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1NC Reed Slavery/Gratuitous Violence Link
Basing politics on the gratuitous violence of racism usurps understanding of
political economy---this legitimizes neoliberal ideology and mystifies class
antagonism
Adolph Reed 13, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and a
member of the interim national council of the Labor Party. Django Unchained, or, The Help:
How “Cultural Politics” Is Worse Than No Politics at All, and Why,
http://nonsite.org/feature/django-unchained-or-the-help-how-cultural-politics-is-worse-thanno-politics-at-all-and-why
On reflection, it’s possible to see that Django Unchained and The Help are basically different versions of the same movie. Both dissolve political
economy and social relations into individual quests and interpersonal transactions and thus
effectively sanitize, respectively, slavery and Jim Crow by dehistoricizing them. The problem
is not so much that each film invents cartoonish fictions; it’s that the point of the cartoons is to
take the place of the actual relations of exploitation that anchored the regime it depicts. In The Help the
buffoonishly bigoted housewife, Hilly, obsessively pushes a pet bill that would require employers of black domestic servants to provide separate, Jim Crow toilets for them; in
It’s as if Jim
Crow had nothing to do with cheap labor and slavery had nothing to do with making slave
owners rich. And the point here is not just that they get the past wrong—it’s that the particular way
they get it wrong enables them to get the present just as wrong and so their politics are as
misbegotten as their history. Thus, for example, it’s only the dehistoricization that makes each film’s entirely neoliberal (they could have been
Django Unchained the sensibility of 1970s blaxploitation imagines “comfort girls” and “Mandingo fighters” as representative slave job descriptions.
scripted by Oprah) happy ending possible. The Help ends with Skeeter and the black lead, the maid Aibileen, embarking joyfully on the new, excitingly uncharted paths their
book—an account of the master-servant relationship told from the perspective of the servants—has opened for them. But dehistoricization makes it possible not to notice the
great distance between those paths and their likely trajectories. For Skeeter the book from which the film takes its name opens a career in the fast track of the journalism and
publishing industry. Aibileen’s new path was forced upon her because the book got her fired from her intrinsically precarious job, more at-whim than at-will, in one of the few
areas of employment available to working-class black women in the segregationist South—the precise likelihood that had made her and other maids initially reluctant to warm to
Skeeter’s project. Yet Aibileen smiles and strides ever more confidently as she walks home because she has found and articulated her voice. The implication is that having been
fired, rather than portending deeper poverty and economic insecurity, was a moment of liberation; Aibileen, armed with the confidence and self-knowledge conferred by
knowing her voice, was now free to venture out into a world of unlimited opportunity and promise. This, of course, is pure neoliberal bullshit, of the same variety that permits
the odious Michelle Rhee to assert with a straight face that teachers’ defined-benefit pensions deny them “choice” and thereby undermine the quality of public education. But
who knows? Perhaps Skeeter brought with her from the 2000s an NGO to arrange microcredit that would enable Aibileen to start up a culturally authentic pie-making venture
or a day spa for harried and stressed domestic servants. In the Jackson, Mississippi of 1963, no such options would exist for Aibileen. Instead, she most likely would be
blackballed and unable to find a comparable menial job and forced to toil under even more undesirable conditions. Django Unchained ends with the hero and his lady fair riding
happily off into the sunset after he has vanquished evil slave owners and their henchmen and henchwomen. Django and Broomhilda—whose name is spelled like that of the
1970s comic strip character, not the figure in Norse mythology, presumably a pointless Tarantino inside joke—are free. However, their freedom was not won by his prodigious
bloodletting; it was obtained within the legal framework that accepted and regulated property rights in slaves. Each had been purchased and manumitted by the German bounty
hunter who, as others have noted, is the only character in the film to condemn slavery as an institution. Django is no insurrectionist. His singular focus from beginning to end is
on reclaiming his wife from her slave master. Presumably, we are to understand this solipsism as indicative of the depth and intensity of his love, probably also as homage to the
borderline sociopathic style of the spaghetti western/blaxploitation hero. Regardless, Django’s quest is entirely individualist; he never intends to challenge slavery and never
does. Indeed, for the purpose of buttressing the credibility of their ruse, he even countermands his bounty hunter partner’s attempt to save—through purchase, of course—a
recalcitrant “Mandingo fighter” from being ripped apart by dogs. He is essentially indifferent to the handful of slaves who are freed as incidental byproducts of his actions. The
happy ending is that he and Broomhilda ride off together and free in a slavocracy that is not a whit less secure at the moment of celebratory resolution than it was when Django
set out on his mission of retrieval and revenge.
In both films the bogus happy endings are possible only because they characterize their respective regimes of racial hierarchy in the superficial terms of interpersonal
In Tarantino’s
vision, slavery’s definitive injustice was its gratuitous and sadistic brutalization and sexualized degradation.
Malevolent, ludicrously arrogant whites owned slaves most conspicuously to degrade and
torture them. Apart from serving a formal dinner in a plantation house—and Tarantino, the Chance the Gardener of American filmmakers (and Best Original
transactions. In The Help segregationism’s evil was small-minded bigotry and lack of sensitivity; it was more like bad manners than oppression.
Screenplay? Really?) seems to draw his images of plantation life from Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind, as well as old Warner Brothers cartoons—and the Mandingo
Tarantino’s slaves do no actual work at all; they’re present only to be brutalized.
In fact, the cavalier sadism with which owners and traders treat them belies the fact that slaves
were, first and foremost, capital investments. It’s not for nothing that New Orleans has a
monument to the estimated 20,000-30,000 antebellum Irish immigrants who died constructing
the New Basin Canal; slave labor was too valuable for such lethal work.
The Help trivializes Jim Crow by reducing it to its most superficial features and irrational extremes.
The master-servant nexus was, and is, a labor relation. And the problem of labor relations particular to the
segregationist regime wasn’t employers’ bigoted lack of respect or failure to hear the voices of
the domestic servants, or even benighted refusal to recognize their equal humanity. It was that the labor relation was structured within
and sustained by a political and institutional order that severely impinged on, when it didn’t altogether deny,
black citizens’ avenues for pursuit of grievances and standing before the law. The crucial
lynchpin of that order was neither myopia nor malevolence; it was suppression of black citizens’ capacities for
fighters and comfort girls,
political life, with racial disfranchisement and the constant threat of terror
as its principal mechanisms. And the point of the
regime wasn’t racial hatred or enforced disregard; its roots lay in the much more prosaic
concern of dominant elites to maintain their political and economic hegemony by suppressing
potential opposition and in the linked ideal of maintaining access to a labor force with no options but to accept
employment on whatever terms employers offered. (Those who liked The Help or found it moving should watch The Long Walk
direct participation in civic and
intrinsic to substantive denial of equal protection and due process before the law
Home, a 1990 film set in Montgomery, Alabama, around the bus boycott. I suspect that’s the film you thought you were watching when you saw The Help.)
Django Unchained trivializes slavery by reducing it to its most barbaric and lurid excesses.
Slavery also was fundamentally a labor relation. It was a form of forced labor regulated—systematized,
enforced and sustained—through a political and institutional order that specified it as a civil relationship
granting owners absolute control over the life, liberty, and fortunes of others defined as eligible for enslavement, including most of all control of the
conditions of their labor and appropriation of its product. Historian Kenneth M. Stampp quotes a slaveholder’s succinct
explanation: “‘For what purpose does the master hold the servant?’ asked an ante-bellum Southerner. ‘Is it not
that by his labor, he, the master, may accumulate wealth?’”1
That absolute control permitted horrible, unthinkable brutality, to be sure, but perpetrating such
brutality was neither the point of slavery nor its essential injustice. The master-slave relationship
could, and did, exist without brutality, and certainly without sadism and sexual degradation. In Tarantino’s depiction, however, it is not clear that slavery shorn of its extremes of
It does not diminish the historical injustice and horror of slavery to note that
it was not the product of sui generis, transcendent Evil but a terminus on a
continuum of bound labor that was more norm than exception in the Anglo-American world until well into the
eighteenth century, if not later. As legal historian Robert Steinfeld points out, it is not so much slavery, but the emergence of the notion of
free labor—as the absolute control of a worker over her person—that is the historical anomaly
that needs to be explained.2 Django Unchained sanitizes the essential injustice of slavery by not
problematizing it and by focusing instead on the extremes of brutality and degradation it
permitted, to the extent of making some of them up, just as does The Help regarding Jim Crow.
brutality would be objectionable.
The Help could not imagine a more honest and complex view of segregationist Mississippi partly because it uses the period ultimately as a prop for human interest cliché, and
Neither film
is really about the period in which it is set. Film critic Manohla Dargis, reflecting a decade ago
on what she saw as a growing Hollywood penchant for period films, observed that such films are
typically “stripped of politics and historical fact…and instead will find meaning in appealing to seemingly timeless ideals and stirring
Django Unchained’s absurdly ahistorical view of plantation slavery is only backdrop for the merger of spaghetti western and blaxploitation hero movie.
scenes of love, valor and compassion” and that “the Hollywood professionals who embrace accuracy most enthusiastically nowadays are costume designers.”3 That observation
applies to both these films, although in Django concern with historically accurate representation of material culture applies only to the costumes and props of the 1970s film
genres Tarantino wants to recall.
To make sense of how Django Unchained has received so much warmer a reception among black and leftoid commentators than did The Help, it is useful to recall Margaret
Few observers—among
opponents and boosters alike—have noted how deeply and thoroughly both films are embedded
in the practical ontology of neoliberalism, the complex of unarticulated assumptions and unexamined first premises that provide its common
Thatcher’s 1981 dictum that “economics are the method: the object is to change the soul.”4 Simply put, she and her element have won.
sense, its lifeworld.
Objection to The Help has been largely of the shooting fish in a barrel variety: complaints about the film’s paternalistic treatment of the maids, which generally have boiled
down to an objection that the master-servant relation is thematized at all, as well as the standard, predictable litany of anti-racist charges about whites speaking for blacks, the
film’s inattentiveness to the fact that at that time in Mississippi black people were busily engaged in liberating themselves, etc. An illustration of this tendency that conveniently
refers to several other variants of it is Akiba Solomon, “Why I’m Just Saying No to ‘The Help’ and Its Historical Whitewash” in Color Lines,August 10, 2011, available
at:http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/08/why_im_just_saying_no_to_the_help.html.
the social significance of the narrative of a black hero. One node of this
emphasizes the need to validate a history of autonomous black agency and “resistance” as
a politico-existential desideratum. It accommodates a view that stresses the importance of recognition of
rebellious or militant individuals and revolts in black American history. Another
centers on a notion that exposure to fictional black heroes can inculcate the sense of personal
efficacy necessary to overcome the psychological effects of inequality and to facilitate
upward mobility and may undermine some whites’ negative stereotypes about black people. In
either register assignment of social or political importance to depictions of black heroes rests on
presumptions about the nexus of mass cultural representation, social commentary, and
racial justice that are more significant politically than the controversy about the film itself.
In both versions, this argument casts political and economic problems in psychological
terms. Injustice appears as a matter of disrespect and denial of due recognition, and the
remedies proposed—which are all about images projected and the distribution of jobs associated with their projection—
look a lot like self-esteem engineering. Moreover, nothing could indicate more strikingly the extent of
Defenses of Django Unchained pivot on claims about
argument
neoliberal ideological hegemony than the idea that the mass culture industry and its representational
practices constitute a meaningful terrain for struggle to advance egalitarian interests. It is
possible to entertain that view seriously only by ignoring the fact that the production and
consumption of mass culture is thoroughly embedded in capitalist material and ideological
imperatives.
That, incidentally, is why I prefer the usage “mass culture” to describe this industry and its products and processes, although I recognize that it may seem archaic to some
readers. The mass culture v. popular culture debate dates at least from the 1950s and has continued with occasional crescendos ever since.5 For two decades or more,
instructively in line with the retreat of possibilities for concerted left political action outside the academy, the popular culture side of that debate has been dominant, along with
its view that the products of this precinct of mass consumption capitalism are somehow capable of transcending or subverting their material identity as commodities, if not
Despite the dogged commitment of several generations of American Studies and cultural studies graduate
students who want to valorize watching television and immersion in hip-hop or other specialty market niches centered
on youth recreation and the most ephemeral fads as both intellectually avant-garde and politically “resistive,”
it should be time to admit that that earnest disposition is intellectually shallow and an ersatz
politics. The idea of “popular” culture posits a spurious autonomy and organicism that
actually affirm mass industrial processes by effacing them, especially in the
putatively rebel, fringe , or underground market niches that depend on the fiction of the authentic
to announce the birth of new product cycles.
The power of the hero is a cathartic trope that connects mainly with the sensibility of adolescent boys—of whatever nominal age.
avoiding that identity altogether.
Tarantino has allowed as much, responding to black critics’ complaints about the violence and copious use of “nigger” by proclaiming “Even for the film’s biggest detractors, I
think their children will grow up and love this movie. I think it could become a rite of passage for young black males.”6 This response stems no doubt from Tarantino’s arrogance
and opportunism, and some critics have denounced it as no better than racially presumptuous. But he is hardly alone in defending the film with an assertion that it gives black
youth heroes, is generically inspirational or both. Similarly, in a January 9, 2012 interview on the Daily Show, George Lucas adduced this line to promote his even more
execrable race-oriented live-action cartoon, Red Tails, which, incidentally, trivializes segregation in the military by reducing it to a matter of bad or outmoded attitudes. The
ironic effect is significant understatement of both the obstacles the Tuskegee airmen faced and their actual accomplishments by rendering them as backdrop for a blackface,
slapped-together remake of Top Gun. (Norman Jewison’s 1984 film, A Soldier’s Story, adapted from Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play, is a much more sensitive and thoughtprovoking rumination on the complexities of race and racism in the Jim Crow U.S. Army—an army mobilized, as my father, a veteran of the Normandy invasion, never tired of
remarking sardonically, to fight the racist Nazis.) Lucas characterized his film as “patriotic, even jingoistic” and was explicit that he wanted to create a film that would feature
“real heroes” and would be “inspirational for teenage boys.” Much as Django Unchained’s defenders compare it on those terms favorably to Lincoln, Lucas hyped Red Tails as
being a genuine hero story unlike “Glory, where you have a lot of white officers running those guys into cannon fodder.”
Of course, the film industry is sharply tilted toward the youth market, as Lucas and Tarantino are acutely aware. But Lucas, unlike Tarantino, was not being defensive in
asserting his desire to inspire the young; he offered it more as a boast. As he has said often, he’d wanted for years to make a film about the Tuskegee airmen, and he reports that
he always intended telling their story as a feel-good, crossover inspirational tale. Telling it that way also fits in principle (though in this instance not in practice, as Red Tails
bombed at the box office) with the commercial imperatives of increasingly degraded mass entertainment.
Dargis observed that the ahistoricism of the recent period films is influenced by market imperatives in a global film industry. The more a film is tied to historically specific
contexts, the more difficult it is to sell elsewhere. That logic selects for special effects-driven products as well as standardized, decontextualized and simplistic—“universal”—
story lines, preferably set in fantasy worlds of the filmmakers’ design. As Dargis notes, these films find their meaning in shopworn clichés puffed up as timeless verities,
including uplifting and inspirational messages for youth. But something else underlies the stress on inspiration in the black-interest films, which shows up in critical discussion
of them as well.
