1AC
Contention 1: The War on Drugs
Federal marijuana prohibition is a form of violent, racist social control that targets
black and Latin@ communities at home and abroad. Marijuana convictions cut
individuals off from essential support systems such as food stamps, housing,
and other federal aid. One in three black men can expect to go to jail in their
lifetimes. 60,000 have died in Mexico since 2008 as a result of the War on Drugs.
We must connect the dots between the history of marijuana policy, mass
incarceration, and broader structures of oppression.
Shipps 11-4-14 (Joan, DC statehood activist, "Yes on 71: A Moral Case for Legalizing Marijuana" Huffington Post)
www.huffingtonpost.com/joan-shipps/dc-marijuana-legalization_b_6077894.html
U.S. Marijuana Prohibition Is Recent and Racist The criminalization of marijuana is relatively new in the
United States, and deeply tied to some of most shameful moments in our country's history. From the
1600s into the 1890s, the U.S. government encouraged and incentivized the production of hemp -- the plant from which marijuana is
derived. In the early 1900s, Mexican immigrants reportedly introduced recreational marijuana use to the
United States. After the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the presence of Mexican immigrants in the United States surged. And
though President Abraham Lincoln officially signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, the post-
slavery system of convict leasing, frequently more violent and inhumane than the system that
preceded it, ensured that black Americans continued to be brutally exploited for unpaid labor and
profit, until the United States formally prohibited the practice in response to embarrassing propaganda campaigns by the Axis
powers in the early years of World War II. Notably, in an era where the U nited S tates encountered unprecedented
levels of Mexican immigration, and arguably the first true liberation of black Americans in its
history, the legal fight against marijuana -- and the criminalization of its consumers -- began in
earnest. During the 1930's, the height of eugenics, dubious but nevertheless influential research
linked so-called "racially inferior communities," criminality, and marijuana use. By 1931, 29 states had
outlawed marijuana. The Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 was the first piece of federal legislation to effectively criminalize the drug,
restricting marijuana possession to individuals who paid excise taxes and who were only permitted a limited number of authorized
medical and industry uses. The Civil Rights era brought in a new and harsher wave of marijuana
restrictions. As black Americans struggled and died for equal rights to public school access and
voting representation, the country that had oppressed them for centuries passed law after law
making marijuana possession a crime worthy of imprisonment and a lifetime of limited citizenship
rights. Between 1951 and 1956, the United States enacted federal laws requiring mandatory sentencing for marijuana
possession. Richard Nixon, who rose to the presidency by embracing the "Southern Strategy," introduced the "war on drugs"
concept in 1971, and established the Drug Enforcement Administration in 1973. And Ronald Reagan, who counted among
his advisors the infamous Lee Atwater -- outspoken champion of using coded racist language to
win elections in a more linguistically gentile post-Civil Rights Act era -- signed the Anti-Drug
Abuse Act into law in 1986, instituting mandatory sentences for drug-related crimes. In 1989,
President George H.W. Bush -- whose campaign had been managed by none other than Lee
Atwater -- launched in a presidential address the more forceful, multi-billion dollar, modern
incarnation of the "War on Drugs." We're Paying in Blood : The Staggering Costs of Marijuana
Prohibition The prohibition of marijuana in the United States may have happened only recently, but its consequences
have been swift and dire. The Sentencing Project reported last year that one in three black males can expect
to go to jail in their lifetimes. Given that felons are often stripped of their voting rights even after
they have served out their sentences, and given the seemingly unstoppable expansion of
carcerality plaguing our nation, the number of disenfranchised felons in the United States grew from
1.17 million in 1976 to 5.85 million by 2010, and at a rate of 500 percent since 1980 . In some
Southern states, including Florida, Kentucky, and Virginia, the consequences of harsh sentencing
policies, the War on Drugs, and life-long post-imprisonment voting restrictions, mean that one in
five black Americans is prevented outright from going to the polls on election day ever again.
