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- Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Clark University (Walter, “Historical Analogies, Slippery Slopes, and the
Question of Euthanasia” foumal of Law, Medicine &Ethics, 28 (2000): 176-186, Wiley)
The gathering threads of the eugenics and “right-to- die” movements converged in
the influential 1920 publica- tion Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens: I hr Mass und Form (
Permitting the Destruction of Lives not
Worth Living: Its Extent and Form
) by
Karl
Binding and Alfred Hoche.37 Binding was perhaps the most distinguished legal scholar of his time and Hoche was a physician and Professor at Freiburg. Their independent essays on the com- mon question appeared together. Most importantly, this little volume became a crucial avenue for disseminating the idea that some lives are not worth living. I will briefly review Binding's historically influential arguments leaving Hoche’s less germane discussion to the side.
Binding provides a careful legal analysis of a range of related cases, including
suicide, assisting someone to com- mit suicide, responding to a request from a terminally ill, hopeless, and suffering patient, killing a mentally ill person at the request of family members, and so on. He is very careful to make important distinctions, and he attempts to maintain clear boundaries around the specific cases of kill- ing he proposes to categorize as “not legally forbidden.” Thus, while he finds suicide “not legally forbidden,” assist- ing in a suicide is actually the killing of a third party and the consent of the victim does not remove legal liability from the assistant. However, not all lives are equal.
Binding introduces the idea that “terminally ill or fatally wounded people” are in a new category.
“Here there clearly appears the idea that such a life no longer merits strict legal protection.” These are, he thinks, “lives not worth living.” He distinguishes three cases. In the first group are “those irretrievably lost as a result of illness or injury, who, fully understanding their situation, possess and have somehow expressed their urgent wish for release.”M For Binding, killing such patients is “a duty of legal mercy.” Among other examples, he includes the fatally injured comrade on a battlefield or a mountain- eering expedition. The second group “consists of incur- able idiots."1’ These people have the will neither to live nor to die. In this case too Binding finds “no grounds— legally, socially, ethically, or religiously—for not permitting the killing of these people who are the fearsome counter image of true humanity, and who arouse horror in nearly everyone who meets them.”40 His restriction in this case is that the right of application should be limited to the family who have been caring for the handicapped patient, or to the guardian. The third group consists of mentally sound people who “through some event like a very severe, doubt- less fatal wound,” have become comatose. He docs not think that any blanket rule can cover this last group of cases, but then goes on to conclude with a general guideline: [OJnly those persons arc candidates for having their deaths permitted who are terminally ill and who, in addition to being beyond help, have either requested death or consented to dying, or else would have re- quested or consented, had they not fallen into uncon- sciousness at the critical time or if they had been able to achieve awareness of the situation.41 (Emphasis added.) All of this, Binding views within the constraint that “Every unforbidden killing of a third person must be expe- rienced as a release, at least by the victim; otherwise allow- ing it is self-evidently ruled out.”42 Having established his basic principle, Binding then goes on to propose a formal procedure with careful safeguards as a way to implement it without abuses.4*
Binding’s arguments incorporate elements of the “right to die” movement as well as the eugenicist’s appeals to the preservation of social wellbeing
. If one abstracts from this work’s historical results, ignores the occasionally crude cal- culations of social utility, and considers the rather careful protections that he includes against possible abuses, o ne could perhaps take these arguments as sensible, compas- sionate and progressive. They are surprisingly modern in tone
, suggesting both Singer’s careful defense of permitting a limited practice of euthanasia, and recent guidelines in the Netherlands. But can one abstract from the work’s historical effects?
This is the core of the slippery slope argument. Binding’s and Hoche’s views were extensively discussed by their con- temporaries and, although never officially accepted in the ^Xfeimar period, became widely influential among physicians. Participants in the
T444 program used them explicitly to justify their actions.41 This connection is an instance of both a “precedent based” and a “causal” slippery slope. First, by providing support for a limited practicc of medical killing, Binding
and Hoche made such things discussible
. In doing so, they provided intellectual cover for people who wished later to abuse the opportunity
. Second, their work brought about a climate among German medical profes- sionals that permitted doctors to accept the idea of killing their patients. This climate could be claimed to have been a contributing cause for the vigorous advocacy by some German physicians of a policy of killing mentally retarded, physically handicapped, elderly people
: the “useless eat- ers.” In that respect, Singer’s opponents might say, the German experience confirms the claim that even discuss- ing the idea that some lives might not be worth living helps to create the “unmitigated disaster
.” Their argument also connects to the “peg” protecting our wagon from rolling down the hill.
Their influence in Germany effectively “pulled the peg” in the slope
(provided by the Hippocratic ethic), so that, when external social forces pushed the medi- cal cart, physicians were no longer able to arrest its slide
.46

, Artist Initiative Grantee at Minnesota State Arts Board Senior Academic Adviser for the College of Education and Human Development at University of Minnesota Steering Committee at Education Abroad
Network at University of Minnesota Volunteer Coordinator for Social Inclusion and Bullying Prevention at Marcy Open School see less Past 2012-2013 Buckman Fellow at Buckman Fellowship Travel and Study Grantee at Jerome
Foundation Loft Mentor Series Award Winner for Poetry at The Loft Literary Center Institute on Community Integration Post-graduate Certificate Graduate Student at University of Minnesota University of Minnesota College of
Education and Human Development/University Honors Program Liaison at University of Minnesota University Honors Program Academic Advisor at University of Minnesota University of Minnesota Learning Abroad
Center/University Honors Program Liaison at University of Minnesota Foreign Lecturer--English Studies, Cultural Awareness, Humanities at Hokkaido University of Education Educational Technologies post-grad certificate program at University of British Columbia, Vancouver Adjunct Lecturer--Japanese Language at Wayne County Community College Adjunct Lecturer--English Composition at Wayne State University Foriegn Lecturer--English Studies, Creative
Writing, English Literature at Sophia University--Tokyo, Japan ‘Screw normal’: Resisting the myth of normal by questioning media’s depiction of people with autism and their families, http://blog.lib.umn.edu/gara0030/iggds/Screw%20Normal_FINAL_Dosch%20Brown.pdf
The one societal need in our society that is often unacknowledged, silenced, and left unexamined is that humans have
, as Michalko quoted Cornel West, the ― deep, visceral need to belong
‖ (Michalko, 2002, p. 81) — all of us struggle with full acceptance of ourselves and our desire to be seen as acceptable or welcome in a society that loves to label people.
The media creates walls between its ideals and the people it views as Others
, such as when the media views people with autism as ‘abnormal mysteries’. We are being taught that differences occurring from autism are wrong, and
sadly too many families depicted in the media perpetuate this negative view of their own children.
When thinking of ‗normal‘ henceforth, let‘s consider what
Michalko
wrote about society and his blindness. He explained that, although society might have found ways technologically for him to participate (he is a professor), he is still seen as ‗strange‘ because he is blind. He said the difference in his blindness must be grappled with inside his being in ―a space between nature and culture‖ and ―normal and abnormal
‖ (2002, p. 83), and it is within this confusing, unmarked space where he has had to build his own identity. By moving through the world with his ―body of blindness,‖ Michalko has projected himself into the ―social space
,‖ just as my son must project his own self, by moving through the social space with his ‗mind of difference‘; thus, society reacts to people who have disabilities who cannot live up to the mythical norms with ―help, ―pity, ―ridicule, ―unease,‖ and
―curiosity
‖ (2002, p. 88), and it results in an unequal power structure that creates treacherous terrain for all of us who have been Othered.
Michalko (2002) noted that mainstream Western society views all disabilities as abnormal, and it thus approaches people with disability as tragic people who live lives
―not worth living
‖; they are seen as the Other, as objects of pity, both ―vulnerable and fragile‖ (p.68). The complexity, diversity, and range of differences of all human beings in this world are erased, denied, and ignored under a banner of ‗sameness‘ or ‗normalcy‘—and those who cannot or will not conform are silenced and lumped into the category of Other, and dealt with suspicion for not conforming to social construction of what is acceptable in appearance, behavior, and experience. Eugenics
, the academic Phil
Smith (2008) has concluded, is still very much present in societal attitudes toward disability. Eugenics formalized ―the Normal, a cultural landscape outlined in order to support the hegemony of its inhabitants, a liberalist bourgeois class of white, able-bodied men
‖ (P. Smith, p. 419).
By silencing those with perceived disabilities (or those with a particular perceived race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation , etc.) and deeming them as lesser than ‘normal‘ humans —society is able to continue to deny that ‘being normal‘ is actually a socially constructed myth
(Michalko, 2002, p. 69). Phil Smith further pointed out that not so long ago those who committed the war crimes by killing or sterilizing people they had deemed of inferior intelligence in the Nazis T-4 project were consistently given less severe convictions and higher acquittal rates
(P. Smith, 2008, p. 421)— revealing
, indeed, that as a society we devalue the lost lives of those considered too different from the mythical norm, which we will demonstrate later is a devaluation of human life very much alive in media depiction of autism. Society rarely has ears for the voices or rooms reserved for those with differences who think otherwise
, and it rarely realizes that indeed people with differences also have value and critical roles to play in society.
The media maintains this gaping silence as well.
Society,
Michalko has argued, either expects those deemed ―abnormal‖ will ―get through their

differences by adapting to the dominant rules, so as to be less noticed, or it expects them to ―get out‖ by removing themselves from view, by being silent and isolated
(Michalko, 2002, p. 75); and some experts, doctors, educators, and therapists make a sizable income from attempting to enforce these societal expectations on families.

– school of psychology, Massey University (Anne, Mandy Morgan, and Antonia Lyons, “The Problem with Death:
Towards a Genealogy of Euthanasia” Refereed Proceedings of Doing Psychology: Manawatu Doctoral Research Symposium 2011 43–48, http://mro.massey.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10179/3387/8%20Ryan%2c%20Morgan%20%2b%20Lyons.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y)
Euthanasia is ostensibly a humane response to the incalculable pain
and suffering associated with chronic and terminal illness and the loss of quality of life. It can be viewed as a noble aspiration, laying claim as it does to individual rights, freedom of choice and personal autonomy.
However
, this genealogy is able to open up that discursive space surrounding euthanasia to
at least a modicum of suspicion. In tracing the historical development of moral arguments, we are able to gain
some insight into
Foucault’s suggestions about the formation of the self through selfsubjection within these ancient ethical frameworks
. The ethic of self-killing was firstly identified in order for it to become moulded by moral actions. This required the subjection of the self to a recognised moral order
. For example, the ancient Greeks and Romans subjected themselves to the gods or the state and the early Chri stians to their Creator. As a result this moral obligation became objectified into ethical discourses and rules of behaviour
. Turner (1997) argues that these
‘discourses of subjectivity’ have the effect of producing identities,
for example the chronic sufferer and the terminally ill. As this genealogy further unfolded it became apparent that in Turner’s words, “ it is these identities which then become the object and focus of medicalisation and normalization
” (p. xii).
Foucault argued
that m edicine was at the center of the quest for normalization and by its infiltration of the law had created a
‘juridico -medical’ web that represented a major structure of power
(Foucault, 1996). The increasing demands for the legalization of the right-to-die are unlikely to deliver the promised ‘freedom of choice’ or control of our own dying. Rather it will result in an escalation of governmental power.
Euthanasia can be viewed as emblematic of neo-liberalism that is intrinsically linked to an art of government that develops the ways and means in which to shape and guide the conduct of each and every one of its citizens
.
It requires the population to be acted upon to ensure its own welfare and for its own economic good through techniques that need to appear reasonable and acceptable to both the practitioners and the people
(Foucault, 1991). Hegemonic discourses of medicalisation and personal autonomy that prevail
in our society today and are accepted as ‘common sense’ seek to represent euthanasia as the obvious response of a humane society to terminal illness. They endorse a practice that is widely viewed as the logical extension of a fundamental human right
. However, it should be recognised that these discourses also allow for the exercising of power while simultaneously masking that power
.

