in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, B.A. in English from the University of
Cape Town, 1996 (“’No Longer in a Future Heaven’: Gender, Race and Nationalism,” Becoming National:
A Reader, Published by Oxford University Press, ISBN: 9780195096613, pgs. 100-106)
All nationalisms are gendered, all are invented, and all are dangerous. Nations are not the natural
flowering into time of the organic essence of a people, borne unscathed through the ages. Rather, as
Ernest Gellner observes, nationalism "invents nations where they do not exist." Most modern nations,
despite their appeal to an august and immemorial past, are for the most part very recent inventions.
Benedict Anderson thus argues that nations are best understood as "imagined communities," systems of
representations whereby people come to imagine a shared experience of identification with an
extended community.
Nonetheless, nations are not simply phantasmagoria of mind. The term "imagined" carries in its train
connotations of fiction and make-believe, moonshine and chimera. The term “invented community,” by
contrast, refuses the conservative faith in essence and nature, while at the same time conveying more
powerfully the implications of labor and creative ingenuity, technology and institutional power.
Nations are elaborate social practices enacted through time, laboriously fabricated through the media
and the printing press, in schools, churches, the myriad forms of popular culture, in trade unions and
funerals, protest marches and uprisings. Nationalism both invents and performs social difference,
enacting it ritualistically in Olympic extravaganzas, mass rallies and military displays, flag waving and
costumery, and becoming thereby constitutive of people's identities. The green, black, and gold flag of
the African National Congress, or a Palestinian kafiyeh, may be bits of colored cloth, but there is nothing
fictive about their power to conjure up the loyalties of life and death, or to provoke the state's expert
machinery of wrath.
For this reason, nationalisms are dangerous, not, as Eric Hobsbawm would have it, in the sense that
they should be opposed, but rather in the sense that they represent relations to political power and to
the technologies of violence. Nationalisms are contested systems of representation enacted through
social institutions, and legitimizing, or limiting, people's access to the rights and resources of the
nation-state: land and water, political and economic power, children, food and housing, the
technologies of violence. Nations are situations under constant contest.
All nationalisms, moreover, are gendered. "When you own a big chunk of the bloody Third World, the
babies just come with the scenery," as the Chrissie Hynde song goes. In the chronicles of male
nationalism, women, too, are all too often figured as mere scenic backdrops to the big-brass business of
masculine armies and uprisings. Theorists of nationalism (Fanon notably excepted) have seldom felt
moved to explore how nationalisms are at every minute implicated in gender power. No nationalism in
the world has granted women and men the same privileged access to the resources of the nation-state.
So far, all nationalisms are dependent on powerful constructions of gender difference.
Reject patriarchy as a starting point for broader social reform — ignoring this impact is
heteronormative and wrong.
***Be careful just because you can’t read this with the cap turn—the cap turn assumes that cap is the
root cause. The aff could concede cap is the root cause to get out of the net benefit to the CP and then
just go for a “black nationalism solves cap because we sever from it” arg***
Ferber 04 — Abby Ferber, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Matrix Center for the
Advancement of Social Equity and Inclusion at the University of Pittsburgh, co-organizer of the national
White Privilege Conference, Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Oregon, M.A. in Sociology from the
University of Oregon, (“Racial Warriors and Weekend Warriors,” Feminism and Masculinities, Published
by Oxford University Press, ISBN: 0–19–926724–3, pgs. 235-236)
Kipnis (1995) argues that ‘male-bashing is de rigueur in today’s academy’ and describes feminism as
‘male-denigrating. . . . After decades of unrestrained male-bashing, men have good cause for anger
toward the women’s movement. This is not backlash; it is a legitimate response to abuse of academic,
social, media, and literary power’ (pp. 278–80). [. . .] Kipnis describes a conspiratorial environment
where women are in control and patriarchy is a relic of the past. Wherever patriarchy is referred to, it is
in the past tense. For example, Bly (1996) admits, ‘We know that women paid a huge price in selfrespect, in violence, in slavery, in shame, in the old paternal society. Almost no woman in the world
wants to return to that’ (pp. 113–14). Elsewhere Bly (1995) explains, ‘None of us wants to reestablish
patriarchy’ (p. 272).
We find in both discourses a reversal of the reality of inequality. Both movements assert that the days
of white male power are over and that the playing field has been leveled. Within this framework, then,
any attempts to aid women or minorities are seen as giving them unfair advantages, and perceived as
unfair attacks against white males. Whether affirmative action or women’s studies programs, they are
depicted as attempts to privilege women and minorities. Because they assume that white men receive
no power or privilege in contemporary society, they reverse the balance of power, seeing all attempts
to remedy inequality as actually attacks against white men, as instances of reverse discrimination.
Kipnis (1992) suggests it is now men who must fight for equal rights. In his ‘New Male Manifesto,’ he
declares, ‘Men deserve the same rights as women for custody of children, economic support,
government aid, education, health care, and protection from abuse.’ Sociologists, however, continue to
document white male privilege (Coppock, Haydon, and Richter 1995; Wellman 1997). While some men
(white, middle/upper class, heterosexual, able bodied) are more privileged than others, generally
speaking, all men have greater access to valued resources in our society than women as a group. As
Coppock et al. (1995) painstakingly demonstrate, ‘the proclamation of “postfeminism” has occurred at
precisely the same moment as acclaimed feminist studies demonstrate that not only have women’s real
advancements been limited, but also that there has been a backlash against feminism of international
significance’ (p. 3). They point out that ‘criticizing feminism for oppressing men has become positively
fashionable’ (p. 5). That is precisely what we find in these two discourses.
The reality of power relations is further eclipsed with the mythopoets’ emphasis on wounding. [. . .]
Inequality and power are erased, and instead both men and women are said to be ‘wounded.’ According
to this logic, both men and women must explore their wounds and ‘reconcile’ with each other.
[. . .] There is no patriarchy, only sexism, which is equally harmful to women and men. There is no
power, only differences that must be reconciled. [. . .] Structural power imbalances are reduced to a
matter of miscommunication, to psychological obstacles to be worked through. [. . .]
While Kipnis (1995) argues that ‘it is important to create a forum where . . . proactive male perspectives
are not paranoically distorted as implicitly anti-feminism’ (p. 275), the mythopoetic movement is not
that forum. This discourse is clearly antifeminist, and the ‘pro-male’ language distorts this fact. Like the
white supremacist movement, the mythopoetic movement presents itself as not ‘anti’ anyone, simply
pro-male. They simply love and seek to protect their own kind. This logic mirrors white supremacist
logic, evident in a Western Guardian article that argues that the purpose of the white supremacist
movement is merely ‘the restoration of a healthy interest in and love of the achievements of White
Western man’ (Western Guardian 1980). Another publication proclaims that the social problems they
address have ‘very little to do with the black man rising . . . rather it is about the white man falling’
(Instauration 1980, 14). The language used here is part of a broader effort to remake the image of the
movement. Rather than be seen as haters, white supremacists are attempting to present themselves
simply as defenders of the white race. In many articles, they insist that they hate no one, but simply
wish to promote and protect the white race, and white men in particular, today’s truly oppressed. [. . .]
Global Overview/Explanation.
The concept of “nationalism” is always gendered and patriarchal — the very concept
of a nation is premised on a logic of boundaries and exclusion. Where are the borders?
Who can have land? Who can have resources? The affirmative leaves these questions
up to a masculine structure that necessarily excludes women. This makes the
affirmative nothing more than a reproduction of patriarchal hegemony in a new
context — that’s McClintock.
Patriarchy should act as an impact frame for all decision calculus because it structures
relationships to violence — even within structures of racial oppression, patriarchy
affects men and women in radically different ways — that’s Ferber.
The term “invented community” solves all affirmative offense while avoiding
problematic discourse — it better illustrates the relationship of labor and institutional
power for identity formation, while allowing for the formation of independent
communities without the violent tendencies of the nation state — that’s McClintock.
NB extension cards
Black Nationalism reinforces patriarchal norms and fails to escape racism — it can’t escape
the Eurocentric nation state.
Dunning 09 — Stefanie Dunning, Associate Professor of Black World Studies at Miami University, Ph.D.
in Gender Studies from the University of California, Riverside, B.A. in Race Studies from Spelman College,
2009 (“No Tender Mercy,” Queer in Black and White: Interraciality, Same Sex Desire, and Contemporary
African American Culture, Published by Indiana University Press, ISBN:9780253221094, pgs. 46-47)
Importantly, the link between Eurocentric and black nationalisms can be further exposed through an
examination of the patriarchal nature of both discourses. Sharon P. Holland has noted that in hip-hop
the black male functions as the authentic site of suffering. The same is true of black nationalism, to
which hip-hop is indebted in important aspects. Black Nationalism is invested in the production of a
patriarchal hegemony, where the black male body is the legitimate space of suffering and where the
ultimate reproductive aim of the nation is to reproduce not only blackness, but maleness. Black
feminists have critiqued its repressive gender politics while not always recognizing that the sexual and
racial politics of Black Nationalism are as deeply flawed as those of Eurocentric nationalism. Perhaps,
Black Nationalism seduces because it offers the promise of homogeneity, even though this is a false
solution to the iniquitous burdens of racism. So while Black Nationalism originally conceived of itself as
opposing the agenda of Eurocentric nationalism, it actually reproduced it in a new context.
James Baldwin's Another Country reveals the fact that these discourses are so interdependent that our
racial and sexual selves can never be homogeneous or circumscribed. There can be no "white" or
black" nation because the relationship of opposition between the two is what makes the idea of a
racially pure (and reproductive) nation even possible. To write about same-sex interraciality is not only
to contemplate but to perform these anxieties around reproduction of the nation. I will show that in
these texts nationalism is critiqued and upheld through considerations of racial and sexual boundaries. I
begin my discussion of these Issues with Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice because it articulates a nationalist
critique of interraciality and homosexuality while, like Eddie Murphy, "not quite succeeding at asserting
itself and as Robert Reid-Pharr has noted in the black community as straight, another context.
The alternative solves—starting by problematizing their discourse and language
choices is key to tear down broader structures of White Supremacy and Patriarchy
Davidson 9 (Maria del Guadalupe Davidson is an Assistant Professor, Business Communication CoDirector, Center for Social Justice Affiliate Faculty, Women's and Gender Studies at the University of
Oklahoma, Edited by Maria del Guadalupe Davidson and George Yancy “Critical Perspectives on Bell
Hooks” Accessed via Google Books page 126 //ekr)
A though she does not state it expressly, hooks's work is implicitly aligned with discourse analysis,23
construed broadly. In Language as Symbolic Action, Kenneth Burke famously states that "Man is a
symbol-using and according to Burke, we use symbols to nonverbally communicate meaning.25 Burke
importantly calls our attention to the potentiality of language and symbols to name, define, and destroy
the object ofverbal and nonverbal speech. Similarly, throughout her work, hooks argues that the
superiority Of whiteness is inscribed through verbal and nonverbal discourse such that, "If we compare
the relative progress African Americans have made in education and employment to the struggle to gain
control over how we are represented, particularly in the mass media, we see that there has been little
change in the area of representation."26 The role of discourse analysis here is to deconstruct
misconceptions of blackness and the relegation of black people to the status of the marginalized other.
Discourse analys.s asks that we see those ..institutional conditions and power-structures that serve to
make given statements accepted as authoritative or true...." Hooks's analysis of the media images of
black women in particular challenges us to confront the images that reinforce the nonbeing of black
women as "true." For example, she uses the obsession with black women's butts28 (think Josephine
Baker), the wildness of Tina Turner,' 9 the exotic images of Iman and Naomi Campbe1130 as tropes used
to communicate (verbally and nonverbally) the availability of black women as objects of sex and sexual
desire. Additionally, discourse analysis asks that we " understand the function of a particular discourse,
the way they position their subjects In relations to contempt and respect, of domination and
subordination or of opposition and resistance, we pass quickly and ineluctably from conceptual critique
to social critique."3' White supremacist patriarchal society establishes a false dichotomy that positions
whites as subjects and b ack people in general and black women in particular as subordinated and
marginalized others. While hooks provides an intellectual critique of such oppressive discourses, this
critique alone is not enough. She asks that we move beyond the critique of power, domination, and
subjugation to a praxis of liberation which cha enges the status quo. One such challenge comes in the
form of her radical black subjectivity which, like discourse analysis, . is not only a reflexive process; it is
also a productive process or a process that brings change."32
They Say: “Permute – Do CP”
1. This severs the term “nationalism” Our counterplan is mutually exclusive:
A. Textually — it excludes a core term in the 1AC.
B. Functionally — our net-benefit proves that the counterplan would be implemented
and perceived differently because it does not invoke the term “nationalism.” The
counterplan changes the role of women and shapes the decision calculus of activists.
2. Reject severance permutations — they evade clash and let the affirmative off the
hook for important choices about language and framing. Makes the aff a moving
target and impossible to negate
3. Still links: “nationalism” in the affirmative communicates problematic assumptions
and shapes the way the policy will be implemented in harmful ways.