Today, the United States has the highest imprisonment rate of any country, including North Korea,
China, and Iran, in the world. And in our modern era of mass incarceration, as civil rights lawyer and
acclaimed scholar Michelle Alexander documented in her book, "The New Jim Crow," there are currently more black American men
behind bars in the United States than there were enslaved in 1850. Internationally, it is unusual -- if not virtually unheard of -- to lock
people in cages for non-violent drug offenses. And yet the United States does this with prolific and alarming regularity. In 2012,
some 1.5 million people -- a population greater than those residing in about 10 states -- were arrested on non-violent drug charges.
Of those, 749,825 were for marijuana law violations, and 658,231 were for marijuana possession only. Considering that our last
three U.S. presidents admit to having smoked marijuana, it boggles the mind that the country whose drug policies they determine
continues to cage marijuana users on such a massive scale. Tragically, once convicted on marijuana charges, a U.S.
citizen's capacity to improve his or her life circumstances is forever imperiled. What follows are a
partial list of restrictions that, depending on which state one is lucky or unlucky enough to be arrested in, an
American can expect to face -- into perpetuity -- even after he or she has served out any time in
prison associated with marijuana possession or sales: ineligibility for adoption or foster
parenting, ineligibility for "food stamps" or T emporary A ssistance to N eedy F amilies; legal
discrimination in hiring and ineligibility for professional licensing programs; ineligibility for
federal student loans and financial aid; revocation of driver's licenses; and, as noted above,
outright prohibitions on voting. In short, without outside sources of wealth, an American convicted
for marijuana possession can be legally prohibited from working, going to college, receiving
welfare, or voting for the rest of his or her life. By policy design, the U nited S tates is effectively
erasing the humanity and citizenship of hundreds of thousands of Americans, year after year
after year. Moreover, American marijuana prohibition policies have lethal consequences even
beyond our country's borders. Mexico, the United States' biggest marijuana supplier, has been particularly
devastated by the War on Drugs. Human Rights Watch reports that, from 2006 to 2012, 60,000
deaths in Mexico were directly attributable to the War on Drugs and the gang violence that
inevitably occurs when the sale of a highly popular commodity -- in this case, marijuana -- is
prohibited from being sold in the open and is driven into an underground market dominated by
violent drug cartels. Notably, U.S. firearms policies have contributed significantly to gun violence in the country from which
we import much of our international marijuana supply. While there is only one licensed gun dealer in all of Mexico, there are
approximately 6,700 firearms retailers along the U.S. side of our southern border. Roughly 70 percent of guns recovered from
Mexican criminal activity in the United States between 2007 and 2011 were traced back to U.S. origins. By keeping
marijuana illegal, the U nited S tates is effectively fueling international crime rings and cross border
violence, and at a cost to human lives, the livelihoods of people we incarcerate and their families ,
and U.S. tax payers generally. Since its inception in 1971, the War on Drugs has cost the federal government more than $1 trillion -an average of over $20 billion a year. Comparatively, the president's fiscal year 2015 budget calls for $7.9 billion for the
Environmental Protection Agency, $11.8 billion for the Department of Labor, and $17.5 billion to the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration.