All these films—The Help, Red Tails, Django Unchained, even Lincoln and Glory—make a claim to public attention based partly on their social significance beyond
entertainment or art, and they do so because they engage with significant moments in the history of the nexus of race and politics in the United States. There would not be so
much discussion and debate and no Golden Globe, NAACP Image, or Academy Award nominations for The Help, Red Tails, or Django Unchained if those films weren’t defined
partly by thematizing that nexus of race and politics in some way.
The pretensions to social significance that fit
into their
these films
particular market niche don’t conflict with the mass-market film
industry’s imperative of infantilization because those pretensions are only part of the show; they are little more than empty bromides, product differentiation in the patter of
“seemingly timeless ideals” which the mass entertainment industry constantly recycles. (Andrew O’Hehir observes as much about Django Unchained, which he describes as “a
three-hour trailer for a movie that never happens.”7) That comes through in the defense of these films, in the face of evidence of their failings, that, after all, they are “just
substantive content is ideological; it is their contribution to the naturalization of
neoliberalism’s ontology as they propagandize its universalization across spatial, temporal,
and social contexts.
entertainment.” Their
Purportedly in the interest of popular education cum entertainment, Django Unchained and The Help, and Red Tails for that matter, read the sensibilities of the present into the
past by divesting the latter of its specific historicity. They reinforce the sense of the past as generic old-timey times distinguishable from the present by superficial inadequacies—
outmoded fashion, technology, commodities and ideas—since overcome. In The Help Hilly’s obsession with her pet project marks segregation’s petty apartheid as irrational in
part because of the expense rigorously enforcing it would require; the breadwinning husbands express their frustration with it as financially impractical. Hilly is a mean-spirited,
narrow-minded person whose rigid and tone-deaf commitment to segregationist consistency not only reflects her limitations of character but also is economically unsound, a
fact that further defines her, and the cartoon version of Jim Crow she represents, as irrational.
The deeper message of these films, insofar as they deny the integrity of the past, is that there is no thinkable alternative to
the ideological order under which we live. This message is reproduced throughout the mass entertainment industry; it
shapes the normative reality even of the fantasy worlds that masquerade as
escapism. Even among those who laud the supposedly cathartic effects of Django’s insurgent
violence as reflecting a greater truth of abolition than passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, few commentators notice that he and Broomhilda attained their freedom
through a market transaction.8 This reflects an ideological hegemony in which students all too commonly wonder why planters would deny slaves or sharecroppers education
because education would have made them more productive as workers. And, tellingly, in a glowing rumination in the Daily Kos, Ryan Brooke inadvertently thrusts mass
culture’s destruction of historicity into bold relief by declaiming on “the segregated society presented” in Django Unchained and babbling on—with the absurdly ill-informed and
pontifical self-righteousness that the blogosphere enables—about our need to take “responsibility for preserving racial divides” if we are “to put segregation in the past and fully
Decoupled from its moorings in a
historically specific political economy, slavery becomes at bottom a problem of race relations,
and, as historian Michael R. West argues forcefully, “race relations” emerged as and has remained a discourse that
substitutes etiquette for equality.10
This is the context in which we should take account of what “inspiring the young” means as a justification for those films. In part, the claim to inspire is
a simple platitude, more filler than substance. It is, as I’ve already noted, both an excuse for films that are cartoons made for
fulfill Dr. King’s dream.”9 It’s all an indistinguishable mush of bad stuff about racial injustice in the old-timey days.
the ease with which
“inspiration of youth” rolls out in this context resonates with three related and disturbing themes: 1)
underclass ideology’s narratives—now all Americans’ common sense—that link poverty and
inequality most crucially to (racialized) cultural inadequacy and psychological damage; 2) the belief that racial
inequality stems from prejudice, bad ideas and ignorance, and 3) the cognate of both: the
neoliberal rendering of social justice as equality of opportunity, with an aspiration of creating
“competitive individual minority agents who might stand a better fighting chance
in the neoliberal rat race rather than a positive alternative vision of a society that
eliminates the need to fight constantly against disruptive market whims in the first
place.”11
This politics seeps through in the chatter about Django Unchained in particular. Erin Aubry Kaplan, in the Los Angeles Times article in which Tarantino asserts his appeal
to youth, remarks that the “most disturbing detail [about slavery] is the emotional violence and
degradation directed at blacks that effectively keeps them at the bottom of the social order, a
place they still occupy today.” Writing on the Institute of the Black World blog, one Dr. Kwa David Whitaker, a 1960s-style cultural nationalist, declaims
an infantilized, generic market and an assertion of a claim to a particular niche within that market. More insidiously, though,
on Django’s testament to the sources of degradation and “unending servitude [that] has rendered [black Americans] almost incapable of making sound evaluations of our
In its blindness to political economy, this
notion of black cultural or psychological damage as either a legacy of slavery or of
more indirect recent origin—e.g., urban migration, crack epidemic, matriarchy,
babies making babies—comports well with the reduction of slavery and Jim Crow
to interpersonal dynamics and bad attitudes. It substitutes a “politics of recognition”
and a patter of racial uplift for politics and underwrites a conflation of political action and
therapy.
With respect to the nexus of race and inequality, this discourse supports victim-blaming programs of personal
rehabilitation and self-esteem engineering—inspiration—as easily as it does multiculturalist
respect for difference, which, by the way, also feeds back to self-esteem engineering and inspiration as
nodes within a larger political economy of race relations. Either way, this is a discourse that
displaces a politics challenging social structures that reproduce inequality with
concern for the feelings and characteristics of individuals and of categories of population
statistics reified as singular groups that are equivalent to individuals. This discourse has
made it possible (again, but more sanctimoniously this time) to characterize destruction of lowincome housing as an uplift strategy for poor people; curtailment of access to public education as “choice”; being cut
adrift from essential social wage protections as “empowerment”; and individual material success
as socially important role modeling.
current situations or the kind of steps we must take to improve our condition.”12
Neoliberalism’s triumph is affirmed with unselfconscious clarity in the ostensibly leftist defenses of Django Unchained that center on the theme of slaves’ having liberated
themselves. Trotskyists, would-be anarchists, and psychobabbling identitarians have their respective sectarian garnishes: Trotskyists see everywhere the bugbear of
anarchists similarly fetishize direct action and voluntarism and oppose
large-scale public institutions on principle, and identitarians romanticize essentialist notions
of organic, folkish authenticity under constant threat from institutions. However, all are
indistinguishable from the nominally libertarian right in their disdain for
government and institutionally based political action, which their common reflex
is to disparage as inauthentic or corrupt.
“bureaucratism” and mystify “self-activity;”
1NC RC Race/Slavery
Class analysis better explains the historical progression of anti-black violence--the aff’s reactionary approach fails
Pascal Robert 13, Lawyer, Co-founder of the Haitian Bloggers' Caucus, The Reactionary
Nature of Black Politics, www.huffingtonpost.com/pascal-robert/the-reactionary-natureof_b_3260054.html
The main vehicle allowing this constant social and political demobilization of the Black
community stems from the problematic reality that Black politics has traditionally been
grounded in a purely reactionary response to the phenomenon of racism -- particularly without a clear
understanding of the purpose of racism in its application to Blacks.
This stems from a failure to understand basic key aspects of the relationship of Blacks to America and racism, mostly because the sheer terror used
under the guise of racism to maintain the prevailing order has been so atrocious that the political focus by Blacks has been to concentrate on that terror
and attempts to neutralize it without truly addressing its root cause.
From the beginning, Europeans
did not bring Africans to the Americas because they were racist. They
brought Africans to the Americas to expropriate labor from them as workers in an economic
system that denied compensation for that labor to maximize return on investment for the presence of those Africans. The function of
Black people in America was an innately economic one from the start rooted in a politics that was based on
protecting the sanctity of that economic relationship. All the terror and brutality used to maintain that system was
purely ancillary to the goal of protecting that economic system of exploiting free Black labor. Yet
many Blacks, even educated ones, will say that Europeans brought Africans to the Americas because of racism and White Supremacy. Racism is
merely the rationale and tactic used to justify that exploitative economic relationship, and White
Supremacy is the subsequent accrued benefit of the successful maintenance of that relationship
-- in varying degrees -- over time.
A perfect example of how these realities are confused can easily be shown by attempting to ascertain from most people what the actual
purpose and function of Jim Crow Segregation, which started with the consummation of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, and
lasted to the end of the Civil Rights Era in 1968, actually was. Many would say things like: keeping Blacks subjugated,
or denying blacks the ability to compete with Whites, or racism/White Supremacy, or fear of
Black male sexual potency via White women. In reality, Jim Crow was a purely intentional
reaction by White Southern agricultural interests meshed with Northern industrialists to
combat the rising political and economic militancy and mutual co-operation of Blacks and poor
Whites during the progressive era of the 1890s with the combined efforts of the Farmer's
Alliance and the Colored Farmers Alliance in order to maintain economic hegemony and cheap
exploited labor for capitalist interests in the South, primarily Agricultural but also industrial,
with the slow but new development of Southern industrialization. Jim Crow was rooted in
economic control, not simply racism and brutality. Those were the tools used to keep the
system intact.
Moreover, few people will admit that the main reason for the collapse of Jim Crow starting in the 1930s, and expanding
rapidly into the post World War II era, had more to do with three key factors as opposed to the romanticized
notions of how the valiant fight of the ancestors during the Civil Rights Movement brought us
freedom: First, the new methods of mechanized agricultural farming technology started to make the need
for Black farm labor in the South obsolete. Hence, the need for the disenfranchisement and related
oppression became more about form rather than substance; second, the rise of Hitler and Nazism made
the notion of race-based exclusion in the United Stated unpalatable, particularly in the face of Hitler's anti-semitism;
thirdly, the Cold War era and the fear of American racism being an obstacle to the competitive
advantage over the Soviet Union in winning the hearts and minds of the newly independent
Black, Brown, and Yellow third world would rapidly assure desegregation and ending Jim Crow
being an American primary domestic agenda.
As African American political science professor Adolph Reed, Jr. states in his essay "The Color Line Then and Now," found in the anthology, Renewing
Black Intellectual History, when discussing some of the egalitarian social science and legal strategies to end Jim Crow:
This intellectual enterprise was no more responsible for defeating early-twentieth-century race theory than Charles Hamilton Houston's and Thurgood
Marshall's legal arguments were for defeating codified racial segregation, probably much less so. Factors like the leftward shift in the domestic political
climate in the 1930s and 1940s, the embarrassment that Nazi extremism presented for racialist ideology, and cold war concerns with the United States'
international image were undoubtedly more important.
An excellent treatise that explains the relationship between the Cold War and the Civil Rights victories we often wrongly think were a result of these
romanticized protest activities is Cold Civil Rights: Race and the Imagery of American Democracy, by professor of law and political science, Mary L.
Dudziak, in which she states about Brown v. Board of Education: "According to the Justice Department, the interest of the United States in school
segregation was that race discrimination harmed American foreign relations."
This is not to diminish the efforts of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who waged moral protest to the brutal and racist treatment of our nations
Black citizens. To diminish in such a fashion could have the effect of discouraging the belief in the human capacity to make social or political change.
The point is to show that our
desires to romanticize certain periods of history, especially dealing with
African Americans, lead to a limited and pedestrian understanding of the factors that truly
shape events.
In the face of the reactionary nature of Black politics, we can better understand the post Civil Rights dilemma that has plagued the Black political scene.
If the illusion of racial equality is touted as one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century American democratic experiment via these Civil Rights
victories, how do you create a Black politics in a post Civil Rights era when the political traditions of this group has been rooted in combating or
reacting to the racism that society now forces them to accept as no more, when in fact that is not the case?
Now we understand the
root of the past 45 years of increasing Black political demobilization -- meaning Black
politics being unable to actually achieve lasting policy that succeeds at remedying the true root
of Black suffering: economic inequality.
The ultimate sign of that demobilization is the over 97 percent support of Black America for a
president whose agenda is to introduce neoliberal privatization of government resources at rates
never seen before that might ultimately demolish those same communities that supported him - i.e. Barack Obama.
This is why Black America is in a crisis, because Black politics is in a crisis. That crisis is a product of the place from which Black politics was born and
grew. We
now need a new politics, if we shall even call it Black politics, that is not rooted in reactionary
response to racism, but seeks to foster cross-racial coalitions with those similarly situated to
crush the barriers to economic equality while allowing Blacks to maintain social autonomy and
ideological integrity in recognition of the need for nuance in neutralizing the tool of
racism that has been used to distract them from the ultimate problem of economic
injustice. This is the work that must be done, but the question is: Who is up to the task?
1NC Impact/FW
Your ballot has to center around class politics---capitalism is the root cause of
racialized oppression and makes mass violence and extermination inevitable
Peter Mclaren 4, Education and Urban Schooling Division prof, UCLA—and Valerie
Scatamburlo-D'Annibale; University of Windsor, Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 36,
No. 2, 2004, www.freireproject.org/articles/node%2065/RCGS/class_dismissed-valpeter.10.pdf
For example, E. San Juan (2003) argues that race relations and race conflict are necessarily
structured by the larger totality of the political economy of a given society, as well as by
modifications in the structure of the world economy. He further notes that the capitalist mode of
production has articulated ‘race’ with class in a peculiar way. He too is worth a substantial
quotation:
While the stagnation of rural life imposed a racial or castelike rigidity to the peasantry, the rapid
accumulation of wealth through the ever more intensifying exploitation of labor by capital could
not so easily ‘racialize’ the wage-workers of a particular nation, given the alienability of labor
power—unless certain physical or cultural characteristics can be utilized to divide the
workers or render one group an outcast or pariah removed from the domain of ‘free labor.’ In
the capitalist development of U.S. society, African, Mexican, and Asian bodies—more precisely,
their labor power and its reproductive efficacy—were colonized and racialized; hence the idea of
‘internal colonialism’ retains explanatory validity. ‘Race’ is thus constructed out of raw materials
furnished by class relations, the history of class conflicts, and the vicissitudes of
colonial/capitalist expansion and the building of imperial hegemony. It is dialectically accented
and operationalized not just to differentiate the price of wage labor within and outside the
territory of the metropolitan power, but also to reproduce relations of domination–
subordination invested with an aura of naturality and fatality. The refunctioning of physical or
cultural traits as ideological and political signifiers of class identity reifies social relations. Such
‘racial’ markers enter the field of the alienated laborprocess, concealing the artificial nature of
meanings and norms, and essentializing or naturalizing historical traditions and values
which are contingent on mutable circumstances.
For San Juan, racism and nationalism are modalities in which class struggles articulate
themselves at strategic points in history. He argues that racism arose with the creation and
expansion of the capitalist world economy. He maintains, rightly in our view, that racial or
ethnic group solidarity is given ‘meaning and value in terms of their place within the social
organization of production and reproduction of the ideological-political order; ideologies of
racism as collective social evaluation of solidarities arise to reinforce structural constraints
which preserve the exploited and oppressed position of these “racial” solidarities’.
