1NC vs TSA
K
The only ethical demand available to modern politics is that of the demand for
the end of America itself. This demand exposes the grammar of the Affirmative
for larger institutional access as a fortification of antiblack civil society
Wilderson 2010 [Frank B., killed apartheid officials in South Africa, nuff said, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of
U.S. Antagonisms, pages 1-5]
When I was a young student at Columbia University in New York there was a Black
woman who used to stand outside the gate and yell at Whites, Latinos, and East- and South Asian students, staff,
and faculty as they entered the university. She accused them of having stolen her sofa and of selling her
into slavery. She always winked at the Blacks, though we didn’t wink back. Some of us thought her
outbursts too bigoted and out of step with the burgeoning ethos of
multiculturalism and “rainbow coalitions” to endorse. But others did not wink back
because we were too fearful of the possibility that her isolation would
become our isolation, and we had come to Columbia for the express, though largely assumed and unspoken,
purpose of foreclosing upon that peril. Besides, people said she was crazy. Later, when I attended UC Berkeley, I saw a
Native American man sitting on the sidewalk of Telegraph Avenue. On the ground in front of him was an upside down hat
and a sign informing pedestrians that here was where they could settle the “Land Lease Accounts” that they had neglected
to settle all of their lives. He too, so went the scuttlebutt, was “crazy.” Leaving aside for the moment their state of mind, it
would seem that the structure, that is to say the rebar, or better still the grammar of their
demands—and, by extension, the grammar of their suffering—was indeed an ethical
grammar. Perhaps their grammars are the only ethical grammars available to
modern politics and modernity writ large, for they draw our attention not to the way in which
space and time are used and abused by enfranchised and violently powerful interests, but to the violence that underwrites
the modern world’s capacity to think, act, and exist spatially and temporally. The violence that robbed
her of her body and him of his land provided the stage upon which other
violent and consensual dramas could be enacted. Thus, they would have to be crazy, crazy
enough to call not merely the actions of the world to account but to call the world itself to account, and to account for them
no less! The woman at Columbia was not demanding to be a participant in an unethical
network of distribution: she was not demanding a place within capital, a piece of the pie (the demand for
her sofa notwithstanding). Rather, she was articulating a triangulation between, on the
one hand, the loss of her body, the very dereliction of her corporeal
integrity, what Hortense Spillers charts as the transition from being a being
to becoming a “being for the captor” (206), the drama of value (the stage upon which surplus value
is extracted from labor power through commodity production and sale); and on the other, the corporeal
integrity that, once ripped from her body, fortified and extended the
corporeal integrity of everyone else on the street. She gave birth to the
commodity and to the Human, yet she had neither subjectivity nor a sofa to show for it. In her eyes,
the world—and not its myriad discriminatory practices, but the world itself—was unethical. And yet, the
world passes by her without the slightest inclination to stop and disabuse her of her claim. Instead, it calls her “crazy.”
And to what does the world attribute the Native American man’s insanity? “He’s crazy if he thinks he’s getting any money
out of us?” Surely, that doesn’t make him crazy. Rather it is simply an indication that he does not have a big enough gun.
What are we to make of a world that responds to the most lucid enunciation
of ethics with violence? What are the foundational questions of the ethico-political? Why are these questions
so scandalous that they are rarely posed politically, intellectually, and cinematically—unless they are posed obliquely and
unconsciously, as if by accident? Return Turtle Island to the “Savage.” Repair the
demolished subjectivity of the Slave. Two simple sentences, twelve simple
words, and the structure of U.S. (and perhaps global) antagonisms would be
dismantled. An “ethical modernity” would no longer sound like an oxymoron. From there we could
busy ourselves with important conflicts that have been promoted to the level of antagonisms: class
struggle, gender conflict, immigrants rights. When pared down to twelve words and two
sentences, one cannot but wonder why questions that go to the heart of the ethico-political, questions of political ontology,
are so unspeakable in intellectual meditations, political broadsides, and even socially and politically engaged feature films.
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 they 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.i 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.ii 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’s 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 strategiesdesign), 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 non-ontology. 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.iv 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.
The 1AC is a form of phallacized whiteness that posits a neutral subject that
eradicates difference in the name of freedom
Winnubst 06 [Shannon Winnubest, Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at The Ohio State
University, “Queering Freedom” page 37-43]
Cultures of phallicized whiteness are grounded in the constitutive and categorical
exclusion of useless expenditure. While Locke attempts to maintain the absolute
reign of utility by reasserting a different kind of ‘use’ in the functions of money as
capital, the fundamental tension between systems of value based in utility
and those grounded in endless expenditure threatens utility’s
domination. This tension worsens as politics of race, sexual differ- ence,
and sexuality compound this nascent politics of class (and, less explic- itly,
religion) that we find in Locke’s texts. While money appears in Locke’s texts to be
the inevitable outgrowth of utility’s preference for future-oriented labor, cultivated
land, and private property, it also introduces an order of value that may not be
reducible to the final judgment of utility. The intro- duction of money appears to
render utility’s closed system rather fragile, a phenomenon and tension that will
resurface repeatedly across the following chapters. The sort of worldview that we
find in Locke is thereby one dominated by the twin logics of property and utility.
Labor, which man must undertake due to an ontological lack, connects these twin
logics: it encloses the world and one’s self into units of private property and
then, elevated into the form of money, invites reason to overstep utility’s
boundary and hoard more property than one can use. Labor initiates the twin
expressions of the logic of the limit: enclosure and prohibition. We ought not
own more than we can use; yet, true to the dynamic of desire grounded in lack, we
are drawn toward transgressing the fundamental prohibition of waste proclaimed by
nature’s law, reason. Labor develops into a system of expression that
appears to twist the dynamics of scarcity and abundance beyond the
reach of utility, while simultaneously using utility to judge all acts within
it: one’s labor must be deemed useful if one is to enter into the desired
life of propertied abundance, a possibility that will always be scarce in
advanced capitalist cultures of phallicized whiteness. Locke’s normative model for
the liberal individual thereby becomes he who is bound by his ability to
labor within a concept of the future sufficient to stake out a piece of land
as property. While Cynthia Willett gives Locke credit for trying to articulate a
middle-class resistance to “the leisure class and its idle games,” she nonetheless
argues that Locke remains entrapped by a conception of rationality “in terms of the
English middle-class appreciation for the market value of productive labor and
property” (2001, 71). Not only are his concepts of rationality shaped by these
historical preferences, but his concepts of man’s condition—man’s desire, destiny,
labor, and individuality— all carry these historical preferences into universalized
discourses that con- tinue to serve as the bedrock of many of our cultural
assumptions and prac- tices. Although Locke’s politics were moderately progressive
for the late seventeenth century, the lasting damage of these concepts still
haunts our political quandaries and the very frameworks through which we
continue to seek redress. The logic of limit as enclosure, as the ways that the
state of society becomes demarcated from—and always preferred over, even
while roman- ticizing—the state of nature, continuously rewrites itself in several
registers across the political histories of the U.S. It fundamentally grounds our understanding of the individual as the person who is clearly demarcated from nature.
The individual becomes that ‘civilized’ man who takes his natural origin,
as an enclosed body that is a product of God’s labor, and produces
private property that is enclosed into durable forms which persist into
and even control the future. From this critical enclosure of the world and the
self, written in the register of property, other modern epistemologies and political
projects easily attach themselves to this clear and distinct unit, the individual. (Adam
Smith, for example, quickly comes to mind.) The indi- vidual, carved out of
nature through productive labor and conceiving the world and himself
on the model of appropriating private property, emerges as the cornerstone
of political theories and practices in cultures of phallicized whiteness. The individual
thereby comes to function as an ahistorical unit defined by its productive labor’s
distancing relation to the state of nature, not by any historico-political forces. (With
his unhistorical thinking, Locke acts per- fectly as a liberal individual.) Classical
liberalism writes the individual as the (allegedly) neutral substratum of all
political decisions, positioning it as sep- arable from historico-political forces.