Generic Discourse Shapes Reality
Discourse shapes reality with enough power to create violence
Shepherd, 2010 –[Laura Sheperd, Associate Professor of International Relations at the School of Social
Sciences, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, UNSW, “Women, armed conflict and language – Gender, violence and
discourse”, Available Online @ https://www.icrc.org/eng/assets/files/other/irrc-877-shepherd.pdf, International
Review of the Red Cross, Volume 92, Number 877, March 2010] N.H
In our personal lives, we know that language matters, that words are constitutive of reality. There are
words that have been excised from our vocabularies, deemed too damaging to use. There are forbidden
words that children whisper with guilty glee. There are words we use daily that would be meaningless to
our grandparents. Moreover, the cadence and content of our communications vary by context; words
that are suitable for the boardroom may not be appropriate for the bedroom or the bar. In our personal
lives, we admit that words have power, and in Formal politics we do the same. It is not such a stretch to
admit the same in our Professional lives. I am not claiming that all analysis must be discourse-theoretical
– must take language seriously – to be policy-relevant, for that would clearly be nonsense. I am,
however, claiming that post-structural theories of language have much to offer policy makers and
practitioners, and arguing that in order to understand how best to implement policy we first need to
understand ‘how’ a policy means, not just what it means. That is, we must understand a policy before
we can implement it. This article argues that we need to engage critically with how that understanding is
mediated through and facilitated by our ideas about the world we live in. If we are to avoid
unconsciously reproducing the different forms of oppression and exclusion that different forms of policy
seek to overcome, we need to take seriously Jacques Derrida’s suggestion that ‘il n’y a pas de horstexte’.5
They Say: “Permute — Do Both”
1. It Either Links or it Severs — the affirmative supported a framing of their
movement as one towards Black “nationalism.” Our links are intrinsic to the
strategy of the affirmative. The affirmative was “Nationalism Good,” the PIC is
“Nationalism Bad” — that’s McClintock.
2. There’s No Escaping the Link — even if they didn’t mean it to be harmful, the
connotations of “Nationalism” are patriarchal. Even though they had no
intention of being patriarchal, their words are violent to different subject
positions.
They Say: “Word PICs Bad — General”
1. Specificity key in this instance — evidence should determine whether language
choices matter, not debate theory. We’ve read specific evidence that the term
“nationalism” should be rejected. Even if some word PICs are bad, this word PIC
is good. We have a comparative solvency advocate who’s a professor. Evidence
prevents a race to the bottom. Case-by-case judgment is better than universal
condemnation.
2. No infinite regression or unfairness — they chose the words in their plan and
the term “nationalism” is central to their case.
3. Language is key in the context of race — words radically change chances of
success.
Thompson 11 — Gabriel Thompson, Author and Activist, Steinbeck Fellow in Creative Writing at San
Jose State University, 2011 (“How the Right Made Racism Sound Fair,” Color Lines, September 13th,
Accessible Online at http://www.colorlines.com/articles/how-right-made-racism-sound-fair-andchanged-immigration-politics, Accessible Online at 07-21-15)
The Language of Lawmaking
The art of choosing words has become big business in politics, for good reason. How a problem or
solution is framed can be key to its chances of success.
Take, for example, Bush's plan in 2005 to privatize Social Security. Republicans trumpeted the idea, with
Bush repeatedly referring to the creation of private accounts for individuals. Democrats campaigned
vigorously to label the proposal as too risky and support for the idea plummeted; privatizing Social
Security, it turned out, made Americans uneasy. The Republicans then switched words. They talked
about personal rather than private accounts and called media outlets to complain when they didn't
adopt the new language. But by then it was too late and the proposal died.
That a single word can reframe an entire debate points to the power of language in evoking broad,
often unexamined feelings. A public library or park may sound like a welcoming place to pass an
afternoon; a government (or even worse, government-run) library or park, on the other hand, can bring
to mind images of dull texts and rusty equipment.
"Words have entire narratives that go with them," says Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at University of
California, Berkeley. "Government has acquired negative connotations, so public is what we call
government when we don't want to say 'government.'"
When President Obama unveiled his health care proposal, he was careful to call the creation of a
government-managed plan the "public option." As Republican strategist and pollster Frank Luntz told
Fox News, "If you call it a 'public option,' the American people are split," but "if you call it the
'government option,' the public is overwhelmingly against it."
While language is always important, it has a special prominence when the discussion turns to
immigration--and race. As Nunberg noted about the charged vocabulary around the topic: "The words
refuse to be confined to their legal and economic senses; they swell with emotional meanings that
reflect the fears and passions of the time."
They Say: “Word PICs Bad — Privileged”
1. Prefer Specificity — even if debates about words are privileged in general, debates
about how “nationalist” structures oppress women is the opposite of privileged.
There’s nothing privileged about trying to break down an oppressive rhetorical
structure.
2. This Argument is too Sweeping — some debates about wording are good.
Otherwise racist phrases and slurs could be used without being questioned by critical
academics. The alternative is net-worse for privilege.
3. Language Debates are Good — they’re central to contesting dominant power
relations. Language is not neutral in the specific context of race.
Hosang 06 — Daniel Hosang, Ph.D. Candidate in Ethnic and American Studies at the University of
Southern California, 2006 (“Beyond Policy: Ideology, Race and the Reimagining of Youth,” Beyond
Resistance! Youth Activism and Community Change, Published by Taylor & Francis, ISBN: 0-415-95250-6,
pgs. 4-5)
If we take seriously the role that language and discourse play in constituting and constructing political
conflicts, rather than just expressing or representing them, then Cosby has offered an exemplary recital
of the most commanding discourse on the failures and defects of black youth in particular and the
racialization of large groups of youth in general. That is, while it has been through specific regressive
shifts in policy and legislation—such as the expansion of “zero tolerance” law enforcement and cuts in
public-education funding—that the possibilities for racial justice in the post–Civil Rights period have
been undermined, those shifts have been naturalized and secured through significant ideological
struggles and symbolic conflicts.
Here, we must think of political discourse as more than just “language games” or the “marketing” of
political issues through clever framing strategies developed by communications specialists (e.g.,
rechristening estate or inheritance tax as “the death tax”). To be sure, in any immediate political
conflict, language, messaging, and issue framing are critical; as the linguist George Lakoff and other
media strategists have demonstrated, people comprehend political issues through a repertoire of
narrative frameworks, and organizers and advocates must frame their campaign demands and policy
proposals to resonate within these existing schemes. But as Gilmore (2004b) notes, an emphasis on
short-term issue frames alone risks reifying those narrative categories as “a-historic durables” rather
than historically contingent and contested ideological concepts.
A more expansive interpretation of political discourse—and its broader ideological dimensions—involves
not simply which words or slogans are used to advance political issues, but a recognition that to exercise
long-term political power requires interventions into the way people formulate, imagine, and identify
themselves within the social world. As mediators of experience, discourses establish the terrain on
which people understand their identities, experiences, and interests, constituting the “common sense”
they draw upon in their negotiations and calculations of day-to-day life. Political discourses are central
to the engagement and contestation of all power relations because they provide coherent frameworks
through which people view the world, understand their identities in relation to others, and make
meaning from their experience (Purvis & Hunt, 1993). As the contrasting accounts of the crisis in public
education provided by Johns and Cosby affirm, the ability of a discourse to structure a particular field of
meaning—to regulate what constitutes its specific “truths,” common sense, and logics—matters a great
deal in understanding, interpreting, and responding to social problems.2
They Say: “Reclaiming Words Good”
Reclaiming words is hurtful and demeaning — words can be irrevocably bad.
McLoed 12 — Kimberly McLoed, Founder of Elixher — an Black LGBT magazine, activist and author,
contributor to XOJane and Ebony, 2012 (“Sticks, Stones and Slurs: Does 'Reclaiming' Words Work?,”
Ebony, March 14th, Accessible Online at http://www.ebony.com/news-views/sticks-stones-and-slurs,
accessed on 7-22-15)
From the b-word to the n-word (and everything in between), the debate around words, what they
mean, and who can or cannot use them is not a new one. Whether about race, religion, gender, sexual
orientation or gender identity, the hot-button topic has been tackled by everyone from cultural critics to
activists to rappers. There has been a recent discussion that specifically examines whether or not
members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community should use anti-gay and antitransgender slurs. While we’re each entitled to self-naming and reclaiming words that ring true to us,
when we don’t acknowledge, respect or honor how the words we use harm, hurt, and put other
people’s lives at risk, we are being bullies, or at the very least, reckless.
Recently, Huffington Post ‘Gay Voices’ ran a point/counterpoint column where the National Center of
Transgender Equality (NCTE) executive director, Mara Keisling, challenged the use of those epithets.
“Words like ‘tranny,’ ‘faggot,’ ‘dyke,’ ‘illegal,’ ‘retard,’ and ‘lame’ are often used to stereotype and
marginalize people,” she explained. “Some people who are the targets feel that they are hateful, cruel
words. That's enough for me [not to use them].”
The reality is that LGBT people are targeted for who they are and whom they love. This is especially true
for LGBT people of color who are our siblings, our children, our parents, our co-workers, our friends –
who are us. The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs found that violence against LGBT people is
up 23 percent, with people of color and transgender women as the most likely targets. Of the hate crime
victims murdered in 2010, 70 percent were people of color and 44 percent were transgender women.
Anti-gay and anti-trans slurs – no matter who they may be directly aimed at – can fuel an underlying
hostility, which can then lead to harassment and violence. When we use derogatory language, we give
license to those around us to also use them (whether or not we feel they are entitled to). This harmful
rhetoric makes its way from the airwaves, social media and conversations with our friends to our kids’
playgrounds.
This link turns their privilege arguments — “reclaiming” reinforces historical amnesia
and violence against marginalized groups.
McLoed 12 — Kimberly McLoed, Founder of Elixher — an Black LGBT magazine, activist and author,
contributor to XOJane and Ebony, 2012 (“Sticks, Stones and Slurs: Does 'Reclaiming' Words Work?,”
Ebony, March 14th, Accessible Online at http://www.ebony.com/news-views/sticks-stones-and-slurs,
accessed on 7-22-15)
How Can We "Reclaim" Something That Was Never Ours To Begin With?
Opponents argue that by embracing anti-gay and anti-trans slurs, we can both embrace the hurtful
histories behind them and allow these words to “empower” our daily existence. But why is our healing
as historically marginalized groups (women, people of color, LGBT folks, etc.) intrinsically linked to
reclaiming words that have historically served to dehumanize us and tear us down? And even more
baffling, how can we "reclaim" something that was never ours to begin with? Interestingly enough we
don’t see white or straight people “reclaiming” pejorative words like “cracker” or “breeder” because as
dominant groups, they don’t need the false sense of power “reclaiming” demeaning language like
“b*tch” and “faggot” provide. Even the word "queer," which for some serves as an umbrella term in
addition to an oppositional political identity to racism and heteronormativity, needs to be navigated
with care.
Other naysayers suggest that by somehow demanding that everyday people and public figures respect
others, the “politically correct word police” are somehow inconveniencing bigots, racists, homophobes
and wealthy, able-bodied, white, male, straight, non-transgender, educated folks that are in denial of
their privilege. If protecting innocent people and children makes me part of the “word police,” then
where can I sign up? Insensitive slurs perpetuate an intolerant culture. And I would gladly stand on the
side of political correctness if it means saving a young life, making it safer for someone to walk home
at night or stay in school.
After Roland Martin’s controversial tweets on Super Bowl Sunday implicitly inciting violence against men
who liked an underwear ad featuring David Beckham, New York Times columnist Charles Blow said it
best: “Words have power. And power recklessly exerted has consequences. It’s not about being
politically correct. It’s about being sensitive to the plight of those being singled out. We can’t ask the
people taking the punches to also take the jokes.” The same applies to slurs. They’re irresponsible and
they ask those that the slurs were created to hurt to ignore how these words are tied to their trials and
struggles.
They Say: “Not Our Nationalism”
1. Yes, Your “Nationalism” — McClintock specifically mentions Black Nationalism and
Fanon, she’s writing in the context of post-apartheid South Africa. Their
characterization of our evidence is wrong.
2. Even if We’re Wrong — the meaning of “nationalism” is inevitably tied to
underlying notions of patriarchy and has violent connotations for women.
They Say: “Censorship Bad”
1. Not Responsive — our counterplan is debating, not censorship. The reason that
speech codes are bad is because they prevent important discussions, but the
counterplan facilitates an important discussion about the term “nationalism” and its
underlying assumptions.
2. Prefer Specific Evidence — context matters. Even if their censorship thesis is
generally true, challenging the language of “nationalism” is particularly important
because it frames the goals and actions of Black Nationalism.
They Say: “Racism Outweighs”
1. Non-Responsive — we endorse the entirety of the 1AC except for “Nationalism.”
There’s no unique offense because we confront the root cause of their impacs—White
Supremacy
2. Deconstructing Gender difference strikes a blow at White Supremacy — our impact
does implicate race.
Ferber 04 — Abby Ferber, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Matrix Center for the
Advancement of Social Equity and Inclusion at the University of Pittsburgh, co-organizer of the national
White Privilege Conference, Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Oregon, M.A. in Sociology from the
University of Oregon, (“Racial Warriors and Weekend Warriors,” Feminism and Masculinities, Published
by Oxford University Press, ISBN: 0–19–926724–3, pgs. 232-233)
Like the white supremacist movement, mythopoets present their movement as men’s salvation—join
our retreats, read our books, and find your real masculine self. Unfortunately, this deep masculinity
nevertheless retains many other features of hegemonic masculinity, as we shall see. Both movements,
then, promise to help men discover their true masculinity and prove to the world that they are real men.