It is remarkable, in our opinion, that so much of contemporary social theory has largely
abandoned the problems of labor, capitalist exploitation, and class analysis at a time when
capitalism is becoming more universal, more ruthless and more deadly. The metaphor
of a contemporary ‘tower of Babel’ seems appropriate here—academics striking radical
poses in the seminar rooms while remaining oblivious to the possibility that their seemingly
radical discursive maneuvers do nothing to further the struggles ‘against oppression and
exploitation which continue to be real, material, and not merely “discursive” problems of the
contemporary world’ (Dirlik, 1997, p. 176). Harvey (1998, pp. 29–31) indicts the new academic
entrepreneurs, the ‘masters of theory-in-and-for-itself’ whose ‘discourse radicalism’ has deftly
side-stepped ‘the enduring conundrums of class struggle’ and who have, against a ‘sobering
background of cheapened discourse and opportunistic politics,’ been ‘stripped of their selfadvertised radicalism.’ For years, they ‘contested socialism,’ ridiculed Marxists, and promoted
‘their own alternative theories of liberatory politics’ but now they have largely been ‘reduced to
the role of supplicants in the most degraded form of pluralist politics imaginable.’ As
they pursue the politics of difference, the ‘class war rages unabated’ and they seem
‘either unwilling or unable to focus on the unprecedented economic carnage occurring around
the globe.’
Harvey’s searing criticism suggests that post-Marxists have been busy fiddling while
Rome burns and his comments echo those made by Marx (1978, p. 149) in his critique of the
Young Hegelians who were, ‘in spite of their allegedly “worldshattering” statements, the
staunchest conservatives.’ Marx lamented that the Young Hegelians were simply fighting
‘phrases’ and that they failed to acknowledge that in offering only counter-phrases, they were in
no way ‘combating the real existing world’ but merely combating the phrases of the world.
Taking a cue from Marx and substituting ‘phrases’ with ‘discourses’ or ‘resignifications’ we
would contend that the practitioners of difference politics who operate within exaggerated
culturalist frameworks that privilege the realm of representation as the primary
arena of political struggle question some discourses of power while legitimating others.
Moreover, because they lack a class perspective, their gestures of radicalism are belied by their
own class positions.10 As Ahmad (1997a, p. 104) notes:
One may speak of any number of disorientations and even oppressions, but one cultivates all
kinds of politeness and indirection about the structure of capitalist class relations in which those
oppressions are embedded. To speak of any of that directly and simply is to be ‘vulgar.’ In this
climate of Aesopian languages it is absolutely essential to reiterate that most things are a matter
of class. That kind of statement is … surprising only in a culture like that of the North American
university … But it is precisely in that kind of culture that people need to hear such obvious
truths.
Ahmad’s provocative observations imply that substantive analyses of the carnage wrought by
‘globalized’ class exploitation have, for the most part, been marginalized by the kind of
radicalism that has been instituted among the academic Left in North America. He further
suggests that while various post-Marxists have invited us to join their euphoric celebrations
honoring the decentering of capitalism, the abandonment of class politics, and the decline of
metanarratives (particularly those of Marxism and socialism), they have failed to see that the
most ‘meta of all metanarratives of the past three centuries, the creeping annexation of the globe
for the dominance of capital over laboring humanity has met, during those same decades, with
stunning success’ (Ahmad, 1997b, p. 364). As such, Ahmad invites us to ask anew, the proverbial
question: What, then, must be done? To this question we offer no simple theoretical,
pedagogical or political prescriptions. Yet we would argue that if social change is the aim,
progressive educators and theorists must cease displacing class analysis with the
politics of difference.
Conclusion … we will take our stand against the evils [of capitalism, imperialism, and racism]
with a solidarity derived from a proletarian internationalism born of socialist idealism. —
National Office of the Black Panther Party, February 1970
For well over two decades we have witnessed the jubilant liberal and conservative
pronouncements of the demise of socialism. Concomitantly, history’s presumed failure to defang
existing capitalist relations has been read by many self-identified ‘radicals’ as an advertisement
for capitalism’s inevitability. As a result, the chorus refrain ‘There Is No Alternative’, sung by
liberals and conservatives, has been buttressed by the symphony of post-Marxist voices
recommending that we give socialism a decent burial and move on. Within this context, to speak
of the promise of Marx and socialism may appear anachronistic, even naïve, especially since the
post-al intellectual vanguard has presumably demonstrated the folly of doing so. Yet we
stubbornly believe that the chants of T.I.N.A. must be combated for they offer as a fait accompli,
something which progressive Leftists should refuse to accept—namely the triumph of capitalism
and its political bedfellow neo-liberalism, which have worked together to naturalize
suffering, undermine collective struggle, and obliterate hope. We concur with Amin
(1998), who claims that such chants must be defied and revealed as absurd and criminal, and
who puts the challenge we face in no uncertain terms: humanity may let itself be led by
capitalism’s logic to a fate of collective suicide or it may pave the way for an alternative
humanist project of global socialism.
The grosteque conditions that inspired Marx to pen his original critique of capitalism are
present and flourishing. The inequalities of wealth and the gross imbalances of power that exist
today are leading to abuses that exceed those encountered in Marx’s day (Greider, 1998, p. 39).
Global capitalism has paved the way for the obscene concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer
hands and created a world increasingly divided between those who enjoy opulent affluence and
those who languish in dehumanizing conditions and economic misery. In every corner of
the globe, we are witnessing social disintegration as revealed by a rise in abject poverty and
inequality. At the current historical juncture, the combined assets of the 225 richest people is
roughly equal to the annual income of the poorest 47 percent of the world’s population, while
the combined assets of the three richest people exceed the combined GDP of the 48 poorest
nations (CCPA, 2002, p. 3). Approximately 2.8 billion people—almost half of the
world’s population—struggle in desperation to live on less than two dollars a day
(McQuaig, 2001, p. 27). As many as 250 million children are wage slaves and there are over a
billion workers who are either un- or under-employed. These are the concrete realities of our
time—realities that require a vigorous class analysis, an unrelenting critique of capitalism and
an oppositional politics capable of confronting what Ahmad (1998, p. 2) refers to as ‘capitalist
universality.’ They are realities that require something more than that which is offered by the
prophets of ‘difference’ and post-Marxists who would have us relegate socialism to the
scrapheap of history and mummify Marxism along with Lenin’s corpse. Never before has a
Marxian analysis of capitalism and class rule been so desperately needed. That is not to say that
everything Marx said or anticipated has come true, for that is clearly not the case. Many
critiques of Marx focus on his strategy for moving toward socialism, and with ample
justification; nonetheless Marx did provide us with fundamental insights into class society that
have held true to this day. Marx’s enduring relevance lies in his indictment of capitalism which
continues to wreak havoc in the lives of most. While capitalism’s cheerleaders have attempted to
hide its sordid underbelly, Marx’s description of capitalism as the sorcerer’s dark power is even
more apt in light of contemporary historical and economic conditions. Rather than jettisoning
Marx, decentering the role of capitalism, and discrediting class analysis, radical educators
must continue to engage Marx’s oeuvre and extrapolate from it that which is useful
pedagogically, theoretically, and, most importantly, politically in light of the challenges that
confront us.
1NC Class Pedgaogy Alt
Our alternative is recommitment to class struggle grounded in socialist
humanism---pedagogical recommitment to Marxist struggle is key
Peter Mclaren 4, Education and Urban Schooling Division prof, UCLA—and Valerie
Scatamburlo-D'Annibale; University of Windsor, Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 36,
No. 2, 2004, www.freireproject.org/articles/node%2065/RCGS/class_dismissed-valpeter.10.pdf
These are the concrete realities of our time—realities that require a vigorous class analysis,
an unrelenting critique of capitalism and an oppositional politics capable of confronting
what Ahmad (1998, p. 2) refers to as ‘capitalist universality.’ They are realities that require
something more than that which is offered by the prophets of ‘difference’ and post-Marxists who
would have us relegate socialism to the scrapheap of history and mummify Marxism along with
Lenin's corpse. Never before has a Marxian analysis of capitalism and class rule been so
desperately needed. That is not to say that everything Marx said or anticipated has come true,
for that is clearly not the case. Many critiques of Marx focus on his strategy for moving toward
socialism, and with ample justification; nonetheless Marx did provide us with fundamental
insights into class society that have held true to this day. Marx's enduring relevance lies in his
indictment of capitalism which continues to wreak havoc in the lives of most. While capitalism's
cheerleaders have attempted to hide its sordid underbelly, Marx's description of capitalism as
the sorcerer's dark power is even more apt in light of contemporary historical and economic
conditions. Rather than jettisoning Marx, decentering the role of capitalism, and discrediting
class analysis, radical educators must continue to engage Marx's oeuvre and extrapolate from it
that which is useful pedagogically, theoretically, and, most importantly, politically in
light of the challenges that confront us.
The urgency which animates Amin’s call for a collective socialist vision necessitates, as we have
argued, moving beyond the particularism and liberal pluralism that informs the ‘politics
of difference.’ It also requires challenging the questionable assumptions that have come
to constitute the core of contemporary ‘radical’ theory, pedagogy and politics. In terms of
effecting change, what is needed is a cogent understanding of the systemic nature of
exploitation and oppression based on the precepts of a radical political economy approach
(outlined above) and one that incorporates Marx’s notion of ‘unity in difference’ in which
people share widely common material interests. Such an understanding extends far beyond
the realm of theory, for the manner in which we choose to interpret and explore the
social world, the concepts and frameworks we use to express our sociopolitical
understandings, are more than just abstract categories. They imply intentions,
organizational practices, and political agendas. Identifying class analysis as the basis for
our understandings and class struggle as the basis for political transformation implies
something quite different than constructing a sense of political agency around issues of
race, ethnicity, gender, etc. Contrary to ‘Shakespeare’s assertion that a rose by any other name
would smell as sweet,’ it should be clear that this is not the case in political matters. Rather, in
politics ‘the essence of the flower lies in the name by which it is called’ (Bannerji, 2000, p. 41).
The task for progressives today is to seize the moment and plant the seeds for a political
agenda that is grounded in historical possibilities and informed by a vision committed to
overcoming exploitative conditions. These seeds, we would argue, must be derived from the
tree of radical political economy. For the vast majority of people today—people of all ‘racial
classifications or identities, all genders and sexual orientations’—the common frame of reference
arcing across ‘difference’, the ‘concerns and aspirations that are most widely shared are those
that are rooted in the common experience of everyday life shaped and constrained by political
economy’ (Reed, 2000, p. xxvii). While post-Marxist advocates of the politics of ‘difference’
suggest that such a stance is outdated, we would argue that the categories which they have
employed to analyze ‘the social’ are now losing their usefulness, particularly in light of actual
contemporary ‘social movements.’ All over the globe, there are large anti-capitalist movements
afoot. In February 2002, chants of ‘Another World Is Possible’ became the theme of protests in
Porto Allegre. It seems that those people struggling in the streets haven’t read about T.I.N.A.,
the end of grand narratives of emancipation, or the decentering of capitalism. It seems as
though the struggle for basic survival and some semblance of human dignity in the mean streets
of the dystopian metropoles doesn’t permit much time or opportunity to read the heady
proclamations emanating from seminar rooms. As E. P. Thompson (1978, p. 11) once remarked,
sometimes ‘experience walks in without knocking at the door, and announces deaths, crises of
subsistence, trench warfare, unemployment, inflation, genocide.’ This, of course, does not mean
that socialism will inevitably come about, yet a sense of its nascent promise animates current
social movements. Indeed, noted historian Howard Zinn (2000, p. 20) recently pointed out that
after years of single-issue organizing (i.e. the politics of difference), the WTO and other anticorporate capitalist protests signaled a turning point in the ‘history of movements of recent
decades,’ for it was the issue of ‘class’ that more than anything ‘bound everyone together.’
History, to paraphrase Thompson (1978, p. 25) doesn’t seem to be following Theory’s script.
Our vision is informed by Marx's historical materialism and his revolutionary socialist
humanism, which must not be conflated with liberal humanism. For left politics and pedagogy, a
socialist humanist vision remains crucial, whose fundamental features include the creative
potential of people to challenge collectively the circumstances that they inherit. This variant of
humanism seeks to give expression to the pain, sorrow and degradation of the oppressed, those
who labor under the ominous and ghastly cloak of ‘globalized’ capital. It calls for the
transformation of those conditions that have prevented the bulk of humankind from fulfilling its
potential. It vests its hope for change in the development of critical consciousness and social
agents who make history, although not always in conditions of their choosing. The political goal
of socialist humanism is, however, ‘not a resting in difference’ but rather ‘the emancipation of
difference at the level of human mutuality and reciprocity.’ This would be a step forward for the
‘discovery or creation of our real differences which can only in the end be explored in reciprocal
ways’ (Eagleton, 1996, p. 120). Above all else, the enduring relevance of a radical socialist
pedagogy and politics is the centrality it accords to the interrogation of capitalism. We can no
longer afford to remain indifferent to the horror and savagery committed by capitalist's barbaric
machinations. We need to recognize that capitalist democracy is unrescuably contradictory in its
own self-constitution. Capitalism and democracy cannot be translated into one another without
profound efforts at manufacturing empty idealism. Committed Leftists must unrelentingly
cultivate a democratic socialist vision that refuses to forget the ‘wretched of the earth,’ the
children of the damned and the victims of the culture of silence—a task which requires more
than abstruse convolutions and striking ironic poses in the agnostic arena of signifying
practices. Leftists must illuminate the little shops of horror that lurk beneath ‘globalization’s’
shiny façade; they must challenge the true ‘evils’ that are manifest in the tentacles of global
capitalism's reach. And, more than this, Leftists must search for the cracks in the edifice of
globalized capitalism and shine light on those fissures that give birth to alternatives.
Socialism today, undoubtedly, runs against the grain of received wisdom, but its vision of a
vastly improved and freer arrangement of social relations beckons on the horizon. Its unwritten
text is nascent in the present even as it exists among the fragments of history and the shards of
distant memories. Its potential remains untapped and its promise needs to be redeemed.