In carving the individual out of both the natural and socio-historico-political
landscapes, modern political and epistemological projects turn around Locke’s
fundamental metaphors of en- closure. The individual, that seat of political and
personal subjectivity, is enclosed and thus cut off from all other forces circulating in
the social envi- ronment. The individual effectively functions as a piece of private
property, with the strange twist of owning itself, impervious to all intruders and
pro- tected by the inherent right of ownership, derived from the ontological
right to one’s own enclosed body. History then is reduced to a collection of
what Kelly Oliver has aptly called “discrete facts that can be known or
not known, written in history books, and [that] are discontinuous with
the present” (2001, 130). History is that collection of events that occurred in the
past and is now tightly sealed in that past. History is simply what has happened,
with no fundamental effect or influence upon what is happening now or might
happen in the future. Historicity is unthought and unthinkable here. The modern
rational self—the liberal individual—exists in a temporally and historically sealed
vacuum, made possible by the clear disjunction between past, present, and future.
Cartesian concepts of time as discrete moments that do not enter into contact or
affect one another dominate this conception of the individ- ual.10 The logic of the
limit thereby demarcates the past sharply and neatly from the present, turning
each into objects about which we can develop concepts, facts, and truths. The
future, that temporal horizon initiated by preferred forms of complex labor,
becomes the sole focus of intention and desire. But the future never arrives.
Therefore, if historicity and ‘the historical’ mean reading present ideas,
values, or concepts as undergoing a constant shaping and reshaping by
material forces, this divorce of the past from the present effectively renders all
temporal zones—past, present, future, and all permutations—ahistorical.
Existence itself is radically dehistoricized. And the individual, that bastion of
political activity and value, accordingly resides in a historical vacuum, untouched
by historical forces—the very realm of whiteness. This ahistorical view of history
perpetuates the modern project of clas- sical liberalism and its damages, creating a
particular kind of individual. The individual becomes the locus of identity, selfhood,
and subjectivity in the modern political project. Demarcated from historical
existence, it also re- quires careful delineation from other bodies, whether persons,
institutions, history, or social attitudes. This concept of the individual develops with a
pronounced insistence on its neutrality, rendering specific attributes of the individual
merely particular qualities that function, again, on the model of private property:
characteristics such as race, gender, religion, or nationality remain at a distance
from this insistently neutral individual. (I use the pro- noun “it” to emphasize the
function of this alleged neutrality, a dynamic that is central to the valorization of the
white propertied Christian male as the subject of power in phallicized whiteness.)
This insular existence, under- scored by its ahistorical status, is further ensured by
claims of radical auton- omy, whereby the individual is the source, site, and endpoint
of all actions, desires, thoughts, and behaviors: we choose what we do. And we
choose it, of course, because we are rational: Kantian ethics become the proper
bookend to Locke’s initiating of “high modernity’s”11 schemas. This demarcation of
the individual then carves the critical division between internal and external, and its
political-psychic counterpart, that between self and Other. The self is located
squarely and exclusively in one’s rational faculties, the natural law that, according to
Locke, civilizes us into economies of labor, utility, and a strange mix of scarcity and
abundance. The modern rational self is radically self-contained—enclosed. It is a
sovereign self, unaffected by and independent from any thing or force external to it,
whether materiality or the Other. Assuming it exercises rationality appropriately, this
self is radically autonomous, choosing its own place in the world. (Pointing to
America, Locke insists that civilized men are free to leave society.) It does not heed
any call of the Other. It is effectively autog- enous, existing in a pre-Hegelian
philosophical world.12 Utility and its epistemological counterpart, instrumentality,
subsequently become the operative conceptions of power in this schema of the
liberal individual as the self. Autonomous, autogenous, and ahistorical, the modern
rational individual is in full control of its self. Its power is thereby something that it
owns and wields, as it chooses. Power is not some force that might shape the
individual without its assent or, at a minimum, its acknowledg- ment. It is
something that an individual, even if in the form of an individual state, wields
intentionally. It can still use this power legitimately or illegiti- mately, but that is a
matter of choice. The individual controls power and the ways that it affects the
world: this is its expression of freedom. Accordingly, the role of the law becomes to
vigilantly protect this ahistorical unit, the individual, from the discriminations and
violences of historical vicissitudes. The role of the law is to protect the individual’s
power, the seat of its freedom. We are far from Foucaultian ideas that perhaps
power and history constitute the ways we view and experience the world, shaping
our categories and embedding us in this very notion of the individual as
autonomous, au- togenous, and ahistorical. The liberal individual, untouched by
material, po- litical, and historical conditions, is a neutral substratum that freely
wields its power as it chooses: this is the liberal sovereignty and mastery of
freedom. Because the individual is this neutral substratum, differences may or may
not attach themselves to it. But those differences are cast into that incon- sequential
space of material conditions along with history and the Other. The odd twist of selfownership surfaces more fully here. Following Locke’s metaphors of enclosure, the
individual is enclosed and sealed off not only from all historical and social forces in
the environment, but also from the very attributes of difference within itself. While
specific attributes that con- stitute “difference” in North American culture
continuously shift, with new categories emerging and old ones receding, the
particular vector of difference that matters depends on our historical location, and all
its complexities.13 Consequently, these attributes do not fundamentally affect the
neutrality of the modern individual. These differences occur at the level of the body
and history, realms of existence that do not touch the self-contained individual. The
neutral individual relates to these differences through the models of enclosure and
ownership. It experiences these discrete parts of itself (e.g., race, gender, religion,
nationality) as one owns a variety of objects in econ- omies of (scarce) private
property: one chooses when one wishes to purchase, own, display, or wear such
objects as one freely desires. The unnerving in- fluence of power surfaces, however,
as we realize that this free choice be- comes the exclusive power of the subject
position valorized in cultures of phallicized whiteness, the white propertied Christian
(straight) male14 who determines when, how, and which differences matter.
Neutrality thus functions as the conceptual glue of the modern political project of
classical liberalism. It allows the model of ownership to take hold as the dominant
conception of selfhood: one’s true self resides in a neutral space and from that
space one owns one’s power, one’s freedom, and one’s attributes. Just as the
capitalist fantasy still convinces us today that we choose and control our private
property, the neutral individual also resides in a self- enclosed, self-contained space
that hovers above these matters. Just as the kind of car an American drives today
supposedly does not affect the kind of person that he or she is, so too the rational
and therefore neutral individual resides in a space that transcends material
conditions and their entrapments. Differences between individuals, whether of race
or religion or gender or nationality or sexuality, become a mere matter of
ownership—i.e., what one has and has not chosen to own. And as the inherent
rights of private property imply, one consequently has the right to protect or
dispense with one’s prop- erty: the individual is free to choose how to wield its
power and how to respond to these (inconsequential) differences. Not to have this
ability—i.e., not to be able to choose and control when and how one’s gender, race,
nationality, sexuality, or religion matters—signifies a lack of individualism, a lack of
power, a lack of civility.15 The individual thus becomes the proprietor of its
differences and the various, discrete rights obtaining to them. The logic of enclosure
and de- marcation, expressing the logic of the limit here, grounds the conceptions of
difference itself in these schemas of classical liberalism. One owns—en- closes—
one’s differences and, additionally, the differences themselves are dis- crete—
demarcated—from one another. The language of rights derives from the
overarching model of ownership, just as we find it developed out of the fundamental
right to one’s own enclosed body in Locke’s text. The modern project of liberal
individualism thereby reads difference as that which is, can be, or ought to be
demarcated, delimited, enclosed—and owned. When I turn to contemporary
debates around affirmative action below, I will return to several dynamics that have
emerged here. First of all, the liberal individual exists as a neutral
substratum to which differences, caused by history and materiality (the
body), attach themselves. Equality conse- quently resides in that neutral
substratum of the individual and we access it only by stripping away the
merely historical attributes of difference: equality and neutrality
mutually constitute one another. Consequently, those who cannot
abstract from merely historical attributes of difference (e.g., race and
gender) will be read as unequal to those for whom these historical
differences do not matter. Secondly, freedom is understood as the expression
of power, over which one has conscious and rational control. Power, framed as a
tool that one wields, is derived from the model of instrumental reason. And, finally,
the liberal individual experiences differences such as race, gender, religion, and
nationality as attributes that it owns. It consequently exercises rights over them such
as those derived from the inherent right of ownership that Locke locates in the
natural imperative to labor: the language of rights assumes, thrives in, and thereby
perpetuates an economy of scarcity, the economy in which debates around
affirmative action are firmly entrenched. Each of these colludes to give phallicized
whiteness the necessary tools to maintain the white propertied Christian (straight)
male as the valorized subject in power. Functioning through the rhetoric of
neutrality, this specific subject disavows its historical and material conditioning and
thereby gains the power to determine when, how, and which differences matter.