Despite these differences, the similarities are striking. To enable men to discover their masculinity, both
movements are concerned with creating community among men, ‘drawing men together . . . breaking
isolation . . . for the development of community’ (Bliss 1995, 296). Both see men as out of touch with
their true masculinity. [. . .] Masculinity is characterized as unchanging and universal, merely needing
to be recovered. [. . .] Describing the process by which a boy becomes a man, Bly (1996) concludes, ‘That
is the way it has been for hundreds of years’ (p. 127). Mythopoetic authors Moore and Gillette (1992)
claim that masculinity has ‘remained largely unchanged for racial warriors and weekend warriors
millions of years,’ because it is ‘hard wired’ and ‘genetically transmitted’ (p. 33).tcd
Men and women are depicted as opposites possessing complementary natures. [. . .] Not only do men
and women possess essential natures, then, but these natures are dichotomous and timeless. [. . .] Like
mythopoetic discourse, white supremacist discourse rearticulates essentialist notions of identity. The
discourse insists that racial and gender differences are essential and immutable, secured by either God
or genetics. While race is the most overt preoccupation of the white supremacist movement, gender
identity remains central to the discourse and is intertwined with the construction of racial identities.
While whiteness is repeatedly defined in terms of visible, physical differences in appearance, differences
in intelligence, morality, character, and culture are all posited as racially determined. As The NSV
Report (National Socialist Vanguard) proclaims, ‘Racists believe that values and ideals are a
manifestation of race and are thus biologically inherited’ (NSV Report 1991, 3). Physical characteristics
and culture are linked here, both determined by race and unchanging.
Gender differences are also posited as inherent. White supremacist discourse, like mythopoetic
discourse, often relies on stories of the past to demonstrate the immutability of these natures. For
example, a White Power article explains that ‘our ancestors wisely realized that women were different
from men not just biologically, but psychologically and emotionally as well. They recognized that the
sexes had distinct but complementary roles to play in society . . . ordained by natural law’ (White Power
no. 105, 4). As in mythopoetic discourse, sexual difference is depicted as oppositional and
complementary. [. . .] These identities are always at risk and never secure. The endless repetition
through which these identities are constructed suggests that they require this repetition for their
existence; they are neither innate nor essential. It is at this historical juncture, when both racial and
gender identities are increasingly revealed to be unstable, that those who have the most invested in
these categories and their hierarchical construction react by reasserting their unwavering foundations.
State PIC
1NC
1NC — State PIC
[THE FIRST/NEXT OFF CASE IS THE STATE PIC]
We endorse the entirety of the 1AC except for state action.
Externalizing action onto the state undermines personal agency and causes massive
global violence.
Shaffer 7 — Butler Shaffer, Irwin R. Buchalter Professor of Law at Southwestern Law School, J.D. from
the University of Chicago, B.S. in Law from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, 2007 (“Identifying With
the State,” Lew Rockwell, June 29th, Accessible Online via the Wayback Machine, Accessed On 07-15-15)
One of the deadliest practices we engage in is that of identifying ourselves with a collective entity.
Whether it be the state, a nationality, our race or gender, or any other abstraction, we introduce
division — hence, conflict — into our lives as we separate ourselves from those who identify with
other groupings. If one observes the state of our world today, this is the pattern that underlies our
deadly and destructive social behavior. This mindset was no better articulated than when George W.
Bush declared you’re either with us, or against us.
Through years of careful conditioning, we learn to think of ourselves in terms of agencies and/or
abstractions external to our independent being. Or, to express the point more clearly, we have learned
to internalize these external forces; to conform our thinking and behavior to the purposes and
interests of such entities. We adorn ourselves with flags, mouth shibboleths, and decorate our cars with
bumper stickers, in order to communicate to others our sense of who we are. In such ways does our
being become indistinguishable from our chosen collective.
In this way are institutions born. We discover a particular form of organization through which we are
able to cooperate with others for our mutual benefit. Over time, the advantages derived from this
system have a sufficient consistency to lead us to the conclusion that our well-being is dependent upon
it. Those who manage the organization find it in their self-interests to propagate this belief so that we
will become dependent upon its permanency. Like a sculptor working with clay, institutions take over
the direction of our minds, twisting, squeezing, and pounding upon them until we have embraced a
mindset conducive to their interests. Once this has been accomplished, we find it easy to subvert our
will and sense of purpose to the collective. The organization ceases being a mere tool of mutual
convenience, and becomes an end in itself. Our lives become institutionalized, and we regard it as
fanciful to imagine ourselves living in any other way than as constituent parts of a machine that
transcends our individual sense.
Once we identify ourselves with the state, that collective entity does more than represent who we
are; it is who we are. To the politicized mind, the idea that we are the government has real meaning,
not in the sense of being able to control such an agency, but in the psychological sense. The successes
and failures of the state become the subject’s successes and failures; insults or other attacks upon
their abstract sense of being — such as the burning of their flag — become assaults upon their very
personhood. Shortcomings on the part of the state become our failures of character. This is why so
many Americans who have belatedly come to criticize the war against Iraq are inclined to treat it as only
a mistake or the product of mismanagement, not as a moral wrong. Our egos can more easily admit to
the making of a mistake than to moral transgressions. Such an attitude also helps to explain why, as
Milton Mayer wrote in his revealing post-World War II book, They Thought They Were Free, most
Germans were unable to admit that the Nazi regime had been tyrannical.
It is this dynamic that makes it easy for political officials to generate wars, a process that reinforces
the sense of identity and attachment people have for their state. It also helps to explain why most
Americans — though tiring of the war against Iraq — refuse to condemn government leaders for the
lies, forgeries, and deceit employed to get the war started: to acknowledge the dishonesty of the system
through which they identify themselves is to admit to the dishonest base of their being.
The truthfulness of the state’s rationale for war is irrelevant to most of its subjects. It is sufficient that
they believe the abstraction with which their lives are intertwined will be benefited in some way by war.
Against whom and upon what claim does not matter — except as a factor in assessing the likelihood of
success. That most Americans have pipped nary a squeak of protest over Bush administration plans to
attack Iran — with nuclear weapons if deemed useful to its ends — reflects the point I am making. Bush
could undertake a full-fledged war against Lapland, and most Americans would trot out their flags and
bumper-stickers of approval.
The brightness or wrongness of any form of collective behavior becomes interpreted by the standard of
whose actions are being considered. During World War II, for example, Japanese kamikaze pilots were
regarded as crazed fanatics for crashing their planes into American battleships. At the same time,
American war movies (see, e.g., Flying Tigers) extolled the heroism of American pilots who did the same
thing. One sees this same double-standard in responding to u201Cconspiracy theories. Do you think a
conspiracy was behind the 9/11 attacks? It certainly seems so to me, unless one is prepared to treat the
disappearance of the World Trade Center buildings as the consequence of a couple pilots having bad
navigational experiences! The question that should be asked is: whose conspiracy was it? To those
whose identities coincide with the state, such a question is easily answered: others conspire, we do not.
It is not the symbiotic relationship between war and the expansion of state power, nor the realization
of corporate benefits that could not be obtained in a free market, that mobilize the machinery of war.
Without most of us standing behind system, and cheering on troops, and defending your leaders, none
of this would be possible. What would be your likely response if your neighbor prevailed upon you to
join him in a violent attack upon a local convenience store, on the grounds that it hired illegal aliens?
Your sense of identity would not be implicated in his efforts, and you would likely dismiss him as a
lunatic.
Only when our ego-identities become wrapped up with some institutional abstraction — such as the
state — can we be persuaded to invest our lives and the lives of our children in the collective
madness of state action. We do not have such attitudes toward organizations with which we have more
transitory relationships. If we find an accounting error in our bank statement, we would not find
satisfaction in the proposition the First National Bank, right or wrong. Neither would we be inclined to
wear a T-shirt that read Disneyland: love it or leave it.
One of the many adverse consequences of identifying with and attaching ourselves to collective
abstractions is our loss of control over not only the meaning and direction in our lives, but of the
manner in which we can be efficacious in our efforts to pursue the purposes that have become central
to us. We become dependent upon the performance of group; reputation rises or falls on the basis of
what institutional leaders do or fail to do. If nation-state loses respect in the world — such as by the
use of torture or killing innocent people – we consider ourselves no longer respectable, and scurry to
find plausible excuses to redeem our egos. When these expectations are not met, we go in search of
new leaders or organizational reforms we believe will restore our sense of purpose and pride that we
have allowed abstract entities to personify for us.
2NC
Global Explanation/Overview.
The affirmative decided to externalize agency for Black Nationalism onto the state,
but this choice carries problematic visions of who is responsible for actions and
agency. The state isn’t in charge of social change — we are.
The Impact is Ego confusion—their act of pretending to curtail surveillance erases the
distinction between the individual and institution. This Egocentric-Identification with
the State continually baits us into madness and continued violence. Our minds
become politicized to think that we are affecting real change, but instead these
actions breed passivity and inaction in the face of increasing global violence — only
personal agency gives us the tools we need to address oncoming global threats —
that’s Shaffer.
They Say: “Permute — Do Both”
1. The Permutation is Impossible — a rational decision-maker cannot simultaneously
make the decision to both accept and reject fiat as a tool of analysis.
2. It Either Links or it Severs — the affirmative simulated change though the state, and
we’re saying simulated change bad. The links are intrinsic to the way their advocacy
was framed in the 1AC. We are a critique of the plan as it was presented.
3. Reject Severance Permutations — severance kills meaningful negative ground and
undermine potential for in-depth clash. Take-backs aren’t fair or productive because
they give the affirmative a massive structural advantage.
4. The Net-Benefit is a DA to the Perm — State advocacy actively trades-off with
personal advocacy — we externalize agency onto the state and fail to take action in
the face of oncoming threats, because we feel absolved of responsibility — that’s
Shaffer.
They Say: “Permute — Do the CP”
1. This is the Worst Form of Severance — severing out of an entire advocacy once
they’ve heard the 1NC undermines clash and deprives the negative of meaningful
critique ground. Debate is only educational when the negative can meaningfully
engage with the affirmative. We are a critique of the plan as it was presented.
They Say: “PICs Bad”
1. Prefer Specificity — even if PICs are bad in general —debating about methods and
strategic decisions of the plan are vital to determine the best activist strategy. It’s the
best internal link to advocacy skills and education.
2. Predictability Ensures Fairness — the decision to defend fiat was an aff choice, not a
mandate. Strategic decisions carry strategic costs, no race to the bottom or infinite
regression.
3. Our argument is an aff inclusive critique, not a floating PIC — it doesn’t “hijack the
aff,” it contests the activist strategies of their advocacy.
They Say: “Fiat Good — Activism Skills/Spills Up”
This argument is wrong — we aren’t training activists, we’re training bureaucrats.
Moral thought is irrelevant in this role-confusion.
Schlag 90 — Pierre Schlag, Byron R. White Professor of Law at the University of Colorado, Boulder, J.D.
from the University of California, Los Angeles, B.A. in Philosophy from Yale University, 1990 (“Normative
and Nowhere to Go,” Stanford University Law Review, November, Accessible Online at
https://lawweb.colorado.edu/profiles/pubpdfs/schlag/SchlagSLR.pdf, accessed on 07-20-15)
Yet it is doubtful this image can be maintained. It is not so much the case that normative legal thought
has effects on the field of pain and death—at least not in the direct, originary way it imagines. Rather, it
is more the case that normative legal thought is the pattern, is the operation of the bureaucratic
distribution and the institutional allocation of the pain and the death. And apart from the leftover egocentered rationalist rhetoric of the eighteenth century (and our routine), there is nothing at this point
to suggest that we, as legal thinkers, are in control of normative legal thought. The problem for us, as
legal thinkers, is that the normative appeal of normative legal thought systematically turns us away from
recognizing that normative legal thought is grounded on an utterly unbelievable re-presentation of the
field it claims to describe and regulate. The problem for us is that normative legal thought, rather than
assisting in the understanding of present political and moral situations, stands in the way. It
systematically reinscribes its own aesthetic—its own fantastic understanding of the political and moral
scene. Until normative legal thought begins to deal with its own paradoxical postmodern rhetorical
situation, it will remain something of an irresponsible enterprise. In its rhetorical structure, it will
continue to populate the legal academic world with individual humanist subjects who think themselves
empowered Cartesian egos, but who are largely the manipulated constructions of bureaucratic
practices—academic and otherwise.
To the extent possible, it is important to avoid this kind of category mistake. For instance, it is important
to understand that your automobile insurance adjuster is not simply some updated version of the
eighteenth century individual humanist subject. Even though the insurance adjuster will quite often
engage you in normative talk— arguing with you about responsibility, fairness, fault, allocation of blame,
adequacy of compensation, and the like— he is unlikely to be terribly receptive or susceptible to any
authentic normative dialogue. His normative competence, his normative sensitivity, is scripted
somewhere else. It is important to be clear about these things. The contemporary lawyer, for instance,
may talk the normative rhetoric of the eighteenth century individual humanist subject. But make no
mistake: This normative or humanist rhetoric is very likely the unfolding of bureaucratic logic. The
modern lawyer is very often a kind of meta-insurance adjuster. And that makes you and me, as legal
academics, trainers of meta-insurance adjusters. This is perhaps an unpleasant realization. One of the
most important effects of normative legal thought is to intercede here so that we, as legal academics, do
not have to confront this unpleasant realization. Normative legal thought allows us to pretend that we
are preparing our students to become Atticus Finch while we are in fact training people who will enter
the meta-insurance adjustment business.