McLaren Alt
The alternative is the only way to solve racial (and gendered) oppression---class
consciousness does not preclude discussions of race or exclude the oppressed--default to the account with the best systemic explanatory power
Peter Mclaren 4, Education and Urban Schooling Division prof, UCLA—and Valerie
Scatamburlo-D'Annibale; University of Windsor, Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 36,
No. 2, 2004, www.freireproject.org/articles/node%2065/RCGS/class_dismissed-valpeter.10.pdf
Another caveat. In making such a claim, we are not renouncing the concept of experience. On the contrary, we believe it is
imperative to retain the category of lived experience as a reference point in light of misguided post-Marxist critiques which imply that all forms of
Marxian class analysis are dismissive of subjectivity. We
are not, however, advocating the uncritical fetishization of
‘experience’ that tends to assume that experience somehow guarantees the authenticity of
knowledge and which often treats experience as self-explanatory, transparent, and solely
individual. Rather, we advance a framework that seeks to make connections between seemingly isolated situations and/or particular experiences
by exploring how they are constituted in, and circumscribed by, broader historical and social circumstances. Experiential
understandings, in and of themselves, are suspect because, dialectically, they constitute a unity of
opposites—they are at once unique, specific, and personal, but also thoroughly
partial, social, and the products of historical forces about which individuals may
know little or nothing (Gimenez, 2001). In this sense, a rich description of immediate experience in terms of
consciousness of a particular form of oppression (racial or otherwise) can be an appropriate and indispensable
point of departure. Such an understanding, however, can easily become an isolated ‘difference’ prison unless it
transcends the immediate perceived point of oppression, confronts the social system in which it is rooted, and
expands into a complex and multifaceted analysis (of forms of social mediation) that is capable of
mapping out the general organization of social relations. That, however, requires a broad
class-based approach.—¶ Having a concept of class helps us to see the network of social
relations constituting an overall social organization which both implicates and cuts
through racialization/ethnicization and gender… [a] radical political economy [class] perspective
emphasizing exploitation, dispossession and survival takes the issues of … diversity [and difference] beyond
questions of conscious identity such as culture and ideology, or of a paradigm of homogeneity and
heterogeneity … or of ethical imperatives with respect to the ‘other’. (Bannerji, 2000, pp. 7, 19)¶ A radical
political economy framework is crucial since various ‘culturalist’ perspectives seem to diminish the role of political
economy and class forces in shaping the edifice of ‘the social’—including the shifting constellations and meanings of
‘difference.’ Furthermore, none of the ‘differences’ valorized in culturalist narratives alone, and certainly not ‘race’ by itself can explain the massive
transformation of the structure of capitalism in recent years. We agree with Meyerson (2000) that ‘race’ is not an adequate explanatory category on its
own and that the
use of ‘race’ as a descriptive or analytical category has serious
consequences for the way in which social life is presumed to be constituted and
organized. The category of ‘race’—the conceptual framework that the oppressed often
employ to interpret their experiences of inequality ‘often clouds the concrete reality of
class, and blurs the actual structure of power and privilege.’ In this regard, ‘race’ is all too often a
‘barrier to understanding the central role of class in shaping personal and
collective outcomes within a capitalist society’ (Marable, 1995, pp. 8, 226). In many ways, the use of ‘ race’ has become
an analytical trap precisely when it has been employed in antiseptic isolation from the messy terrain of historical
and material relations. This, of course, does not imply that we ignore racism and racial oppression; rather,
an analytical shift from ‘race’ to a plural conceptualization of ‘racisms’ and their historical articulations is necessary (cf. McLaren & Torres, 1999).
However, it
is important to note that ‘ race’ doesn’t explain racism and forms of racial oppression. Those
relations are best understood within the context of class rule, as Bannerji, Kovel, Marable and Meyerson imply—
but that compels us to forge a conceptual shift in theorizing, which entails (among other things)
moving beyond the ideology of ‘difference’ and ‘race’ as the dominant prisms for
understanding exploitation and oppression. We are aware of some potential implications for white Marxist criticalists to unwittingly
support racist practices in their criticisms of ‘race-first’ positions articulated in the social sciences. In those instances, white criticalists wrongly go on
‘high alert’ in placing theorists of color under special surveillance for downplaying an analysis of capitalism and class. These activities on the part of
white criticalists must be condemned, as must be efforts to stress class analysis primarily as a means of creating a white vanguard position in the
struggle against capitalism.
Our position is one that attempts to link practices of racial oppression to the central, totalizing
dynamics of capitalist society in order to resist white supremacist capitalist
patriarchy more fully .7¶ We have argued that it is virtually impossible to conceptualize class without attending to the forms and
contents of difference, but we insist that this does not imply that class struggle is now outdated by the politics of difference. As Jameson (1998, p. 136)
notes, we are now in the midst of returning to the ‘most fundamental form of class struggle’ in light of current global conditions. Today’s climate
suggests that class struggle is ‘not yet a thing of the past’ and that those who seek to undermine its centrality are not only ‘morally callous’ and ‘seriously
out of touch with reality’ but also largely blind to the ‘needs of the large mass of people who are barely surviving capital’s newly-honed mechanisms of
globalized greed’ (Harvey, 1998, pp. 7–9). In our view, a more comprehensive and politically useful understanding of the contemporary historical
juncture necessitates foregrounding class analysis and the primacy of the working class as the fundamental agent of change.8¶ This does not render as
‘secondary’ the concerns of those marginalized by race, ethnicity, etc. as is routinely charged by post-Marxists. It
is often assumed that
foregrounding capitalist social relations necessarily undermines the importance of attending to
‘difference’ and/or trivializes struggles against racism, etc., in favor of an abstractly defined class-based
politics typically identified as ‘white.’ Yet, such formulations rest on a bizarre but generally
unspoken logic that assumes that racial and ethnic ‘minorities’ are only conjuncturally related to
the working class. This stance is patently absurd since the concept of the ‘working class’ is
undoubtedly comprised of men and women of different races, ethnicities, etc. (Mitter, 1997). A good deal
of post-Marxist critique is subtly racist (not to mention essentialist) insofar as it implies that ‘people of
color’ could not possibly be concerned with issues beyond those related to their ‘racial’ or ‘ethnic’
‘difference.’ This posits ‘people of color’ as single-minded, one-dimensional caricatures and
assumes that their working lives are less crucial to their self-understanding (and survival) than is the
case with their ‘white male’ counterparts.9 It also ignores ‘the fact that class is an ineradicable dimension
of everybody’s lives’ (Gimenez, 2001, p. 2) and that social oppression is much more than tangentially linked to class background and
the exploitative relations of production. On this topic, Meyerson (2000) is worth quoting at length: ¶ Marxism properly interpreted emphasizes the
primacy of class in a number of senses. One of course is the primacy of the working class as a revolutionary agent—a primacy which does not render
women and people of color ‘secondary.’ This view assumes that ‘working class’ means white—this division between a white working class and all the
others, whose identity (along with a corresponding social theory to explain that identity) is thereby viewed as either primarily one of gender and race or
hybrid … [T]he primacy of class means … that building a multiracial, multi-gendered international working-class organization or organizations should
be the goal of any revolutionary movement so that the primacy of class puts the fight against racism and sexism at the center. The
intelligibility of this position is rooted in the explanatory primacy of class analysis for
understanding the structural determinants of race, gender, and class oppression.
Oppression is multiple and intersecting but its causes are not .¶ The cohesiveness of this position
suggests that forms of exploitation and oppression are related internally to the extent that they are located in the same totality— one which is currently
defined by capitalist class rule. Capitalism is an overarching totality that is, unfortunately, becoming increasingly invisible in post-Marxist ‘discursive’
narratives that valorize ‘difference’ as a primary explanatory construct.
Ontology-AT Jim Crow/Slavery Metaphor
Analogizing the present situation to Jim Crow and slavery obscure the distinct
transformations of capital that underlie current racialization---ontological
explanations or starting with ‘the libidinal economy’ ironically severs structural
and institutional processes from our explanations of racism by positing a transcontextual, unified theory of oppression
Adolph Reed 13, prof at Penn, On the “New Jim Crow”: An Interview With Adolph Reed,
http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=8096
Doug Henwood: The phrase “the new Jim Crow” is making the rounds a lot. What’s wrong with
drawing that parallel?
Adolph Reed: A number of things. First, not to be pedantically historicist about this, but it’s not.
Jim Crow was a regime that was brought into existence after the defeat of the populist
insurgency at the end of the 19th century as a set of mechanisms for consolidating class power in
the South, in particular that of the planter-merchant class. And it was a set of institutions, both
those of petty apartheid and the grand apartheid of denying citizenship rights to black
Americans, that were rooted to that political-economic moment and the regime of class power
that was anchored in plantation elites. One of the reasons the Jim Crow system was vulnerable
to attack after World War II in a way it hadn’t been previously—because black people never liked
it and tried to stop it as much as possible—was that it had lost a good bit if its economic
foundations. So the structure of petty apartheid wasn’t as essential anymore to maintain class
and racial hierarchies.
So, that’s a problem. I would argue that this is not just a problem of historicist pedantry, because
the tendency to disconnect the social practices analytically from the institutional arrangements
in which those practices were embedded really kind of cuts the historicity of the past and the
present out of the picture. And besides, it can’t be just like Jim Crow. I remember I was at a
conference a number of years ago at Harvard Law School when Derrick Bell was still on the
faculty there. Bell was on a panel at this conference, and he insisted that nothing really had
changed for black Americans since 1865. And I’m looking at this—here he was, a full professor at
Harvard Law School, making the assertion that nothing had changed. Well, obviously something
had changed, because he was in Harvard Law School without a broom in his hand.
The argument by analogy simply doesn’t work. And of course the poster version of this
argument now, Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow, kind of makes this point for me,
because she dangles the analogy throughout the first two thirds of the book, and finally she says,
Well, it doesn’t really work, because this isn’t really Jim Crow, and there are a lot of ways that
it’s different. At best, it’s a nice-sounding slogan, but it’s not one that helps us understand
anything. And the stronger version of my argument would be that it does just the opposite.
D.H.: Of course, there are vast differences in experiences of the criminal justice system, from
stop-and-frisk in the streets of New York to residents of death row in Texas. That, people say, is
Jim Crow-ish. What do you say?
A.R.: Well, I don’t know what it gains for us to call it Jim Crow-ish. It might be better to make
sense of it on its own terms, that is, in relation to the drug war, to policing, urban decline, and
the changing logic of metropolitan redevelopment in cities over the last two or three decades,
which have produced this vast new lumpenproletariat or marginal working class—I’m going to
try to avoid the neologisms like precariat—that’s available for casual labor and fodder for the
criminal-justice industry and for the therapy industry. I think it would make sense to discuss
those phenomena, or in fact the general phenomenon that would encompass all those taxa, on
their own terms, without the analogy to Jim Crow. Among other reasons, what’s the agency? The
New Jim Crow argument, it seems to me, posits racism as an ontological force that
imposes itself trans-contextually on historical circumstances. Therefore, ironically,
the argument separates racism from its embeddedness in the structures and
dynamics that reproduce American capitalism on a regular basis—like, for instance,
presumptions of racial hierarchy that are built into assessments of skill in the labor market and
into residential real estate value quite explicitly.
That would be a conversation to have that would point in some policy directions, but I don’t
see what good ontologizing racism, as the analogy does, does for us, except for those
people who are committed to a view that racism is America’s original sin or the national disease
or a pathology that will undercut any progressive movement, and so on. To my taste, that’s just
way too close to the Nation of Islam’s Yakub theory.
D.H.: Funny to find myself quoting Milton Friedman at a moment like this, but he did say once
in a debate with George Shultz over fiscal policy that when you start resorting to metaphors,
you’re admitting that your argument is weak.
A.R.: [Laughs.] Yeah, well, God forbid I should also find myself endorsing anything Milton
Friedman said, even at the level of the sun shining outside. But that sounds pretty good to me.
D.H.: You said The Help located Jim Crow in attitudes and personal relations rather than in law,
very explicit, racialized law. So this New Jim Crow is what, attitudes?
A.R.: I guess so. This is where the metaphor climbs the scale of mysticism, because what you get
are attempts to square the circle between references to structural forces and
disembodied ideology. So this is where the “takes on a life of its own” thing becomes not a
metaphor but in effect a substantive claim, or a metaphor that’s treated like a substantive claim.
You get convoluted discussions of structural racism, systemic racism, institutional racism, all of
which feel instructively like Thomas S. Kuhn’s description in The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions about what happens when interpretive paradigms are in crisis, and it springs leaks
all over the place. and the adherents have to keep patching. You spend more time patching up ad
hoc explanations of anomalies that should be explained by the paradigm but aren’t, which are
the ultimate indication that the paradigm is experiencing a crisis of its own interpretative
authority. And I think that’s where we are with anti-racism at this point. Look, there are only
two possibilities. Either there’s an idea that drives the movement of the structural forces and
gives them teleological direction—let’s just call it God—or there’s not. And I think a lot of the
argument that underlies the appeal either to Jim Crow, or to slavery for that matter, rests on an
attempt to have that question both ways or to split the difference. And you can’t. It’s a
difference that can’t be split.
Privg
Experience doesn’t equal expertise and you shouldn’t throw out our claims
because of our privilege---we have to extend politics beyond the realm of our
immediate experience---systemic analysis key
Rob 14 Carleton College, Robtheidealist, My Skinfolk Ain't All Kinfolk,
www.orchestratedpulse.com/2014/03/problem-identity-politics/
identity politics merely
means political activity that caters to the interests of a particular social group. In a certain sense,
all politics are identity politics. However, it’s one thing to intentionally form a group around
articulated interests; it’s another matter entirely when group membership is socially imposed.
Personal identities are socially defined through a combination of systemic rewards/marginalization plus actual
and/or potential violence. We can’t build politics from that foundation because these socially
imposed identities don’t necessarily tell us anything about someone’s political interests.
Successful identity politics requires shared interests, not shared personal identities.
I’m not here to tell you that personal identity doesn’t matter; we rightfully point out that
systemic power shapes people’s lives. Simply put, my message is that personal identity is not the only thing that matters. We spend so
much energy labeling people—privileged/marginalized, oppressor/oppressed—that we often
neglect to build spaces that antagonize the systems that cause our collective
trauma.
Some people look at these flaws and call for an end to “identity politics”, but I think that’s a mistake. At its most basic level,
All You Blacks Want All the Same Things
We assume that if a person is systemically marginalized, then they must have a vested interest in dismantling that system. Yet, that’s not always the case.
Take Orville Lloyd Douglas, who last summer wrote an article in the Guardian in which he admitted that he hates being Black.
I can honestly say I hate being a black male… I just don’t fit into a neat category of the stereotypical views people have of black men. I hate rap music, I hate most sports, and I
like listening to rock music… I have nothing in common with the archetypes about the black male… I resent being compared to young black males (or young people of any race)
who are lazy, not disciplined, or delinquent. Orville Lloyd Douglas, Why I Hate Being a Black Man
As we can see from Douglas’ cry for help, membership in a marginalized group is no guarantee that a person can
understand and effectively combat systemic oppression. Yet, we seem to treat all marginalized
voices as equal, as if they are all insightful, as if there is no diversity of thought, as if—in the case
of race– “All you Blacks want all the same things”.
Shared identity does not equal shared interests. John Ridley, the Oscar-winning screenplay writer of 12 Years a Slave, is a good example.
He’s written screenplays based on Jimi Hendrix, the L.A. riots, and other poignant moments and icons within Black history. He wants to see more Black people in Hollywood
and he has a long history of successfully incorporating Black and Brown characters into comic book stories and franchises.
However, in 2006, Ridley made waves with an essay in which he castigated Black people who did not live up to his standards; saying, “It’s time for ascended blacks to wish
niggers good luck.”