Grounded in the fundamental value of neutrality, difference should not matter;
hence, for example, contemporary rhetorics of color-blindness dominate discourses
about the desired endpoint of a ‘just’—and therefore raceless—society.17 However,
in those circumstances in which difference insists on its existence (i.e.,
circumstances in which ‘minorities’ or the disenfranchised insist on their rights,
voices, and even votes), the decisions about when, how, and which differences
matter will remain in the power of the neutral individual, the subject in power—and
the one who is free.
The AFFs politics of inclusion is structural adjustment of the black body that
forecloses black liberation. If we win their scholarship produces this structural
violence that is a reason to vote negative
Wilderson 2010- Frank B Wilderson III- Professor at UC irvine- Red, White and Black- p. 8-10
I have little interest in assailing political conservatives. Nor is my ar- gument wedded
to the disciplinary needs of political science, or even sociology, where injury must be
established, first, as White supremacist event, from which one then embarks on a
demonstration of intent, or racism; and, if one is lucky, or foolish, enough, a solution
is proposed. If the position of the Black is, as I argue, a paradigmatic impossibility in
the Western Hemisphere, indeed, in the world, in other words, if a Black is the very
antithesis of a Human subject, as imagined by Marxism and psy- choanalysis, then
his or her paradigmatic exile is not simply a function of repressive practices on the
part of institutions (as political science and sociology would have it). This
banishment from the Human fold is to be found most profoundly in the emancipatory
meditations of Black people's staunchest "allies," and in some of the most "radical"
films. Here—not in restrictive policy, unjust legislation, police brutality, or
conservative scholarship—is where the Settler/Master's sinews are most resilient.
The polemic animating this research stems from (1) my reading of Native and Black
American meta-commentaries on Indian and Black subject positions written over the
past twenty-three years and ( 2 ) a sense of how much that work appears out of joint
with intellectual protocols and political ethics which underwrite political praxis and
socially engaged popular cinema in this epoch of multiculturalism and globalization.
The sense of abandonment I experience when I read the meta-commentaries on
Red positionality (by theorists such as Leslie Silko, Ward Churchill, Taiaiake Alfred,
Vine Deloria Jr., and Haunani-Kay Trask) and the meta-commentaries on Black
positionality (by theorists such as David Marriott, Saidiya Hartman, Ronald Judy,
Hortense Spillers, Orlando Patterson, and Achille Mbembe) against the deluge of
multicultural positivity is overwhelming. One suddenly realizes that, though the
semantic field on which subjec- tivity is imagined has expanded phenomenally
through the protocols of multiculturalism and globalization theory, Blackness and an
unflinching articulation of Redness are more unimaginable and illegible within this
expanded semantic field than they were during the height of the F B I ' S repressive
Counterintelligence Program ( C O I N T E L P R O ) . On the seman- tic field on
which the new protocols are possible, Indigenism can indeed lO become partially
legible through a programmatics of structural adjust- ment (as fits our globalized
era). In other words, for the Indians' subject position to be legible, their positive
registers of lost or threatened cultural identity must be foregrounded, when in point
of fact the antagonistic register of dispossession that Indians "possess" is a position
in relation to a socius structured by genocide. As Churchill points out, everyone from
Armenians to Jews have been subjected to genocide, but the Indigenous position is
one for which genocide is a constitutive element, not merely an historical event,
without which Indians would not, paradoxically, "exist." 9 Regarding the Black
position, some might ask why, after claims 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 integrity; if the Slave is, to borrow from Patterson, generally dishonored, perpetually
open to gratuitous violence, and void of kinship structure, that is, having no relations
that need be recognized, a being outside of re- lationality, then our analysis cannot
be approached through the rubric of gains or reversals in struggles with the state
and civil society, not unless and until the interlocutor first explains how the Slave is
of the world. The onus is not on one who posits the Master/Slave dichotomy but on
the one who argues there is a distinction between Slaveness and Blackness. How,
when, and where did such a split occur? The woman at the gates of Columbia
University awaits an answer.
The alternative is an unflinching paradigmatic analysis that poses the question
of whether civil society is ethical
Wilderson 10 [Frank, Professor of African American Studies and Drama at UC Irvine, Ph.D. in
Rhetoric/Film Studies from UC Berkeley, “Red, White, & Black”, pp ix-]
STRANGE AS it might seem, this book project began in South Africa. During the
last years of apartheid I worked for revolutionary change in both an underground
and above-ground capacity, for the Charterist Movement in general and the ANC in
particular. During this period, I began to see how essential an unflinching
paradigmatic analysis is to a movement dedicated to the complete overthrow of an
existing order. The neoliberal compromises that the radical elements of the Chartist
Movement made with the moderate elements were due, in large part, to our inability
or unwillingness to hold the moderates' feet to tthe fire of a political agenda
predicated on an unflinching paradigmatic analysis. Instead, we allowed our
energies and points of attention to be displaced by and onto pragmatic
considerations. Simply put, we abdicated the power to pose the question—and the
power to pose the question is the greatest power of all. Elsewhere, I have written
about this unfortunate turn of events (Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid),
so I'll not rehearse the details here. Suffice it to say, this book germinated in the
many political and academic discussions and debates that I was fortunate enough to
be a part of at a historic moment and in a place where the word revolution was
spoken in earnest, free of qualifiers and irony. For their past and ongoing ideas and
interventions, I extend solidarity and appreciation to comrades Amanda Alexander,
Franco Barchiesi, Teresa Barnes, Patrick Bond, Ashwin Desai, Nigel Gibson,
Steven Greenberg, Allan Horowitz, Bushy Kelebonye (deceased), Tefu Kelebonye,
Ulrike Kistner, Kamogelo Lekubu, Andile Mngxitama, Prishani Naidoo, John Shai,
and S'bu Zulu.
The black body is the site of social death par excellence, having become dead by
a 700-year injunction barring its subjectivity. Social death is a condition of
existence and not some avoidable impact—how we relate to this condition is all
that is important
Wilderson 02 - The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal-Presented a t #Imprisoned
Intellectuals # Conference Brown University]
Civil society is not a terrain intended for the Black subject. It is coded as waged and
wages are White. Civil society is the terrain where hegemony is produced,
contested, mapped. And th e invitat ion to p articipate in hegemony's gestures of
influence, leadership, and consent is not ext ended to t he unwaged. We live in the
world , but ex ist out side of civil s ociety. This structurally impossible position
is a paradox, because the Black subject, the slave, is vital to political economy:
s/he kick-starts capital at its genesis and rescues it from its overaccumulation crisis at its end. But Marxism has no account of this
phenomenal birth and life-saving role played by the Black subject: from
Marx and Gr amsci we have con sistent s ilence. In taking Foucau lt to ta sk for a
ssum ing a univ ersal s ubject in r evolt ag ainst d iscipline, in the same s pirit in
which I have t aken Gr amsci to ta sk for as suming a u niversal sub ject, the subject
of civil societ y in revolt a gainst capita l, Joy Jam es writes : The U.S. carceral
network kills, however, and in its prisons, it kills more blacks than any other ethnic
group. American prisons constitute an "outside" in U.S. political life. In fact, our
society displays waves of concentric outside circles with increasing distances from
bourgeois self-policing. The state routinely polices the14 unassim ilable in the hell of
lockdow n, deprivat ion tanks , control units , and holes for political prisoners
(Resisting State Violence 1996: 34 ) But this peculiar preoccupation is not
Gramsci's bailiwick. His concern is with White folks; or with folks in a White (ned)
enough subject position that they are confronted by, or threat ened by th e remova l
of, a wag e -- be it monetary or social. But Black subjectivity itself disarticulates the
Gramscian dream as a ubiquitous emancipatory strategy, because Gramsci, like
most White activists, and radical American movements like the prison abolition
movement, has no theory of the unwaged, no solidarity with the slave If we are to
take Fanon at his word when he writes, #Decolonization, which sets out to
change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete
disorder # (37) then we must accept the fact that no other body
functions in the Imaginary, the Symbolic, or the Real so completely as a
repository of complete disorder as the Black body. Blackness is the site of
absolute dereliction at the level of the Real, for in its magnetizing of bullets the Black
body functions as the map of gratuitous violence through which civil society is
possible: namely, those other bodies for which violence is, or can be, contingent.
Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Symbolic, for
Blackness in America generates no categories for the chromosome of History, no
data for the categories of Immigration or Sovereignty; it is an experience without
analog # a past, without a heritage. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction
at the level of t he Imaginary for #whoever says #rape # says Black, # (Fanon) ,
whoever says #prison # says Black, and whoever says #AIDS # says Black
(Sexton) # the #Negro is a phobogenic object # (Fanon). Indeed &a phobogenic
object &a past without a heritage &the map of gratuitous violence &a program of
complete disorder. But whereas this realization is, and should be cause for alarm,
it should not be cause for lament, or worse, disavowal # not at least, for a true
revolutionary, or for a truly revolutionary movement such as prison a bolition. 15
If a social movement is to be neither social democratic, nor Marxist, in terms of the
structure of its political desire then it should grasp the invitation to assume the
positionality of subjects of social death that present themselves; and, if we are to
be honest with ourselves we must admit that the “Negro “ has been inviting
Whites, and as well as civil society #s junior partners, to the dance of social
death for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps.
They have been, and remain today # even in the most anti-racist movements, like
the prison abolition movement # invested elsewhere. This is not to say that all
oppositional political desire today is pro-White, but it is to say that it is
almost always “anti-Black”
which is to say it will not dance with death. Black
liberation, as a prospect, makes radicalism more dangerous to the U.S. Not
because it raises the specter of some alternative polity (like socialism, or
community control of existing resources) but because its condition of possibility
as well as its gesture of resistance functions as a negative dialectic: a politics of
refusal and a refusal to affirm , a program of complete disorder. One must embrace
its disorder, its in coherence and allow oneself to be elaborated by it, if
indeed one's politics are to be underwritten by a desire to take this country down. If
this is not the desire which underwrites one #s politics then through what strategy of
legitimation is the word #prison # being linked t o the wo rd #abolition #? Wh at ar
e this movem ent #s lines of po litical a ccount abilit y? There #s nothing foreign,
frightening, or even unpracticed about the embrace of disorder and incoherence.
The desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by disorder and incoherence is not
anathema in and of itself: no one, for example, has ever been known to say #geewhiz, if only my orgasms would end a little sooner, or maybe not come at all. # But
few so-called radicals desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by the disorder and
incoherence of Blackness # and the state of politica l movemen ts in A merica to
day is ma rked by t his very N egroph obogen isis: #gee-whiz, if only Black rage
could be more coherent, or maybe not come at all. # Perhaps there #s something
more terrifying about the joy of Black, then there is about the joy of sex (unless one
is talking sex wit h a Negr o). Perhaps coalitions today p refer to remain in- orgas
mic in the fa ce of civilsociety # with hegemony as a handy prophylactic, just in
case. But if, through this stasis, or paralysis , they tr y to do t he work of pr ison a
bolit ion # that work will fail; because it is always work from a position of
coherence (i.e. the worker) on behalf of a position of incoherence, the Black subject,
or prison slave. In this way, social formations on the Left remain blind to the
contradictions of coalitions bet ween worker s and s laves. T hey remain coalitions
opera ting with in the logic of civil society; and function less as revolutionary
promises and more as crowding out scenarios of Black antagonisms # they simply
feed our frustration. Whereas the positionality of the worker # be s/he a factory
worker demanding a monetary wage or an immigrant or White woman demanding a
social wage # gestures toward the reconfiguration of civil society, the positionality of
the Black subject # be s/he a prison-slave or a prison-slave-in-waiting # gestures
toward the disconfiguration of civil society: from the coherence of civil society, t he
Black subject beckons with the in coherence of civil war. A civil war which
reclaims Blackness not as a positive value, but as a politically enabling site, to
quote Fanon, of “absolute dereliction“: a scandal which rends civil society
asunder. Civil war, then, becomes that unthought, but never forgotten
understudy of hegemony. A Black specter waiting in the wings, an endless
antagonism that cannot be satisfied (via reform or reparation) but must nonetheless
be pursued to the death.
CASE
Islamophobia
This is a prior framing question—racism is a deontological side constraint that must
come first. The 1AC is an investment in the killing state, which governs by expanding
democracy and creating new liberal subjects. The rule of law does not end conflict,
racism, or war- it uses the discourse of liberalism to eradicate the racialized monsters
who threaten it
Anthony Paul Farley, 2002, Amusing Monsters, pg. 1511-16
The world, according to the theology of the killing state, is filled with demons, angels, purity,
and danger. We the people imagine ourselves to be angels in danger. Our imagined innocence
is a requirement of the killing state. The killing state, which governs through crime, being
democratic, "requires citizens who imagine themselves to be potential victims or those
responsible for the care of such victims." 80 For such citizens "[t]he death penalty remains the ultimate form of
public victim recognition."81 Leviathan, then, sets "the victim" in a high place. As Alison Young writes, "the
victim.., offers us a kind of certainty against such loss of limits. 8 2 Further, "[t]he victim
assures us that there is an end to the loss of faith, that there is a point beyond which nihilism
will not go." 3 Former Attorney General Janet Reno states, "I draw most of my strength from victims,.., for
they represent America to me .... You are my heroes and heroines. You are but little lower than the
angels."' In thinking about these angelic victims from whom the Attorney General "draw[s] most of her strength,
85 as the ideal citizens of the killing state it is also important to remember those whose
exclusion is the wind beneath their wings. In the theology of the killing state, blacks appear as
demons: "Capital punishment also has been crucial in the processes of demonizing young, black males
and using them in the pantheon of public enemies to replace the Soviet 'evil empire. '86 A "little lower
than the angels,"87 but, as Sarat writes, "the victims' rights movement wants more. '88 Why?