For our students, this role-confusion is unlikely to be very funny. It will get even less so upon their
graduation— when they learn that Atticus Finch has been written out of the script. For us, of course, it is
a pleasant fantasy to think we are teaching Atticus Finch. When the fantasy is over, it becomes one hell
of a category mistake. And in the rude transition from the one to the other, Atticus Finch can quickly
turn into Dan Quayle. In fact, if you train your students to become Atticus Finch, they will likely end up
as Dan Quayle— cognitively defenseless against the regimenting and monitoring practices of
bureaucratic institutions. Atticus Finch, as admirable as he may be, has none of the cognitive or critical
resources necessary to understand the duplicities of the bureaucratic networks within which we
operate. Apart from the fantasies of the legal academy, there is no longer a place in America for a
lawyer like Atticus Finch. There is nothing for him to do here—nothing he can do. He is a moral
character in a world where the role of moral thought has become at best highly ambivalent, a normative
thinker in a world where normative legal thought is already largely the bureaucratic logic of institutions.
The impact is bureaucratic violence — normative legal thought exists on a field of pain
and death.
Schlag 90 — Pierre Schlag, Byron R. White Professor of Law at the University of Colorado, Boulder, J.D.
from the University of California, Los Angeles, B.A. in Philosophy from Yale University, 1990 (“Normative
and Nowhere to Go,” Stanford University Law Review, November, Accessible Online at
https://lawweb.colorado.edu/profiles/pubpdfs/schlag/SchlagSLR.pdf, accessed on 07-20-15)
Now, one reaction a normative legal thinker might have to all this is that it is all perfectly horrible—and
that we should all try to preserve our normative universe by using words more carefully and by arguing
very morally against instrumentalism and the instrumentalization of law (and so on). But this argument
misses the point again. This is history—not dialogue among disembodied Cartesian selves. And it doesn't
do much good to make normative arguments against history—especially not if you keep misidentifying
your own addressee, your agent of change, your subject. Unfortunately, that is precisely what
normative legal thought keeps getting confused about. It keeps thinking that it is addressing some
morally competent, well-intentioned individual who has his hands on the levers of power. The
pervasiveness of this metaphysical confusion—its routine character within the legal academy— is
precisely what engenders the more socially situated confusions of "liberal" and "progressive" legal
academics as to whether or not the Warren Court is still sitting.
All of this can seem very funny. That's because it is very funny. It is also deadly serious. It is deadly
serious, because all this normative legal thought, as Robert Cover explained, takes place in a field of
pain and death. And in a very real sense Cover was right. Yet as it takes place, normative legal thought
is playing language games— utterly oblivious to the character of the language games it plays, and thus,
utterly uninterested in considering its own rhetorical and political contributions (or lack thereof) to the
field of pain and death. To be sure, normative legal thinkers are often genuinely concerned with
reducing the pain and the death. However, the problem is not what normative legal thinkers do with
normative legal thought, but what normative legal thought does with normative legal thinkers. What is
missing in normative legal thought is any serious questioning, let alone tracing, of the relations that the
practice, the rhetoric, the routine of normative legal thought have (or do not have) to the field of pain
and death. And there is a reason for that: Normative legal thought misunderstands its own situation.
Typically, normative legal thought understands itself to be outside the field of pain and death and in
charge of organizing and policing that field. It is as if the action of normative legal thought could be
separated from the background field of pain and death. This theatrical distinction is what allows
normative legal thought its own self-important, self-righteous, self-image—its congratulatory sense of
its own accomplishments and effectiveness. All this self-congratulation works very nicely so long as
normative legal thought continues to imagine itself as outside the field of pain and death and as having
effects within that field.
They Say: “Fiat Good — Agency/Action”
Externalizing ethics onto the state trades-off with personal agency — the aff destroys
our collective will for change and causes atrocity.
Rozo 04 — Diego Cagüeñas Rozo, M.A. candidate in Philosophy and Cultural Analysis from the
University of Amsterdam, 2004 (“Forgiving the Unforgivable,” University of Amsterdam, January,
Accessible Online at http://admin.banrepcultural.org/sites/default/files/forgiving_the_unforgivable.pdf,
accessed on 7-19-15)
Within the legal order the relations between individuals will resemble this logic where suffering is
exchanged for more, but ‘legal’ suffering, because these relations are no longer regulated by the
“culture of the heart” [Kultur des Herzens]. (CV 245) As Benjamin describes it, the “legal system tries to
erect, in all areas where individual ends could be usefully pursued by violence, legal ends that can be
realized only by legal power.” (CV 238) The individual is not to take law in his own hands; no conflict
should be susceptible of being solved without the direct intervention of law, lest its authority will be
undermined. Law has to present itself as indispensable for any kind of conflict to be solved. The
consequence of this infiltration of law throughout the whole of human life is paradoxical: the more
inescapable the rule of law is, the less responsible the individual becomes. Legal and judicial
institutions act as avengers in the name of the individual. Even the possibility of forgiveness is
monopolized by the state under the ‘right of mercy’. Hence the responsibility of the person toward the
others is now delegated on the authority and justness of the law. The legal institutions, the very agents
of (legal) vengeance exonerate me from my essential responsibility towards the others, breaking the
moral proximity that makes every ethics possible. Thus I am no longer obliged to an other that by
his/her very presence would demand me to be worthy of the occasion (of every occasion), because law,
by seeking to regulate affairs between individuals, makes this other anonymous, virtual: his otherness is
equaled to that of every possible other. The other becomes faceless, making it all too easy for me to
ignore his demands of justice, and even to exert on him violence just for the sake of legality. The logic of
evil, then, becomes not a means but an end in itself: state violence for the sake of the state’s survival.
Hence, the ever-present possibility of the worst takes the form of my unconditional responsibility
towards the other being delegated on the ideological and totalitarian institutions of a law gone astray in
the (its) logic of selfpreserving vengeance. The undecidability of the origin of law, and its consequent
meddling all across human affairs makes it possible that the worst could be exerted in the name of law.
Even the very notion of crimes against humanity, which seeks to protect the life of the population, can
be overlooked by the state if it feels threatened by other states or by its own population. From now on,
my responsibility towards the other is taken from me, at the price of my own existence being constantly
threatened by the imminent and fatal possibility of being signaled as guilty of an (for me) indeterminate
offence. In this picture, the modern state protects my existence while bringing on the terror of state
violence – the law infiltrates into and seeks to rule our most private conflicts.
They Say: “State Good — Order/War”
Use of the state is genocidal — personal activism is superior.
Beres 94 — Louis Rene Beres, Professor of International Law at Princeton University, 1994 (“SelfDetermination, International Law and Survival on Planet Earth,” (11 Ariz. J. Int'l & Comp. L. 1 1994),
Spring, Accessible Online via subscribing institution to Lexis-Nexus, accessed on 07-14-15)
II. Affirming the Individual Self: A Planetary Imperative
To fulfill the expectations of a new global society, one that would erect effective barriers around
humankind's most murderous forms of self-determination, the essential initiatives must be undertaken
within States. In this connection, national leaders can never be expected to initiate the essential changes
on their own. Rather, the new evolutionary vanguard must — in the fashion of the growing worldwide
movement against nuclear weapons and nuclear war — grow out of informed publics throughout the
world. Such a vanguard must aim to end the separation of State interests from those of its citizens and
from those of humanity as a whole.
This vanguard must grow out of searches for individual self-determination. But the journey from the
herd to selfhood begins in myth and ends in doubt. For this journey to succeed, the individual traveling
along the route must learn to substitute a system of uncertainties for what he has always believed; learn
to tolerate and encourage doubt as a replacement for the comforting "securities" of Statism. Induced to
live against the grain of our civilization, he must become not only conscious of his singularity, but also
satisfied with it. Organically separated from "civilization," he becomes aware of the forces that
undermine it, forces that offer him a last remaining chance for both meaning and survival.
We may turn to Kierkegaard for guidance. Recognizing the "crowd" as "untruth," the nineteenth-century
Danish philosopher warns of the dangers that lurk in submission to multitudes:
A crowd in its very concept is the untruth, by reason of the fact that it renders the individual completely
impenitent and irresponsible, or at least weakens his sense of responsibility by reducing it to a fraction. .
. . For "crowd" is an abstraction and has not hands: but each individual has ordinarily two hands. . . .
And what is the most degrading crowd of all? The answer is supplied not by Kierkegaard, but by
Nietzsche:
The State tells lies in all the tongues of good and evil; and whatever it says it lies — and whatever it has
it has stolen. Everything about it is false. . . . All-too-many are born: for the superfluous the State was
invented.
In giving ourselves over completely to national self-determination, we commit a grievous form of
idolatry. Allegedly offering ourselves to a "higher cause," we actually turn national frontiers into prison
walls that lock up capacity for thought and authentic feeling. We nurture incessant preparations for
killing by embracing the cold, metallic surfaces of the State. Without such preparations national leaders
would jeopardize their positions, and the State itself would be in "danger" of relinquishing its hold on
citizens as an object of libation. As Simone Weil has observed: "The State is a cold concern, which cannot
inspire love, but itself kills, suppresses everything that might be loved; so one is forced to love it,
because there is nothing else. That is the moral torment to which all of us today are exposed."
The task, then, is for each person to become an individual. In order to reject the idolatry of militaristic
nationalism and national self-determination, each man and woman must understand the lethal
encroachments of the State. Recognizing in their current leadership an incapacity to surmount
collective misfortune, citizens must strive to produce their own private expressions of progress. "From
becoming an individual no one," says Kierkegaard, "is excluded, except he who excludes himself by
becoming a crowd."
We live in a twilight era. Faced with endless infamy of the modern State, we must understand the
responsibility to be in the world, to act in history. If we are unwilling to accept abolition of the future,
then we must rescue life from the threat of war and genocide.
Black Feminism Critique
1NC Shell
1NC — Black Feminism Critique
[THE FIRST/NEXT OFF CASE IS THE BLACK FEMINISM CRITIQUE]
Black Nationalism reinforces Eurocentrism and reproduces oppressive systems of patriarchy.
Dunning 09 — Stefanie Dunning, Associate Professor of Black World Studies at Miami University, Ph.D.
in Gender Studies from the University of California, Riverside, B.A. in Race Studies from Spelman College,
2009 (“No Tender Mercy,” Queer in Black and White: Interraciality, Same Sex Desire, and Contemporary
African American Culture, Published by Indiana University Press, ISBN:9780253221094, pgs. 45-46)
Though black nationalism saw itself as contrary to the aims of Eurocentric nationalism, the relationship
between the two cannot be so easily disavowed, as the epigraph from "The Black Panther Platform:
What We Want, What We Believe" clearly demonstrates. Taken directly from the Declaration of
Independence, this passage confirms that the goals of Black Nationalism are predicated on the American
ideal of "rights" as "unalienable" and God-given. It is significant that this passage is not quoted in the
platform, but included as if it were native to that document' It establishes that the Black Panther Party
relied on a founding mainstream American principle to articulate their discontent with that very system.
It is ironic, of course, that they are demanding the very things the Declaration of Independence purports
to give all American citizens but fails to do because of systemic and institutionalized racism. But they are
also bound to articulate their claims for "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" because these are the
parameters set by Thomas Jefferson in 1776, and because—despite their attempts to disavow it—they
are Americans. Hence the desire for a different politics is hindered by the anachronism of the
nationalist movement's premise that the ideals upon which the United States is founded entitle all men
to certain rights. In other words, the platform does not engage the entire range of possibility of the
Declaration, but rather mobilizes around the rights of men while continuing to exclude women. This is
a fitting metaphor for my argument that the politics of Black Nationalism do not markedly contrast
with Eurocentric nationalism(s) because the project of resistance is one that is always already bound to
the oppressive system which creates the need for a politics of antithesis. As one writer so eloquently put
it, "To oppose something is to maintain it."
Black Nationalism promotes violence and subordination of the Black Female voice.
hooks 96 — bell hooks, Professor of African American Studies at Yale University, Ph.D. in English from
the University of California, Santa Cruz, 1996 (“The Integrity of Black Womanhood,” Killing Rage: Ending
Racism, Published by: Macmillan Press, ISBN: 9780805050271, pgs. 80-81)
Since contemporary feminist movement began, and created more of a cultural space for feminist black
female voices to come out of the shadows and be heard—a space for more of us to gain access to power
and privilege within the existing social structure—sexist black men have felt threatened. Yet they do not
present the threat as a challenge to the patriarchal mindset they refuse to give up but rather represent
black women engaged in feminist politics as usurping benefits and privileges that if bestowed exclusively
on black men would benefit racial uplift. The notion that somehow black males are more committed to
racial uplift and black liberation struggle than their female counterparts is an idea that has its
foundation in patriarchal assumptions of gender values. Black women's roles in struggles for black
liberation have always been and continue to be subordinated to those of black males. Sexist black men
(and their female allies) want to keep it that way. They have no difficulty supporting those white men
and women who promote gender divisiveness among black people, who pit black women and men
against one another. Concurrently, in separatist Black Nationalist locations, black women are continually
represented as race traitors who must be disciplined and kept in place by strong non-emasculated black
men. Haile Gerima's popular film Sankofa gave viewers an Afrocentric representation of the betraying
black woman who redeems herself when she submits to reeducation by a strong black male
teacher/healer. In this same film, the bi-racial black male (child of a strong black mother and the white
colonizer) can assume his rightful place as warrior challenging the system only after he murders the
black female "matriarch." Again and again the rhetoric of Black Nationalism which supports patriarchy
suggests that the "death" of strong black women whether literal or symbolic is needed for the
redemption of black masculinity, which is then made synonymous with redemption of the race. All the
recent mass media focus on black males, labeling them as an "endangered species," reinscribes white
supremacist capitalist patriarchal scapegoating of black womanhood by the constant insistence that
black women are to "blame" for the dilemmas black males face and not white supremacy and/or
patriarchy, whether it is a small academic journal like Transition publishing articles with undocumented
data that suggest black professional women are earning more than black men or a similar
representation in the magazine section of the New York Times, the message is the same—black women
are gaining benefits at the expense of black men. Such thinking promotes divisiveness between black
women and men. It continues racist/sexist devaluation of black women as well as condoning violent
repression as a means of keeping uppity black women in check. This assault is usually overtly directed at
professional black women yet it converges with the more vicious sustained and insidious assault on
single black mothers, especially those who receive welfare.