So I say this: It’s time for ascended blacks to wish niggers good luck. Just as whites may be concerned with the good of all citizens but don’t travel their days worrying
specifically about the well-being of hillbillies from Appalachia, we need to send niggers on their way. We need to start extolling the most virtuous of ourselves. It is time to
celebrate the New Black Americans—those who have sealed the Deal, who aren’t beholden to liberal indulgence any more than they are to the disdain of the hard Right. It is time
to praise blacks who are merely undeniable in their individuality and exemplary in their levels of achievement. The Manifesto of Ascendancy for the Modern American Nigger
While Ridley and I share cultural affinity, and we both want to see Black people doing well, shared cultural affinity and common identity are not enough– which recent history
Don
Lemon, speaking in support of Bill O’Reilly, said that racism would be lessened if Black people
pulled up their pants and stopped littering. Last fall, 40% of Black U.S. Americans supported
airstrikes against Syria.
makes abundantly clear. Barack Obama continues to deport record numbers of Brown immigrants here at home, while mercilessly bombing Brown folks abroad.
My skinfolk ain’t all kinfolk, and the Left needs to catch up.
NO MORE ALLIES
John Ridley, Barack Obama, myself, and Don Lemon are all Black males. We also have conflicting political positions and interests, but how can we decide which paths are valid
if we only pay attention to personal identity?
Instead of learning to recognize how the overarching systems maintain their power and then
attacking those tools, we spend our energy finding an “other” to embody the systemic
marginalization and legitimize our spaces and ideals. In some interracial spaces I feel like
nothing more than an interchangeable token whose only purpose is to legitimize the politics of
my White peers. If not me, then some other Black person would fill the slot.
We use these “others” as authorities on various issues, and we use concepts like “privilege” to
ensure that people stay in their lanes. People of color are the authorities on race, while LGBTQ people are the authorities on gender and sexuality,
and so forth and so on. Yet, experience is not the same as expertise, and privilege doesn’t
automatically make you clueless. As I’ve discussed, these groups are not oriented around a singular
set of political ideals and practices. Furthermore, as we see in Andrea Smith’s work, there are often competing
interests within these groups. We mistake essentialism for intersectionality as we look
for the ideal subjects to embody the various forms of oppression; true intersectionality is a description of systemic power,
not a call for diversity.
If we don’t develop any substantive analysis of systemic power, then it’s impossible to
know what our interests are, and aligning with one another according to shared interests is out
of the question. In this climate all that remains is the ally, which requires no real knowledge or
political effort, only the willingness to appear supportive of an “other”. We can’t build power
that way.
After having gathered to oppose organized White supremacy at the University of North
Carolina, a group of organizers in Durham, North Carolina found that the Left’s emphasis on personal
identity and allyship was a major reason why their efforts collapsed. They proposed that we
adopt the practice of forming alliances rather than identifying allies. (h/t NinjaBikeSlut)
Much of the discourse around being an ally seems to presume a relationship of one-sided support, with one person or group following another’s leadership. While there are
In an alliance, the two parties support
each other while maintaining their own self-determination and autonomy, and are bound
together not by the relationship of leader and follower but by a shared goal. In other words, one
cannot actually be the ally of a group or individual with whom one has no political affinity – and
this means that one cannot be an ally to an entire demographic group, like people of color, who
do not share a singular cohesive political or personal desire. The Divorce of Thought From Deed
While it’s vital for me to learn the politics and history of marginalized experiences that differ
from my own, listen to their voices, and respect their spaces and contributions — it’s also important for me to understand the
ways in which these same systems have shaped my own identity/history as well. Since we know that
oppression is systemic and multidimensional, then I’m going to have to step outside of personal
experience and begin to develop political ideals and practices that actually
antagonize those systems. I have to understand and articulate my interests, which will allow
me to operate from a position of strength and form political alliances that advance those
interests– interests which speak to issues beyond just my own immediate
experience.
certainly times where this makes sense, it is misleading to use the term ally to describe this relationship.
Block
telos
We need to reassert a moment for metanarratives by re-centering our focus on
class---the aff’s emphasis on difference is reactionary and entrenches the status
quo
Dave Hill 9, teaches at Middlesex University and is Visiting Professor of Critical Education
Policy and Equality Studies at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Culturalist and Materialist
Explanations of Class and "Race", Cultural Logic 2009 http://clogic.eserver.org/2009/Hill.pdf
Postmodernism’s rejection of metanarratives can be seen as symptomatic of the theoretical
inability to construct a mass solidaristic oppositional transformatory political
project, and that it is based on the refusal to recognise the validity or existence of solidaristic
social class. More importantly, this general theoretical shortcoming is politically disabling
because the effect of eschewing mass solidaristic policy is, in effect, supporting a reactionary
status quo. Both as an analysis and as a vision, post-modernism has its dangers – but more
so as a vision. It fragments and denies economic, social, political, and cultural relations. In
particular, it rejects the solidaristic metanarratives of neo-Marxism and socialism. It thereby
serves to disempower the oppressed and to uphold the hegemonic Radical Right in their
privileging of individualism and in their stress on patterns and relations of
consumption as opposed to relations of production. Postmodernism analysis, in effect if not
in intention, justifies ideologically the current Radical Right economic, political,
and educational project.
libidinal econ
Claims of a trans-historical antiblack racism mystifies neoliberal social relations
Adolph Reed 13, professor of political science @ U Pennsylvania, Marx, Race, and
Neoliberalism, New Labor Forum January/February 2013 22: 49-57,
Chang’s perspective may help us see more clearly how ascriptive ideologies function. It certainly
is no surprise that dominant classes operate among themselves within a common sense that
understands their dominance unproblematically, as decreed by the nature of things. At
moments when their dominance faces challenges, those narratives may be articulated more
assertively and for broader dissemination. This logic, for example, underlay the antebellum
shift, in the face of mounting antislavery agitation, from pragmatic defenses of slavery as a
necessary evil—a stance that presumed a ruling class speaking among itself alone—to essentialist
arguments, putatively transcending class interests, namely, that slavery was a positive good. It
also may be seen in the explosion of racialist ideology in its various forms, including eugenics, in
justifying imperialist expansionism and consolidating the defeat of populism and working-class
insurgency in the years overlapping the turn of the twentieth century. That same dynamic was at
work displacing the language of class and political economy by culture and culturology
in the postwar liberalism that consolidated the defeat of CIO radicalism. Later, racial
essentialism helped reify the struggles against southern segregation, racial discrimination,
inequality, and poverty during the 1960s by separating discussions of injustice from
capitalism’s logic of reproduction. Poverty was reinvented as a cultural dilemma, and “white
racism” singled out as the root of racial inequality.
In this way, Chang’s perspective can be helpful in sorting out several important limitations in
discussions of race and class characteristic of today’s left. It can also help to make sense of the
striking convergence between the relative success of identitarian understandings of
social justice and the steady, intensifying advance of neoliberalism. It suggests a
kinship where many on the left assume an enmity. The rise of neoliberalism in
particular suggests a serious problem with arguments that represent race and class as
dichotomous or alternative frameworks of political critique and action, as well as those
arguments that posit the dichotomy while attempting to reconcile its elements with formalistic
gestures, for example, the common “race and class” construction.
This sort of historical materialist perspective throws into relief a fundamental limitation of the
“whiteness” notion that has been fashionable within the academic left for roughly two decades:
it reifies whiteness as a transhistorical social category. In effect, it treats “whiteness”—
and therefore “race”—as existing prior to and above social context.10 Both who qualifies as
white and the significance of being white have altered over time. Moreover, whiteness
discourse functions as a kind of moralistic exposé rather than a basis for strategic
politics; this is clear in that the program signally articulated in its name has been simply to
raise a demand to “abolish whiteness,” that is, to call on whites to renounce their racial privilege.
In fact, its fixation on demonstrating the depth of whites’ embrace of what was known to an
earlier generation’s version of this argument as “white skin privilege” and the inclination to slide
into teleological accounts in which groups or individuals “approach” or “pursue” whiteness
erases the real historical dynamics and contradictions of American racial history.
The whiteness discourse overlaps other arguments that presume racism to be a sui generis form
of injustice. Despite seeming provocative, these arguments do not go beyond the premises of the
racial liberalism from which they commonly purport to dissent. They differ only in
rhetorical flourish, not content. Formulations that invoke metaphors of disease or original
sin reify racism by disconnecting it from the discrete historical circumstances and
social structures in which it is embedded, and treating it as an autonomous force.
Disconnection from political economy is also a crucial feature of postwar liberalism’s
construction of racial inequality as prejudice or intolerance. Racism becomes an independent
variable in a moralistic argument that is idealist intellectually and ultimately defeatist politically.
This tendency to see racism as sui generis also generates a resistance to precision in
analysis. It is fueled by a tendency to inflate the language of racism to the edge of its reasonable
conceptual limits, if not beyond. Ideological commitment to shoehorning into the rubric of
racism all manner of inequalities that may appear statistically as racial disparities has yielded
two related interpretive pathologies. One is a constantly expanding panoply of neologisms—
“institutional racism,” “systemic racism,” “structural racism,” “color-blind racism,” “post-racial
racism,” etc.—intended to graft more complex social dynamics onto a simplistic and frequently
psychologically inflected racism/anti-racism political ontology. Indeed, these efforts bring to
mind [Thomas S.] Kuhn’s account of attempts to accommodate mounting anomalies to salvage
an interpretive paradigm in danger of crumbling under a crisis of authority.11
A second essentialist sleight-of-hand advances claims for the primacy of race/racism as an
explanation of inequalities in the present by invoking analogies to regimes of explicitly racial
subordination in the past. In these arguments, analogy stands in for evidence and
explanation of the contemporary centrality of racism. Michelle Alexander’s widely read and cited
book, The New Jim Crow, is only the most prominent expression of this tendency; even she has
to acknowledge that the analogy fails because the historical circumstances are so radically
different.12
Rigorous pursuit of equality of opportunity exclusively within the terms of capitalist class
relations has been fully legitimized under the rubric of “diversity.”
deck chairs
Even if they solve, it turns the case---race based politics rearranges deck-chairs of
oppression---understanding how neoliberalism continually reconstitutes itself
through ascriptive hierarchies like racialization is key
Adolph Reed 13, professor of political science @ U Pennsylvania, Marx, Race, and
Neoliberalism, New Labor Forum January/February 2013 22: 49-57,
In this way, Chang’s perspective can be helpful in sorting out several important limitations in
discussions of race and class characteristic of today’s left. It can also help to make sense of the
striking convergence between the relative success of identitarian understandings of
social justice and the steady, intensifying advance of neoliberalism. It suggests a
kinship where many on the left assume an enmity. The rise of neoliberalism in
particular suggests a serious problem with arguments that represent race and class as
dichotomous or alternative frameworks of political critique and action, as well as those
arguments that posit the dichotomy while attempting to reconcile its elements with formalistic
gestures, for example, the common “race and class” construction.
This sort of historical materialist perspective throws into relief a fundamental limitation of the
“whiteness” notion that has been fashionable within the academic left for roughly two decades:
it reifies whiteness as a transhistorical social category. In effect, it treats “whiteness”—
and therefore “race”—as existing prior to and above social context.10 Both who qualifies as
white and the significance of being white have altered over time. Moreover, whiteness
discourse functions as a kind of moralistic exposé rather than a basis for strategic
politics; this is clear in that the program signally articulated in its name has been simply to
raise a demand to “abolish whiteness,” that is, to call on whites to renounce their racial privilege.
In fact, its fixation on demonstrating the depth of whites’ embrace of what was known to an
earlier generation’s version of this argument as “white skin privilege” and the inclination to slide
into teleological accounts in which groups or individuals “approach” or “pursue” whiteness
erases the real historical dynamics and contradictions of American racial history.
The whiteness discourse overlaps other arguments that presume racism to be a sui generis form
of injustice. Despite seeming provocative, these arguments do not go beyond the premises of the
racial liberalism from which they commonly purport to dissent. They differ only in
rhetorical flourish, not content. Formulations that invoke metaphors of disease or original
sin reify racism by disconnecting it from the discrete historical circumstances and
social structures in which it is embedded, and treating it as an autonomous force.
Disconnection from political economy is also a crucial feature of postwar liberalism’s
construction of racial inequality as prejudice or intolerance. Racism becomes an independent
variable in a moralistic argument that is idealist intellectually and ultimately defeatist politically.
This tendency to see racism as sui generis also generates a resistance to precision in analysis. It
is fueled by a tendency to inflate the language of racism to the edge of its reasonable conceptual
limits, if not beyond. Ideological commitment to shoehorning into the rubric of racism all
manner of inequalities that may appear statistically as racial disparities has yielded two related
interpretive pathologies. One is a constantly expanding panoply of neologisms—“institutional
racism,” “systemic racism,” “structural racism,” “color-blind racism,” “post-racial racism,” etc.—
intended to graft more complex social dynamics onto a simplistic and frequently psychologically
inflected racism/anti-racism political ontology. Indeed, these efforts bring to mind [Thomas S.]
Kuhn’s account of attempts to accommodate mounting anomalies to salvage an interpretive
paradigm in danger of crumbling under a crisis of authority.11
A second essentialist sleight-of-hand advances claims for the primacy of race/racism as an
explanation of inequalities in the present by invoking analogies to regimes of explicitly racial
subordination in the past. In these arguments, analogy stands in for evidence and explanation of
the contemporary centrality of racism. Michelle Alexander’s widely read and cited book, The
New Jim Crow, is only the most prominent expression of this tendency; even she has to
acknowledge that the analogy fails because the historical circumstances are so radically
different.12
Rigorous pursuit of equality of opportunity exclusively within the terms of capitalist class
relations has been fully legitimized under the rubric of “diversity.”
From the historical materialist standpoint, the view of racial inequality as a sui generis injustice
and dichotomous formulations of the relation of race and class as systems of hierarchy in the
United States are not only miscast but also fundamentally counterproductive. It is particularly
important at this moment to recognize that the familiar taxonomy of racial difference is but one
historically specific instance of a genus of ideologies of ascriptive hierarchy that stabilize
capitalist social reproduction. I have argued previously that entirely new race-like
taxonomies could come to displace the familiar ones. For instance, the “underclass”
could become even more race-like as a distinctive, essentialized population, by our current folk
norms, multiracial in composition, albeit most likely including in perceptibly greater frequencies
people who would be classified as black and Latino “racially,” though as small enough pluralities
to preclude assimilating the group ideologically as a simple proxy for nonwhite inferiors.13
This possibility looms larger now. Struggles for racial and gender equality have largely divested
race and gender of their common sense verisimilitude as bases for essential difference.
Moreover, versions of racial and gender equality are now also incorporated into the normative
and programmatic structure of “left” neoliberalism. Rigorous pursuit of equality of opportunity
exclusively within the terms of given patterns of capitalist class relations—which is after all the
ideal of racial liberalism—has been fully legitimized within the rubric of “diversity.” That ideal is
realized through gaining rough parity in distribution of social goods and bads among designated
population categories. As Walter Benn Michaels has argued powerfully, according to that ideal,
the society would be just if 1 percent of the population controlled 90 percent of the resources,
provided that blacks and other nonwhites, women, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender
(LGBT) people were represented among the 1 percent in roughly similar proportion as their
incidence in the general population.14
Given the triumph of racial liberalism, it is entirely possible that new discourses of ascriptive
difference might take shape that fit the folk common sense of our time and its cultural norms
and sensibilities. Indeed, the explosive resurgence in recent years of academically
legitimated determinist discourses—all of which simply rehearse the standard idealist
tropes and circular garbage in/garbage out faux scientific narratives—reinforce that concern.