Because "[p]unishment lives in culture through its pedagogical effects. It teaches us how to
think about categories like intention, responsibility, and injury, and it models the socially
appropriate ways of responding to injuries done to us."89 The victims' rights movement,
therefore, "seeks participation and power by making the victim the symbolic heart of modern
legality."' Sarat argues that attempts to differentiate revenge and retribution fail. The former
cannot be contained, only renamed. The latter is usually just the cloak for the former: "The
demand for victims' rights and the insistence that we hear the voices of the victims are just
the latest 'style' in which vengeance has disguised itself."91 Vengeance appears in the form of
the victims' rights movement demand to amplify the voices of victims, a demand that is itself
"but a symptom of the fragility and instability of the myths... that have been used to
legitimate the killing state. 9 2 This symptom-disguised-as-a-demand is disastrous because the
legal system seeks, impossibly, to "replace ... vengeful violence with an economy of violence
controlled and disciplined by legal norms."93 Vengeance is what the victims' rights movement
wants but state violence, "controlled and disciplined by legal norms," is not vengeance, at
least, not exactly.94 State violence, therefore, fails to satisfy those who desire it. And this, I
argue, is precisely what causes the demands to increase in intensity. The desire for vengeance
cannot be satisfied legally and is, therefore, the perfect ally of the Leviathan to whom the
prayerful, angry voices of the victims' rights movement are directed. Just as vengeance of times appears
as retribution, so too does the entity to whom these monsters are monstrously sacrificed Of times appear as Apollo. A closer
examination, however, reveals a decidedly Dionysian aspect to the face that governs the ceremony. We might imagine-with an
imagination amplified by the electricity coursing through the body of the condemned, an electricity we can feel coursing though our
own monstrous corporate body, an electricity that causes our hearts to beat as one-how our own faces must look to the anybody
strapped to the electric chair or any of our other killing devices: "A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to
torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning
one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic."95 The body electric sings its hymns to Apollo (retribution) or
Dionysus (vengeance) or, and this is most likely, to itself and its hierarchies. These hierarchies, our hierarchies,
expressed
through law, are the same hierarchies that produce amusing monsters. And these hierarchies,
expressed through law, take bodily form: white-over-black, man-over-woman, citizen-overalien, and so on. Law does not settle anything: "Humanity does not gradually progress from
combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces
warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from
domination to domination."96 The legal system is the way in which we take pleasure in the
sacrifice. Executions concern us all. Our hierarchies, "the system," produce monsters:
monsters whose murders and executions are found amusing. Monsters who find amusement
in executions and who look upon the scaffold as if it were a stage peopled with actors. And
this peculiar passion play justifies the entire state apparatus of poverty, racism, sexism,
neglect that creates the distortions-monstrous distortions-distortions that often find
themselves expressed in and through monsters who kill. The passion play-state killing-justifies
the entire monstrous apparatus that is Leviathan by focusing our anger, a collective anger
cultivated by the system, on the individual monster that killed. We have become, all of us,
amusing monsters. Sarat writes of the old spectacle of the scaffold, a spectacle that has, in his view, largely disappeared:
Viewers obtained pleasure as well as schooling in their relation to sovereign power, by
witnessing pain. The excesses of execution and the enthusiasm of the crowd blended the
performance of torture with pleasure, creating an unembarrassed celebration of death that knew no law except the
law of one person's will inscribed on the body of the condemned. The display of violence, of the sovereignty that
was constituted in killing, was designed to create fearful, if not obedient, subjects.97 This
spectacle has not, however, disappeared. It appears today in a form more suitable for Apollo than Dionysus: "Today the death
penalty... has been transformed
from dramatic spectacle to cool, bureaucratic operation, and the
role of the public now is strictly limited and tightly controlled."" Apollo, however, is, as often as not,
Dionysus disguised: "the law is a calculated and relentless pleasure, delight in the promised blood,
which permits the perpetual instigation of new dominations and the staging of meticulously
repeated scenes of violence."99 The pleasure of domination is a many-splendored thing."° It
can appear in a wild, rough, up-close form or it can appear in a highly stylized, sophisticated
distanced form. Ecstasy-in-domination can secret itself anywhere and every where-even in
state killing. State killing is secret, yes, but it is, more importantly, public. We participate, as a
public, in the general ritual of state killing as well as in those individual killings that are accompanied
by media storms such as that surrounding Timothy McVeigh. Regarding these public secrets of the scaffold, Phyllis Goldfarb reveals:
Empathy, more broadly and deeply experienced, would have prevented the Oklahoma City bombing. We rightly ask: Why couldn't
the McVeigh who could sympathize so deeply with the humanity of the Branch Davidians appreciate the humanity of the innocents
of the Murrah building? Let us then extend the question to ourselves: Are we too suffering from selective empathy? In expressing
compassion for the victims in the Oklahoma City bombing, are we replicating the very same thing that we must always fight if we are
to have any hope of preventing further atrocities-the dehumanization of another human being, even a human being as deeply
disturbed as Timothy McVeigh? What
is secret is the way that Leviathan allows, even encourages us all
to take pleasure in the ritual denial of the humanity of the condemned. What is secret is the
way that Leviathan, by encouraging us all to deny the humanity of the condemned,
encourages us also to sanctify the terrible hierarchies that produced the atmosphere of
violence that joined the condemned to the victim through the act of murder. The stormy
violence of our laws gathers and darkens and clouds our futures and, with what strangely seems like
suddenness, sometimes joins victim and murderer with the lightning act of murder, an act which our
laws, Leviathan, attributes to the lightning, the murderer, and not the storm. What is secret is the way that
Levziathan makes itself sinless and therefore holy by killing the evidence of its evils. What is
secret is the way that the "flattened narratives" of Leviathan's anti-gospel hide this entire
monstrous process from our eyes-eyes too busy watching Leviathan's executions through
Leviathan's eyes to see through the false necessities of the killing state." Our own all-toohuman eyes stay closed (too busy watching Leviathan). The modern scaffold is pleasurable
only when we experience the spectacle as Leviathan would have us experience it. °3 Allen Lee Davis
was burned to death in the electric chair by the state of Florida. The picture of his post-electrocution body appears, like a sharp stick
in the eye, as "Figures 3, 4, and 5" in When the State Kills."' Figures 3, 4, and 5 depict a bald, bloated, bleeding, marshmallowcolored man with eyes of burnt cork.' It is an ugly picture, an awful picture, an unsettling picture of a monstrous moment. "If you
want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face-forever": it is a picture of the future, according to Leviathan."
The 1AC forgets that Islamophobia affects Black people far differently than Brown
people. Acts of Islmophobic violence against Black people are ignored, and AntiBlackness plagues the Brown Muslim community. No matter what kind of violence
upon Brown people the 1AC resolves, Black people will always be the site of absolute
derilection
MIRE 15 [Muna Mire, 4-29-2015, "Towards a Black Muslim Ontology of Resistance," New Inquiry,
http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/towards-a-black-muslim-ontology-of-resistance/]
Black Muslims fall into the rhetorical trap of anti-blackness as it exists today in what Columbia
University professor Saidiya Hartman calls the “afterlife of slavery.” Her colleague Stephen Dillon explains that thanks to Hartman’s
analysis, “scholars have come to understand the barracoons, slave holds, and plantations of the Middle Passage as spatial,
discursive, ontological, and economic analogues of modern punishment that have haunted their way into the present.” Folk
rationalizations for anti-Blackness from above and below have survived along with these growths, sustaining cartoonish claims about
Black people and Blackness that still structure our most quotidian choices as citizens.¶ Black people are (in no particular order):¶ lazy;
stupid; untrustworthy; deviant; oversexed; ugly; violent; rapacious; brutal; unfeeling; inhuman.¶ Part of the covenant of the
American Dream is an agreement non-Black immigrants enter into when they land on U.S. shores. It’s an implicit contract with
explicit aims: when you come to America, you’d better not ally yourself in any way with Black people or Blackness if you expect to
get ahead. Black people are bad news. For
Arabs and South Asians who make up a significant portion of
the U.S. Muslim community, this manifests in a model-minority ethos that uses Black
Americans as an example of what not to do and who not to affiliate with. I experienced this myself as
a young Black Muslim woman, and it disgusted me. Ya abid! It was not uncommon to hear jokes whose
punchline rested on a word that meant, essentially, nigger. When I resisted what I saw as racism
from my Muslims peers, I would receive a half-hearted, “but we don’t mean you! We mean
those other Black people!Ӧ My grandmother was a Black Somali woman who worked as law enforcement in the Emirates
in the late 1970s. Widowed tragically young—my grandfather died in his forties—she was forced to take the position of breadwinner
for her family, my young mother and her eight siblings. At the time, male police officers were not culturally permitted to deal with
unmarried female subjects alone. Religious custom dictated the need for a small force of female officers, hijabis, who would process
or interview women that the male police officers could not freely engage with. As a result, my mother and her siblings attended high
school in Abu Dhabi, at an Arab school. My grandmother was and still is a hard woman. My mother and aunts and uncles, all nine of
them, would learn Arabic and attempt to assimilate into Emirati life. But despite being an embodied representative of the state as a
police officer, she suffered profound racism from Arab citizens.¶ My mother didn’t talk freely about growing up in Abu Dhabi. As a
child, I would pry for details sparingly given by her at long intervals. Because she would ritualistically remind me of the privilege I had
growing up in the West, I wondered what her girlhood was like. I dreamed of my mother’s adolescent becoming: Where did she go
to high school? What was it like? How did she meet my father? These chapters were always missing, carefully excluded from the
abridged version of her youth I got: the stories she would tell us of Somalia. Ha Nolaato! I was sure I came from a beautiful place in
Africa where beaches were endless and guavas and papayas grew bigger than my head. What’s more, Hooyo inscribed “Black is
beautiful” on my brain when I was still small. Her standards of beauty and self were determinedly Afrocentric, something I would
later learn was an act of resistance in her childrearing. But my mother would always tell me I was a Muslimah too, something I tried
to incorporate into the way carried myself—even as a little girl.¶ It wasn’t until I was out in the world myself—in the House of God of
all places—that
I would understand and experience anti-Blackness for the first time. At twelve,
my tearful recounting of racism from my Brown Muslim peers at the kitchen table prompted
my mother to finally open up to me about her own experiences in the Emirates growing up.