The alternative is to center analysis and community building on a Black feminist approach to
challenging the matrix of domination
Collins 90 — Patricia Hill Collins, Distinguished University Professor of Sociology at the University of
Maryland, Ph.D. in Gender Studies from the University of Cincinnati, M.A. in Social Science Education
from Harvard University, 1990 (“Black Feminist Thought in the Matrix of Domination,” Black Feminist
Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, Published by Routledge Press,
ISBN: 978-0-04-445137-2, pgs. 39-40)
Reconceptualizing Race, Class, and Gender as Interlocking Systems of Oppression
"What I really feel is radical is trying to make coalitions with people who are different from you,"
maintains Barbara Smith. "I feel it is radical to be dealing with race and sex and class and sexual identity
all at one time. I think that is really radical because it has never been done before." Black feminist
thought fosters a fundamental paradigmatic shift that rejects additive approaches to oppression.
Instead of starting with gender and then adding in other variables such as age, sexual orientation, race,
social class, and religion, Black feminist thought sees these distinctive systems of oppression as being
part of one overarching structure of domination. Viewing relations of domination for Black women for
any given sociohistorical context as being structured via a system of interlocking race, class, and gender
oppression expands the focus of analysis from merely describing the similarities and differences
distinguishing these systems of oppression and focuses greater attention on how they interconnect.
Assuming that each system needs the others in order to function creates a distinct theoretical stance
that stimulates the rethinking of basic social science concepts.
Afrocentric feminist notions of family reflect this reconceptualization process. Black women's
experiences as bloodmothers, othermothers, and community othermothers reveal that the mythical
norm of a heterosexual, married couple, nuclear family with a nonworking spouse and a husband
earning a "family wage" is far from being natural, universal and preferred but instead is deeply
embedded in specific race and class formations. Placing African-American women in the center of
analysis not only reveals much-needed information about Black women's experiences but also
questions Eurocentric masculinist perspectives on family Black women's experiences and the
Afrocentric feminist thought rearticulating them also challenge prevailing definitions of community.
Black women's actions in the struggle or group survival suggest a vision of community that stands in
opposition to that extant in the dominant culture. The definition of community implicit in the market
model sees community as arbitrary and fragile, structured fundamentally by competition and
domination. In contrast, Afrocentric models of community stress connections, caring, and personal
accountability. As cultural workers African-American women have rejected the generalized ideology of
domination advanced by the dominant group in order to conserve Afrocentric conceptualizations of
community. Denied access to the podium, Black women have been unable to spend time theorizing
about alternative conceptualizations of community. Instead, through daily actions African-American
women have created alternative communities that empower.
This vision of community sustained by African-American women in conjunction with African-American
men addresses the larger issue of reconceptualizing power. The type of Black women's power discussed
here does resemble feminist theories of power which emphasize energy and community. However, in
contrast to this body of literature whose celebration of women's power is often accompanied by a lack
of attention to the importance of power as domination, Black women's experiences as mothers,
community othermothers, educators, church leaders, labor union center-women, and community
leaders seem to suggest that power as energy can be fostered by creative acts of resistance.
The spheres of influence created and sustained by African-American women are not meant solely to
provide a respite from oppressive situations or a retreat from their effects. Rather, these Black female
spheres of influence constitute potential sanctuaries where individual Black women and men are
nurtured in order to confront oppressive social institutions. Power from this perspective is a creative
power used for the good of the community, whether that community is conceptualized as one's family,
church community, or the next generation of the community's children. By making the community
stronger, Atrican-American women become empowered, and that same community can serve as a
source of support when Black women encounter race, gender, and class oppression. . . .
Approaches that assume that race, gender, and class are interconnected have immediate practical
applications. For example, African-American women continue to be inadequately protected by Title VII
of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The primary purpose of the statute is to eradicate all aspects of
discrimination. But judicial treatment of Black women's employment discrimination claims has
encouraged Black women to identify race or sex as the so-called primary discrimination. "To resolve the
inequities that confront Black women," counsels Scarborough, the courts must first correctly
conceptualize them as 'Black women,' a distinct class protected by Title VII." Such a shift, from protected
categories to protected classes of people whose Title VII claims might be based on more than two
discriminations, would work to alter the entire basis of current antidiscrimination efforts.
2NC/1NR Essentials
Global Overview/Explanation
The creation of a new “nation state” is steeped in the logic of Eurocentric paternalism.
Black Nationalism unintentionally, but unquestionably reinforces patriarchal
hegemony. The idea of the “nation state” is irredeemably tied to notions of hierarchy
that necessarily excludes women. The black male body becomes the only legitimate
space of suffering and continues patriarchal, racial-sexual, economic, and privatized
violence — that’s Dunning.
This takes out and turns the case — Black Nationalism’s attempt to escape from
Eurocentrism only reproduces it in a new context. There can be no "white" or “black"
nation because opposition between the two is what makes the reproductive nation
possible — that’s Wallis.
Alternative Overview
The alternative is a focus on Black Feminist perspective — an escape from the Black
Matrix of the status quo is key to formulating new methods of activism and rupturing
conventional protest. Only the alternative creates the resistance communities of Black
Nationalism with a recognition of the unique intersectionality of identity — that’s
Collins.
This destroys their “alternative fails” arguments — the Black Matrix actively shapes
our perception of success and always casts Black Feminism as irrelevant and a failure.
This round matters — small actions pave the way for total liberation.
James 02 — Joy James, F.C. Oakley 3rd Century Professor of the Humanities and a professor in political
science at Williams College, 2002 (“Conclusion: Black Shadow Boxers,” Shadowboxing: Representations
of Black Feminist Politics, Published by: Palgrave McMillan, ISBN: 0312294492, pgs. 182-183)
For instance, for a much smaller readership, during the same month TIME marketed "Is Feminism
Dead?" The Nation published Ellen Willis's "We Need a Radical Left." Willis's insightful perspective on
liberalism and the "left" expands the range of white feminist concerns reported by Bellafante. Reading
Willis as representative of radical white feminism elicits an emphatic "no" to TIME’s query: Rather than
"dead," feminism and the "left" need to be differentiated.
According to Willis:
It's not necessary, as many leftists imagine, to round up popular support before anything can be
done; on the contrary, the actions Of a relatively troublemakers can lead to support. The history
of movements is crowded with acts of defiance by individuals and small groups—from the 1937
sit-in of workers in a Flint, Michigan auto plant to Rosa Parks' 1955 refusal to get up. —that
inspired a wave of similar actions and a broader revolt.
The few embolden the many to break through the malaise of a culture routinized to inequality and
injustices. For Willis, the ideas of "militant minorities" can "capture people's imaginations by presenting
another possible world." The impulse of institutional elites "wary of the potential threat posed by an
organized minority," she writes, "is to make concessions." (It should be noted that elites also have
resorted to police repression to maintain power and dominance.) "As a result," Willis maintains, "radical
movements that articulate a compelling vision have an impact far beyond their core of committed
activists." This impact, however, is not uniformly welcomed among progressives. Using a metaphor with
considerable irony for radicals and revolutionaries, "We Need a Radical Left" describes how the "good
cop/bad cop routine" is played out in the left's internecine battles: [L]iberals dismiss the radicals as
impractical sectarian extremists, promote their own "responsible" proposals as an alternative and take
the credit for whatever change results. The good news is that this process does bring about significant
change. The bad news is that by denying the legitimacy of radicalism it misleads people about how
change takes place... (and leaves people unprepared for the inevitable backlash... Capital, according to
Willis, "has no incentive to embrace liberal constraints." Yet feminists have material incentives to
embrace the constraints of liberalism.
They Say: “Permute — Do Both”
1. Not Possible — we are critiquing that framed their revolution through Black
Nationalism in the 1AC. Our links are intrinsic to their framing and to their plan: they
said “Black Nationalism Good” and we said “Black Nationalism Sexist.” The
permutation either links or severs.
2. No take-backs: the case carries ethico-political consequences that are intrinsic to
voting “Aff.” Discourse is meaningful and policy-relevant, especially in the context of
race.
3. Reject severance — stable aff advocacy establishes the groundwork for neg
rejoinder. 2AC take-backs make neg’s job too hard, discouraging arg innovation and
case-specific critique research. Err neg because of aff’s substantial “opening move”
advantage.
4. Footnoting DA — simply acknowledging multiple levels of oppression while taking other
action does not solve.
Crenshaw 03 — Kimberlé Crenshaw, Professor of Law at UCLA, J.D. from Harvard University, LLM from
the University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2003 (“The Intersectionality of Race and Gender Discrimination,”
ISIS International — a Women’s Rights NGO, May 8th, accessible online via the Wayback Machine at
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.isiswomen.org/womenet/lists/apgrlist/archive/doc00009.doc, accessed on 7-10-15)
The discourse on the trafficking of women is an example. When one pays attention to which women get
trafficked, the immediate link to their racial and social marginalization is obvious. Yet the problem of
trafficking is often absorbed into a gender framework without addressing race and other forms of
subordination that are at play. For instance, in the recent report on trafficking sponsored by the
Commission on the Status of Women, no attention was directed toward the fact that often race or
related forms of subordination contribute to the likelihood that some women rather than others will be
subject to such abuses. Efforts to remedy such situations must be grounded in an understanding of the
full magnitude of the problem including, where relevant, its racialized dimensions. There have been
occasions where attention to the racial or social identity of trafficked women has been apparent.
However, acknowledgment of the racial dimensions of the problem is not always sufficient to ensure
that the remedies are fully informed by these factors.
For example, in the Asia Pacific WCAR Expert Seminar held recently in Bangkok, the relationship
between racial discrimination and trafficking was recognized. This was an important first step in efforts
to understand the full contours of the problem. Yet this attention to race in the analysis of the problem
was not substantially furthered by the recommendations for further action. A fully integrated analysis
of trafficking would suggest that all factors that contribute to the vulnerability of women in this context
be included both in the analysis of the problem as well as in the recommendations designed to address
the issue.
5. Direction DA — top-down approaches like the perm fail and distract from contextual
analysis.
Crenshaw 03 — Kimberlé Crenshaw, Professor of Law at UCLA, J.D. from Harvard University, LLM from
the University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2003 (“The Intersectionality of Race and Gender Discrimination,”
ISIS International — a Women’s Rights NGO, May 8th, accessible online via the Wayback Machine at
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.isiswomen.org/womenet/lists/apgrlist/archive/doc00009.doc, accessed on 7-10-15)
Intersectional vulnerability is especially unlikely to be recognized when the dominant analysis is
structured as a categorical, top-down investigation into the way various forms of discrimination color
our social world. Only if this top-down approach is configured to follow the trail of discrimination to the
point where subordinating practices interact with, influence, and are influenced by other forms of
subordination will the interactive consequences of racism and sex discrimination be revealed.
Recognizing and accommodating this problem requires that intersectional protocols place primary
focus on contextual analysis. Attention to intersectional discrimination thus calls for an analytical
strategy that values a bottom-up analysis. Beginning with questions about how women live their lives,
the analysis can build upward, accounting for the various influences that shape the lives and life chances
of marginalized women. Particularly important is uncovering how policies and practices may shape their
lives differently from those who are not exposed to similar obstacles.
6. Appropriation DA— the permutation appropriates Black Women destroying alternative
solvency and reproducing colonial violence.
bell hooks 89 — bell hooks, Professor of African American Studies at Yale University, Ph.D. in English
from the University of Southern California, 1989 (“’when i was a young soldier for the revolution’:
coming to voice,” Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, Published by: South End Press, ISBN:089608-352-7, pgs. 14-15)
Appropriation of the marginal voice threatens the very core of self-determination and free selfexpression for exploited and oppressed peoples. If the identified audience, those spoken to, is
determined solely by ruling groups who control production and distribution, then it is easy for the
marginal voice striving for a hearing to allow what is said to be over determined by the needs of that
majority group who appears to be listening, to be tuned in. It becomes easy to speak about what that
group wants to hear, to describe and define experience in a language compatible with existing images
and ways of knowing, constructed within social frameworks that reinforce domination. Within any
situation of colonization, of domination, the oppressed, the exploited develop various styles of relating,
talking one way to one another, talking another way to those who have power to oppress and dominate,
talking in a way that allows one be understood by someone who does not know your way of speaking,
your language. The struggle to end domination, the individual struggle to 'resist colonization, to move
from object to subject, is expressed in the effort to establish the liberatory voice—that way of speaking
that is no longer determined by one's status as object—as oppressed being.