The undergirding premises of intellectual programs like evolutionary psychology, behavioral
economics, genes and politics, and neurocriminology are strikingly like straight-line
extrapolations from Victorian race science—although for the most part, though not entirely,
scholars operating in those areas are scrupulous, or at least fastidious, in not implicating the
familiar racial taxonomies in their deterministic sophistries. Some scholars imagine that
“epigenetics”—a view that focuses on the interplay of genes and environment in producing
organisms and genotypes—avoids determinism by providing causal explanations that are not
purely biological. Recent research purporting to find epigenetic explanations for socioeconomic
inequality already foreshadows a possible framework for determinist “underclass” narratives
that avoid the taints associated with biological justifications of inequality and references to
currently recognized racial categories.15 Ironically, some enthusiasts for this epigenetic patter
expressly liken it to Lamarckian evolutionary theory, which stressed the heritability of
characteristics acquired after birth, as though this were insulation against determinism. As
historian of anthropology George Stocking, Jr., and others have shown, Lamarckian race theory
was no less determinist than its Darwinian alternative, which posited strictly biological
determinism. As Stocking notes, Lamarckians’ dependence on a “vague sociobiological
indeterminism” made it all the more difficult to challenge their circular race theories.16 In any
event, narrow approaches that reduce ascriptive ideology to reified notions of race/racism are
not at all up to the challenge posed by this new determinist turn.
perm
they should be forced to defend the 1ac itself as a political strategy
Iris Marion Young 6, was Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago,
Responsibility and Global Justice, sites.coloradocollege.edu/engaging-theglobal/files/2013/01/Young_2006.pdf
So far, I have offered only a way of thinking about responsibility in general. One mightwellobjectthatthesocialconnectionmodelofrespon- sibility raises
as many questions as it answers. For example, the model says that all
who participate by their actions in processes that
produce injustice share responsibility for its remedy. Does this mean that all par- ticipants bear responsibility in the
same way and to the same degree? If not, then what are the grounds for differentiating kinds and degrees of
responsibility? Most of us participate in many structural processes, more- over, that arguably have disadvantaging, harmful, or unjust
consequences for others. It is asking too much to expect most of us to work actively to restructure each and every one of the structural injustices for
which we arguably share responsibility. How, then, should
we reason about the best ways to use our limited
time, resources, and creative energy to respond to structural injustice? ¶ Adequately responding to
questions like these would take at least another fullessay.Thus,Iwillonlysketchanswershere,andillustratetheresponses once again through the example
of the anti-sweatshop movement. ¶ Some moral theorists argue that responsibility names a form of
obligationdistinctfromduty.JoelFeinberg,forexample,distinguishesbetween an ethic that focuses on obligation or duty and an ethic that focuses on
responsibility. On the one hand, a duty specifies a rule of action or delineates the substance of what actions count as performing the duty. A
responsibility, on the other hand, while no less obligatory, is more open with regard to what counts as
carrying it out.49 A person with responsibilities is obliged to attend to outcomes that the responsibilities call for, and to orient her actions in
ways demonstrably intended to contribute to bringing about those outcomes. Because a person may face many moral demands on her actions, and
because changes in circumstances are often unpredictable, just how a person goes about discharging her responsibilities is a matter subject to
considerable discretion.5° Given
that a combination of responsibilities may be overly
demanding, and given that agents have discretion in how they choose to discharge their responsibilities, it is reasonable to say
that it is up to each agent to decide what she can and should do under the circumstances, and
how she should order her moral priorities. Others have the right to question and criticize our decisions and actions, however,
especially when we depend on one another to perform effective collective action. Part of what it means to be responsible on
the social connection model is to be accountable to others with whom one shares responsibility—accountable for
what one has decided to do and for which structural injustices one has chosen to
address . When an agent is able to give an account of what she has done, and why, in terms of shared
responsibilities for structural injustice, then others usually ought to accept her decision and the way she sets
priorities for her actions.¶ These considerations begin to provide an answer to the question I stated above, namel how should one reason
about the best way to use one’s limited time and resources to respond to structural injustices? In a world with many and deep structural injustices,
most of us, in principle, share more responsibility than we can reasonably be expected to
discharge.5’ Thus, we must make choices about where our action can be most useful or which
injustices we regard as most urgent. While a social connection model of responsibility will not give us a list of maxims or
imperatives, it should offer some parameters for reasoning to guide our decisions and actions. These parameters, in turn, address the other ques tion I
raised earlier—the question about kinds and degrees of responsi bility. Different agents plausibly have different kinds of responsibilities in relation to
particular issues of justice, and some arguably have a greater degree of responsibility than others.
alt
The process of class struggle and debate facilitate resistance against
racism and marginalization---systemic analysis is key but is also
continually reflexive which ensures it doesn’t paper over individual
difference
Esme Choonara and Yuri Prasad 14, author of A Rebel's Guide to Trotsky and author of
The struggle for Tamil freedom. What’s wrong with privilege theory? www.isj.org.uk/?id=971
But what of the rivalries, jealousies and downright prejudices that can be found among many workers today? Tim Wise argues that “before any
substantial alteration in the class system can become possible, we will have to attack white
racism and substantially diminish it”.32 But this creates a circular argument in which white
workers cannot act to change society because they are too racist, but they are racist because they
have been unable to change society. Marx’s answer to this was to say that struggle can play a
crucial role in breaking the hold of reactionary ideas and transforming society.
Because capitalism forces workers to fight for even the basics of life, it generates class
struggles that test and clarify ideas. For example, it is not possible to understand how it is that
prejudice against black and Asian people in Britain was pushed back from the 1980s onwards
without looking at the crucial struggles in the workplaces, schools and communities that came
before. These were battles that encouraged black and white workers to act together, sometimes over strictly
economic issues, and as a consequence forced many white people who accepted racist stereotypes to
reappraise them. For Marx, struggle has a cleansing effect:¶ The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that
circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to
The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing
can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.33¶ Marxists see
struggle as fertile terrain in which all the backward ideas that surround us are up for
challenge—on the proviso that there are individuals and groups that are determined to do so.¶ Marxism and oppression¶ Opponents of Marxism
often claim that the theory reduces everything to a question of class and therefore cannot help us understand or counter oppression.
society.
Even some on the radical left repeat the charge that Marx and Engels romanticised workers while trivialising the divisions among them. So Patricia Hill Collins caricatures
If this were
really our attitude then you would expect Marxists to have ignored struggles for liberation,
treating them as a diversion from the necessary business of class struggle. On the contrary, Marxists have
always thrown themselves into such battles—from the earliest movements of working class
women in east London, in which Eleanor Marx played a crucial role, to the role played by Communists in the fight
against segregation in the American South during the Depression years, to the mass movement
against Thatcher’s anti-gay Section 28 law in the 1980s.¶ Neither does Marxism as a theory ignore oppression. Even a cursory
reading of Marx and Engels shows that they both rightly viewed chauvinism and prejudice as a cancer in
the working class movement—one that required the utmost attention from socialist
organisations of the day. Describing the anti-Irish racism of the 19th century, Marx wrote: “This
antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the
secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And that class is fully aware of it”.35¶ Long
before women won the right to vote in Britain, Marx was arguing (using the sometimes unfortunate language of the time)
for them to be admitted into the leadership of the working class organisations internationally, writing,
Marxists as saying: “If only people of colour and women could see their true class interests, class solidarity would eliminate racism and sexism”.34¶
“Everyone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress may be measured precisely by
the social position of the fair sex”.36 And, as British newspapers spewed racist bile about the often bloody 1857 Indian Mutiny, Marx defended the insurrectionists and their
methods, writing: “There is something in human history like retribution, and it is a rule of historic retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended, but by the
It is true that Marxists place an emphasis on class, despite knowing that an individual’s class position or
class analysis is
crucial to understanding the roots of oppression, that is how and under what circumstances it began, and why it
continues today. Class analysis helps us understand in whose interest oppression functions, and how it is linked to the capitalist system as a whole.
Developing such an approach allows Marxists to avoid the main pitfalls that befall other attempts to
explain oppression which tend to see it as either the result of poor education and lack of appropriate training, or as something
offender himself”.37¶
background does not always trump their gender, race or sexuality in the way that it shapes their lives. We do so for two specific reasons. First, a
innate and biologically written into our brains. Second, class analysis is vital because, by locating the problem
within the system rather than within individuals, and identifying a force that can
overthrow the system, it holds out the only real possibility of fundamental and
permanent change. Marxists argue that capitalism can be overthrown, and with it will go the
whole baggage of backward ideas that the system depends on.¶ Dominant ideas about race,
gender and sexuality have undergone a massive transformation in the decades since the Second World War. But the
changes, in nearly all cases for the better, did not come about by accident or through gradual evolution—and they certainly didn’t come about because of a wave of
enlightenment passing among the ruling class. Rather they are the product of the changing needs of capitalism and of
people’s struggles to shape the world they live in. ¶ Marx argued that the working class is the only group
in society that has both the power and a material interest in overturning society and creating the
world anew. He understood class as a social relationship that exists independently of whether people identify themselves as part of it. Viewed in this way, class is
radically different from the categories created by oppression and the working class should not be regarded simply as a group that also faces discrimination to be added to a list.¶
people who face oppression can start to envisage
those workers as potential allies, rather than hostile competitors and enemies, raising the prospect of
united struggles that may have seemed impossible not long before.
An important consequence of seeing workers breaking from chauvinism is that
Humanist socialism empirically is the most inclusive system of
political organization
Nikhil Pal Singh 3, Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis , History ; SCA
Director of Graduate Studies Yale University, PhD 1995 American Literary History, Volume 15,
Number 4, Winter 2003, pp. 830-840 American Literary History 15(4), © Oxford University
Press 2003; all rights reserved.
Reflecting on the 1930s more than half a century later, the black historian St. Clair Drake remarked that by 1932 he knew very
few black intellectuals “who privately or publicly didn’t claim to be some kind of Marxist” (108).
This claim suggests the difficulty of overstating the importance of both formal Marxist
thinking and the concrete organizing efforts of the American Communist Party (CPUSA), through which it was often filtered, on the
formation of the modern black intelligentsia. In the two decades before the plight of blacks
became prevalent within prominent discourses of liberal reform, American Communists, and to a
lesser extent Trotskyists, gave unprecedented centrality to the “Negro Question” (see Myrdal 1021).
Understanding blacks as the most exploited segment of the US proletariat, and as an incipient
“nation within a nation” that was potentially a center of global, anti-imperialist struggle,
communists positioned black people, at least symbolically, in the vanguard of world revolution. With the
campaign to free the Scottsboro boys, the CPUSA began to attain enormous prestige within black communities and among a significant number of talented black writers and
artists.
The most remarkable thing for ordinary black people, as Drake had noted years earlier in Black Metropolis (1945), a work he
was that “Reds fought for Negroes as Negroes.
coauthored with Horace Cayton,
Thousands of Negro preachers and doctors and lawyers,
as well as quiet housewives, gave their money and verbal support for freeing the Scottsboro Boys and for releasing Angelo Herndon. Hundreds, too, voted for Foster and Ford,
what other party since Reconstruction days had ever run a Negro for vice-president
who had ever put Negroes in a position where they led white men as well as black?”
(736). So deep were vernacular associations between communism and antiracism that rural and
Southern blacks sometimes alluded to communism as a new manifestation of
Abolition, envisaging Joseph Stalin as the next incarnation of Lincoln come to emancipate the slaves (see Kelley 100). As Carl Murphy, editor of the Baltimore AfroAmerican, indicated, communism had insinuated itself into an urban, black nationalist lexicon as well,
declaring, “[T]he Communists are going our way, for which Allah be praised” (qtd. in Du Bois 14). Perhaps the single, lasting legacy
of the CPUSA was the practical, if not theoretical, elevation of antiracism as a
framework for progressive politics in the US. Spearheading the Scottsboro defense, the Communist Party’s International
Labor Defense won major modern Supreme Court victories on behalf of black plaintiffs in 1935 for denial of due process by the Alabama courts. The CPUSA was
arguably the first institutional formation in the country to aggressively practice a
form of affirmative action, even mandating levels of black representation within
party committees out of proportion to their numbers as party members. And the
party was surely the only political body in American history to ever expel whites
for the crime of “white chauvinism” (Sitkoff 158). In Harvard Sitkoff’s succinct summary of this period, the far Left may
Browder and Ford, for
of the United States? And
have “failed to destroy capitalism in the 1930s, but it succeeded in revolutionizing the status of
civil rights issues” (139).
root cause
Ending oppression is impossible without analyzing capitalism--clarity of root causes is necessary to resolve it
Katz-Fishman 14, W. Katz-Fishman -- Howard University, J. Scott -- Founder and Former
Director, Project South K. Haltinner (ed.), Editor of Teaching Race and Anti-Racism in
Contemporary America Adding Context to Colorblindness, Race, Class and Transformation:
Confronting Our History to Move
Forward, http://download.springer.com/static/pdf/934/chp%253A10.1007%252F978-94-0077101-7_26.pdf?auth66=1390670850_4076387ffba6f17ddf3a828859827d80&ext=.pdf
From inside today’s bottom-up movement for equality, justice, democracy and social transformation, we share experiences and lessons for
understanding race and class in the context of historical and contemporary U.S. capitalism and social struggle.
We cannot resolve a
problem unless there is clarity about its root cause . America at its inceptionwas a
Southern nation grounded in genocide and slavery . The colonial
occupation and stealth of the land and resources of the western hemisphere from
Indigenous peoples combined with the super-exploitation of Africanslave labor in
the plantation system was extraordinarily profitable for capital . To continue
to produce and reproduce this source of capital accumulation and wealth, white
supremacy and institutional racism were embedded in U.S.law, ideology, and
society . Though no longer de jure, the content of white supremacy and racism
remains de facto in every aspect of social life, even in the so-called “post-racial
era” of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. (Bonilla-Silva 2010; Feagin 2006; Heagerty and Peery
2000). The question of race in America – from Indigenous genocide and the slave
system, to the attack on immigrant communities and the state execution of Troy
Davis – inextricably links race and a racially exploitative and oppressive system to
the very core of American class exploitation and super-exploitation, State
power andrepression, ideological hegemony, and social and environmental
crises. Based on this history of U.S. capitalism and the deep interpenetration of race
and class, we argue that it is not possible to resolve
the fundamental problems of capitalism, especially
supremacy and institutional racism, without ending capitalism
white
(Katz-Fishman and Scott 2004;
Peery 2002). In the classroom of life – whether formal education settings, or the movement itself – theory, practice, and study around these questions
is increasingly converging. We
offer as a pedagogical tool the critical study of social history –
the debunking of historical myth and the claiming of ourreal history of
domination, oppression, exploitation, and of resistance and social struggle. This
means gaining clarity around the victories of past movements, what has and has
not been won, where we are today and why, and the path forward (Katz-Fishman et al. 2007).