They were ugly: her peers bullied her and her siblings systematically and on racial grounds.
“Abid” was a word painfully familiar to her – but not one she expected to follow her through space and time,
across the sea to the West. Here, where we would start over from the smoldering trauma the Somali Civil War left in its wake, we
were still just niggers. Even to those we shared our deen with. My mother was heartbroken that she could not
protect me from cruelties of those she saw as her own people, but chose to teach me to love Blackness and love
Allah nonetheless. In her eyes and in His, I was whole.¶ As Black folks, we are in practice not a part of the
larger community of Muslims; we are allowed to practice, but we don’t share deen with the ummah. America is home to the most
racially diverse group of Muslims in the world, but the community is still segregated. What does it mean to be seen as Muslim? As a
legitimate believer? Whatever the answer, in the eyes of many U.S. Muslims today, it’s negated by Blackness. Black Muslims
are a contradiction in terms—invisible despite being the foundation for the faith in the country. Black Muslims are
not seen as true Muslims. And that is the moral equivocation that legitimizes and props up all manner
of anti-Black racism in American Muslim community today . Black people are not seen as viable potential
partners in Muslim faith or love; Black families are not accepted into Muslim faith communities outside of their own. State
violence against Black Muslims is not acknowledged or used to mobilize movements the way
violence against non-Black Muslims does. One has to ask: does Black Life Matter to the Muslim community? Is the
Muslim community aware of the structural impacts of anti-Black racism in America? The very idea of a larger coherent Muslim
community is thrown into question when we confront cultural rifts as deep, wide, and painful as these.¶ The public perception of
Muslims, particularly since the faith was thrust into the spotlight post 9/11, remains riddled with misconceptions. Racist stereotypes
external to the Muslim community dictate that Americans still think of Muslims as brown bearded men. As recently as the white
supremacist massacre at a Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, the conflation of Sikh men who wear turbans with Muslims has
had deadly consequences. In 2013, Columbia Professor Prabhjot Singh, who studied hate crimes against Sikhs wrongly believed to be
Muslim in the U.S. post-9/11, was himself the target for such violence. He was attacked by a group of young men on his way home in
what was believed to be a hate crime. “I heard, ‘Terrorist, Osama, get him,’” Singh recalled, explaining in a New York Times article
after the attack that “Our turban and beard are a trigger for fear in the minds of many Americans.” Public perception of Muslims as
the bearded brown other post-9/11 functions as a shadowy parallel to Islamophobic state violence, the vigilante enforcer of racial
categories of difference. Islamophobia is a lived reality for everyone who is Muslim, including those who are seen as Muslim but are
not.¶ Because Black Muslims are not perceived as Muslim, they face rogue Islamophobic violence less often—
but when that violence comes, their deaths do not garner as much outrage or mobilize Muslims in the same ways. Around the same
time three young Arab Muslims were murdered in their Chapel Hill home, a
Somali Muslim man was shot through
the door of his apartment in Fort McMurray, Alberta. While Deah, Yusor, and Razan’s deaths trended worldwide,
Mustafa Mattan’s murder was barely a passing blip outside of the Somali community. In a
thought-provoking article co-written by UCLA Professor Khaled Beydoun and Muslim Anti-Racist Collaborative cofounder Margari Hill
entitled “The Color of Muslim Mourning,” the authors pointedly ask the Muslim community who they prioritize and why. “Deah’s
fundraiser for dental supplies for Syrian refugees went from $20,000 before his death to $380,000. In contrast, Mattan’s family still
is struggling to raise $15,000 for his burial costs,” they write. The reality for today’s Black Muslims is bifurcated into a war fought on
two fronts: a battle with one’s own community to be seen and respected as well as a battle to resist targeted state and vigilante
violence. Black
Muslims are also being surveilled, detained, and harassed by state operatives
with increasingly alarming regularity. As Muslims, and as politically concerned citizens, we know the name of
someone like Omar Khadr. How many of us can say the same of Mahdi Hashi, a Somali British national who has been stripped of
citizenship and currently rots away in detention in Manhattan after refusing to spy on other Muslims? The Muslim community’s
disinterest in his case speaks to the violence of what Frank B. Wilderson has termed “anti-Black solidarity.” Even when protecting his
community, Hashi remains invisible.¶ At the turn of the 20th century, Du Bois mapped a conceptual understanding of the Black
American subject: “One ever feels his twoness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two
warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” Double consciousness signifies a
subjecthood, a self whose several identities are at odds with one another. To be Black and Muslim in America today is to live a sort
of Du Boisian double consciousness with an added dimension of dissonant interiority. To be Black and Muslim is to occupy a space of
simultaneous invisibility and hypervisibility. Blackness is hypervisible, perceived and consumed through the historical aperture of the
brutality of slavery. The stereotypes about Black people that guide our most quotidian and unconscious choices dictate that
Blackness is dangerous: something to be contained; a threat. Blackness does not ask the Black subject to legitimize their Blackness,
perhaps as a consequence of hypervisibility. It is simply a fact of one’s being, a physicality that signifies much more than just
melanin.¶ But when
you add the identity marker of “Muslim” to that of “Black,” something very
different happens: erasure. Black Muslims are invisible to their faith communities and to
wider society, for Muslims, unlike Black people, must actively legitimize their identities as
Muslims—through practicing faith, maintaining proximity to a community, or a cultural
inheritance. The hypervisibility of Blackness makes one’s identity as a Muslim impossible precisely because Blackness precludes
Muslimness in the cultural imaginary. So to occupy both subject positions is to experience the downward thrust of cognitive
dissonance: you will always be too Black to be a true Muslim, but you must live with all of the pain that America inflicts on both
Black people and Muslims. How are we to understand ourselves and our social locations, if being Muslim precludes being Black,
which cannot be reconciled with being an American subject? The
historical and contemporary erasure of Black
Muslims can only be situated in the context of a violent anti-Black solidarity; the Black Muslim
in America must then contend with an economy of unresolved strivings—towards faith,
visibility, resistance, and self determination.
Solvency
SPOT doesn’t do anything—there are only officers at 0.8% of US Airports
Forbes 14 (Steve, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of Forbes Media, editorials for each issue of Forbes
under the heading of “Fact and Comment,” January 6, “Spot-on Mistake at TSA; Duped by Obama,”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/othercomments/2014/01/06/spot-on-mistake-at-tsa-duped-by-obama/,
//rck)
Consider SPOT’s
results last year: Behavior detection officers chose nearly 36,000 travelers for extra screening, then
referred about 2,100 of them to law enforcement. Of those, a tiny fraction were denied boarding, and 183 were arrested on a
range of charges, from fraudulent documents to suspected drugs. None for terrorism. The agency points to the arrests
as proof of SPOT’s success. But consider that the TSA had to pick out 196 travelers, on average, for each one who ultimately
merited arrest. Not exactly a big payoff for the effort and expense of keeping 3,131 officers at 122 airports. Nor is the TSA
supposed to be in the business of detaining drunks or catching common criminals, unless they mean to blow up a plane. Airport
security and airline personnel can handle the routine stuff. The Government
Accountability Office reported that
flagging travelers based on behavior is only slightly better than picking them out by random
chance. Although a 2011 study by TSA’s parent agency concluded the program is effective, the GAO found that the study’s data
were unreliable and its method flawed.