[Boston College (Anthony, “Perfecting Slavery”, http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1028&context=lsfp)]
Slavery is with us still . We are haunted by slavery. We are animated by slavery. White-over-black is slavery
and segregation and neosegregation and every situation in which the distribution of material or spiritual goods follows the colorline.
The movement from slavery to segregation to neosegregation to whatever form of white-over-black it is that may come with post-modernity or after is not toward freedom.
The movement from slavery to segregation to neosegregation is the movement of slavery perfecting itself . White-over-black is neosegregation.
White-over-black is segregation. White-over-black is slavery. All of it is white-over-black , only whiteover-black, and that continually
. The story of progress up from slavery is a lie, the longest lie.
The story of progress up from slavery is told juridically in the form of the rule of law. Slavery is the rule of law
. And slavery is death. The slave perfects itself as a slave when it bows down before its master of its own free will
.
That is the moment in which the slave accomplishes the impossible reconciliation of its freedom with its unfreedom by willing itself unfree
.3 When exactly does this perfection of slavery take place?
The slave bows down before its master when it prays for legal relief, when it prays for equal rights, and while it cultivates the field of law hoping for an answer . The slave’s free choice
, the slave’s leap of faith, can only be taken under conditions of legal equality. Only after emancipation and legal equality, only after rights, can the slave perfect itself as a slave . Bourgeois legality is the condition wherein equals are said to enter the commons of reason4
or the kingdom of ends5 or the New England town meeting of the soul to discuss universalizable principles, to discuss equality and freedom.
Much is made of these meetings, these struggles for law, these festivals of the universal. Commons, kingdom, town meeting, there are many mansions in the house of law, but the law does not forget its father
, as Maria Grahn-Farley observes:
The law of slavery has not been forgotten by the law of segregation; the law of segregation has not been forgotten by the law of neosegregation. The law guarding the gates of slavery, segregation, and neosegregation has not forgotten its origin
; it remembers its father and its grandfather before that.
It knows what master it serves; it knows what color to count.6 To wake from slavery is to see that everything must go, every law room,7 every great house, every plantation, all of it, everything . Requests for equality and freedom will always fail.
Why? Because the fact of need itself means that the request will fail . The request for equality and freedom
, for rights, will fail whether the request is granted or denied
.
The request is produced through an injury
.8
The initial injury is the marking of bodies for less—less respect, less land, less freedom, less education, less
. The mark must be made on the flesh because that is where we start from. Childhood is where we begin and, under conditions of hierarchy, that childhood is already marked. The mark organizes, orients, and differentiates our otherwise common flesh. The mark is race, the mark is gender, the mark is class, the mark is. The mark is all there is to the reality of those essences—race, gender, class, and so on—that are said to precede existence. The mark is a system.9 Property and law follow the mark. And so it goes. There is a pleasure in hierarchy. We begin with an education in our hierarchies. We begin with childhood and childhood begins with education. To be exact, education begins our childhood. We are called by race, by gender, by class, and so on.
Our education cultivates our desire in the direction of our hierarchies
. If we are

successful, we acquire an orientation that enables us to locate ourselves and our bodies vis-à-vis all the other bodies that inhabit our institutional spaces. We
follow the call and move in the generally expected way.
Whiteoverblack is an orientation, a pleasure, a desire that enables us to find our place, and therefore our way, in our institutional spaces
. This is why no one ever need ask for equality and freedom. This is why the fact of need means that the request will fail. The request for rights—for equality—will always fail because there are always ambiguities. To be marked for less, to be marked as less han zero, to be marked as a negative attractor, is to be in the situation of the slave. The slave is not called. The slave is not free.
The slave is called to follow the calling that is not a calling. The slave is trained to be an object; the slave is trained, in other words, to not be.
The slave is death. Death is the end of ambiguity. To be in the situation of the slave is to have all the ambiguities organized against you. But there are always ambiguities, one is always free. How, then, are the ambiguities organized? How is freedom ended?
The slave must choose the end of ambiguity, the end of freedom, objecthood
. The slave must freely choose death.
This the slave can only do under conditions of freedom that present it with a choice
. The perfect slave gives up the ghost and commends its everlasting spirit to its master.
The slave’s final and perfect prayer is a legal prayer for equal rights.
The texts of law, like the manifest content of a dream, perhaps of wolves, may tell a certain story or an uncertain story. The certainty or uncertainty of the story is of absolutely no consequence. The story, the law, the wolves’ table manners, do not matter. The story, the law, the story of law, the dream of wolves,10 however, represents a disguised or latent wish that does matter.
The wish is a matter of life or death
. We are strangers to ourselves.
The dream of equality, of rights, is the disguised wish for hierarchy . The prayer for equal rights is the disguised desire for slavery. Slavery is death. The prayer for equal rights, then, is the disguise of the deathwish. The prayer for equal rights is the slave’s perfect moment .
The slave’s perfect prayer, the prayer of the perfect slave, is always answered.
The slave
, however, knows not what it does when it prays for rights, for the slave is estranged from itself.
Of its own inner strivings it knows not. The slave strives to be property, but since property cannot own property the slave cannot own its inner strivings. The slave strives to produce the final commodity— law. In other words, the slave produces itself as a slave through law.
The slave produces itself as a slave (as a commodity) through its own prayer for equal rights
. And that prayer is all there is to law. The slave bows down before the law and prays for equal rights.
The slave bows down before the law and then there is law.
There is no law before the slave bows down. The slave’s fidelity becomes the law, and the law is perfected through the slave’s struggle for the universal, through the slave’s struggle for equality of right
. The slave prays for equality of right.
Rights cannot be equa l. Its perfect prayer is answered; the law’s ambiguities open, like the gates of heaven, just above its head. And all of the white-over-black accumulated within the endless ambiguities of law rains down. White over-black is slavery and slavery is death. Death is the end of forever. The end of forever is perfection and perfection, for us, seems divine, beyond the veil, beyond death; hence, the end of forever.
Dylan
, 20
(Professor at UCR of Latin American Studies, “The Terms of Engagement: Warfare, White Locality, and Abolition”, http://crs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/36/1/151 :)
Thus, behind the din of progressive and liberal reformist struggles over public policy
, civil liberties
, and law
, and beneath the infrequent mobilizations of activity to defend against the next onslaught of racist
, classist, ageist, and misogynist criminalization
, there is an unspoken politics of assumption that takes for granted the mystified permanence of domestic warfare as a constant production of
targeted and massive suffering
, guided by the logic of normalized and mundane black, brown, and indigenous subjection to the expediencies and essential violence of the American
( global
) nation-building project
. To put it differently: despite the unprecedented forms of imprisonment
, social and political repression
, and violent policing that compose the mosaic of our historical time
, the establishment left
(within and perhaps beyond the USA) really does not care to envision, much less politically prioritize, the abolition of US domestic warfare and its structuring white supremacist social logic as its most urgent task
of the present and future.
The nonprofit and NGO left, in particular, seems content to engage in desperate
(and usually well-intentioned) attempts to manage the casualties of domestic warfare
, foregoing the urgency of an abolitionist praxis that openly
, critically, and radically addresses the moral, cultural, and political premises of these wars
. In so many ways, the US progressive/left establishment is filling the void created by
what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has called

the violent 'abandonments' of the state
, which forfeits and implodes its own social welfare capacities
(which were already insufficient at best) while transforming and (productively) exploding its domestic warmaking functionalities —which
Gilmore (2007b: 44—5) says are guided by a 'frightening willingness to engage in human sacrifice'. Yet, at the same time that the state has been openly galvanizing itself to declare and wage violent struggle against strategically targeted local populations
, the establishment left remains relatively unwilling and therefore institutionally unable to address the questions of social survival, grass roots mobilization, radical social justice, and social transformation on the concrete and everyday terms of the very domestic war
(s) that the state has so openly and repeatedly declared as the premises of its own coherence.
Given that domestic warfare composes both the common narrative language and concrete material production of the state, the question remains as to why the establishment left has not understood this statecraft as the state of emergency that the condition so openly, institutionally encompasses
(war!). Perhaps it is because critical intellectuals
, scholar activists, and progressive organizers are underestimating the skill and reach of the state as a pedagogical
(teaching) apparatus
, that they have generally undertheorized how the state so skillfully generates
(and often politically accommodates) sanctioned spaces of political contradiction that engulf 'dissent' and counter-state, antiracist, and antiviolence organizing
. Italian political prisoner Antonio Gramscis thoughts on the formation of contemporary pedagogical state are instructive here:
The State does have and request consent, but it also
'educates' this consent, by means of the political and syndical associations; these, however, are private organisms, left to the private initiative of the ruling class
. (Gramsci 1995: 259).
- Frank B Wilderson III- Professor at UC irvine- Red, White and Black- p. 8-10
I have little interest in assailing political conservatives. Nor is my ar- gument wedded to the disciplinary needs of political science, or even sociology, where injury must be established, first, as White supremacist event, from which one then embarks on a demonstration of intent, or racism; and, if one is lucky, or foolish, enough, a solution is proposed.
If the position of the Black is
, as I argue, a paradigmatic impossibility in the
Western Hemisphere, indeed, in the world, in other words
, if a Black is the very antithesis of a
Human subject
, as imagined by Marxism and psy- choanalysis
, then his or her paradigmatic exile is not simply a function of repressive practices on the part of institutions
(as political science and sociology would have it).
This banishment from the Human fold is to be found most profoundly in the emancipatory meditations of
Black people's staunchest "allies," and in some of the most "radical" films.
Here—not in restrictive policy, unjust legislation, police brutality, or conservative scholarship—is where the Settler/Master's sinews are most resilient
. The polemic animating this research stems from (1) my reading of Native and Black American meta-commentaries on
Indian and Black subject positions written over the past twenty-three years and ( 2 ) a sense of how much that work appears out of joint with intellectual protocols and political ethics which underwrite political praxis and socially engaged popular cinema in this epoch of multiculturalism and globalization. The sense of abandonment I experience when I read the meta-commentaries on Red positionality (by theorists such as Leslie
Silko, Ward Churchill, Taiaiake Alfred, Vine Deloria Jr., and Haunani-Kay Trask) and the meta-commentaries on Black positionality (by theorists such as David Marriott, Saidiya Hartman, Ronald Judy, Hortense Spillers, Orlando Patterson, and Achille Mbembe) against the deluge of multicultural positivity
is overwhelming. One suddenly realizes that, though the semantic field on which subjec- tivity is imagined has expanded phenomenally through the protocols of multiculturalism and globalization theory, Blackness and an unflinching articulation of
Redness are more unimaginable and illegible within this expanded semantic field than they were during the height of the F B I ' S repressive
Counterintelligence Program ( C O I N T E L P R O ) . On the seman- tic field on which the new protocols are possible, Indigenism can indeed lO become partially legible through a programmatics of structural adjust- ment (as fits our globalized era). In other words, for the Indians' subject position to be legible, their positive registers of lost or threatened cultural identity must be foregrounded, when in point of fact the antagonistic register of dispossession that Indians "possess" is a position in relation to a socius structured by genocide. As Churchill points out, everyone from Armenians to Jews have been subjected to genocide, but the Indigenous position is one for which genocide is a constitutive element, not merely an historical event, without which Indians would not, paradoxically, "exist." 9 Regarding the Black position, some might ask why, after claims suc- cessfully made on the state by the Civil Rights Movement, do I insist on positing an operational analytic for
cinema, film studies, and political theory that appears to be a dichotomous and essentialist pairing of Masters and Slaves?
In other words, why should we think of today's Blacks in the United States as Slaves and everyone else (with the exception of Indians) as Masters?
One could answer these questions by demonstrat- ing