The criminalization of blackness is a direct result of neoliberalism--the aff mystifies capitalist oppression by ontologizing contingent
constructions of anti-blackness
Loic Wacquant 1, UC Berkeley, Deadly symbiosis,
http://loicwacquant.net/assets/Papers/DEADLYSYMBIOSISPRISONGHETTO.pdf
This marked lowering and homogenization of the social composition of the ghetto makes it akin to the
monotonous class recruitment of the carceral institution, dominated as the latter is by the most
precarious fractions of the urban proletariat of the unemployed, the casually employed, and the
uneducated. Fully 36 percent of the half-million detainees housed by US jails in 1991 were
jobless at the time of their arrest and another 15 percent worked only part-time or irregularly. One-half had not finished high school and two-thirds
earned less than a thousand dollars a month that year; in addition, every other inmate had been raised in a home receiving welfare and a paltry 16 percent were married
Residents of the hyperghetto and clients of the carceral institution thus present
germane profiles in economic marginality and social dis-integration.
(Harlow, 1998).
2. Loss of a positive economic function
The transformed class structure of the hyperghetto is a direct product of its evolving
position in the new urban political economy ushered by post-Fordism. We have seen that, from
the Great Migration of the interwar years to the 1960s, the dark ghetto served a positive economic function as reservoir of
cheap and pliable labor for the city’s factories. During that period, it was ‘directly exploited by outside
economic interests, and it provide[d] a dumping ground for the human residuals created by
economic change. These economic conditions [we]re stabilized by transfer payments that
preserve[d] the ghetto in a poverty that recreate[d] itself from generation to generation’,
ensuring the ready availability of a low-cost workforce (Fusfeld and Bates, 1982: 236). By the 1970s, this was
no longer true as the engine of the metropolitan economy passed from manufacturing to
business and knowledge-based services, and factories relocated from the central city to the mushrooming
industrial parks of the suburbs and exurbs, as well as to anti-union states in the South and to foreign countries.
Between 1954 and 1982, the number of manufacturing establishments in Chicago plunged from 10,288 to 5,203, while the number of production workers sank from nearly half
The demand for black labor plummeted accordingly, rocking the entire black
class structure (Wacquant, 1989: 510–11), given that half of all employed African Americans in Chicago were blue-collar wage earners at the close of World War II.
Just as mechanization had enabled Southern agriculture to dispense with black labor a generation earlier, ‘ automation and suburban relocation
created a crisis of tragic dimension for unskilled black workers’ in the North, as ‘for the first time in American
a million to a mere 172,000.
history, the African American was no longer needed in the economic system’ of the metropolis (Rifkin, 1995: 79; also Sugrue, 1995: 125–52). The effects of technological
upgrading and postindustrialization were intensified by (1) unflinching residential segregation, (2) the breakdown of public schools, and (3) the renewal of working-class
the hyperghetto now serves
the negative economic function of storage of a surplus population devoid of market utility, in
which respect it also increasingly resembles the prison system.
immigration from Latin America and Asia to consign the vast majority of uneducated blacks to economic redundancy. At best,
<Continues>
The contemporary prison system and the ghetto not only display a similarly skewed recruitment and
composition in terms of class and caste. The former also duplicates the authority structure
characteristic of the latter in that it places a population of poor blacks under the direct supervision of
whites – albeit, in this case, lower-class whites. In the communal ghetto of the postwar, black residents chaffed under the rule of white landlords, white employers, white
unions, white social workers and white policemen (Clark, 1965). Likewise, at century’s end, the convicts of New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit and
Chicago, who are overwhelming African-American, serve their sentence in establishments staffed by officers who are overwhelmingly white (see Figure 1). In Illinois, for
With the
proliferation of detention facilities in rural areas, perversely, the economic stability and social
welfare of lower-class whites from the declining hinterland has come to hinge on the continued
socioeconomic marginality and penal restraint of ever-larger numbers of subproletarian blacks
from the urban core.
instance, two-thirds of the state’s 41,000 inmates are blacks who live under the watch of a 8,400 uniformed force that is 84 percent white.
The convergent changes that have ‘prisonized’ the ghetto and ‘ghettoized’ the prison in the aftermath of the Civil Rights revolution suggest that the inordinate and mounting
over-representation of blacks behind bars does not stem simply from the discriminatory targeting of specific penal policies such as the War on Drugs, as proposed by Tonry
(1995), or from the sheer destabilizing effects of the increased penetration of ghetto neighborhoods by the penal state, as Miller argues (1997). Not that these two factors are not
at work, for clearly they are deeply involved in the hyper-incarceration of African Americans. But they fail to capture the precise nature and the full magnitude of the
transformations that have interlocked the prison and the (hyper)ghetto via a relation of functional equivalency (they serve one and the same purpose, the coercive confinement
of a stigmatized population) and structural homology (they comprise and comfort the same type of social relations and authority pattern) to form a single institutional mesh
suited to fulfil anew the mission historically imparted to America’s ‘peculiar institutions’.
The thesis of the structural-functional coupling of the remnants of the ghetto with the carceral system is supported by the timing of racial transition: with a lag of about a dozen
blackening’ of the carceral population has followed closely on the heels of the demise of the
Black Belt as a viable instrument of caste containment in the urban industrial settting, just as, a century
years, the ‘
earlier, the sudden penal repression of African Americans had helped to shore up ‘the walls of white supremacy as the South moved from an era of racial bondage to one of racial
caste’ (Oshinsky, 1996: 57). It is also verified by the geographic patterning of racial disproportionality and its evolution: outside of the South – which for obvious historical
reasons requires a separate analysis – the black-white gap in incarceration is more pronounced and has increased faster in those states of the Midwest and Northeast that are the
historic cradle of the Northern ghetto (Mauer, 1997).
The intertwining of the urban Black Belt and the carceral system is further evidenced, and in turn powerfully abetted, by the fusion of ghetto and prison culture, as vividly
expressed in the lyrics of ‘gangsta rap’ singers and hip hop artists (Cross, 1993), in graffitti and tattooing (Phillips, 1999: 152–67), and in the dissemination, to the urban core
and beyond, of language, dress, and interaction patterns innovated inside of jails and penitentiaries. The advent of hyper-incarceration for lower-class blacks and Latinos has in
effect rendered moot the classic dispute, among scholars of imprisonment, between the ‘deprivation thesis,’ canonized by Gresham Sykes, and the ‘importation thesis,’ proposed
in response by John Irwin and Donald Cressey. This alternative has been transcended by the melting of street and carceral symbolism, with the resulting mix being re-exported
to the ghetto and diffused throughout society via the commercial circuits catering to the teenage consumer market, professional sports, and even the mainstream
media.34Witness the widespread adolescent fashion of baggy pants worn with the crotch down to mid-thigh and the resurgent popularity of body art featuring prison themes
and icons – more often than not unbeknownst to those who wear them.
HOW PRISON IS REMAKING ‘RACE’ AND RESHAPING THE
CITIZENRY
I indicated earlier that slavery, the Jim Crow system and the ghetto are ‘race making’ institutions, which is to say
that they do not simply process an ethnoracial division that would somehow exist
outside of and independently from them. Rather, each produces (or co-produces) this division
(anew) out of inherited demarcations and disparities of group power and inscribes it at every epoch in a
distinctive constellation of material and symbolic forms.35 And all have consistently racialized the
arbitrary boundary setting African Americans apart from all others in the United States by actively
denying its cultural origin in history, ascribing it instead to the fictitious necessity of
biology.
The highly particular conception of ‘race’ that America has invented, virtually unique in the world for its rigidity and consequentiality, is a direct outcome of the momentous
collision between slavery and democracy as modes of organization of social life after bondage had been established as the major form of labor conscription and control in a
racialized boundary between slave and
free into a rigid caste separation between ‘whites’ and ‘Negros’ – comprising all persons of known African ancestry, no matter how minimal – that infected every crevice of
the postbellum social system in the South (Powdermaker, 1939). The ghetto, in turn, imprinted this dichotomy onto the spatial makeup and institutional schemas
of the industrial metropolis. So much so that, in the wake of the ‘urban riots’ of the 1960s, which in truth were
uprisings against intersecting caste and class subordination, ‘urban’ and black became nearsynonymous in policy making as well as everyday parlance. And the ‘crisis’ of the city came to stand for the enduring contradiction between the individualistic and
underpopulated colony home to a precapitalist system of production (Fields, 1982). The Jim Crow regime reworked the
competitive tenor of American life, on the one hand, and the continued seclusion of African Americans from it, on the other.3
As a new century dawns, it is up to the fourth ‘peculiar institution’ born of the adjoining of the hyperghetto with the
carceral system to remould the social meaning and significance of ‘race’ in accordance with
the dictates of the deregulated economy and the post-Keynesian state.
the penal apparatus has long served as an accessory to ethnoracial domination by helping to
stabilize a regime under attack or bridge the hiatus between successive regimes: thus the ‘Black
Codes’ of Reconstruction served to keep African-American labor in place following the demise of
slavery while the criminalization of civil rights protests in the South in the 1950s aimed to retard
the agony of Jim Crow. But the role of the carceral institution today is different in that, for the first time in US history, it has been elevated to the rank of main
Now,
machine for ‘race making’.
Among the manifold effects of the wedding of ghetto and prison into an extended carceral mesh, perhaps the most consequential is the practical revivification and official
solidification of the centuries-old association of blackness with criminality and devious violence. Along with the return of Lombroso-style mythologies about criminal atavism
and the wide diffusion of bestial metaphors in the journalistic and political field (where mentions of ‘superpredators’, ‘wolf-packs’, ‘animals’ and the like are commonplace), the
massive over-incarceration of blacks has supplied a powerful common-sense warrant for ‘using color as a proxy for dangerousness’ (Kennedy, 1997: 136). In recent years, the
courts have consistently authorized the police to employ race as ‘a negative signal of increased risk of criminality’ and legal scholars have rushed to endorse it as ‘a rational
adaptation to the demographics of crime’, made salient and verified, as it were, by the blackening of the prison population, even though such practice entails major
inconsistencies from the standpoint of constitutional law (Kennedy, 1997: 143, 146). Throughout the urban criminal justice system, the formula ‘Young + Black + Male’ is now
openly equated with ‘probable cause’ justifying the arrest, questioning,bodily search and detention of millions of African-American males every year (Gaynes, 1993).
In the era of racially targetted ‘law-and-order’ policies and their socio-logical pendant, racially skewed mass imprisonment, the reigning public image of the criminal is not just
that of ‘a monstruum – a being whose features are inherently different from ours’ (Melossi 2000: 311), but that of a black monster, as young African-American men from the
‘inner city’ have come to personify the explosive mix of moral degeneracy and mayhem.37
The conflation of blackness and crime in
reactivates ‘race’
collective representation and government policy (the other side of this equation being the conflation of blackness and welfare) thus
by giving
a legitimate outlet to the expression of anti-black animus in the form of the public vituperation of criminals and prisoners. As writer John Edgar Wideman (1995: 504) points
out, It’s respectable to tar and feather criminals, to advocate locking them up and throwing away the key. It’s not racist to be against crime, even though the archetypal criminal
in the media and the public imagination almost always wears ‘Willie’ Horton’s face. Gradually, ‘urban’ and ‘ghetto’ have become code words for terrible places where only blacks
reside. Prison is rapidly being re-lexified in the same segregated fashion.
Indeed, when ‘to be a man of color of a certain economic class and milieu is equivalent in the public eye to being a criminal’, being processed by the penal system is tantamount
to being made black, and ‘doing time’ behind bars is at the same time ‘marking race’ (Wideman, 1995: 505).38 A second major effect of the penalization of the ‘race question’ via
the hypertrophic expansion of the prison system has been to thoroughly depoliticize it. For reframing the problems posed by the maintenance of ethnoracial division in the wake
of the ghetto’s demise as issues of law enforcement automatically delegitimates any attempt at collective resistance and redress. Established organizations of civic voice for
African Americans cannot confront head on the crisis of hyperincarceration in their community for fear that this would seem to validate the very conflation of blackness and
crime in public perception that fuels this crisis. Thus the courteous silence of the NAACP, the Urban League, the Black Congressional Caucus, and black churches on the topic,
even as the penal tutelage of African Americans has escalated to heights experienced by no other group in history, even under the most repressive authoritarian regimes and in
Soviet-style societies. This reticence is further reinforced by the fact, noted long ago by W.E.B. DuBois, that the tenuous position of the black bourgeoisie in the socioracial
hierarchy rests critically on its ability to distance itself from its unruly lower-class brethen: to offset the symbolic disability of blackness, middle-class African Americans must
forcefully communicate to whites that they have ‘absolutely no sympathy and no known connections with any black man who has committed a crime’ (DuBois cited in
Christianson, 1998: 228).
Even riots, the last weapon of protest left to an urban subproletariat spurned by a political system thoroughly dominated by the white suburban electorate and corporations,
have been rendered purposeless by mass penal confinement. It is commonly believed that ‘race riots’ in the United States crested in the 1960s and then vanished, save for
anomalous outbursts such as in Miami in 1980 and Los Angeles in 1992. In reality, the ghetto uprisings of 1963–1968 have been succeeded by a rolling wave of upheavals inside
of prisons, from Attica and Soledad to facilities throughout Michigan, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Illinois, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania, among others (Morris, 1995: 248–9;
Useem and Kimball, 1989). But, by moving from the open stage of the streets to the closed perimeter of penitentiaries, these outbursts differed from their predecessors of the
1960s in three important ways. First, ghetto riots were highly visible and, through the media, interpellated the highest authorities in the land. Carceral riots, on the contrary,
were never conspicuous to start with (unless they caused major destruction), and they have rapidly grown less and less perceptible to the point of virtually disappearing from the
public scene.39 Next, they have received administrative responses from within the correctional bureaucracy in lieu of political responses from without, and these responses have
only compounded the problem: the approach of the state to inmate belligerence in the 1950s was to ‘intensify the therapeutic thrust in prisons’ (Rotman, 1995: 189); thirty years
later, it is to intensify the drive to ‘classify, separate, and isolate’ (Irwin, 1980: 228), to toughen discipline, routinize the use of ‘lockdown’, and to multiply ‘special housing units’
and ‘supermax’ facilities. A third difference between the uproarious ghetto riots of decades past and the diffuse, muffled, carceral riots that have replaced them is that they
typically pit, not blacks against whites, but one subordinate ethnic group against another, such as blacks versus Mexicans, thereby further diminishing the likelihood that they
By entombing poor blacks in
the concrete walls of the prison, then, the penal state has effectively smothered and silenced
subproletarian revolt.
will receive a broad sociopolitical interpretation connecting them to the transformed ethnoracial order on the outside.40
By assuming a central role in the post-Keynesian government of race and poverty, at the
crossroads of the deregulated low-wage labor market, a revamped ‘welfare-workfare’ apparatus
designed to support casual employment, and the vestiges of the ghetto, the overgrown carceral
system of the United States has become a major engine of symbolic production in its own right.41 It is not only the
preeminent institution for signifying and enforcing blackness, much as slavery was during the first three centuries of US history. Just as bondage effected the ‘social death’ of
mass incarceration also induces the civic death
imported African captives and their descendants on American soil (Patterson, 1982),
of
those it ensnares by extruding them from the social compact. Today’s inmates are thus the target of a threefold movement of exclusionary closure:
Prisoners are denied access to valued cultural capital: just as university credentials are becoming a prerequisite for employment in the (semi-)protected sector of the labor
market, inmates have been expelled from higher education by being made ineligible for Pell Grants, starting with drug offenders in 1988, continuing with convicts sentenced to
death or lifelong imprisonment without the possibility of parole in 1992, and ending with all remaining state and federal prisoners in 1994. This expulsion was voted by Congress
for the sole purpose of accentuating the symbolic divide between criminals and ‘law-abiding citizens’ in spite of overwhelming evidence that prison educational programs
drastically cut recividism as well as help to maintain carceral order (Page, 2000). 2. Prisoners are systematically excluded from social redistribution and public aid in an age
when work insecurity makes access to such programs more vital than ever for those dwelling in the lower regions of social space. Laws deny welfare payments, veterans benefits
and food stamps to anyone in detention for more than 60 days. The Work Opportunity and Personal Responsibility Act of 1996 further banishes most ex-convicts from Medicaid,
public housing, Section 8 vouchers, and related forms of assistance. In spring of 1998, President Clinton denounced as intolerable ‘fraud and abuse’ perpetrated against ‘working
families’ who ‘play by the rules’ the fact that some prisoners (or their households) continued to get public payments due to lax bureaucratic enforcement of these prohibitions.