The TSA is impossible to regulate- even court rulings have been circumvented
Jansen 2015 [“Lawsuit: TSA needs formal regulations for full-body scanners”, USA Today,
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/07/15/tsa-lawsuit-full-body-scanners-cei-transgender-equality-rutherford/30193799/,
Accessed 8/5/15, AX]
Three groups representing limited government and civil liberties asked the U.S. Circuit Court
of Appeals for the District of Columbia to order TSA to propose a regulation governing the use of the
machines within 90 days. This is the latest filing in a lengthy court battle since TSA began deploying
the machines in 2007. More than 740 scanners are installed in 160 airports, according to the lawsuit. The machines detect
objects within or under the clothing of travelers who have their arms raised. In 2011 -- four years ago to the day -- the
appeals court had ruled in an earlier case involving the Electronic Privacy Information Center that TSA was
required to develop a formal regulation. But after publishing a proposed regulation in March 2013, TSA never
followed up with a final rule.
The latest lawsuit is a demand for action from the Competitive Enterprise Institute,
which advocates for limited government, and the National Center for Transgender Equality and the Rutherford Institute, which
advocate for civil rights. "For four years the
TSA has flouted the court's order, preventing the public and
outside experts from scrutinizing their actions as required under the law," said Marc Scribner, a CEI
research fellow named as a petitioner in the case. "This lawsuit aims to enforce that court decision and bring much needed
accountability to an agency plagued by lawlessness."
Here are a litany of programs the TSA can use absent SPOT:
1. Computer database targeting programs that have existed since before SPOT
Chandrasekhar 2003 [Charu (Harvard lawyer), “Flying while Brown: Federal Civil Rights Remedies to Post-9/11 Airline
Racial Profiling of South Asians”, Asian American Law Journal, Volume 10 Issue 2, 2003, AX]
Racial profiling as an airline security device gained increased prominence in the aftermath of the
9/11 terrorist attacks. Popular support for its use has grown.4' For example, immediately after the 9/11 attacks, a
national poll found that most Americans (58%) supported requiring people (including American citizens)
of Arab descent to undergo intensive security checks before boarding airplanes in the United States.
Support from airlines has grown, evident from the several airline profiling proposals that have been advanced after 9/11. The Air
Transport Association ("ATA") called for the adoption of a voluntary "National Traveler's ID" card and mandatory traveler
identification for non-resident aliens.43 The
federal government has also acted to affirm its confidence in
profiling. The Transportation Security Administration ("TSA") has been developing the
Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System ("CAPPS II"), a computer system that will
examine facts such as travel reservations, housing information, family ties, and credit reports
to determine if passengers possess links to terrorist communities or have "unusual" histories
that show potential threats." The TSA's ultimate goal is to create an "automated system
capable of integrating and simultaneously analyzing numerous databases from
Government, industry and the private sector which establishes a threat risk
assessment on every air carrier passenger, airport and flight .'45 This new system will likely
become "the foundation" on which other public security measures will be built.46 In addition, the
DOT has been funding private research to explore sophisticated computerized racial profiling
methodologies.
2. Patdowns and scanners
Bahrampour 10
(Tara, 12/23/10, Washington Post, “TSA scanners, pat-downs particularly vexing for Muslims, other religious groups,”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/22/AR2010122202919.html?sid=ST2010122202299, 7/30/15,
SM)
Ever since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a trip to the airport has been fraught for
Muslims, who sometimes feel they are being profiled as potential terrorists because of their
religion. The addition of full-body scanners, which many say violate Islam's requirements of
modesty, has increased the discomfort.∂ Muslims aren't alone in their antipathy toward the new security measures.
Followers of other religions, including Sikhs and some Orthodox Jews and evangelical Christians, also say the scanners and patdowns make them uncomfortable or breach the tenets of their faiths.∂ But Muslim women
have been particularly
reluctant to subject themselves to the scanners, which reveal the contours of the human body
in glaring detail.∂ In Islam, "a woman's body and a man's body are both pretty much private," said Ikramullah, 29, who wears a
head scarf. "I choose to cover myself and dress in loose-fitting clothing so the shape of my body is not revealed to everyone in the
street."∂ The other choice, an "enhanced" pat-down in which security agents touch intimate body parts, was hardly more appealing,
said the College Park resident. In recent years,
Ikramullah said, she has been pulled aside for a milder
version of the
pat-downs almost every time she flies. The reason, she believes, is her head
scarf.∂ "It can be humiliating when you're standing there and people are walking by, seeing you get the pat-down," she said.
"You just feel like you have a target on your head."∂ About 440 advanced imaging technology machines are in
use in the United States, and there are plans to increase that number to 1,000 - in roughly half the nation's security checkpoint lanes
- by the end of 2011.∂ Opponents
and civil libertarians have likened the scanning to a virtual strip
search, and it has caused some to rethink their holiday travel.∂ "I've had a lot of Muslims, and particularly Muslim women, say
they're going to put off travel plans as much as is humanly possible because they just can't take the humiliation of it all," said
Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). "They're tired of being singled out for their
attire. We have reports of Muslim women in tears."∂ Earlier this year, the Fiqh Council of North America, a body of Muslim jurists
who interpret Islamic law for Muslims in North America, issued a ruling calling the full-body
scanners "a violation of
clear Islamic teachings" that men and women not be seen naked, adding that the Koran requires believers
to "cover their private parts."∂ But the alternative - the enhanced pat-down - has also posed problems for some, including Sikhs,
who wear turbans as part of their religious observance.∂ Since 2007, people with "bulky" clothing, including Muslim women in head
scarves and Sikh men in turbans, have been required to undergo secondary screenings involving pat-downs. Whether they are
willing to go through the new scanners makes no difference, according to the Transportation Security Administration.∂ "Removal of
all head wear is recommended, but the rules accommodate those with religious, medical or other reasons for which the passenger
wishes not to remove the item," said Greg Soule, a TSA spokesman. If an officer cannot "reasonably determine that the clothing or
head covering is free of a threat item," passengers are referred for additional screening, he said.∂ People interviewed for this article
emphasized that they understand the importance of security for air travel, but some said the determination of what constitutes
"bulky clothing" is made subjectively, with a bias against religious headgear.∂ "Somebody
could pass through with a
pair of loose pants that is definitely more bulky than a head covering, but the head covering
gets secondary screenings," said Ameena Mirza Qazi, deputy executive director and staff attorney for CAIR in Los Angeles,
adding that she has urged the TSA to revisit its policies. "The issue is whether it is being treated differently than other items of
clothing and why it is being treated differently," she said.
3. “Random searches” that target Muslims
Khan 13
(Azeem, 5/19/13, Huffington Post, “Airport Profiling: A Familiar Story for Muslims,” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/azeemkhan/racial-profiling-muslim_b_3303582.html, 7/30/15, SM)
I went to Puerto Rico last weekend to celebrate a bachelor party for a friend of mine. On my way to the airport I joked with my
friend that I was going to be picked for a random search because that's what happens to you when you have a Muslim name like I
do. As I went through security, making sure to take all of the items out of my pocket to go through the scanner, I decided I had
gotten it all into those ugly plastic bins. The official running the bags through the machine commented on my Yankees hat because
he is a fan himself. I was feeling like maybe I was going to get lucky today, and not be searched just because I'm brown. After he told
me to have a nice day I
we go again." So
walked through the metal detector. It began to beep. I started to think to myself "here
I asked the TSA official in front of me if my glasses had set off the machine.
He replied, "No, this is a random search ."∂ What happened next was that I was brought over to an area in front
of everyone. I was told that my bag would be checked. They
proceeded to open my bag, and go through
everything in it while asking me what each item was. It was hard not to give snarky responses when asked each question
because it was just a duffel bag filled with a bag of dirty clothes and damp board shorts. I knew there was nothing in there they
would find of interest, but it's not like voicing that to them would have been helpful at all. If anything, it would have just brought me
to a back room where I would get interrogated and probed further just because I decided to stand up for myself.∂ I have a huge issue
And what happens to me every single time I go to an airport . This
was supposedly a random search. But it wasn't a random search at all. It was a
"you're a Muslim" search. I'm tired of being told that it's a random search every single
time . I have fewer rights when I walk into an airport because I'm brown. I always have to feel on edge because I know I'm being
with what happened that day.
looked at suspiciously, and not being I've done anything wrong, but because I'm one of the two million Muslims living in this country
in a post 9/11 era.∂ I get it. My
name is Azeem Khan. It's not James Williams. That's why I got picked.