how nothing remotely approaching claims successfully made on the state has come to pass.
In other words, the election of a Black president aside, police brutality
, mass incarceration
, segregated and substandard schools and housing, astronomical rates of H I V
infection, and the threat of being turned away en masse at the polls still constitute the lived expe- rience of Black life
.
But such empirically based rejoinders would lead us in the wrong direction; we would find ourselves on "solid" ground, which would only mystify, rather than clarify, the question. We would be forced to appeal to "facts," the "historical record," and empirical markers of stasis and change, all of which could be turned on their head with more of the same. Underlying such a downward spiral into
sociology, political sci- ence, history, and public policy debates would be the very rubric that I am calling into question: the grammar of suffering known as exploitation and alienation, the assumptive logic whereby subjective dispossession is arrived at
in the calculations between those who sell labor power and those who acquire it. The Black qua the worker. Orlando Patterson has already dispelled this faulty ontological grammar in Slavery and Social Death, where he demonstrates how and why work, or forced labor, is not a constituent element of slavery.
Once the "solid" plank of "work" is removed from slavery, then the conceptually coherent notion of "claims against the state"—the proposition that the state and civil society are elastic enough to even contemplate the possibility of an emancipatory project for the Black position—disintegrates into thin air.
The imaginary of the state and civil society is parasitic on the Middle Passage. Put an- other way, No slave, no world. And, in addition, as Patterson argues, no slave is in the world. If, as an ontological position, that is, as a grammar of suffering, the Slave is not a laborer but an anti-Human, a position against which Hu- manity establishes, maintains, and renews its coherence, its corporeal in- tegrity; if the Slave is, to borrow from Patterson, generally dishonored, perpetually open to gratuitous violence, and void of kinship structure, that is, having no relations that need be recognized, a being outside of re- lationality, then our analysis cannot be approached through the rubric of gains or reversals in struggles with the state and civil society, not unless and until the interlocutor first explains how the Slave is of the world. The onus is not on one who posits the Master/Slave dichotomy but on the one who argues there is a distinction between Slaveness and Blackness
. How, when, and where did such a split occur? The woman at the gates of Columbia University awaits an answer.
[2010, Frank B. Wilderson is an Associate Professor of African-American Studies at UC Irvine and has a Ph.D. from UC
Berkeley, “Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms,”]
Leaving aside for the moment their state of mind, it would seem that the structure
, that is to say the rebar, or better still the grammar of their demands
—and, by extension, the grammar of their suffering— was
indeed an ethical
grammar. Perhaps their grammars are the only ethical grammars available to modern politics and modernity writ large
, for they draw our attention not to the way in which space and time are used and abused by enfranchised and violently powerful interests, but to the violence that underwrites the modern world’s capacity to think, act, and exist spatially and temporally .
The violence that robbed her of her body and him of his land provided the stage upon which other violent and consensual dramas could be enacted. Thus, they would have to be crazy
, crazy enough to call not merely the actions of the world to account but to call the world itself to account
, and to account for them no less!
The woman
at Columbia was not demanding to be a participant in an unethical network of distribution: she was not demanding a place within capital, a piece of the pie
(the demand for her sofa notwithstanding). Rather, she was articulating a triangulation between, on the one hand, the loss of her body, the very dereliction of her corporeal integrity, what Hortense
Spillers charts as the transition from being a being to becoming a “being for the captor” (206), the drama of value (the stage upon which surplus value is extracted from labor power through commodity production and sale); and on the other, the corporeal integrity that, once ripped from her body, fortified and extended the corporeal integrity of everyone else on the street. She gave birth to the commodity and to the Human, yet she had neither subjectivity nor a sofa to show for it.
In her eyes, the world—and not its myriad discriminatory practices, but the world itself —was unethical
. And yet, the world passes by her without

the slightest inclination to stop and disabuse her of her claim
. Instead, it calls her “crazy.” And to what does the world attribute the Native American man’s insanity? “He’s crazy if he thinks he’s getting any money out of us”? Surely, that doesn’t make him crazy.
Rather it is simply an indication that he does not have a big enough gun. What are we to make of a world that responds to the most lucid enunciation of ethics with violence ?
What are the foundational questions of the ethico-political? Why are these questions so scandalous that they are rarely posed politically, intellectually, and cinematically—unless they are posed obliquely and unconsciously, as if by accident? Return Turtle Island to the “Savage.”
Repair the demolished subjectivity of the Slave
.
Two simple sentences, thirteen simple words, and the structure of U.S. (and perhaps global) antagonisms would be dismantled.
An “ethical modernity” would no longer sound like an oxymoron
. From there we could busy ourselves with important conflicts that have been promoted to the level of antagonisms: class struggle, gender conflict, immigrants rights.
When pared down to thirteen words and two sentences, one cannot but wonder why questions that go to the heart of the ethico-political, questions of political ontology, are so unspeakable in intellectual meditations, political broadsides
, and even socially and politically engaged feature films. Clearly they can be spoken, even a child could speak those lines, so they would pose no problem for a scholar, an activist, or a filmmaker. And yet, what is also clear—if the filmographies of socially and politically engaged directors, the archive of progressive scholars, and the plethora of Left-wing broadsides are anything to go by—is that what can so easily be spoken is now (five hundred years and two hundred fifty million Settlers/Masters on) so ubiquitously unspoken that these two simple sentences, these thirteen words not only render their speaker “crazy” but become themselves impossible to imagine .
Soon it will be forty years since radical politics, Left-leaning scholarship, and socially engaged feature films began to speak the unspeakable. In the 1960s and early 1970s the questions asked by radical politics and scholarship were not “Should the U.S. be overthrown?” or even “Would it be overthrown?” but rather when and how
—and, for some, what— would come in its wake. Those steadfast in their conviction that there remained a discernable quantum of ethics in the U.S. writ large
(and here I am speaking of everyone from Martin Luther King, Jr., prior to his 1968 shift, to the Tom Hayden wing of SDS, to the Julian Bond and Marion Barry faction of SNCC, to Bobbie Kennedy Democrats) were accountable, in their rhetorical machinations, to the paradigmatic zeitgeist of the Black Panthers, the American Indian
Movement, and the Weather Underground. Radicals and progressives could deride, reject, or chastise armed struggle mercilessly and cavalierly with respect to tactics and the possibility of “success,” but they could not dismiss revolution-as-ethic because they could not make a convincing case
—by way of a paradigmatic analysis— that the U.S. was an ethical formation and still hope to maintain credibility as radicals and progressives
.
Even Bobby Kennedy
(a U.S. attorney general and presidential candidate) mused that the law and its enforcers had no ethical standing in the presence of Blacks
.i One could (and many did) acknowledge
America’s strength and power.
This seldom,
however, rose to the level of an ethical assessment, but rather remained an assessment of the so-called “balance of forces.”
The political discourse of Blacks, and to a lesser extent
Indians, circulated too widely to credibly wed the U.S. and ethics. The raw force of COINTELPRO put an end to this trajectory toward a possible hegemony of ethical accountability. Consequently, the power of Blackness and Redness to pose the question—and the power to pose the question is the greatest power of all— retreated as did White radicals and progressives who “retired” from struggle.
The question’s echo lies buried in the graves of young Black
Panthers, AIM Warriors, and Black Liberation Army soldiers, or in prison cells where so many of them have been rotting
(some in solitary confinement) for ten, twenty, thirty years, and at the gates of the academy where the “crazies” shout at passers-by . Gone are not only the young and vibrant voices that affected a seismic shift on the political landscape , but also the intellectual protocols of inquiry, and with them
a spate of feature films that became authorized, if not by an unabashed revolutionary polemic, then certainly by a revolutionary zeitgeist
.
Is it still possible for a dream of unfettered ethics, a dream of the Settlement and the Slave estate’sii destruction , to manifest itself
at the ethical core of cinematic discourse, when this dream

is no longer a constituent element of political discourse
in the streets nor of intellectual discourse in the academy? The answer is “no” in the sense that, as history has shown, what cannot be articulated as political discourse in the streets is doubly foreclosed upon in screenplays and in scholarly prose; but “yes” in the sense that in even the most taciturn historical moments such as ours, the grammar of Black and Red suffering breaks in on this foreclosure
, albeit like the somatic compliance of hysterical symptoms—it registers in both cinema and scholarship as symptoms of awareness of the structural antagonisms. Between 1967 and
1980, we could think cinematically and intellectually of Blackness and Redness as having the coherence of full-blown discourses. But from 1980 to the present,
Blackness and Redness manifests only in the rebar of
cinematic and intellectual (political) discourse
, that is, as unspoken grammars
.
This grammar can be discerned in the cinematic
strategies (lighting, camera angles, image composition, and acoustic strategies/design), even when the script labors for the spectator to imagine social turmoil through the rubric of conflict
( that is, a rubric of problems that can be posed and conceptually solved) as opposed to the rubric of antagonism ( an irreconcilable struggle between entities , or positionalities, the resolution of which is not dialectical but entails the obliteration of one of the positions
). In other words, even when films narrate a story in which Blacks or Indians are beleaguered with problems that the script insists are conceptually coherent (usually having to do with poverty or the absence of “family values”), the non-narrative, or cinematic, strategies of the film often disrupt this coherence by posing the irreconcilable questions of Red and Black political ontology—or nonontology.
The grammar of antagonism breaks in on the mendacity of conflict .
Semiotics and linguistics teach us that when we speak, our grammar goes unspoken. Our grammar is assumed. It is the structure through which the labor of speech is possible.iii
Likewise, the grammar of political ethics
—the grammar of assumptions regarding the ontology of suffering— which underwrite
Film Theory and political discourse
(in this book, discourse elaborated in direct relation to radical action), and which underwrite cinematic speech (in this book, Red, White, and Black films from the mid-1960s to the present) is also unspoken
. This notwithstanding, film theory, political discourse
, and cinema assume an ontological grammar, a structure of suffering
. And the structure of suffering
which film theory, political discourse, and cinema assume crowds out other structures of suffering, regardless of the sentiment of the film or the spirit of unity mobilized by the political discourse in question
. To put a finer point on it, structures of ontological suffering stand in antagonistic, rather then conflictual, relation to one another
(despite the fact that antagonists themselves may not be aware of the ontological positionality from which they speak). Though this is perhaps the most controversial and out-of-step claim of this book, it is, nonetheless, the foundation of the close reading of feature films and political theory that follows.
[2010, Frank B. Wilderson is an Associate Professor of African-American Studies at UC Irvine and has a Ph.D. from UC
Berkeley, “Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms,”]
STRANGE AS it might seem, this book project began in South Africa.
During the
last years of apartheid
I worked for revolutionary change
in both an underground and above-ground capacity, for the
Charterist Movement in general and the ANC in particular. During this period, I began to see how essential an unflinching paradigmatic analysis is to a movement dedicated to the complete overthrow of an existing order .
The neoliberal compromises that the radical elements
of the Chartist
Movement made with the moderate elements were due
, in large part, to our inability or unwillingness to hold the moderates' feet to the fire of a political agenda predicated on an unflinching paradigmatic analysis
. Instead, we allowed our energies and points of attention to be displaced by and onto pragmatic considerations
. Simply put, we abdicated the power to pose the question —

and the power to pose the question is the greatest power of all . Elsewhere, I have written about this unfortunate turn of events (Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid), so I'll not rehearse the details here. Suffice it to say, this book germinated in the many political and academic discussions and debates that I was fortunate enough to be a part of at a historic moment and in a place where the word revolution was spoken in earnest, free of qualifiers and irony. For their past and ongoing ideas and interventions, I extend solidarity and appreciation to comrades Amanda Alexander, Franco Barchiesi, Teresa Barnes, Patrick Bond, Ashwin Desai, Nigel
Gibson, Steven Greenberg, Allan Horowitz, Bushy Kelebonye (deceased), Tefu Kelebonye, Ulrike Kistner, Kamogelo
Lekubu, Andile Mngxitama, Prishani Naidoo, John Shai, and S'bu Zulu.
Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies
Manning-Professor of History @ Columbia University;
“Speaking Truth to Power: Essays on Race, Resistance and Radicalism; p. 198-199
Black Americans also comprehend that peace is not the absence of conflict. As long as institutional racism, apartheid, and social class inequality exist, social tensions will erupt into confrontations.
Most blacks recognize that peace is the realization of social justice and human dignity for al l nations and historically oppressed peoples
.
Peace more than anything else is the recognition of the oneness of humanity. As Paul Robeson, the great black artist and activist, observed in his autobiographical work Here I Stand, “I learned that the essential character of a nation is determined not by the tipper classes, but by the common people, and that the Common people of all nations are truly brothers in the great family of mankind.” Any people who experience generations of oppression gain an awareness of the innate commonalty of all human beings, despite their religions, ethnic, and political differences. In order to reverse the logic of the Cold War, white Americans must begin to view themselves as a distinct minority in a world dominated by people of color.
Peace between the superpowers is directly linked to the evolution of democratic rights, economic development, and social justice in the third world periphery
. Black intellectuals, front W.E.B. DuBois to the present, have also comprehended their unique role in the struggle for peace arid social justice. Cultural and intellectual activity for it is inseparable from politics. All art and aesthetics, scientific inquiry, and social studies are directly or indirectly linked to the material conditions of human beings, and the existing set of power relationships which dictates the policies of the modern state.
When intellectual artists fail to combat racial or gender inequality,
or the virus of anti-Semitism, their creative energies may indirectly contribute to the ideological justification for prejudice and social oppression.
This is equally the case for the problem of war and peace. Through the bifurcation of our moral and social consciences against the cold abstractions of research and “value-free” social science, we may console ourselves by suggesting that we play 110 role in the escalation of the
Cold War political culture.
By hesitating to dedicate ourselves and our work to the pursuit of peace and social justice, we inevitably contribute to the dynamics of national chauvinism, Militarism, and perhaps set the ideological basis necessary for World War III.
Paul Robeson, during the Spanish Civil War, expressed the perspective of the black Peace tradition as a passionate belie in humanity: “Every artist, every scientist must decide, now, where he stands, life has no alternative.
There are no impartial observers
. The commitment to contest public dogmas, the recognition that we share with the
Soviet people a Community of social, economic, and cultural interests, force the intellectual into the terrain of ideological debate. If we fail to do so, and if the peace consensus of black America remains isolated from the electoral mainstream, the results may be the termination of humanity itself
.