And he proudly launched ‘unprecedented federal, state, and local co-operation as well as new, innovative incentive programs’ using the latest ‘high-tech tools to weed out any
inmate’ who still received benefits (Clinton, 1998), including the disbursement of bounties to counties who promptly turn in identifying information on their jail detainees to the
Social Security administration. 3. Convicts are banned from political participation via ‘criminal disenfranchisement’ practiced on a scale and with a vigor unimagined in any
other country. All but four members of the Union deny the vote to mentally competent adults held in detention facilities; 39 states forbid convicts placed on probation from
exercising their political rights and 32 states also interdict parolees. In 14 states, ex-felons are barred from voting even when they are no longer under criminal justice
supervision – for life in ten of these states. The result is that nearly 4 million Americans have temporarily or permanently lost the ability to cast a ballot, including 1.47 million
who are not behind bars and another 1.39 million who served their sentence in full (Fellner and Mauer, 1998). A mere quarter of a century after acceding to full voting rights, one
black man in seven nationwide is banned from the electoral booth through penal disenfranchisement and seven states permanently deny the vote to more than one fourth of
their black male residents.
Through this triple exclusion, the prison, and the criminal justice system more broadly, contribute to the ongoing
reconstruction of the ‘imagined community’ of Americans around the polar opposition between
praiseworthy ‘working families’- implicitly white, suburban, and deserving – and the
despicable ‘underclass’ of criminals, loafers, and leeches, a two-headed antisocial hydra personified by the dissolute teenage ‘welfare mother’ on
the female side and the dangerous street ‘gang banger’ on the male side – by definition darkskinned, urban, and undeserving. The former are
exalted as the living incarnation of genuine American values, self-control, deferred gratification, subservience of life to labor;42 the latter is vituperated as the loathsome
embodiment of their abject desecration, the ‘dark side’ of the ‘American dream’ of affluence and opportunity for all believed to flow from morality anchored in conjugality and
work. And the line that divides them is increasingly being drawn, materially and symbolically, by the prison.
On the other side of that line lies an institutional setting unlike any other. Building on his celebrated analyses of Ancient Greece, classical historian Moses Finley (1968) has
genuine slave societies’. In the former, slavery is but one of several modes of labor control
enslaved labor is epicentral to both
economic production and class structure, and the slave-master relation provides the pattern after which all other social relations are built or
distorted, such that no corner of culture, society and self is left untouched by it. The astronomical overrepresentation of blacks in
houses of penal confinement and the increasingly tight meshing of the hyperghetto with the carceral
system suggests that, owing to America’s adoption of mass incarceration as a queer social policy
designed to discipline the poor and contain the dishonored, lower-class African Americans now dwell, not in
introduced a fruitful distinction between ‘societies with slaves’ and ‘
and the division between slave and free is neither impermeable nor axial to the entire social order. In the latter,
a society with prisons as their white compatriots do, but in the first genuine prison society of history.
2nr
Cap makes objectification of black women’s bodies inevitable --- our account can
explain the black female
Chakaz 11, The Loss of the Body, chaka85.wordpress.com/2011/05/24/the-loss-of-the-bodya-marxist-feminist-response-to-estranged-labor/
The
worker is alienated from the product she produces, which contains her objectified human labor, yet she does not own it. Therefore the products of her labor stand as an alien force opposed to her. She is
also alienated from the work process itself, which, like her products, she does not control or own.
She works to survive and reproduce herself so she can go out and work again. This is estranged
labor. It degrades human life into a depressing, animal-like, existence where you are working
just to survive, while producing wealth and pleasure for someone else. Your life and existence is crushed into this abstract,
In the ‘Estranged Labor’ section of Marx’s 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts he describes the exploitative system of private property, and its use of alienated labor to support it.
congealed human labor; you are a machine whose sole purpose within a society based on commodity production is to produce value. Your individuality, abilities, skills and creative development does not matter.
Although human beings have consciousness that allows us, as a species, to be creative and engage in work that is external to us and not solely based on our survival and reproduction, we are deprived of these
activities as alienated workers. We are alienated from our work, ourselves, and ultimately our collectivity as a species. Marx argues that the only way to crush such an oppressive system of private property and
emancipate society, is through a class struggle that will emancipate the workers, because within the emancipation of the workers is the universal emancipation of humanity. He emphasizes the workers, not
because it is their emancipation alone that is on the line, but it is the social relation and role of the worker that everyone is forced into while living under such a system. He writes, “because the whole of human
servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production, and all relations of servitude are but modifications and consequences of this relation.” Marx is right in his analysis of the oppressive social character
of the system, and his solution to overthrow it. However, he did not apply his concepts of estranged labor to gender, race, sexuality, and reproduction to reveal all the oppressive social relations that help keep the
The alienation of women’s bodies, and subsequent loss of autonomy over our
bodies through the regulation of our sexuality, regulation of our reproduction (forced or
limited), and systemic and intra-class violence (rape, domestic, ect.) is a part of the capitalist
social organization of society. The family, and relegation of women to the unpaid role of
housewife as well as waged worker, has been a mechanism to support this oppression and
regulation of women’s bodies and sexuality. Selma James speaks to this objectification in her pamphlet Sex Race & Class, “Because as
long as most women are housewives part of whose function in reproducing labour power is to be the sexual
object of men, no woman can escape that identity.” Even if you are queer or not a married
housewife, all women are subjected to this role within patriarchal capitalism. Our bodies are objectified and not under
our control much in the same way that a worker does not control her work conditions or products of her labor; therefore, our bodies stand as an alien force opposed to us.¶ This type of gendered
alienation is not a result or side effect of the division of labor, but is a part of the division of labor that relies on exploitation,
including the sexual exploitation of women’s bodies. This was evident during American slavery,
where the rape and breeding of Black women was very much a part of the origins of American
Capitalism; or today where sex work is a global market. If we don’t understand the particular role that gender plays within the division of labor,
system of private property intact.
then we don’t completely understand the division of labor that structures our society, and if we don’t understand the structures of our society in their totality then our revolution will be incomplete. Marxist
revolutionaries must seek to understand reality through analyzing the system and crafting revolutionary theory that we can apply in practice to change that reality and smash systems of domination and
Gender and sexuality are not
natural phenomenons. There is a slight biological basis for gender roles historically. But largely gender and sexual categories, like race,
have been constructed to help support the division of labor. Everyone has a position within this exploitative division. Systems of
oppression, such as racism, sexuality and homophobia, intersect with this capitalist system of
exploitation and alienation to support the particularities of this division of labor . I wish to draw on Marx’s concepts
exploitation. This will not happen unless we have a material understanding of gender oppression historically and its role within capital.
of alienation and apply them to reproduction and the gendered body ideas of alienated work, exploitation, and appropriation and expropriation of the product to better understand political economy and
gender/race oppression.¶ We have consciousness, like Marx argues, which allows us to be creative, produce all sorts of commodities, and express desire that isn’t confined to biology and reproduction. We could
under
alienated labor we are not free as workers, and as women, we are not free to own our bodies or
our own sexuality. Our bodies our objectified, and like a workers product, are used for the
pleasure of someone else, this someone else being a man and the ruling class. The same oppressive social relations that
build a society that is based on real freedom and creative development of the people that also doesn’t regulate sexuality; that supports a free, non-constraining sexuality and reproduction. But,
are built into the division of labor, exists with the power relations between the sexes, where women are devalued to support male power within society and the patriarchal Bourgeois State. Therefore, the division of
labor that structures our society is also gendered and sexist and racist. Like workers, who are coerced to work, women are also coerced into these subservient roles. As women, we bear the legacy of the
our sexuality is regulated to be the subservient housewife (Madonna), pumping
out babies, disciplining them, taking care of them and the husband. Or we are seen as whores,
whose bodies are commodified and objectified for the pleasure of men. Whether we are
reproducing labor power or pleasuring men, our bodies are not for our own pleasure and our
own control. I don’t wish to paint a victimizing picture of women though; this plays into patriarchal gender roles of ‘women’ being passive and weak. There are numerous accounts and movements of
madonna/whore dichotomy, where
women owning their sexuality and expressing fierce and independent desire. I am inspired by the contemporary queer women of color feminist movements from the 70’s and 80’s, where queer revolutionary
women of color begin to name the sexism and homophobia that existed within their social movements in order to build a more holistic revolutionary struggle. For now I want to address the particular way the
system exploits and oppresses us, and I will incorporate more detailed examples of resistance to it in the next draft.¶ Although I state that all women share this oppression and alienation, we do not all experience
it the same way based off of differences within race and class. Women are all sexualized, but in different ways depending on what ethnic/racial group you belong to and what class you are a part of. For an example,
Black women are portrayed as hyper-sexual and animalistic, while Asian, more specifically
South East or East Asian, women are portrayed as docile or submissive. Despite the racialized or
ethnic differences in our alienation, we all share a type of objectification of our bodies that has
given us a sense of disempowerment, and has made us feel alienated from them. Marx says above that the realization
of this objectification for the worker is the loss of the object, which results in feelings of alienation. Most women experience a similar feeling of loss, a loss of the body, when we are confronted with sexualized
violence or sexist advertising that commodifies our body parts. I remember feeling this loss of the body by puberty when the boys began to take notice and molest me; I felt it when I was raped at the age of 22; and
our sexuality is
not a choice that we are free to make without interventions by the state and the class.¶ This is very
disempowering, because it is a loss of yourself in a particular and literal way. Looking at the roots of US capitalism and the slave system is
useful for understanding alienated labor in terms of race and gender. Slave women were
exploited as workers in the slave economy, but they also played a particular role within that
economy as breeders and reproducers of the slave population. Their bodies were a part of the
means of production of the slave owning capitalists, and, like the cotton gin, they did not own
them. They did not get to decide if they wanted to reproduce, who they would reproduce with,
and like the product of their labor, they did not get ownership over it when their children were
sold away for profit. Slave women were forced to reproduce with other slaves in breeding houses, and were often vulnerable to rape by their masters. Slave children were a commodity for
I felt it when I learned the history of my ancestry and slavery, which relied on the rape of African women’s bodies. I realized that women’s bodies are never fully in our control;
the capitalist representing the human labor of the slave woman. Although the children followed the mother’s side, due to the slave master not wanting to take responsibility over the children who were a product of
his rape, the mother did not own them and had to bear the pain of being ripped away from her children at slave auctions. In this sense their product, children, represents their labor embodied in material form
making it objectified. This objectification process results in the realization by the mother of this object and the subsequent loss of realization when her product is sold away from her. Therefore the sexual economy
of slave reproduction represented this powerful product that was both a part of her, but independent of her resulting in her alienation from her children and herself. The realization and thus loss of realization for
the slave mother fueled her resistance to such an objectification process; she would often kill her children or help them escape in order to not have them experience a life of slavery that, according to Marx,
‘deprives [her] of the means of life.”¶ Racist and sexist ideology has always been used to justify the particular treatment of black women, and women of color in general. From the very beginnings of colonization
and ‘scientific’ racism these false identity categories have been constructed to support the economic system that was expanding around the world, and the specific sexist nature of it. Black women were stolen from
Africa and travelled around the world like ZOO animals. Europeans were obsessed with their anatomical features; Black women’s sexuality has always been constructed and policed by the oppressors. Back then
they said that African/black women were overly sexual and loose. This justified the massive amounts of rape and economic system of breeding that was forced upon them. Post slavery when blacks were ‘freed’
Black men
were trying to rescue their own masculinity from the process of emasculation that was a part of
the gendered social relations built into the division of labor on the plantation. These sexualized
stereotypes of “jezebels”, ‘hoes’, and ‘hoodrats’ were something reproduced by the oppressors
and reproduced within our own communities and class. This is our legacy today. Why is it that black women
are portrayed as overly sexual past and present and white women aren’t to the same degree?
This has to do with the origins of the racialized and gendered division of labor that were
developed during US slavery, where Black and White women played specific roles. The Black woman was a
there was a movement by Black men to dominate Black women in the same way that black women were dominated by their masters and White women dominated by their husbands.
worker in the slave economy in the fields and in the bedroom, and was devalued as a woman and a black slave woman. The white woman was devalued as well in order to keep the white slave masters power
maintained in the house, but she was a delicate, asexual, house wife; not a slave. Black and white women’s positioning in the division of labor had material as well as ideological consequences that are important
Women of color are still seen as unrapeable, and overly-sexualized. This is reflected in the massive amounts of violence that women
of color sex workers are subjected to where cops assert that ‘they aren’t raped they’re just not
paid;’ Or when a Black stripper is gang raped by White men on the Duke University rugby team, and nothing is done about it. Or when queer women of color in New Jersey are sexually propositioned by a
man and then defend themselves against his physical attacks, and are locked up for two years for defending themselves.¶ Today we still struggle for control over our bodies. In a time of
economic crisis where the working class, especially working-class women of color, must face
massive amounts of cuts to services, jobs, and wages thus lowering the living standard of our
lives. Women must struggle for healthcare, reproductive and family planning services, and
abortions. And we must struggle just to survive and defend ourselves in a violent world, where reported rapes happen so much (every minute in the US) that we must accept rape as our lived condition
today when we think about our relationships to our bodies, and the different identity categories that divide us and oppress us still.
as women. We live in a society where, in the US, three women are killed every day by domestic partners. And we live in a world where a dominated type of sexuality is forced upon us with power relations built into
it supporting patriarchy and the objectification of women’s bodies. All of these examples, historical and present, demonstrate that Marx’s concepts of commodity fetish and alienated labor must be applied to
gender, sexuality, and the body, and the use of the family to exploit women and maintain these gendered social relations to complete his analysis of the social character of the system.