7. Black Nationalism forecloses the possibilities of necessary and effective coalitions
Gordon 3 (Dexter B. Gordon, Professor, Communication Studies and African American Studies Director of African American Studies
Program BA, Jamaica Theological Seminary, 1984 MA, Wheaton College, 1991 Ph.D., Indiana University, 1998 “The Theology of Black
Nationalism” p 194, Accessed from Google Books// ekr)
Black nationalism has constantly been attuned to the collective needs of blacks in America, and thus its collectivist vision readily
emerges When it is needed rather than in reaction to white nationalism per se. By making race its central organizing
principle, nineteenth-century black nationalism has passed what Kwame Anthony Appiah calls "a burdensome legacy" on to twenty-firstcentury Pan- Africanism and more contemporary nationalisms (Appiah 5). According to Appiah, this
legacy predisposes
contemporary black nationalists to assume racial solidarity among blacks (5). Important as it is for
internal group cohesion— especially for disenfranchised blacks in America—this assumed solidarity is textual, a
construct of the rhetoric seeking to advance black causes. Such solidarity is often espoused in exclusive
terms, precluding any possibility of collaboration with whites or other groups. Where race continues to serve as a
fixed entity loaded with the historical baggage of Anglo-American racism and where black nationalism is inflexible, it provides little
rhetorical scope for creative and innovative solutions to our shared social problems, often predicated on "race." From this
perspective, black nationalism is in desuetude, but it can be flexible.
8. Golden Globe DA — the permutation footnotes the alternative and makes women’s
voices the “best supporting philosopher.”
Witt 06 — Charlotte Witt, Charlotte Witt is a Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at the University
of New Hampshire, 2006 (“Feminist Interpretations of the Philosophical Canon,” Signs, Vol. 31, No. 2,
Winter, Accessible Online at
http://pubpages.unh.edu/~cewitt/Site/My_Philosophical_Life_files/FemIntCan.pdf, Accessed On 07-2015)
However, even if we become convinced that women philosophers really were omitted just because they
were women and that therefore their inclusion as women is a necessary adjustment of the historical
record, there still remains a question of how best to achieve this. How can they be rewoven into the
history of philosophy so that they are an integral part of that history? In a recent essay, Lisa Shapiro
(2004), considering the case of women philosophers in the early modern period, argues that it is not
enough simply to add a woman philosopher or two to the reading list to rectify women’s past exclusion.
Rather, according to Shapiro, we need to find a stronger thread that provides internal reasons (rather
than an external, feminist motivation on the part of the teacher or editor) for the inclusion of women.
One way to do this is to show how certain women philosophers made significant contributions to the
work of male philosophers on central philosophical issues. We could call this the “Best Supporting
Actress” approach in that the central cast remains male and the story line of philosophy is undisturbed.
It is a good strategy for several reasons: it is relatively easy to accomplish, and it provides an internal
anchor for women philosophers. On the other hand, it reinforces the secondary status of women
thinkers, and if this were the only way of integrating women philosophers, that would be an unfortunate
result. The wholly inadequate interpretation of Beauvoir’s philosophical thought as a mere application
of Jean-Paul Sartre’s is a good example of the limitations of this strategy. Not only does it reinforce a
secondary, handmaiden role for Beauvoir, but it also promotes a distorted understanding and
appreciation of her thought (Simons 1995).
They Say: “Permute – Sever Representations”
1. Not Fair — the 1AC made arguments that we critiqued. “Take backs” undermine
clash and deprive the neg of meaningful critique ground. We are a critique of the plan
as it was presented.
2. Not Productive — allowing the aff to amend their policy story after they’ve heard
the 1NC strategy lets them dodge our links, undermining clash. Debates are only
useful when the neg can clash with the 1AC.
3. Representations are specifically important in this context — ignorance promotes passivity
and complicity in violence.
Ryan 90 — Michael Ryan, Professor of English at Northeastern University, 1990 (“Social Violence and
Political Representation,” Vanderbilt Law Review, (43 Vand. L. Rev. 1771), November, Accessible Online
via Lexis-Nexus, Accessed On 7-10-15)
Representations signify and produce different kinds of attitudes and actions. They have an active
power: they make things happen, usually by painting the world in such a way that certain policies —
from domestic slavery to Cold War militarism — will appear justified. More importantly, perhaps, the
very act of painting itself enacts the policy. The mapping out of a social terrain as an exploitable field of
economic possibilities already in effect transforms that terrain, denying other possibilities and producing
an object that can be acted on without certain constraints which might have come into play if the social
world had been conceived (pictured, mapped, represented) differently. This is particularly clear when
representations, which are supposedly the effects of the things they represent, come to take the place
of their cause, the things themselves. If the images are powerful and pervasive, they can act on the
things they supposedly represent by transforming them to make them conform to the prevalent images
of those things. Victims of violence are especially susceptible to this process. Rendered passive and
subdued by violence, they are represented as somehow deserving of violence, as wanting or needing it.
An effect of violence, a particular representation, thus comes to justify violence. The representations
produced by acts of violence come to be justifications for further acts of violence. That violence then
furthers the transformation of its victims into people whose behavior conforms with the dominant
representations of them.
2NC/1NR Links
Domination/Power Relations
Their ideas of domination are wrong — the dynamics of power can only be rendered
intelligible by Black Feminism.
Collins 90 — Patricia Hill Collins, Distinguished University Professor of Sociology at the University of
Maryland, Ph.D. in Gender Studies from the University of Cincinnati, M.A. in Social Science Education
from Harvard University, 1990 (“Black Feminist Thought in the Matrix of Domination,” Black Feminist
Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, Published by Routledge Press,
ISBN: 978-0-04-445137-2, pgs. 39-40)
Multiple Levels of Domination
In addition to being structured along axes such as race, gender, and social class, the matrix of
domination is structured on several levels. People experience and resist oppression on three levels: the
level of personal biography; the group or community level of the cultural context created by race, class,
and gender; and the systemic level of social institutions. Black feminist thought emphasizes all three
levels as sites of domination and as potential sites of resistance.
Each individual has a unique personal biography made up of concrete experiences, values, motivations,
and emotions. No two individuals occupy the same social space; thus no two biographies are identical.
Human ties can be freeing and empowering, as is the case with Black women's heterosexual love
relationships or in the power of motherhood in African-American families and communities. Human ties
can also be confining and oppressive. Situations of domestic violence and abuse or cases in which
controlling images foster Black women's internalized oppression represent domination on the personal
level. The same situation can look quite different depending on the consciousness one brings to
interpret it.
This level of individual consciousness is a fundamental area where new knowledge can generate change.
Traditional accounts assume that power as domination operates from the top down by forcing and
controlling unwilling victims to bend to the will of more powerful superiors. But these accounts fail to
account for questions concerning why, for example, women stay with abusive men even with ample
opportunity to leave or why slaves did not kill their owners more often. The willingness of the victim to
collude in her or his own victimization becomes lost. They also fail to account for sustained resistance
by victims, even when chances for victory appear remote. By emphasizing the power of self-definition
and the necessity of a free mind, Black feminist thought speaks to the importance African-American
women thinkers place on consciousness as a sphere of freedom. Black women intellectuals realize that
domination operates not only by structuring power from the top down but by simultaneously annexing
the power as energy of those on the bottom for its own ends. In their efforts to rearticulate the
standpoint of African-American women as a group, Black feminist thinkers offer individual AfricanAmerican women the conceptual tools to resist oppression.
The cultural context formed by those experiences and ideas that are shared with other members of a
group or community which give meaning to individual biographies constitutes a second level at which
domination is experienced and resisted. Each individual biography is rooted in several overlapping
cultural contexts— for example, groups defined by race, social class, age, gender, religion, and sexual
orientation. The cultural component contributes, among other things, the concepts used in thinking and
acting, group validation of an individual's interpretation of concepts, the "thought models" used in the
acquisition of knowledge, and standards used to evaluate individual thought and behavior. The most
cohesive cultural contexts are those with identifiable histories, geographic locations, and social
institutions. For Black women African-American communities have provided the location for an
Afrocentric group perspective to endure.
Subjugated knowledges, such as a Black women's culture of resistance, develop in cultural contexts
controlled by oppressed groups. Dominant groups aim to replace subjugated knowledge with their own
specialized thought because they realize that gaining control over this dimension of subordinate groups'
lives simplifies control. While efforts to influence this dimension of an oppressed group's experiences
can be partially successful, this level is more difficult to control than dominant groups would have us
believe. For example, adhering to externally derived standards of beauty leads many African-American
women to dislike their skin color or hair texture. Similarly, internalizing Eurocentric gender ideology
leads some Black men to abuse Black women. These are cases of the successful infusion of the dominant
group's specialized thought into the everyday cultural context of African-Americans. But the longstanding existence of a Black women's culture of resistance as expressed through Black women's
relationships with one another, the Black women's blues tradition, and the voices of contemporary
African-American women writers all attest to the difficulty of eliminating the cultural context as a
fundamental site of resistance.
War/Terror Representations
War and terrorism disproportionately affects Black women — failure to acknowledge this
violence makes them complicit.
Zerai and Salime 06 — Assata Zerai, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign, Director of the Center for African Studies and Zakia Salime, Associate Professor of
Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign, 2006 (“A Black Feminist Analysis of Responses to War, Racism, and Repression,”
Critical Sociology, Vol. 32, Iss. 2–3 March 1st, accessible online via subscribing institution to Sage
Journals, accessed on 7-10-15)
Feature 2: Black feminism highlights the importance of integrated analysis in political organizing Black
feminism considers multiplicative oppressions to be addressed in communities of color. Black feminist
organizing seeks to understand domination in order to equip people to resist oppression and affect
social change. Integrated analysis informs the points delineated in the leaflet, “10 Reasons Why Women
Should Oppose the US ‘War on Terrorism’” developed by the Women of Color Resource Center. For an
example, see point 3: “Weapons of mass destruction, produced, used and sold by the US worldwide,
poison the environment, causing miscarriages, birth defects and cancers.” They argue that class
interests that promote the sale of weaponry by US corporations to the US military and to other military
interests around the world not only contribute to the further disparity in income and wealth in US
society and between the USA and other countries, but also directly affect the health status of residents
in countries and communities in which such weapons are produced and used. Women generally – poor
women, women of color, and poor women of color in particular – are disproportionately affected by
the income and wealth disparities generated by weapons sales and by the ill-health effects of these
weapons. The organization, INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence further develops this point in their
leaflet “The ‘War of Terror’ Intensifies Violence Against Women of Color, Third World Women and our
Communities.” It states, “Women in the countries under attack search for clean water because poisons
from weapons pollute the soil and water, leading to starvation, cancers, and birth disabilities.” An
integrated analysis is employed when the observer is examining the simultaneous operation of global
racism, class oppression, and sexism. The same perspective informs point 5 of the WCRC’s “10 Reasons
Women Should Oppose War.” It states, “The ‘war on terrorism’ is a cover for US economic, political, and
military domination, which increases women’s poverty worldwide.” In INCITE’s integrated analysis, they
delineate several issues related to this point:
a. Third-world women who survive invasion will live in a . . . colony that has been devastated and
impoverished and has little or no access to jobs and education.
b. The excuse of a wartime economy and national security are used to cut tens of thousands of jobs
from women of color and thirdworld women and our communities . . .
c. The Department of Homeland Security can decertify any union operating or prevent any union
forming if the union is seen as a threat to “national security.” Without unions, working conditions and
salaries for poor folks and people of color will get worse. Point a looks beyond US borders to bring in
nations as a sphere of the intersectional framework. In points b and c, women of color observe ways the
“war on terror” has directly affected earnings of family and community members.
Black Nationalism
Black movements fail to prioritize Black Feminism — this condemns their project to failure
and renders black women's voices invisible.
Wallis 11 — Victor Wallis, Professor of Liberal Arts at Berklee College of Music, Ph.D. in Political Science
from Columbia University, M.A. in Political Science from Brandeis University, A.B. from Harvard
University, 2011 (“Black Radical Theory and Practice: Gender, Race, and Class,” Socialism and
Democracy, April 20th, accessible online at http://sdonline.org/33/black-radical-theory-and-practicegender-race-and-class/, accessed on 7-10-15)
Capitalist patriarchy profoundly shapes male/female relations general, but is quite complicated when
racial dynamics are considered (hooks, 1984). However, in general, the inequality of African American
women is not systematically treated in discussions of racial inequality, especially Black radical treatises
on race and class. The recent work by E. Frances White (2001) makes this point quite tellingly. She
cogently demonstrates the erasure of Black women’s lives by Black male revolutionaries and white
feminists. At issue for White and other radical Black feminists is the untenability of mounting a struggle
for social transformation without taking into serious consideration the mutually reinforcing impact and
complexities of race/gender/class. Thus gender as the social construction of maleness and femaleness
situated in a structured hierarchy of male domination must be more definitively articulated and
theorized in the context of the Black freedom struggle. Without such an articulation, true emancipatory
struggles are not possible.
Black radical feminists also understand that race is at the center of a gender and class logic in the U.S.
(White 2001). They argue that a feminist framework, rooted in white privilege and power, too often
imposes a conceptual logic on women of color that distorts or misrepresents that experience (Collins
1990). Yet, the difficulties of multiplicity within Black communities, cross-cut by age, region, ethnicity,
class, are not easily resolved. For example, the tradition of Black women’s economic exploitation, rooted
in the expropriation of Black women’s productive and reproductive labor (Jones l985), and the
precarious economic position of African American men, mark a long-standing social logic in which Black
womanhood is defined. This is a more complicated space than simply asserting that Black Women are
exploited.