2nc
Prof of Sociology @ York University in Toronto ,
Hira- Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at York University, Toronto, Canada. He has a Ph.D. from the Delhi School of
Economics, University of Delhi, and another Ph.D. from the University of Toronto; Confronting Colonialism and Racism: Fanon and Ghandi;
HUMAN ARCHITECTURE: Journal of the Sociology of Human Knowledge, Special Double Issue, Summer 2007, p. 341-342; http://www.okcir.com/Articles%20V%20Special/HiraSingh.pdf
Today, we are living in a system that is based on counting, and accounting for, every single pin in a factory. The same system, however, boasts
of killing human beings who it, as a rule, doesn’t count. It counts the pins, because each pin, as a commodity, has market value. It is integral part of a system of production for value, whereas, the people it kills in wars
precisely in order to perpetuate and expand the
same marketbased system of social production, have no value, albeit market value. So they don’t count. Who are these people, even less valuable than a pin? These are the colonial other—de-humanized and de-valued? They are being otherized in the process of being colonized.
And colonialism today, like the colonialism of the past (not a very distant past—remember Fanon was writing in the 1950s), is integral part of
the system of commodity production. It has wrapped itself in the lofty ideal of spreading freedom, democracy, and civil society. The old form of colonialism was wrapped in the ideal of the civilizing mission, and the civilizing mission was barbaric to the core. The new one, notwithstanding its new wrapping, is no different. As William Faulkner said, past is not past: past is present with us. The colonial past is
unfolding itself in the present. And that is what makes Fanon and Gandhi so relevant today.
, Professor Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley,
(Ramon, “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn” Cultural Studies, Vol 21 Issue 2-3, p
211-223, T&F Online)
Epistemological Critique The first point to discuss is the contribution of racial/ethnic and feminist subaltern perspectives to epistemological questions. The hegemonic Eurocentric paradigms that have informed western philosophy and sciences in the ‘modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system’ for the last 500 hundred years assume a universalistic, neutral, objective point of view
. Chicana and black feminist scholars (Moraga & Anzaldua 1983, Collins 1990) as well as thirdworld scholars inside and outside the
United States (Dussel 1977, Mignolo 2000) reminded us that we always speak from a particular location in the power structures. Nobody
escapes the class, sexual, gender, spiritual, linguistic, geographical, and racial hierarchies of the ‘modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal worldsystem’. As feminist scholar Donna Haraway (1988) states, our knowledges are always situated. Black feminist scholars called this perspective
‘afro-centric epistemology’ (Collins 1990) (which is not equivalent to the afrocentrist perspective) while Latin American Philosopher of
Liberation Enrique Dussel called it ‘geopolitics of knowledge’ (Dussel 1977) and following Fanon (1967) and Anzaldúa (1987) I will use the term
‘body-politics of knowledge’. This is not only a question about social values in knowledge production or the fact that our knowledge is always partial. The main point here is the locus of enunciation, that is, the geo-political and body-political location of the subject that speaks. In
Western philosophy and sciences the subject that speaks is always hidden, concealed, erased from the analysis. The ‘ ego-politics of knowledge’
of Western philosophy has always privilege the myth of a non-situated ‘Ego’. Ethnic/racial/gender/sexual epistemic location and the subject that speaks are always decoupled. By delinking ethnic/racial/gender/sexual epistemic location from the subject that speaks,
Western philosophy and sciences are able to produce a myth about a Truthful universal knowledge that covers up
, that is, conceals who is speaking as well as the geo-political and body-political epistemic location in
the structures of colonial power/knowledge from which the subject speak
s. It is important here to distinguish the ‘epistemic location’ from the ‘social location’. The fact that one is socially located in the oppressed side of power relations, does not automatically mean that he/she is epistemically thinking from a
subaltern epistemic location. Precisely, the success of the modern/colonial world-system consist in making subjects that are socially located in the oppressed side of the colonial difference, to think epistemicaly like the ones on the dominant positions
.
Subaltern epistemic perspectives are knowledge coming from below that produces a critical perspective of hegemonic knowledge in the power relations involved. I am not claiming an epistemic populism where knowledge produced from below is automatically an epistemic

subaltern knowledge. What I am claiming is that all knowledges are epistemically located in the dominant or the subaltern side
of the power relations and that this is related to the geo- and body-politics of knowledge. The disembodied and unlocated neutrality and objectivity of the ego-politics of knowledge is a Western myth. Rene Descartes, the founder of Modern Western Philosophy, inaugurates a new moment in the history of Western thought. He replaces God, as the foundation of knowledge in the Theo-politics of knowledge of the
European Middle Ages, with (Western) Man as the foundation of knowledge in European Modern times. All the attributes of God are now extrapolated to (Western) Man. Universal Truth beyond time and space, privilege access to the laws of the Universe, and the capacity to produce scientific knowledge and theory is now placed in the mind of Western Man
. The Cartesian ‘ego-cogito’ (‘I think, therefore I am’) is the foundation of modern Western sciences. By producing a dualism between mind and body and between mind and nature,
Descartes was able to claim non-situated, universal, God-eyed view knowledge. This is what the Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gomez called the ‘point zero’ perspective of Eurocentric philosophies (Castro-Gomez 2003). The ‘point zero’ is the point of view that hides and
conceals itself as being beyond a particular point of view, that is, the point of view that represents itself as being without a point of view. It
is this ‘god-eye view’ that always hides its local and particular perspective under an abstract universalism. Western philosophy privileges ‘ego politics of knowledge’ over the ‘geopolitics of knowledge’ and the ‘body-politics of knowledge’. Historically, this has allowed
Western man
(the gendered term is intentionally used here) to represent his knowledge as the only one capable of achieving a universal consciousness, and to dismiss non-Western knowledge as particularistic and, thus, unable to achieve universality
. This epistemic strategy has been crucial
for Western global designs. By hiding the location of the subject of enunciation, European/Euro-American colonial expansion and domination was able to construct a hierarchy of
superior and inferior knowledge and, thus, of superior and inferior people
around the world. We went from the sixteenth century characterization of ‘people without writing’ to the eighteenth and nineteenth century characterization of ‘people without history’, to the twentieth century characterization of ‘people without development’ and more recently, to the early twenty-first century of ‘people without democracy’. We went from the sixteenth century ‘rights of people’ (Sepulveda versus de las Casas debate in the school of Salamanca in the mid-sixteenth century), to the eighteenth century ‘rights of man’ (Enlightment philosophers), and to the late twentieth century ‘human rights’.
All of these are part of global designs articulated to the simultaneous production and reproduction of an international division of labor of core/periphery
that overlaps with the global racial/ethnic hierarchy of Europeans/non-
Europeans. However, as Enrique Dussel (1994) has reminded us, the Cartesian ‘ego cogito’ (‘I think, therefore I am’) was preceded by 150 years
(since the beginnings of the European colonial expansion in 1492) of the European ‘ego conquistus’ (‘I conquer, therefore I am’). The social, economic, political and historical conditions of possibility for a subject to assume the arrogance of becoming God-like and put himself as the foundation of all Truthful knowledge was the Imperial Being, that is, the subjectivity of those who are at the center of the world because they have already conquered it. What are the decolonial implications of this epistemological critique to our knowledge production and to our concept of world-system?
[1997, Charles-; Associate Prof of Philosophy @ U Illinois, Chicago The Racial Contract; p. 1-3]
White Supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today. You will not find this term in introductory, or even advanced, texts in political theory. A standard undergraduate philosophy course will start off with Plato and
Aristotle, perhaps say something about Augustine, Aquinas, and Machiavelli, move on to Hobbes, Locke, Mill and Marx, and then wind up with Rawls and Nozick. It will introduce you to notions of aristocracy, democracy, absolutism, liberalism, representative government, socialism, welfare capitalism, and libertarianism. But though it covers more than two thousand years of Western political thought and runs the ostensible gamut of political systems, there will be no mention of the basic political system that has
shaped the world for the past several hundred years. And this omission is not accidental. Rather, it reflects the fact that standard textbooks and courses have for the most part been written and designed by whites who take their racial privilege so much for granted that they do not even see it as political, as a form of domination. Ironically, the most important political system of recent global history- the system of domination by which white people have historically ruled over and, in certain important ways, continue to rule over nonwhite people-is not seen as a political system at all. It is just taken for granted, it is the background
against which other systems, which we are to see as political are highlighted. This book is an attempt to redirect your vision, to make you see what, in a sense, has been there all along. Philosophy has remained remarkably untouched by the debates over
multiculturalism, cannon reform, and ethnic diversity racking the academy; both demographically and conceptually, it is one of the
“whitest” of the humanities. Blacks, for example, constitute only about 1 percent of philosophers in North American universities-a hundred or so people out of more than ten thousand-and there are even fewer Latino, Asian American, and Native American philosophers. Surely this underrepresentation itself stands in need of an explanation, and in my opinion it can be traced in part to a conceptual array and a standard repertoire of concerns whose abstractness typically elides, rather than genuinely includes, the experience of racial minorities. Since (white) women have the demographic advantage of numbers, there are of course far more female philosophers in the profession than nonwhite philosophers (though still not proportionate to women’s percentage of the population), and they have made far greater progress in developing alternative conceptualizations. Those African American philosophers who do work in moral and political theory tend either to produce general work indistinguishable from that of their

white peers or to focus on local issues (affirmative action, the black “underclass”) or historical figures (W.E.B Du Bois, Alain Locke) in a way that does not aggressively engage the broader debate. What is needed is a global theoretical framework for situating
discussions of race and white racism, and thereby challenging the assumptions of white political philosophy, which would correspond to feminist theorists’ articulation of the centrality of gender, patriarchy, and sexism to traditional moral and political theory. What is needed, in other words, is a recognition that racism (or, as I will argue, global white supremacy) is itself a political system, a particular power structure of formal or informal rule, socioeconomic privilege, and norms for the differential distribution of material wealth and opportunities, benefits and burdens , rights and duties. The notion of the Racial Contract is, I suggest, one possible way of making this connection with mainstream theory, since it uses the vocabulary and apparatus already developed for contractarianism to map this unacknowledged system. Contract talk is, after all, the political lingua franca of our times.
, Professor Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley,
(Ramon, “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn” Cultural Studies, Vol 21 Issue 2-3, p
211-223, T&F Online)
In October 1998, there was a conference/dialogue at Duke University between the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group and the Latin American
Subaltern Studies Group. The dialogue initiated in this conference eventually resulted in the publication of several issues of the journal
NEPANTLA. However, this conference was the last time the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group met before their split. Among the many reasons and debates that produced this split, there are two that I would like to stress. The Latin American Subaltern Studies Group composed primarily by Latinamericanist scholars in the USA. Despite their attempt at producing a radical and alternative knowledge, they reproduced the epistemic schema of Area Studies in the United States. With a few exceptions, they produced studies about the subaltern rather than studies
with and from a subaltern perspective. Like the imperial epistemology of Area Studies, theory was still located in the North while the subjects to be studied are located in the South
. This colonial epistemology was crucial to my dissatisfaction with the project. As a Puerto Rican in the United States, I was dissatisfied with the epistemic consequences of the knowledge produced by this
Latinamericanist group. They underestimated in their work ethnic/racial perspectives coming from the region, while giving privilege to Western thinkers
. This is related to my second point: they gave epistemic privilege to what they called the ‘four horses of the apocalypse’,2 that is, Foucault, Derrida, Gramsci and Guha. Among the four main thinkers they privilege, three are Eurocentric thinkers while two of them (Derrida and Foucault) form part of the poststructuralist/postmodern Western canon. By privileging Western thinkers as their
central theoretical apparatus, they betrayed their goal to produce subaltern studies. This is not an essentialist, fundamentalist, anti-European critique. It a perspective that is critical of both Eurocentric and Third World fundamentalisms, colonialism and nationalism. What all
fundamentalisms share (including the Eurocentric one) is the premise that there is only one sole epistemic tradition from which to achieve
Truth and Universality. However, my main points here are three: (1) that a decolonial epistemic perspective requires a broader canon of
thought than simply the Western canon (including the Left Western canon); (2) that a truly universal decolonial perspective cannot be based
on an abstract universal (one particular that raises itself as universal global design), but would have to be the result of the critical dialogue
between diverse critical epistemic/ethical/political projects towards a pluriversal as oppose to a universal world; (3) that decolonization of
knowledge would require to take seriously the epistemic perspective/cosmologies/insights of critical thinkers from the Global South thinking from and with subalternized racial/ethnic/sexual spaces and bodies. Postmodernism and postructuralism as epistemological projects are
caught within the Western canon reproducing within its domains of thought and practice a coloniality of power/knowledge.
(Richard, Jean N. Lindsley Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Law School, “Is American Law Inherently Racist”, Debate w/ Prof.
Farber, Berkeley Law Scholarship Repository, http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1211&context=facpubs)
One. Consider how racism takes different forms at different times, like one of those characters in a science fiction novel or movie. In one era,
it is blatant, open, and in your face. In another, it is subtle, institutional, embedded in seemingly neutral rules like a University of Colorado at
Boulder requirement that all first-year students live in a campus-residence hall: that is a neutral rule. However, many students of color from
Denver, thirty-five miles away, would prefer to live at home and commute saving the money, avoiding some of the “Animal House” features of dorm life that go against Latino culture, and looking after their younger brothers or sisters who may be flirting with drugs or gangs. In another era, racism takes the form of gentlemanly learned tracts with hundreds of footnotes debating whether folks of color are genetically inferior.
The players, the arguments, and the rationalizations may vary over time, but the gap in brown/white earnings, life expectancy, and social