It wasn't random. I understand that. So does the person telling me it's random.∂
4. Full body pat-downs and physical inspection of baggage for all passengers
from 14 “terrorism-prone” countries
Allen 10
(Mike, 1/3/10, Politico, “US tightens international air security,” http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/31122.html, 7/30/15,
SM)
100 percent of
passengers from 14 terrorism-prone countries will be patted down and have their
carry-ons searched , the Obama administration notified airlines on Sunday.∂ The more stringent Transportation Security
Administration rules , to take effect at midnight , follow the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a
U.S. airliner headed into Detroit from Amsterdam .∂ “These are changes that weren’t widely in place for
All travelers flying into the U.S. from foreign countries will receive tightened random screening, and
all carriers or countries on 12/24,” a senior administration official told POLITICO. “These are sustainable measures that are a
significant enhancement of our security posture. TSA will continuously review these measures with our global aviation partners to
All passengers from countries on the State Department’s
“State Sponsors of Terrorism” list — plus all passengers from other "countries of
interest" such as Nigeria, Pakistan and Yemen — will receive “full body pat-down and
physical inspection of property ,” the official said.∂ The countries on the State Department list are Cuba, Iran,
ensure the highest levels of security."∂
Sudan and Syria. Other countries covered by the TSA directive are Afghanistan, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya,
Saudi Arabia and Somalia.∂ A much higher percentage of all travelers from foreign countries will receive such screening
than is currently the case, the official said. "The screening “could also include explosive detection technology or advanced imaging
technology where it’s available,” the official said.∂ Kristin Lee of the TSA, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security,
announced: "Today the Transportation Security Administration issued new security directives to all United States and international
air carriers with inbound flights to the U.S. effective January 4, 2010. The new directive includes long-term, sustainable security
measures developed in consultation with law enforcement officials and our domestic and international partners.”∂ In other words,
there will be a new normal for international travel into the U.S. The “enhanced security measures” apply to “all international flights
to U.S. locations, including both U.S. and international carriers,” the official said.∂ “All international passengers will be screened and
the majority of passengers will be screened using threat-based or random measures," the official said. “These are designed to be
sustainable measures that are a significant increase in our security posture."∂ The measures
apply to all “passengers
with passports from or itineraries through State Sponsors of Terrorism and ‘countries of
interest.’”∂ “This goes beyond simply looking at passports and now looks at itineraries from and through countries of interest,”
the official said. “This is a significant step forward.”∂ Lee said in her statement: “Because effective aviation security must begin
beyond our borders, and as a result of extraordinary cooperation from our global aviation partners, TSA is mandating that every
individual flying into the U.S. from anywhere in the world traveling from or through nations that are State sponsors of terrorism or
countries of interest will be required to go through enhanced screening. The directive also increases the use of enhanced screening
technologies and mandates threat-based and random screening for passengers on U.S. bound international flights."
5. The no fly and selectee list targets Muslims—their evidence
Huus 11
(Kari, 9/13/11, Today, "Muslim Travelers Say They're Still Saddled with 9/11 Baggage", www.today.com/id/44334738/ns/todaytoday_news/t/muslim-travelers-say-theyre-still-saddled-baggage/#.VafqhnTWKF4, 7/31/15, SM)
The TSA is also required to conduct secondary screening according to two lists — the “no-fly”
list and the “selectee” list, which are provided by the Terrorism Screening Center, a division of the FBI.∂ The
screening center says there are 16,000 individuals — including about 500 U.S. citizens — on the no-fly list,
which bars the individuals on it from flying to, from or within the United States. Another
16,000 are on the selectee list, which triggers secondary screening.∂ Both are subsets of a
consolidated watch list called the Terrorism Screening Database of “known or appropriately
suspected terrorists.” The number of names in the database fluctuates, but at present it names 420,000 individuals, about 2
percent of them Americans, the screening center says. The FBI distributes relevant subsets of the database to different frontline
agencies such as TSA, CBP, financial watchdogs and law enforcers. Even people stopped for traffic violations can be quickly checked
against the list.∂ Each agency “must comply with the law, as well as its own policies and procedures to protect privacy rights and civil
liberties,” the screening center said.∂ The effectiveness of the lists came into question after an attempted bombing of an airliner on
Christmas Day 2009, when Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who was not on either watch list, tried to detonate plastic
explosives on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. Ultimately he hurt only himself, but the scare prompted the screening center to
expand the criteria it uses to populate the no-fly list.∂ By design, none of the criteria that land an individual in the database or on the
watch lists is made public.∂ “People are put on the watch list based on a series of criteria,” said Sheldon Jacobson, a security expert
and computer science professor at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Nobody really knows them. They are very secret and
they keep evolving. In many ways (the government) has to keep it private because if they give it out, people will game the system.”∂
the cases
involve mistaken identity because a traveler possesses a common name like Mohammad — the
Arabic equivalent of Smith. As a result, some civil rights lawyers believe that the lists affect two to three
times as many fliers as are legitimately on them.∂ Marooned ∂ One of the most chilling cases surrounding the nofly list is that of Gulet Mohamed, a 19-year-old American citizen of Somali heritage.∂ Mohamed had been visiting family in
That secrecy presents a conundrum for many people who believe they are on a list and do not belong there.∂ Some of
Yemen and Somalia — two countries with active Islamist terrorist groups. When he went to the Kuwait airport to extend his visa in
December, he was arrested and taken to a detention facility, where he was blindfolded, questioned and beaten by unknown agents,
according to his lawyer, Gadeir Abbas.∂ The questioners were especially interested in information about Anwar al-Awlaki, a dual U.S.
and Yemeni citizen turned Islamic extremist in Yemen, Abbas said. Mohamed insisted he had no information and, after a week,
Kuwait ordered his deportation.∂ But when he tried to board a flight to the United States, he was
told he was on the nofly list. Only after Abbas filed a lawsuit on his behalf in January was Mohamed allowed to return home to Virginia.∂ Mohamed is
pursuing a claim for damages and to be removed from the list. The federal government wants the case thrown out on the grounds
that it is irrelevant now that he is back in the U.S. Meantime, it will not confirm if he is on the no-fly list. The lawsuit is pending, after
a judge moved it to a circuit court on jurisdictional grounds.∂ “It’s this very Kafkaesque world where no one has charged (people on
the list) with any crime … but they can see its effects,” said Abbas, an attorney with CAIR. “… His case is the most heinous example of
what the no-fly list can do.”∂ Other pending court cases allege that
Muslim American travelers have
encountered similar violations of their rights, including some who were forced to take
thousand-mile circuitous land routes to get back into the U.S. or were stuck overseas for
weeks or months until lawyers here took up their cases.
6. Private- public partnerships
Kleiner 2010 [Yevgenia, “Racial Profiling in the Name of National Security:Protecting Minority Travlers' Civil Liberties in the
Age of Terrorism”, Boston College Third World Law Journal, Accessed 8/5/15, AX]
Shortly after
the attacks of September 11th, Congress created the Transportation Security Administration
(TSA), an entity now responsible for the security of domestic U.S. airports as well as all remaining United States mass
transportation systems.98 The TSA’s aim is to
execute a “risk-based and multi-layered approach to
security,” a strategy that its immediate past Assistant Secretary, Edmund S. “Kip” Hawley, described in a 2007 statement to
Congress as requiring “a broad range of interlinked measures that are flexible, mobile, and unpredictable.”99 Under the
Aviation and Transportation Security Act (ATSA), airport security measures such as screenings have
both a private and public component.100 Because the federal government is directly responsible for airport security,
airports and airlines partner with private entities to execute these activities under Federal
Aviation Administration (FAA) supervision.101