Black feminist thinkers and activists began to argue explicitly for the simultaneity of oppression. It is not
just race or class. This critique goes to the heart of Black radical thinking. The demand is that gender
inequality be recognized as an essential dimension of the Black freedom struggle. Even today, much of
the discussion of inequality in the U.S. is centered either on race or on gender, erasing their intersection.
Such analysis renders invisible the experiences of Black women.
Gender
Critiques of gender that don’t address intersectionality are an exercise of white privilege —
civil society relegates Black females as lower than women.
Broeck 08 — Sabine Broeck, professor of American Studies at the University of Bremen, 2008
("Enslavement as Regime of Western Modernity: Re-reading Gender Studies Epistemology through Black
Feminist Critique," Gender Forum, November 15th, accessible online at
https://eee.uci.edu/12w/22500/homepage/broeck_slavery.modernity.pdf, accessed on 7-9-15)
The point I want to make is not that African societies did not organize themselves around different
cultural social and economic interpellations for men and women, neither that in new world slavery, and
colonial societies female beings were not subjected to particular politics and practices - most
importantly - rape, and the theft of motherhood. However, as Spillers has argued, and as Hartman's
texts illuminate, enslaved African-origin female beings never qualified as women (because of their nonhumanness, it followed logically) in the Euro-American modern world, and therefore were not
interpellated to partake in the ongoing social construction and contestation of gender. The point I do
want to make is that gender - a category that would have enabled a black female claim on social
negotiations did not apply to 'things', to what was constructed as and treated as human flesh.
Moreover, that very category gender emerged in western transatlantic rhetoric precisely in the context
of creating a space for white women, who refused to be treated like slaves, like things. Modern gender,
with early modern feminism, constituted itself discursively precisely in the shift from 18th century
female abolitionist Christian empathy with the enslaved to the paradigmatic separation of women from
slaves, a process that repeated itself in the late 19th century American negotiations of, and between,
abolitionism and suffrage. The fact that black women have - in their long history in the western
transatlantic world - consistently fought for an access to the category gender to be able to occupy a
space of articulation at all, most famously, of course, in 19th century Sojourner Truth's angrily
subversive exclamation "Am I not a woman and a sister?", does not alter the structural complicity of
gender as a category with the formation of the sovereign modern white self. That is to say to have, or to
be of female gender which could claim and deserved certain kinds of rights, and treatment, staked the
claim of white 18th century women to full human subjectivity, as opposed to thingness. The infamous
and very persistent use of the analogy of women and slaves (Broeck) provided a springboard for white
women to begin theorizing a catalogue of their own demands for an acknowledgement of modern,
free subjectivity as antagonistic to enslavement; as a discursive construct, then, modern gender served
the differentiation of human from property. White Feminism and gender theory have thus played
active roles in the constitution of modern societies as we know them that need far more reflection in
shaping and negotiating the expectations of how to do gender properly, even in its critical modes - roles
that were claimed rather rarely in conjunction with, or based on an acknowledgment of black people's
agency. To me, the corruption inherent in this history demands a bracketing of the category gender, a
coupling of it to that history to lose its innocence. Making this kind of connection will also support
Gender Studies to go beyond the epistemologically restrictive gender-race analogy which fired white
female abolitionism - an ideological position that is untenable for gender studies in a de-colonial
moment.
Acknowledging the racial implications of sexism is critical to break through gender
oppression.
Crenshaw 95 — Kimberlé Crenshaw, Professor of Law at UCLA, J.D. from Harvard University, LLM from
the University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1995 (“Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the
Movement,” Published by The New Press, Edited by Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas,
ISBN: 9781565842717)
Studies like LaFree’s do little to illuminate how the interaction of race, class, and nontraditional
behavior affects the disposition of rape cases involving black women. Such an oversight is especially
troubling given evidence that many cases involving black women are dismissed outright. Over 20
percent of rape complaints were recently dismissed as unfounded by the Oakland Police Department,
which did not even interview many, if not most, of the women involved. Not coincidentally, the vast
majority of the complainants were black and poor, many of them were substance abusers or prostitutes.
Explaining their failure to pursue these complaints. the police remarked that "those cases were
hopelessly tainted by women who are transient, uncooperative, untruthful, or not credible as witnesses
in court.' The effort to politicize violence against women will do little to link to address the
experiences of black and other nonwhite women until the ramifications of racial stratification among
women are acknowledged. At the same time, the antiracist agenda will not be furthered by
suppressing the reality of intraracial violence against women of color. The effect of both these
marginalizations is that women of color have no ready means to link their experiences with those of
other women. This sense of isolation compounds efforts to politicize sexual violence within
communities of color and perpetuates the deadly silence surrounding these issues.
Wilderson
Wilderson blatantly ignores feminist standpoints on race — refusal to acknowledge gender in
anti-blackness makes him complicit in patriarchy.
Hodges 12 — Aisa Hodges, M.A. Candidate in Africana Studies at the University of California, Irvine,
2012 (“Mama’s Baby and the Black Gender Problematic,” Critical Theory Conference, accessible online at
https://www.academia.edu/attachments/29454461/download_file?st=MTQzNjQxMjMxNSwzNS4yMC4x
OC4yMDYsNzc2NzgwNA%3D%3D&s=work_strip, accessed on 7-8-15)
In the spirit of black feminism, though its ensemble of questions cannot help me here, I must occasion
an explanation of black positionality that accounts for the manner of existential negation and the modes
of violence which position me, moving beyond the concerns with black patriarchy. Theoretically,
antiblackness does not only lend itself to an argument against a gendered understanding of my
condition, it also offers an opportunity for a more nuanced understanding of gender itself. This begs the
question, what does a genderless black subject help us to understand that a more complicated
rendering [or gendering] of the black subject would obscure? In my view, black political thought lags
here, unable to describe its condition without relegating the particularities of the female black to the
abyss. Moreover, it seems the black female labors in service of civil society in ways we have yet to fully
understand. Spillers supports an argument for the necessity of this work in building a more robust
theoretical foundation for black political thought, and afropessimism could be our point of departure.
For Wilderson, there is a line of recognition and incorporation. Above it are human beings, civil society
made up of white men and women, and below it is the black in absolute dereliction, a concept he draws
from Frantz Fanon writings on the black condition. I mean to suggest that the distinction we’re looking
for under the line of recognition and incorporation is not “man” and “woman”, which Wilderson would
reject, but that is not to say there is no distinction to be made whatsoever. It seems we may too hastily
disregard the possibility for distinction for three reasons, described loosely as outlined by Spillers: 1)
there was no distinction made between male and female slaves on the ships, 2) men and women
performed the same hard, physical labor and lastly, 3) gender is a category requiring the symbolic
integrity from which the black is barred. I am unable to go into each in detail here, but the validity of
these points of contention is not what is in question for Spillers. The distinctions made on ships or on
fields are not the only sites we should scourer for insight into the black gender problematic, and
evidence that captives are not regarded as “men” and “women,” like their captors, is elucidating but not
explanatory.
In Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe, Spillers uses naming as a point of entry into black gender problematic.
She revisits Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report on the state of the black community in America during the
late 1960s, and meditates on the significance of black women emerging as the locus of black pathology.
She writes that for Moynihan, “the ‘Negro Family’ has no Father to speak of—his Name, his Symbolic
function mark the impressive missing agencies in the essential life of the black community… and it is,
surprisingly, the fault of the Daughter, or the female line”. Thus, it is the “displacing [of] the Name and
the Law of the father to the territory of the Mother and Daughter [that] becomes an aspect of the
African-American female’s misnaming.” The black is without the gendered symbolic integrity that the
subjects of civil society enjoy; the black performs to both genders, as well as anything in between and
beyond, and is not granted the protections of motherhood or the entitlements of fatherhood for
example. Moynihan observes the behavior of the black family and concludes that it is a manifestation of
the backwardness of blackness generally, and the pathology of black women in particular. But a
structural analysis would include a discussion of historical context, relations to power and positionality,
with an understanding of the black as positioned through the violence of captivity.
Moreover, the emergence of the female black marks the divergence between chattel slavery and racial
slavery. Peter Wood, professor of history at Duke University, explains that partus sequitir ventrem,
“that which is brought forth follows the womb”, is a legal doctrine which mandates that the child
follows the status of the mother, or rather in the case of the female black, her child is doomed to
captivity. Woods notes that there was a “shift from indentured servitude to lifelong slavery to heredity
slavery, where not only am I enslaved but my children as well” and emphasizes that it was indeed “a
remarkable shift” . However, the problem is not that we do not know this history, but rather we have
not dealt with it theoretically, and even in the most likely of discourses, particularity on the basis of sex
is not explored. In chapter 11 of Red, White and Black, Wilderson takes up the issue of gender and sex
under captivity, but largely leaves the work Spillers does in Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe untouched.
Earlier in the chapter, she is employed as support for Wilderson’s claim that the position of white
women and black females are made distinct as a direct consequence of captivity. However, when
Wilderson addresses blackness and gender, specifically gender ontology and the reification of gender,
Spillers absence is haunting.
Moreover, the effect of captivity on gender is not simply a reversal of power between the categories of
“man” and “woman” as suggested by Moynihan, but rather that these categories are in fact eviscerated
entirely where the black is concerned. Though the black does not hold the symbolic integrity for gender
normativity, as argued by both Wilderson and Spillers, the categories of male and female are still apt
here; “man” and “woman” representing the body and the latter, eviscerated categories, representing
Spillers’ notion of the flesh. She writes:
Before there is the ‘body’ there is the ‘flesh,’ that zero degree of social conceptualization that
does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography. Even
though the European hegemonies stole bodies—some of them female… we regard this human
and social irreparability as high crimes against the flesh, as a person of African females and
African males registered the wounding.
Here, Spillers shows that the violence of captivity registers on multiple levels, and of course that the
violence can be understood from multiple registers, however the flesh that registers the wounding is
sexed, the violence at times sexualized. So how, then, does the female black function within the
structure, positioned through regimes of sexualized violence?
My project is to seek answers to the questions developed here by acquiescing to the chasms in our
understanding. I do not aim to fill the chasm here, but only to make the conceptual leap and let the
matter remain unresolved so that we might titter on the edge and engage further with the black gender
problematic. To conclude, the closing thoughts of Spillers in Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe, “The female
breaks in upon the imagination with a forcefulness that marks both a denial and an ‘illegitimacy’… In
this play of paradox, only the female stands in the flesh, both mother and mother-dispossessed. This
problematizing of gender places her, in my view, out of the traditional symbolics of female gender, and
it is our task to make a place for this different social subject.“
Fanon
Fanon’s racialized Black subject is built upon the exclusion of potential femininities.
Bergner 95 — Gwen Bergner, Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of
West Virginia, Ph.D. in English from Princeton University, B.A. in English from Cornell University, 1995
(“Who Is That Masked Woman? Or, the Role of Gender in Fanon's Black Skin,” Publication of the Modern
Language Association, January, Vol. 110, No. 1, accessible online via subscribing institution to JSTOR,
accessed on 7-8-15)
Though Black Skin, White Masks is a foundational text for reconfiguring psychoanalysis to ac- count for
race, Fanon, like Freud, takes the male as the norm. For the exemplary colonized subject, Fanon uses
the term le noir 'the black man.' This masculine "universal" refers not to humankind gen- erally,
however, but to actual men-since Fanon describes these colonized subjects as studying in Paris, lusting
after white women, and competing with white men for intellectual recognition. The French-educated
Martinican who appropriates the superiority of the colonizing culture by ostentatiously wielding proper
French is, by assumption, male: "When he marries, his wife will be aware that she is marrying a joke"
'marie, sa femme saura qu'elle epouse une histoire' (25; 39). That Fanon's"universal" subject describes
the colonized male in particular indicates that racial identities intersect with sexual difference. Fanon
does not ignore sex- ual difference altogether, but he explores sexual- ity's role in constructing race only
through rigid categories of gender. In Black Skin, White Masks, women are considered as subjects
almost exclusively in terms of their sexual relationships with men; feminine de- sire is thus defined as an
overly literal and limited (hetero)sexuality. But though feminine subjectivity clearly deserves broader
description, the dimensions of its confinement within Black Skin, White Masks indicate the architecture
of raced masculinity and femininity in the colonial context. So while it is not surprising that Fanon,
writing in the early fifties, takes the masculine as the norm, it is necessary not only to posit alternative
representations of femininity but also to consider how his account of normative raced masculinity
depends on the production or exclusion of femininities. By examining the role of gender in Black Skin,
White Masks, I aim to broaden Fanon's outline of black women's subjectivity and to work toward
delineating the interdependence of race and gender. Although they may emanate from a common
construction of otherness in psychoanalytic discourses, racial difference and sexual difference intersect
and interact in contextually variable ways that preclude separate or determinist description. Relying on
feminist psychoanalytic theory as a model for revising the discourse of psychoanalysis from within, I
hope to review Fanon's construction of gender while illuminating the contributions of his psychoanalytic
framework of racial identity. Fanon's almost mythical significance for post- colonial theorists and, more
recently, for others gesturing toward multicultural contexts nearly forestalls a gender critique of Black
Skin, White Masks. In an article tracing Fanon's recuperation as a "global theorist," Gates notes that
Fanon is mobilized as an "ethnographic construct" and is used as "both totem and text" to model a
"unified theory of oppression" (459, 457, 470).