well being remains about the same as though obeying some unseen law. Two. Notice how when courts and other official policy makers relax, or even decide to help minorities, this happens more to advance white self-interest than to help the supposed beneficiaries. For example,
Brown v. Board of Education, the case that Professor Farber held up as the crown jewel of American jurisprudence, decided in 1954, came
down just as many U.S. servicemen and women of color were returning to civilian life from military service, where many of them for the first
time had experienced a relatively racism free environment. Many of them probably would not have returned meekly to shining shoes and regimes of “Yes sir” and “No sir.” For the first time in a while, the possibility of real racial unrest loomed in the United States. At the same time, we were in the early stages of a cold war against the forces of godless, ruthless communism. It scarcely would have served U.S. purposes well had the front pages of world newspapers continued to show pictures of Emmett Till lynchings and southern sheriffs with cattle prods.
Brown and other breakthrough cases occur not so much out of generosity or moral *383 imperative, but out of a need to advance white self- interest. Later, when the celebrations died down, the great law reform case was inevitably cut back quietly by lower courts or impeded by
administrative foot-dragging or delay. Today, more black school children attend segregated schools than when
Brown v. Board of Education was decided
.
, Professor Romance Studies and Cultural Anthropology at Duke,
(Walter, “I Am Where I Think: Epistemology and the
Colonial Difference” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol 8 No 2, p 235-245)
By definition, loci of enunciation are not marginal. Yet making them visible also makes it possible to underline that epistemology is not just a happy universal spaces which everybody can join. As with any thing else, joining something that is hegemonic means to accept the rule of the game
. If you play the game, but not exactly according to the rules, chances are that you will be somewhat on the margins. However, I am not interested in either playing the role of the 'Hispanic' victim or of the successful marginal who publishes in
English in American university presses and works at Duke. I am interested in making the (epistemic) colonial difference visible. I did not word it like that in The Darker Side of the Renaissance. It is, however, a key-word in the sequel to The Darker Side of the Renaissance, entitled Local
Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (1999). In this book, I try to clarify the notion of 'colonial difference' by thinking through it. (Hulme is right, by the way, that I do not make an effort to define theoretical concepts in The Darker Side of the Renaissance; I just use them.) Let us go back to Bourdieu for a moment and pursue the equation texts-national languages-coloniality of power and cultures of scholarship. In an effort to elucidate the theoretical frame of his own thinking, Bourdieu honestly pursues a comparison with the German philosophical tradition. The comparison is necessary in order to justify the transferability of scientific thinking from the sciences of nature to the human sciences, a step which is more difficult to take in the German philosophical legacy because, according to
Bourdieu, the distinction 'erklaren-Verstehen (explanation-understanding)' builds a wall between the natural and the human sciences. French legacies, he concludes, 'propose, then, a reflection which is much more general, from which I have drawn an epistemological program that can be summed up in one statement: "The scientific fact is conquered, constructed, confirmed. The conquest of the given is a central concept in
Bachelard's thought, and he sums it up in the term epistemological break. Why is this phase of scientific research important, and why does it separate, as seems to me to be the case, the tradition I represent from the dominant Anglo-Saxon tradition? It is because to say that the scientific fact has to be fought for is radically to defy, in this regard, all of the givens that social scientific researchers find before them"'
(Bourdieu, 1992, p. 43) This brief description of Bourdieu's self-location (e.g. framing his own locus of enunciation in the social sciences and in the European tradition) makes clear the inseparability between epistemology and politics of location. What should I do, identify and assume the tradition Bourdieu represents or the dominant Anglo- Saxon tradition he differentiates from? Obviously neither of them, unless I decide to think from categories, frames and problems that were put in place to deal with the issues of coloniality and the colonial difference in which I am interested. If I follow the first route, I have two choices. Either to become a social scientist according to the rules of the game that were defined in 'a tradition (to which) I do not belong', and therefore to be marginal, or to 'apply' Bourdieu's (or any other) 'model' to deal with and analyse coloniality of power and the colonial difference. In either case, I will be epistemologically marginal, that is, epistemologically subaltern. This was precisely 'Chakrabarty's dilemma' in the domain of historiography: as long as you are a historian, you cannot be a "Third
World' historian because history is an activity, institution, and way of thinking that was instrumental in the colonization of memory
. The basis of 'Chakrabarty dilemma' is that writing subaltern 'histories' means to remain in an
epistemically subaltern position in the domain of cultures of scholarship. This is because one of the invisible places in which the coloniality of
power operates is the domain of epistemology. Consequently, if you 'study' colonialism or the subaltern but you maintain the rules of the
social sciences and humanities game, you maintain the coloniality of power that reproduces the epistemic colonial difference
. Epistemic loci of enunciation are stubborn and, as in the case of Garcia Canclini (1989), you can describe and
'study' the hybridy of society and culture in a specific place like Tijuana, while maintaining a pure, non-contaminated, non-hybrid loci of enunciation. This is why I attempted to think from models and theories provided by Chicano/a thinkers and Latin American philosophers, such as Enrique Dussel and Rodolfo Kusch. Yet, I also used the models provided by 'complementary dichotomies' in Amerindian thoughts (Mignolo,
1995). I believe that Hulme intuitively understood this when he says, on page 223, T had the strange impression that Mignolo actually wanted

to be doing something rather different and even more ambitious'. 'Pluritopic hermeneutics' was a necessary step to avoid the 'noncomplementary dichotomy' between the knowing subject and the known, the disciplines and the object of study. Their thoughts and works were and are in a constant struggle with the epistemic colonial difference, not as an object of study but as loci of enunciation defined by the coloniality of power—that is, with thinking from a subaltern epistemic perspective (or Voices from the margins' as Hulme's title states). Dussel's latest work confronts the issue openly (Dussel, 1994, 1996, 1998; Mignolo, forthcoming). My not so kind remarks on Gordon Brotherston's article, though not on his magnificent book (Brotherston, 1992), were prompted by epistemic, not nationalist, considerations. National histories are local histories, certainly, but they cannot be confused with them. Thus, Brotherston's discussion of Amerindian knowledge of a system of writing, taking position on a dispute between Derrida and Levi-Strauss (that Hulme rightly critiques on page 225), reminded me of Las Casas and
Sepulveda discussing the 'Amerindian Question'. Amerindians themselves having nothing to say, as they have not been invited to participate in a debate in which they themselves are objects of consideration. That is the epistemic colonial difference from whence emerged Amerindians in the sixteenth century, Chicano/as in the US today, and white, mestizo, and immigrant créole intellectuals like Kusch, Dussel, and myself. 'Voices
from the margins' are voices from and dealing with the colonial epistemic difference. This explains the connection between 'darker' and
'hybrid' (a concept I truly do not use very often in the book) that Hulme notices on page 222 of his review. Today, this relationship would be recast in terms of the making of colonial (epistemic) differences. This is what the humanists and men of letters did in the sixteenth century, and this process continues, through 'Orientalism' and 'Area Studies', to today.
[Dylan, Professor and Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside, Forced Passages pages 170-171]
The prison regime’s twinned technologies of immobilization and bodily disintegration depart drastically from the virtual and technically disembodied disciplinary technologies of Bentham’s Panopticon or Foucault’s biopolitical carceral, whose Eurocentric regimes pivot on the relative absence or infrequent physical application of direct bodily coercion and punishment. The technology of the current punitive carceral entails a constant, state-structured application of physical and psychological violence, a vectoring of coercion that generally exceeds conventional notions of torture, encompassing a profoundly sophisticated form of subjection that constantly reshapes the imprisoned body’s form, content, and context. Political prisoner Janet Hollaway Africa, imprisoned since 1978 as one of the MOVE Nine, elaborates how the bodily passage into this relation of direct violence melts away the juridical formality of “the prison,” establishing the political premises for an abolitionist or antisystemic practice.
[Dylan, Professor and Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside, Forced Passages pages 7-8]
Imprisoned radical intellectuals densely articulate, through multiple voices and vernaculars, the proliferation and extension of the prison’s regimented technologies of domination into the everyday systems of social formation. The allegedly excessive, exceptional, or abnormal violence of the prison regime’s violence is, within this political-intellectual lineage, reconceptualized as a fundamental organizing logic of the
United States in its local, translocal, and global enactments: as such, this is a body of “radical” praxis in the etymological sense of the term, as a political labor that emanates from and is directed toward transforming or destroying the “roots” of a particular social formation, engaged in critical opposition to its constitutive logics of organization and historical possibility. Truly, this is a lineage that exposes the symbiosis of love and hate, revolution and creative destruction, in the process of envisioning the end of oppressive violence and programmatic human domination.
To appropriate Frantz Fanon’s meditation in a different time and place, a war of social truths rages beneath the normalized violence of any such condition of domination. It is the Manichaean relation between colonized and colonizer, “native” and “settler,” or here, free and unfree that conditions the subaltern truths of both imminent and manifest insurgencies. Speaking to the anticolonialist nationalism of the Algerian
Revolution, Fanon writes: The problem of truth ought also to be considered. In every age, among the people truth is the property of the national cause. No absolute verity, no discourse on the purity of the soul, can shake this position. The native replies to the living lie of the colonial situation by an equal falsehood. His dealings with his fellow-nationals are open; they are strained and incomprehensible with regard to the settlers. Truth is that which hurries on the break-up of the colonialist regime; it is that which promotes the emergence of the nation; it is all that protects the natives, and ruins the foreigners. In this colonialist context there is no truthful behavior: and the good is quite simply that which is evil for “them.”8 Truth, for Fanon, is precisely that which generates and multiplies the historical possibility of disruptive, subversive movement against colonial oppression. The evident rhetoric of oppositionality, of the subaltern “good” that necessarily materializes “evil” in the eyes of domination, offers a stunning departure from the language of negotiation, dialogue, progress, moderation, and peace that has become hegemonic in discourses of social change and social justice, in and outside the United States. The native’s “equal falsehood” is, in fact, a necessary and ethical response to a regime that renders a hegemonic truth through the regulated death and deterioration of the native’s body and society. Perhaps most important, the political language of opposition is premised on its open-endedness and contingency, a particular refusal to soothe the anxiety generated in the attempt to displace a condition of violent peace for the sake of something else, a world beyond

agendas, platforms, and practical proposals. There are no guarantees, or arrogant expectations, of an ultimate state of liberation waiting on the other side of the politically immediate struggle against the settler colony.
[02/29/12, JMB is his pen name, he is a PhD student in Environmental Studies in Oregon, He’s citing numerous peer reviewed studies in his article. “Colorblind Racism and Environmentalism”, http://ecesisfactor.blogspot.com/2012/02/colorblind-racismand-environmentalism.html]
In their analysis of food justice, Teresa M.
Mares and
Devon C.
Peña
(2011) point to a
pervasive lack of deep culturalecological understanding,
particularly among white food activists
. They begin with an anecdote involving a vegan
Slow Food activist
who, despite professed commitment to local foods, knows nothing of the indigenous culture where she lives.
She is unable to name whose land she lives on, or even any of the foods they rely upon. When asked about these matters, the woman responds, “in Skagit, you know, there are a lot of multigenerational farmers who are not Native American.
They have been here a long time and have as much stake in this watershed as anyone else”.
This assertion displaces focus from the question of Native foodways and attempts simultaneously to legitimate the land tenure of white farmers
, an issue which she was not asked to defend. The woman goes on to describe conflict between Indians and farmers, an issue which she concedes she knows little about, though her earlier comment regarding the Skagit farmers suggests where she might stand on the issue (2011).
It seems unlikely
that this activist would think of herself as racist, even though her responses suggest unexamined privilege and white racial allegiances
.
Additionally, this implied allegiance with farming families over the concerns of indigenous fishing rights complicates not only this person’s claims of “colorblindness” but also her professed relationship to food systems that support environmental and human health
(Norgaard 2011). Julie Guthman (2011) examines more overt colorblind discourse. In her analysis of farmer’s markets, CSAs, and community gardens, she notes “the many discourses of alternative food hail a white subject and thereby code the practices and spaces of alternative food as white”.
Focusing on two sets of data, Guthman looks at pervasive rhetorical tendencies that contribute to the white racializing of alternative foods.
One particularly important tendency is the universalizing white values .
In doing this, white values become coded as the norm, and when those values do not “resonate, it is assumed that those for whom they do not resonate must be educated
…or be forever marked as different” (2011).
This universalizing problematically reenscribes racial/cultural difference
, while
also prohibiting discourses of race by proposing that such discourses are not needed.
For example, in her interviews of CSA managers, several respondents were
openly hostile to questions that directly asked about race
. Managers responded with comments that reaffirmed their belief in the universal value of their project, writing “[w
]e always hope for more people and do not focus on ethnic—what we present attracts all!”
(Guthman 2011). This manager seems oblivious to the whiteness of the space he and his colleagues have developed and is affronted by the suggestion that it would be right to seek out more customers of color.
Other respondents suggested that the research itself was racist for asking questions about inclusion. One wrote “Difference is wrong; it is better to try to become color blind in how we do things… your question has a slant of political correctness”. This manager explicitly deploys the rhetoric of colorblindness while simultaneously dismissing efforts at inclusion as “political correctness”. Another CSA manager also balked at the “pressure to be perfectly politically correct” (2011). While Guthman’s surveys indicate white internalization and deployment of colorblind racism, work by vegan scholar Breeze Harper (2011) considers ways in which animal rights activism and vegan praxis are coded as white , and how vegans of color respond to such coding.
Harper’s work, like Guthman’s asserts,
“ practices, institutions, and spaces are coded as “white”—or at least “not black”—not only through the bodies that tend to inhabit and participate in them but also the discourses that circulate through them ” (
Guthman 2011). Harper indicates that veganism and animal rights activism are generally associated with
“ radically leftist and progressive” whites, “incapable of participating in the overt racism one can normally find within radical right…organizations
” (Harper 2011).
Although their
political positioning may

incline white vegans to avoid traditional forms of racism
,
Harper notes that
“collectively, “ good whites” tend to shy away from antiracism and reflections on white and class privilege”
(2011). Through a quick exploration of popular vegan books and websites, Harper illustrates this tendency to omit discussions of race, class, and sexuality. Then, drawing on comments taken from the popular blog Vegans of Color,
Harper illuminates the “effects of colorblind discourses on activists of color” and how some whites respond to the experiences of fellow vegans
(2011). Centrally,
Harper’s analysis focuses on how words like “exotic” presume "a white audience, marginalizing the subjectivities of vegans of color
” (2011). The white blogger responses to VOC posts regarding this issue highlight colorblind racism. Harper analyzes the response of a blogger, Kram, who conflates geographic food sources with the concept of
“foreign” or “exotic”. Kram goes on to write, “if I were ever to be called out on terms of “white guilt” or “colonialist” or other terms for trying to go to events that are more inclusive of POC [people of color], or run/by or sponsored by POC, then I will not be inclined to participate in those events”. Her tone denies responsibility for any possible wrongdoing, and furthermore “places responsibility for her inclusion on people of color”. This type of response seems strongly indicative of colorblind racism. Kram asserts her white privilege, declaring her opinions on a blog for vegans of color, while simultaneously undermining her fellow vegan’s experiences. Another series of experiences recorded in the Vegans of
Color blog highlight how colorblind racism has a “ chilling effect”
(Guthman 2011) on people of color and shapes the responses of white vegans
. Bloggers
Nassim and Supernovadiva, relate the discomforts experienced by vegans of color in white spaces.
Nassim writes of a conference that leaves her feeling “so frustrated with the population, the cause and …like I could not call myself a vegan. As if
“vegan” was a white word
” (Harper 2011).
Supernovadiva describes the tendency of white animal rights activists to single her out because of her race
. She writes, “the colorblind thing comes up and how that person don’t see color BUT you bee lined straight to me to tell me you’re colorblind, seriously” (Harper 2011).
These expressions of how colorblind racism effects vegans of color is met on the blog with further examples of the very same discourse
. Although overt racism tends to be scarce in environmental and animal rights movements, colorblind racism and other liberal forms of racist praxis are pervasive.
Discourses that ignore or dispute any critical analysis of race are likely to reaffirm racism despite “good intentions ”.
Furthermore, contemporary uses of words such as “exotic” or “foreign” effectively reinforce white as the norm, and in some cases affirm colonial legacies that equate dark skinned people and “racialized others” with “dirt, filth,” and “uncleanliness” placing them “outside of civilized society” (Park and Pello 2011).
These concepts
, even when unvoiced, shape policy decisions and the codification of environmental activism, and environmental benefits as white.
, Amie Breeze, PhD Candidate in Critical Food Geographies, studying how race, class, gender, and region affect relationship to food, UC-Davis (“Race as a “Feeble Matter” in Veganism: Interrogating whiteness, geopolitical privilege, and consumption philosophy of
“cruelty-free” products,” Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Volume VIII, Issue 3, http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/journal-for-criticalanimal-studies/archives/) Note: AR stands for “animal rights”
Practitioners of veganism abstain from animal consumption (dietary and non-dietary). However, the culture of veganism itself is not a monolith and is composed of many different subcultures and philosophies throughout the world, ranging from punk strict vegans for animal rights, to people who are dietary vegans for personal health reasons, to people who practice veganism for religious and spiritual reasons (Cherry, 2006;
Iacobbo, 2006). Veganism is not just about the abstinence of animal consumption; it is about the ongoing struggle to produce socio-spatial epistemologies of consumption that lead to cultural and spatial change; it is about contesting the dominance of animal-product consumption narrative that is central to, and dominant in, the socio-historical as well as present nation-building rhetoric of the United States. Within the context of my interests in feminist geography, racial politics, and consumption studies, I have observed that mainstream vegan outreach models and top selling vegan-oriented books rarely, if ever, acknowledge such differing socio-historically racialized epistemologies amongst the white middle class status quo and the collectivity of other racial groups, such as African Americans, Chinese-Americans, or Native Americans.
There is an underlying assumption amongst mainstream vegan media that racialization and the production of vegan spaces are disconnected.
However, space
, vegan or not,
is raced
(Dwyer and Jones, 2000; McKittrick, 2006; McKittrick and Woods, 2007; Price, 2009) and simultaneously sexualized and gendered (Massey, 1994; Moss, 2008) directly affecting individuals and place identities.
How human beings develop their knowledge base is directly connected to the embodied experiences of the places and spaces we navigate through
. Scholars engaged in critical geographies of race claim that the world is entirely racialized. David
Delaney, a geographer employing critical race theory asks, "What does it mean for geographers to take this claim of a wholly racialized world seriously?" (Price, 2009). As a black feminist geographer and critical race theorist, I take seriously that racialized places and spaces are at the foundation of how we develop our socio-spatial epistemologies; hence, these epistemologies are racialized
. The collective white

middle class USAmerican way of knowing and relating to space, and all the objects and life-forms that occupy it, are connected to this demographics' physical and social placement within a racialized hierarchy in which they are naturalized as normal, un-raced, universal, and the status quo; whiteness as the norm is at center stage of USA's production of knowledge, space, and power
.
Furthermore, to people of color, who are the victims of racism/white supremacy, race is a filter through which they see the world. Whites do not look at the world through this filter of racial awareness, even though they also comprise a race. This privilege to ignore their race gives whites a societal advantage distinct from any received from the existence of discriminatory racism. [Grillo and Wildman] use the term racism/white supremacy to emphasize the link between the privilege held by whites to ignore their own race and discriminatory racism. (Grillo and Wildman 1995, 565) In this essay, I prefer to use the terms whiteness and white privilege as synonyms for Grillo and Wildman's above explication of 'racism/white supremacy.' For critical race geographers, how do we understand how whiteness functions as an epistemology within the power and production of space? In what ways do racialized geographies of exclusion/inclusion influence nuanced and covert acts of whiteness and white privilege amongst the racial status quo? How do these acts of covert whiteness and white privilege manifest albeit- innocently and subconsciously- within spaces of veganism?
Having lived in a racialized nation in which this demographic's epistemologies and ontologies are primarily in center stage, white USAmericans are collectively unaware of how this center stage does not reflect the reality of those who do not exist in such white privileged spaces of inclusion. Racialized spaces create racialized psychic spaces
. Arnold Farr refers to this as
racialized consciousness
, and it is a term that is
much more useful to use within the context of those people who do not fully understand that they are engaging in covert acts of whiteness/white privilege racism, all while they simultaneously engage in AR
/VEG based social activism
. Defined by African American philosopher Dr. Arnold Farr, racialized consciousness replace[s] racism as the traditional operative term in discourses on race. The concept of racialized consciousness will help us examine the ways in which consciousness is shaped in terms of racist social structures... ‘
Racialized consciousness’ is a term that will help us understand why even the well-intentioned white liberal who has participated in the struggle against racism may perpetuate a form of racism unintentionally
(Farr,
2004). Popular vegan-oriented literature in the USA such as Vegan: The New Ethics of Eating (Marcus, 2001), Being Vegan in a Non-Vegan
World (Torres and Torres, 2005), The Vegan Sourcebook (Stepaniak and Messina, 2000), and Becoming Vegan (Davis and Vesanto, 2000), which are considered vegan bibles for the vegan status quo, do not deeply engage in critical analysis of how race (racialization, whiteness, racism, anti-racisms) influence how and why one writes about, teaches, and engages in vegan praxis and ultimately produces vegan spaces to affect cultural change. But what does it mean to be conscious of race when embarking on writing projects such as vegan-oriented research? This is part of a larger conversation on how racialization, race, and whiteness functions/manifest within vegan spaces in white dominated nations.
[L]ike the peace and environmental movements, the AR movement is predominantly white and middle class.
Andrew Rowan, a VP at the Humane Society of the U.S., said surveys indicate the AR movement is "less than three percent" people of color
. In April, 316 people from over 20 states attended the first Grassroots AR Conference in NYC, but the people of color caucus numbered only eight.
If no one is racist, why is the movement largely segregated?
(Hamanaka,
2005) Similarly to second wave USA feminism that falsely universalized the white middle class heterosexual female experience as how all females experience social space, power, and struggle, mainstream vegan rhetoric assumes the same. While veganism itself does create oppositional spaces of consumption that challenge the standard spaces of American carnicentric diet, this essay will explore how mainstream vegan praxis simultaneously creates socio-spatial epistemologies of whiteness that remain invisible to most white identified people.
Interestingly, it can be argued that the white racial demographic in the USA are collectively unaware of racism and white domination as an ongoing covert, institutional, and systemic process
(Tuana and Sullivan, 2007; Yancy, 2004).
Furthermore, this ignorance
commonly manifests as a "post-racial" or "raceless" approach to dealing with the world. It can manifest into believing that
an event about animal rights
, with 308 white people and 8 people of color, has nothing to do with
USA’s history
(and current state) of institutionalized and environmental racism, as well as whiteness as the norm
. In a "post-racial" or "raceless" society, it is believed that racism no longer exists because skin tone no longer determines equality.
Throughout this text, "raceless," and "post-racial" will be written in quotations to reflect that such terms are coded language for "expected whiteness" (Kang, 2000) and "raceless" equaling "default whiteness" (Nakamura, 2002). The consequences of an individual’s "post-racial" approach, in AR/VEG , ignore the socio-historical context of skin color and the accouterments of white privilege that affect access to, and production of, local and global resources; this includes the resources for vegan products purchased by AR/VEG people in the USA.
Even within the most radical activism, such as
anti-Globalization, animal rights
, food activism through farmer’s markets, veganism, and anti-Prison Industrial Complex movements, this collective unawareness to white socio-spatial epistemologies proliferates and is replicated as a form of ignorance
(Appel, 2003; Clark, 2004; Nagra, 2003;
Poldervaart, 2001; Slocum, 2006; Yancy, 2004). The epistemology of ignorance is an examination of the complex phenomena of ignorance, which has as its aim identifying different forms of ignorance, examining how they are produced and sustained, and what role they play in knowledge practices....At times [epistemologies of ignorance] takes the form of those in the center refusing to allow the marginalized to know: witness the 19th century prohibition against black slaves' literacy. Other times it can take the form of the center's own ignorance of injustice, cruelty, and suffering, such as contemporary white people's obliviousness to racism and white domination (Sullivan and Tuana, 2007).
However, it is important to note that not all people of color in the USA acknowledge the consequences or even the existence of racialized or ethnocentric epistemologies of ignorance. However, Dr. Charles Mills, author of The Racial Contract, theorizes that most black identified people