Figuring Fanon as transcultural and transhistorical means that "in the course of an appeal for the
specificity of the Other, we discover that [Fanon as the] global theorist of alterity is emptied of his own
specificity" (459). These invocations do not lead to critical analyses of his work but make the colonial
paradigm the "last bastion for the project, and dream, of global the- ory" (469-70). According to Gates,
pressing Fanon into the service of a "global theory" of colonialism produces either a "sentimental
romance of alterity" complete with a utopian vision of fully achieved independence from the colonial
relation or a conception of that relation as a closed, inescapable system. For Gates, these incompatible
positions structure the central conflict within colonial discourse theory: the tension between utopian
narratives of liberation and deterministic models of subject formation and discourse formation. To
unlock this binary, Gates proposes a more grounded approach that would "historicize" Fanon through
biographical critique. Gates would weigh, for example, reports that Fanon did not identify with and even
found distasteful the common people of the cultures he championed theoretically and politically. This
recourse to the "factual" authority of biography may demythologize the man but does not disprove his
theory or resolve the dilemmas of colonial discourse analysis. Fanon's alienation from the local and the
"low" is in fact the subject of Black Skin, White Masks; the dialectic between solidarity with and
alienation from the colonized population is integral to his analysis of the colonially educated black man's
psychology. Rather than historicize Fanon, I want to challenge post-colonialism's uses of him and to
encourage a deeper engagement with issues of gender-not to constitute a better "unified theory of
oppression" (Gates 470) but to question the dominant practice of "separate but equal" psychoanalytic
discourses of race and gender.
Race Link of Omission
Focus on race structurally disadvantages intersections of gender, race, and other
forms of discrimination.
Nash 13 (Jennifer Nash, Jennifer Nash, Assistant Professor in African Studies at George Washington
University, Ph.D. in African American Studies from Harvard University, J.D. from Harvard Law School,
A.B. in Women’s Studies from Harvard College, 2009, “Practicing Love: Black Feminism, Love Politics,
and Post-Intersectionality”, accessed via JSTOR // ekr)
My reading of intersectionality as an identitarian project underscores that it emerged both as juridical
intervention and as a restoration of identity politics crafted in a moment—not unlike the one we inhabit
now—when identity politics was increasingly critiqued for eliding intragroup difference. As a juridical
intervention, intersectionality problematizes an antidiscrimination regime that always presumes the
mutual exclusiveness of race and gender. By recognizing as cognizable (and legally actionable) only
discrimination claims that are either race-based or gender-based, antidiscrimination law often, though
not always, ignores black women’s injuries because: Black women can experience discrimination in ways
that are both similar to and different from those experienced by white women and Black men. . . .
[O]ften they experience double-discrimination—the combined effects of practices which discriminate on
the basis of race, and on the basis of sex. And sometimes, they experience discrimination as Black
women—not the sum of race and sex discrimination, but as Black women. (Crenshaw 1989, 149)
Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intervention reveals that the architecture of antidiscrimination doctrine, with its
insistent or formation—race-or-gender—ignores the “and” that captures many black women’s
experiences. Crenshaw’s juridical intervention, then, was not to abandon antidiscrimination law’s
reliance on categories both for redressing injuries and for granting relief. Rather, she sought to reveal
the injuries that antidiscrimination’s logic necessarily elides or ignores, and to show the necessity of
judicial attention to injuries that occur “in the intersection” of race and gender. If intersectionality
emerged as a legal intervention, it also sought to rehabilitate identity politics. Crenshaw’s point of
departure is that identity politics “frequently conflates or ignores intragroup difference” (Crenshaw
1991, 1242), and that intersectionality can restore complexity to identity politics by insisting on a
recognition that race and gender are heterogeneous categories.5 To say it another way, Crenshaw seeks
to dismantle the logic that Barbara Smith, Gloria T. Hull, and Patricia Bell Scott called attention to with
their aptly titled anthology All the Women are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave
(Hull, Scott, and Smith 1982). Crenshaw notes, “the intersectional experiences of women of color
marginalized in prevailing conceptions of identity politics does not require that we give up attempts to
organize as communities of color. Rather, intersectionality provides a basis for reconceptualizing race as
a coalition between men and women of color. . . . Recognizing that identity politics takes place at the
site where categories intersect thus seems more fruitful than challenging the possibility of talking about
categories at all” (Crenshaw 1991, 1299). For Crenshaw, intersectionality allows for identity politics
practitioners to perform identity work with a new attention to the heterogeneity of the categories they
labor with. This is not to say that intersectionality neglects the contextuality and contingency of identity.
At times, intersectionality has usefully analyzed how one’s experience of subjectivity or domination
depends on location and moment. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s now-canonical work on the
“metalanguage of race,” for example, recognizes that race “lends meaning” to gender, sexuality, and
class in historically specific ways, effectively “impregnat[ing] the simplest meanings we take for granted.
It makes hair ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ speech patterns ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’” (Higginbotham 1992, 255).
Higginbotham’s intervention reveals that race, gender, class, and sexuality intersect—to borrow
Crenshaw’s vocabulary—in context-specific ways. My interest, though, is in how categories remain fixed,
legible, and knowable, even as scholars attend to how context shifts our experiences of our selves and
the structures of domination that constrain us.
2NC/1NR Blocks
They Say: “Not Our Black Nationalism”
1. This is a link — their attempt to disregard our critique as an irrelevant history lesson
about the Black Panthers is just another attempt to ignore and make invisible Black
Women.
2. This is a question of the link debate — our evidence is specific to modern
movements. They’ve provided no meaningful distinction between the affirmative and
other forms of Black Nationalism.
3. Yes — your Black Nationalism — focus on “nation state” solutions in any context
are inherently patriarchal. Only the alternative can free us from the bonds of the Black
Matrix.
hooks 13 — bell hooks, Scholar in Residence at the New School, Distinguished Professor in Residence
of English at Berea College, Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Santa Cruz — interviewed
by Lloyd D’Aguilar, Founder of Jamaica Resist — an online Jamaican Policy Blog, 2013 (“Bell Hooks
speaks to what is revolutionary black nationalism,” Looking Back, Looking Forward, January 11th,
accessible online at http://lookingbacklookingforward.com/bell-hooks-speaks-to-what-is-revolutionaryblack-nationalism/, accessed on 7-14-15)
BH: I see a hunger, especially among Black youth, for more sophisticated answers. Unfortunately, right
now, it’s narrow nationalism, narrow forms of Afrocentrism, that are mostly addressing that hunger. Our
leading people buy into utopian fantasies of liberation, when in fact our liberation should come from a
concrete struggle in the workforce, no fantasies about ancient Africa, and kings and queens. Not that we
don’t need to know about ancient Africa to address the biases of Western education. People forget that
the militant struggles of the 1960s were profoundly anti-capitalist. Even Martin Luther King reached a
point, before his death, in A Testament of Hope, when he was saying we must be anti-militarist; we
must critique capitalism. That has somehow gotten lost in the mix, and I think that this embracing of
capitalist ethic of liberal individualism has done more to diffuse Black people’s capacity to struggle for
freedom, than any other factor.
On the other hand, when I go to give a talk and there are many more Black men than ever before. There
are many more Black people, so it says to me that there is also a burgeoning group of Black people who
are ready to educate for critical consciousness, in a more powerful, revolutionary way. The question will
be: how many of us will rise as insurgent, revolutionary, Black intellectuals, to be the teachers, and to be
the leaders, and to be the people who make certain sacrifices to bring certain insights. We have to think
of political insight as a resource that we bring to our diverse Black communities and to our lives.
LD: You are also a cultural critic. There are a lot of Black movies out now–do you think these films are
addressing the needs of Black people at this time?
BH: I was told, for example, by a lot of Black people, “Oh, you must see Sankofa“, Haile Gerima’s film.
Then I saw that film and I thought, this script of slavery comes right out of Gone with the Wind. It has
moments where it affirms Black self-determination, but it’s so sentimental when it comes to gender. We
have the sacrificing Black mother who, truly, has a revolutionary consciousness and is not going to go
chasing after some retrograde, self-hating mulatto son in the way we see that Black woman doing. It’s
kind of sad that this is our vision of a film that begins to address our issues because, once again, it’s on
such a banal level.
I think it is worth discussing how useful are fictional narratives of slavery to us in a culture where people
don’t know their actual history. I’m much more interested in students reading and knowing the
speeches and text of Malcolm X, the person, than going to see that garbled, crossover, colonized version
of Spike Lee’s.
Until people have concretely studied the teachings of a Malcolm X or a Martin Luther King, it’s
dangerous to have fiction become the primary learning point.
LD: I guess there’s still a very strong nationalist hold over us.2NC
BH: That’s a good point. I think nationalism is a non-progressive world vision right now. I think that
nationalism is different from Black self-determination because, of course, any vision of Black selfdetermination that is rooted in a class analysis and a critique of sexism unites us with the struggles of,
not only Black people, globally, for liberation, but all oppressed people. I think that nationalism has
undermined revolutionary Black struggle. It’s no accident that people like Malcolm X and Martin Luther
King were destroyed at those moments of their political careers when they had begun to critique
nationalism as a platform of organization; and where, in fact, they replace nationalism with a critique of
imperialism; which then, unites us with the liberation struggles of so many people on the planet. If we
don’t have that kind of global perspective about our social realities, we will never be able to re-envision
a revolutionary movement for Black self-determination that is non-exclusive, and doesn’t assume some
kind of patriarchal nationhood. Many of our African nations have failed precisely because they lacked a
revolutionary vision for social change that worked, and not because they didn’t have a nation. So, Black
Americans must be very, very cautious in embracing the notion of a nation as the redemptive location.
The redemptive location lies in our radical politics and the strategies by which we implement those
radical politics–not with the formation of a nation.
They Say: “Intersectionality Bad — Western Perspective”
This Also Links to the Aff — all of their authors are western and write for western
Universities — this isn’t offense for them.
We’ll Link Turn — intersectionality is the only perspective that can account for various
perspectives on philosophy. It’s vital to increased appreciation of various disciplines of
philosophy.
They Say: “Intersectionality Bad — Homogenization”
Turn — mainstream philosophy is inherently homogenizing — Intersectionality is vital
to breaking down that idea. It doesn’t homogenize Black Women.
Maj 13 — Julia Maj, Ph.D. Candidate in Gender Studies at the University of Manchester, 2013 (“The
Significance of Intersectionality for Feminist Political Theory,” E-IR, November 1st, Accessible Online at
http://www.e-ir.info/2013/11/01/the-significance-of-intersectionality-for-feminist-political-theory/,
Accessed On 07-22-15)
*This dissertation talks about Nash in an earlier section.
However, universalising women’s experiences is not limited to feminist activism; it is also evident in
feminist theory itself (Bryson 1999). Feminist theorists have often based key concepts on the
experiences of a certain group of women without considering that this is not reflective of all women’s
lives. The somewhat biased feminist understanding and explanation of the ‘public/private dichotomy’
illustrates this argument. Feminist scholars such as Pateman (1988) have suggested that the private and
the public realm are highly gendered constructs. Feminist scholars have critiqued liberal political
thought for equating the private realm with femininity and the public realm with masculinity and for the
role that this has played in structuring gender relations in reality (Rudy 1999, Bryson 2003). Although
this scholarship is useful in articulating the problems facing some women, it does not reflect the
experience of all women, a fact that intersectionality accounts for (Carby 1997). For instance, it is
important to question how useful this understanding of the public/private dichotomy is when
considering the issues faced by working class women. Working class women may be required to spend a
vast amount of their time working in the ‘public realm’; spending time in the ‘private’ realm of the
household may be a luxury (Hill Collins 1991). This understanding of the public/private dichotomy also
obscures the way in which the participation of middle-class women in the public domain is made
possible. It is important to note that women being able to take up paid employment often takes place
due to the subjugation of women from ethnic and lower class backgrounds, who look after other
women’s children and homes during the day time (Glenn 1992). This highlights the limitations of
equating more women working in the public realm with achieving gender equality. Here,
intersectionality is instrumental in highlighting the way in which, due to women’s different social
positioning, key concepts in feminist theory do not account for the experience of all women and that
categories other than women’s gender need to be taken into consideration when formulating feminist
theory (Smooth 2011). It also reflects the need for feminist theorists to be self-reflexive and
acknowledge how their specific social positioning influences their work (Mohanty 1988).
Another significant aspect of intersectionality is that it shows how experiences of oppression are not
the same for all women; it highlights the historical and socio-cultural contingency of oppression. This
issue is discussed in the published work of the Combahee River Collective (1977), which highlights how
the structural effects of the slave trade influences black women’s lives in modern contexts. The
Collective argue that it is not possible to fully understand black women’s oppression without looking at
how it has been constructed over time. This issue is also well articulated by Thompson (2002, pp. 347),
who states “Listen to women’s of color’s anger. It is informed by centuries of struggle, erasure, and
experience”.
Highlighting the different historical contexts within which women’s identities and experiences are
constructed is very important for feminist theory. The work of the Collective shows that although their
identity as black women is naturalised, their identity is the result of the historical constructions of
what it means to be a woman and black and how these categories “interrelate and effect each other” in
the present context (Yuval-Davis 2006, pp. 200). This is another point that feminist political theorists
should take into consideration when theorising about women’s lives. Not only does each person have a
different epistemological standpoint, but also these perspectives have been shaped and re-shaped
over time and in relation to different experiences of oppression.