in the USA, are fully aware that their consciousness is "raced" and that the epistemological norm in the USA is derived from whiteness (Mills,
2007). This is what intrigues me about white ignorance: due to embodied experiences of white racialization and socialization, which strategically orients this demographic towards collective ignorance about race, a majority of white identified people in the USA deny that their epistemologies and sense of ethics are "raced" (Sullivan and Tuana, 2007). Dr. Mills has described this epistemological norm as a type of white ignorance a form of ignorance, what could be called white ignorance, linked to white supremacy. The idea of group-based cognitive handicap is not an alien one to the radical traditional, if not normally couched in terms of "ignorance." Indeed, it is, on the contrary, a straightforward corollary of standpoint theory: if one group is privileged, after all, it must be by comparison with another group that is handicapped. In addition, the term has for me the virtue of signaling my theoretical sympathies with what I know will seem to many a deplorably old-fashioned,
"conservative," realist, intellectual framework, one in which truth, falsity, facts, reality, and so forth are not enclosed with ironic scare quotes.
The phrase "white ignorance" implies the possibility of a contrasting "knowledge" (Mills, 2007). How does such ignorance manifest into vegan praxis? I will explore this in the next section. Race and Ethnicity in Vegan and Animal Rights Analysis...is it really a "feeble" matter? From: Clara
==== Date: November 8, 2007 7:58:54 AM PST To: sistahvegan98@mac.com Subject: from one vegan to another... hello, my name is Clara. i am a freshman in high school and while researching animal cruelty, i came across your website about your book. i am very excited about the fact that you wish to reach out to the african american female vegan femi[ni]sts, but i was taken aback when i realized how MUCH you related race and ethnicity to everything. I would just like to say that i honestly don't believe that the race of a vegan should have anything to do with the cause of saving animals and making others aware of animal cruelty. You put out a lot of topics that make me feel as if at one point in your life, you were not proud to be an african american female AND a vegan because of the depictions of most vegans and that is rather disappointing because race, to me, is such a feeble matter and there are more things important in life than just recognizing race and constantly putting out that racial matters are more important than what you believe in seems ignorant to me. well, thank you for your time: clara :) The above message was delivered to my email inbox in early November 2007. As a cultural geographer, scholar, and activist involved in analyzing how race, class, racism, whiteness and geopolitical location shape one’s philosophy of AR/VEG, this email fascinated me. This young woman was writing about my website, www.breezeharper.com and my anthology of black female vegans, Sistah Vegan. One does not have to search too far in the past year or two, within the U.S.A., to see that race is no "feeble matter": The Jena 6, Don Imus’ "nappy-headed hos" comment about the Rutgers University Women’s Basketball team, and Megan William’s torturers who had called her a "nigger" every time they would stab her
(Tone, 2007), are several examples of racially based verbal and/or physical violence.
Though race is a social construction, there have been obvious consequences of this construction, most notably white privilege, white ignorance, and white racism that negatively affect all facets of life in the USA and globally
(Bell, 1992; Bell, 2005; Sullivan and Tuana, 2007; Wing, 2003). Not exempt from these consequences is the geopolitically racialized consumption and production of vegan products (this includes food as well as knowledge as a product) for the vegan and animal rights consumer in the USA. Clara’s email suggests that she is unaware of how a geopolitically racialized labor force and consumption system makes it possible for AR/VEG people in the USA to have access to vegan products. The phrase geopolitically racialized is a phrase I created for this paper. It is a fusion of critical geopolitical theory and the word racialized or raced. Critical geopolitical theory takes a "critical perspective on the force of fusions of geographical knowledge and systems of power" (Dalby and Tuathail, 1996). To this fusion, I also add systems of production and systems of consumption of not only knowledge, but material resources, such as food, clothing, and spices. Racialized/raced added to ‘geopolitical’ or ‘geopolitically,' simply means that human producers and consumers within this system of power, exist in "raced" bodies that are socially and geographically located in a globalized capitalist economic system. Such "raced" placement contributes to their relationships to, and understanding of, knowledge and materials production, power, and ignorance. Dr. Radhika Mohanram, scholar in women’s studies, English, and geopolitics of racial identity, notes that "[it] is a commonplace to point out that the concept of race has always been articulated according to the geographical distributions of people. Racial difference is also spatial difference, the inequitable power relationships between various spaces and place are rearticulated as the inequitable power relations between races" (Mohanram, 1999). For example, an indentured black Haitian sugar cane worker in the Dominican Republic will have a different relationship and perception of sugar, than a
"free" white USAmerican vegan that is consuming a vegan product with sugar harvested by the enslaved Dominican
. Furthermore, one’s sense of "ethical consumption" is contingent upon geopolitical social and physical position
(Barnett et al., 2005). Vegan chocolate, sugar, and cotton (a vegan alternative to wool and silk) products are examples of how globalized racism sustains geopolitically racialized hierarchies of food and animal-free textile production (Harper, 2010). I will explicate the above further, to those who may not fully understand why they should be concerned with the impact unacknowledged geopolitically racialized consciousness has on their animal rights epistemologies and engagement of those epistemologies through vegan consumerism and consumption. There are people outside of the USA that harvest chocolate under the worse conditions, simply for the production of chocolate treats, including chocolate ingredients found in certain vegan foods and beverages. There are thousands of people on cocoa farms who work as slaves to harvest USA’s chocolate. The Ivory Coast exports fifty percent of the cocoa beans that are used in global chocolate production (Hawksley, 2001). There is a surprising association between chocolate and child labor in the Cote d'Ivoire...from which chocolate is made, under inhumane conditions and extreme abuse. This West African country is the leading exporter of cocoa beans to the world market. Thus, the existence of slave labor is relevant to the entire international economic community. Through trade relations, many actors are inevitably implicated in this problem, whether it is the Ivorian government, the farmers, the American or European chocolate manufacturers, or consumers who unknowingly buy chocolate [emphasis added] (Chanthavong, 2002). Furthermore, as of 2001, thousands of children from the country of Mali have been declared "missing". Authorities believe that "at least 15,000 children are thought to be over in the neighbouring Ivory Coast, producing cocoa...Many are imprisoned on farms and beaten if they try to escape. Some are under 11 years old"
(Hawksley, 2001). Although many vegans in the USA believe they are practicing "cruelty free" consumption by saving the life of a non-human animal by eating vegan chocolate products, those who purchase non-fair trade cocoa products may be causing cruelty to thousands of human beings. If a product is not marked in a way that indicates it was harvested through fair and sweatshop-free practices, then how can one know that it is human-cruelty free? Who are the non-white racialized populations who are harvesting chocolate, under conditions of cruelty that help certain USA vegans practice modern ethics through vegan chocolate food consumption? Here’s a hint: they are not white socio-economic class privileged people living in the suburbs of the USA. Since the beginning of European colonialism and the European (and now USAmerican)

pursuit of "civilizing" and "modernizing" the globe, those who have harvested chocolate, coffee, cane sugar and tea, have been overwhelmingly non-white racialized groups of people (Mintz, 1986; Harper, 2010). This pattern continues into 2010 (Gautier, 2007; Hunt, 2007). In my book,
Sistah Vegan, I wrote about the harm produced by USA’s addictions to foodstuffs that are sourced from the global South: In addition, our unmindful consumption of [un]foodstuffs are not only harming and killing our own health in the United States of America; we are supporting the pain, suffering and cultural genocide of those whose land and people we have enslaved and/or exploited for...sucrose, coffee, black tea, and chocolate too. Unless your addictive substances read "Fair Trade" and "Certified Organic" on it, it is most likely supporting a company that pays people less than they can live off of while they work on plantations that use toxic pesticides and or prohibit the right to organize for their own human rights...Is your addiction causing suffering and exploitation thousands of miles a way on a sugar cane plantation, near a town that suffers from high rates of poverty and undernourishment, simply because that land grows our "dope" instead of local grains and produce for them? We have confused our addictive consumption habits with being "civilized" (Jensen, 2006). The British who sipped their sugary teas considered themselves "civilized", despite the torture and slavery it took to get that white sugar into their tea cups (Harper, 2010). I would also like to suggest that one cannot overlook the critical concept of modernity (a.k.a. being "civilized") when analyzing how white racialized consciousness and white epistemologies of ignorance remain invisible to "post-racial
" vegans and animal rights proponents in the USA
. Philosophically , people in AR
/VEG activism can be best described as being engaged in a form of "ethical consumption." However, within "ethical consumption," there are unspoken political assumptions
associated with the practice. As Tamás Dombos described, in
Hungary, where ethical consumption is only beginning to appear, it is not simply about consuming ethically: it is also about becoming modern
[emphasis added].
Early campaigners
for... [ethical consumption] come from West ern Europe and the United States, or are closely associated with such people, and a recurring theme
in talk about ethical consumption is its association with an Occidentalized, imagined West that East ern Europeans ought to be emulating
. It seems, then, that some ethical consumption cannot be understood without seeing it as an embrace of a certain kind of modernity associated particularly with the EU (Carrier, 2007). Though Carrier is referring to the EU, I cannot help but see the same philosophies underlying ethical consumption practices of many USA AR/VEG organizations, such as Vegan Outreach, who talk of ending non-human animal cruelty by purchasing Silk chocolate milk or Soy Delicious chocolate ice cream instead of cow dairy products (Vegan Outreach, 2007). I believe that Vegan
Outreach has done amazing work in educating human beings about the suffering humans cause to non-human animals. However, my two critiques are that a) animal rights activists pictured on Vegan Outreach’s Guide to Cruelty-Free Eating appear to be all white and b) Vegan
Outreach is advocating Silk and Soy Delicious chocolate products for beginner vegans in their guide (Vegan Outreach, 2007); both products’ cocoa sources are not certified human cruelty free. On the Vegetarian Baby & Child website, Turtle Mountain’s Soy Delicious frozen vegan desserts are described as the following: While they’re not a company big enough to purchase fair trade chocolate, Turtle Mountain doesn’t use bone char-refined sugar, and they are certified organic. The company is also a supporter of the Sea Turtle Restoration Project, an organization helping [to] prevent sea turtles’ extinction. What better reason do I need to buy soy ice cream but to help sea turtles? (Veggies123.com) One has to wonder why the Turtle Mountain Company simply does not stop purchasing chocolate all together, if they cannot afford to buy fairly traded chocolate. Furthermore, there is mention that the sugar is vegan, but one also does not know if it was or was not produced through human cruelty practices. It can be assumed that profit is the motivator to continue purchasing cocoa from a non fair trade resource. It can also be assumed that saving sea turtles and using sugar, free from bone char refinement, is what makes this vegan treat "ethical" and "cruelty-free," appealing to many modern day AR/VEG people in the USA. It cannot be overlooked that the "ethics" of geopolitically racialized production of non fair trade cocoa and sugar for Turtle Mountain (and its consumers), is not as equally important as ensuring that the sugar is "bone free" and sea turtles are given the right to self-determination and survival. If it were, I surmise that Turtle Mountain would have received enough complaints from consumers (or boycotts) to start buying fair trade ingredients. In regard to the pamphlet’s images of solely white people engaged in animal rights activism, one also has to wonder why Vegan Outreach did not provide images of racially diverse people distributing flyers or being engaged in animal rights activism. Page two has a white woman with a white baby, sharing food with a turkey (Vegan Outreach,
2007). On page twenty-two, there is a white child holding up an apple who is described as being a "young vegan" (Vegan Outreach, 2007). Page twenty-six has a young white man reading about advocating for animals (Vegan Outreach, 2007). Page twenty-seven has a picture of a white man handing a Vegan Outreach pamphlet to a black man (Vegan Outreach, 2007). On page twenty-eight, there is a young white girl handing out
Vegan Outreach brochures (Vegan Outreach, 2007). The combination of images of white people being the animal rights activists coupled with images that advocate vegan products with sugar and chocolate that are unfairly harvested by the labor of non-white racialized people embodies, for me, a contradictory ethos of who practices veganism and how. What is odd to me is that this is the praxis behind "cruelty-free eating" (hence, the name of the Vegan Outreach starter guide). Throughout the entire starter guide, there is not one mention of the avoidance of vegan products not designated as fair trade, sweatshop-free, or free of current day human slavery practices. Therefore, what type of geopolitically racialized "ethics" are being produced and disseminated? In a 2005 interview with Satya Magazine, Sheila Hamanaka and Tracy
Basile write: It’s one thing for a white person to pass out vegan flyers. But attempts by white AR activists to set the agenda for other cultures bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the historical pattern of suppression by dominant nations. Instead of exporting "democracy," AR activists are exporting their cultural concepts of the proper relationship between human and nonhuman
animals (Hamanaka 2005). In the case of the Vegan
Outreach guide, is a white racialized, middle-classed neoliberal USA concept of proper vegan products being exported? Is this a consequence of white epistemologies of ignorance, "post-racialness," and modernity? Of practicing AR/VEG activism without fully realizing how all oppressions are interlocking (Harper, 2010; Smith, 2007), and that
it may be just as "cruel" to eat animals as it is to eat food and textiles produced by enslaved humans on a cocoa, sugar, or cotton plantations?

1nr
(Fiona Kumari Senior Lecturer in Disability Studies at the School of Human Services & Social Work Griffith University
(Brisbane) and Adjunct Professor in Disability Studies, Faculty of Medicine, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, Legislating Disability Negative
Ontologies and the Government of Legal Identities, Foucault and the Government of Disability, 108-133) *gender modified
In order for the notion of “ableness” to exist and to transmogrify into the sovereign subject of
liberalism it must have a constitutive outside—that is, it must participate in a logic of supplementarity.
Although we can speak in ontological terms of the history of disability as a history of that which is unthought, this figuring should not be confused with erasure that occurs due to total absence or complete exclusion. On the contrary, disability is always present (despite its seeming absence) in the ableist talk of normalcy, normalization, and humanness. Indeed, the truth claims that surround disability are dependent upon discourses of ableism for their very legitimation. The logic of supplementarity, which is infused within modernism’s unitary subject and which produces the Other in a liminal space, deploys what we might call a “compulsion toward terror”: a terror, ontological and actual, of “falling away” and “crossing over” into an uncertain void of disease. Such effects of terror may produce instances of disability hate crimes, disability vilification, and disability panic. The manifestations of this terror rarely enter judicial domains, but rather are excluded from law’s permissible inquiry and codification. In short, this erasure forecloses the possibility of pursuing legal remedies through the
refusal of law’s power to name and countenance oppositional disability discourses. Disability “harms” and “injuries” are only deemed bona fide within a framework of scaled-down disability definitions (read:
‹ctions) elevated to indisputable truth-claims and rendered viable in law.
- Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Clark University (Walter, “Historical Analogies, Slippery Slopes, and the
Question of Euthanasia” foumal of Law, Medicine &Ethics, 28 (2000): 176-186, Wiley)
In Practical Ethics,
Singer responds
to this sort of chal- lenge by citing the example of Holland.
Euthanasia and physicianassisted suicide have been illegal in that country since 1886 under articles 293 and 294 of the Penal Code.56 The issue entered public discussion there in 1973 when a criminal court at Leeuwarden convicted a physician of ad- ministering a fatal injection to her mother, but imposed a suspended sentence. The court found it permissible to ad- minister drugs that shorten a patient’s life so long as the goal was relief of pai n
. In that same year, the KNMG (Koninklijke Nederlandse Maatschappij tot bevordering der Geneeskunst—the Royal Dutch Medical Association) issued a statement that paralleled the court decision. In the next twenty-seven years, case law and KNMG policy statements have evolved in tandem, setting guidelines protecting phy- sicians who conduct euthanasia, so long as the physician carries out the act according to “rules of careful medical practice.”17 The only statute law bearing on the matter has been an act adopted by the Dutch Parliament (November 30,1993) amending the Burial Act and giving formal legal status to the notification procedure in cases of euthanasia (and physician-assisted suicide). In
1981, the court at Rotterdam convicted a layperson of assisting in the suicide of a terminally ill patient. In its decision, the court set the basic criteria that, with modifications, have governed Holland’s active euthanasia practice since. These guidelines included several factors. For an act of euthanasia to be permissible for such a terminally ill patient, the patient must be conscious and experiencing unbearable pain. There must be no other reasonable solutions. The patient must make a well-informed, entirely voluntary, and durable request for death. The attending doctor must consult with an inde- pendent professional, who concurs. Finally, only a doctor may administer the means of death. After listing the guidelines developed by the KNMG and the Dutch courts,
Singer asserts: Euthanasia in these circumstances is strongly sup- ported by the Royal Dutch Medical Association, and by the general public in the Netherlands.
The guide- lines make murder in the guise of euthanasia rather far-fetched, and there is no evidence of an increase in the murder rate in the Netherlands.
5® Thus, for Singer, the Dutch experience of permitting euthanasia, without
(in his account) the arising of atten- dant abuses
and extensions of the practice, supports the claim that the
German experience was
a unique
, one-time occurrence, and not a precedent for the future.59 Singer is correct that the KNMG60 and public opinion generally sup- port the current practices, but he is too optimistic in his reading of the other facts. In particular, he is simply too optimistic about the ability of procedural safeguards to pre- vent abuses.
When we examine the details, the Dutch

example
that he cites to support his view presents a much more ambigu- ous picture
.61
During the last two decades
in Holland, physician practice and case law have extended the catego- ries of patients for whom physician-assisted dying was “not legally forbidden” well beyond the guidelines posited in the
1981 decision.
Recent court cases have acquitted doc- tors who killed patients in cases of transient psychological as well as persistent physical distress, cases of chronic as well as terminal illness, and involuntary as well as volun- tary euthanasia
.62
The prevailing argument
for these ex- tensions has been the claim that it would be discriminatory and unfair to allow euthanasia for some and to deny it to other closely similar cases. This is the archetypal engine for a slippery slope.
6*
The Dutch government has conducted two studies
(1990 and 1995) supported by the Royal Dutch Medical Association with the promise that participating physicians would be immune from prosecution for anything they re- vealed. The authors of the 1995 study claim that, “sub- stantial progress in the oversight of physician assisted death has been achieved in the Netherlands.”64
The tenor of both these reports
, as well as
Marcia Angell’s 1996 editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine*- about them, is
largely favorable
for Dutch euthanasia.
However, this con- clusion requires overlooking significant contrary evidence.
According to the 1990 Remmelink
Report, doctors killed 2,300 people who requested it. However, doctors also killed 1,040 people who did not know or consent to what was happening.
They did this despite the fact that 14% of these patients were fully competent, and 72% had never given any indication that they would want their lives terminated
. In the 1995 reports, physicians indicated that they con- sulted another physician in only 11% of cases
not reported to the government.
Almost 20% of these unreported cases in that report involved ending a life without the patient’s explicit request
. Both in 1990 and 1995, approximately 25% of physicians reported that they had “terminated the lives of patients without an explicit reques t” from the pa- tient to do so.66
In their analysis of the data, Dutch investigators claimed that cases “terminated without an explicit request” had decreased between 1990 and 1995,67 but they reached this result by citing only the cases “without explicit request.” They ignored another listed category—cases in which phy- sicians gave pain medication with the explicit intent of end- ing a patient’s life. These increased
from 1350 to nearly 1900.
In more than 80% of these cases the patient had made no request for death
. If we count these deaths, too, as nonvoluntary, then there has been an increase
(and not a decrease) in the number of patients killed without having requested it/
8 Even today, a large number of euthanasia cases in Holland go unreported
. In these cases, doctors falsify death certificates
to show death by natural causes, thus making regulation of euthanasia impossible.
The guideline calling for a persistent
and repeated re- quest by patients before they can be killed is obviously
be- ing ignored
in practice. As indicated, practice continues to stretch the other guidelines as well.
While Dutch have not produced a
Nazi holocaust, their experience does
indeed provide reasons to think that once allowed
under strict lim- its, killing will expand
beyond them. This independent contemporary example supports the argument that what happened in
Germany may not be a unique and excep- tional circumstance, and that the euthanasia slope may be slippery indeed
. Certainly, the Dutch experience provides little support for Singer’s claim that it is not one.
, Kristine Knoll studies Gender and Women’s studies at the University of Washington, Feminist Disability Studies: Theoretical
Debates, Activism, Identity Politics, & Coalition Building, https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/bitstream/handle/1773/20505/Knoll_washington_0250E_10341.pdf.txt?sequence=2
Regarding symbolic systems of oppression in relation to disability, disability images often invoke pity.
What symbols or stereotypes come to mind when one thinks of disability, or particular disabilities? Some common stereotypes of disability, aside from pity , are weakness/helplessness , evilness/possession , non-sexual , not parents (or should not be), less intelligent and/or child-like
, and as having qualities we want to cure or eradicate
. As Hill- Collins explains, “Central to this process is the use of stereotypical or controlling images of diverse race, class and gender groups” (pp. 59-60). Unfortunately, she neglects to recognize disability.
There are many disability stereotypes that

contribute to the pervasive system that prevents people with disabilities from climbing institutional and social ladders
(such as finding a partner and having children).
Finally, oppression can also occur on an individual level.
Negative images and symbols of disability (stereotypes, or lack of representation) are everywhere , and we all encounter the institutions that subordinate certain groups of people, while privileging others. This impacts us on the individual level, regardless of whether they are conscious or subconscious beliefs and actions. We externalize these beliefs onto Others , and also turn it inward on ourselves
(e.g. internalized oppression). The pervasiveness of discrimination alerts us to where and how oppression is occurring, and this highlights where we need to break down barriers
. Feminist theories challenge us to look at disability from a minority group model, rather than always using the “master’s tools” to try to understand and deconstruct disability oppression. Another feminist theorist, Peggy McIntosh, provides great tools for understanding the ways in which privilege and oppression operate on individual levels; although, of course, these are still linked to symbolic and institutional forces of oppression. Although McIntosh does not address disability within her work, the tools she provides in her article, “White Privilege and Male Feminist Disability Studies 23 Privilege: A Personal
Account of Coming to See the Correspondences through Work in Women Studies” (2001), are easily transferable to disability issues.
(Scott, Scott Lunsford has his M.A. in writing and began his PhD in Rhetoric and Writing studies in 2005, January 1st 2005,
“Seeking a Rhetoric of the Rhetoric of Dis/abilities”, Rhetoric and Composition PhD Papers, Department of English, http://digitalcommons.utep.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=rhet_comp&seiredir=1&referer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Furl%3Fsa%3Dt%26rct%3Dj%26q%3Ddisability%2520and%2520rehtoric%26source%3Dw eb%26cd%3D10%26ved%3D0CHsQFjAJ%26url%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fdigitalcommons.utep.edu%252Fcgi%252Fviewcontent.cgi%253Fartic le%253D1000%2526context%253Drhet_comp%26ei%3DOaTsT_2lJIuY8gSI-6y-
BQ%26usg%3DAFQjCNGi67PqtbUndsIS7f6HPkueRkRJ8A%26sig2%3DsO_68H9jX3Eo8B09DxEAPg#search=%22disability%20rehtoric%22
As an advocate for including dis/ability studies alongside the critical and traditional triumvirate of race, class, and gender, I was excited to see the disability symposium in a recent issue of Rhetoric Review
(22.2). I use the form dis/abilities to emphasize the importance of its inclusion as an issue of difference which we approach as critically as we do race, class, and gender: Just as we cannot discuss race without arguing how “whiteness”— at least in this country— performs hegemonic control over other racial identities, we cannot ignore how “ability” realizes its constituent disability. But how do we go about discussing dis/ability?
How do we move out of this silence and unawareness which strengthen stigma about various forms of disability?
I imagine a metadiscussion to realize a more complicated discourse of disabilities, a discourse which must confront its own disability. First, we must understand the hegemony which makes dis/ability invisible through silence.
To put this notion into a context of race, some members of “white” society remain color-blind and resist talking about race, rendering race invisible . As such, some members of an ableistic society sometimes choose to be silent about disability; thus, disability remains invisible. Ability, too, can be invisible. Those of us who are “able-bodied” might not see it because we are it.
Plus, we often do not see that our ability constructs disability.
Second, once we’ve made dis/ability visible, we can then expand our awareness through language by becoming sensitive to various terminologies assigned to various disabilities
.

ii iii i After the Watts Rebellion, RFK observed: “There is no point in telling Negroes to observe the law…It has almost always been used against them…All these places—Harlem, Watts, South Side [of Chicago]—are riots wating to happen.” Quote in: Clark, Kenneth B. “The Wonder is
There Have Been So Few Riots.” New York Times Magazine, September 5, 1965.
“Slave estate” is a term borrowed from Hortense Spillers.
See Emile Benveniste. Problems in General Linguistics. Trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek. Coral Gables: Univ. of Miami Press, 1971.