The War on Drugs also has a disproportionate impact on women, particularly
women of color, who have the fastest growing prison population and bear the
brunt of the stigma of marijuana due to patriarchal conceptions of motherhood
Castillo ‘15
Tessie Castillo, advocacy and communications coordinator at the North Carolina Harm Reduction Coalition and columnist for
Huffington Post, 2/12/15, “How the Drug War Destroys Women’s Lives” http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/sexism-drug-war
One glance at the mass of black and brown faces locked in prison on nonviolent drug charges
and it’s clear that the so-called War on Drugs has deep roots in racism. But what about the drug
war’s impact on gender? While not as widely discussed as racism, sexism infiltrates every aspect
of drug policy , even within the reform movement itself, impacting how women who use drugs are viewed,
treated and punished. Women are currently the fastest growing segment of the U.S. prison
population. According to the ACLU report “Caught in the Net,” over the past three decades, the number of
females in prison has increased at twice the rate of their male counterparts —even more so for women of
color. From 1977 to 2007, the female prison population grew by 832%, while the male population
grew by 416%. Two-thirds of these women are serving time for nonviolent offenses and more than
three-quarters are mothers. The staggering increase in the number of women in prison does not
reflect larger numbers of women using drugs, but rather, changes in criminal sentencing. Many of
the women in prison are there for co-habitating with a boyfriend or husband who committed drug
offenses in the home. Women who refuse to testify against a partner could face conspiracy
charges on top of the drug charges, in many cases causing them to serve longer sentences than
the partner who actually committed the crime. Women who don’t serve prison time for a partner’s
offense are often left behind as sole caretakers of the next generation. When men come out of
prison, dehumanized, angry, and unable to get decent jobs due to criminal records, they re-enter
households dominated by women, who now have an extra mouth to feed and a potentially volatile
situation on their hands. “Men come back from prison with trauma and not much marketability
because employers won’t hire formerly incarcerated people,” says Xochitl Bervera, co-director of the Racial Justice
Action Center in Georgia. The R.J. Action Center runs a program organizing currently and formerly incarcerated women to reduce the number of
women in jails and prisons. A growing prison population is not the only bad news for women and drugs. While drug overdose fatalities for men have
tripled in the past decade, the number of women dying of opioid drug overdose has risen fivefold during the same period. African-American women are
also the fasting growing demographic of people with HIV, which can be acquired through injecting drugs or having sex with a partner who has injected
Because of the high standards that society holds to mothers, women also bear the brunt of
stigma against drug users. While absentee fathers who use drugs might be given a pass, being a
mother on drugs is an unforgivable offense. Women who admit to drug use are at risk of losing
their children and suffer greater economic and social consequences than those born by men .
Some states have even passed laws criminalizing pregnant women who use drugs. Last year,
drugs.
Tennessee enacted a law that allows pregnant women to be criminally charged with an assaultive offense if their baby is born with
withdrawal symptoms indicative of opioid use. The law passed despite strong dissent from the medical
community, which pointed out that criminalizing pregnant women deters them from seeking drug
treatment and prenatal care, putting both mother and fetus at greater risk for poor birth outcomes.
“Society views drug use as a moral problem and women, especially mothers, are judged the most
harshly,” says Senga Carroll, Training Director at UNC Horizons, a program that works with pregnant and parenting women with
substance use disorders in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. “ A number of women [in our program] have described
delivering babies in small hospitals and being made to feel like ‘dirt beneath the dirt’ by medical
staff. This is a major concern because women who feel judged will often lie to health care
providers about their situation and if we don’t have a clear picture of what is going on, we can’t
get the best help for the mother and baby.”
We should speak out against this injustice in public spaces—federal marijuana
prohibition is a process of annihilation aimed at minority populations and must
be ended now
BW 12, Brown Watch, News for People of Color, "War on Drugs is a War on Black & Brown Men - 75 Years of Racial Control:
Happy Birthday Marijuana Prohibition", October 2, www.brown-watch.com/genocide-watch/2012/10/2/war-on-drugs-is-a-war-onblack-brown-men-75-years-of-racial.html
"There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic
music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes,
entertainers and any others.”- Harry Anslinger, first Drug Czar. From [HERE] As we approach the 75th anniversary of
marijuana prohibition in the United States on October 1, it is important to remember why marijuana was
deemed illicit in the first place, and why we as Americans must open our eyes to the insidious
strategy behind 75 years of failed policy and ruined lives . Marijuana laws were designed not to
control marijuana, but to control the Mexican immigrants who had brought this native plant with them to
the U.S. Fears over loss of jobs and of the Mexicans themselves led cities to look for ways to keep a close eye on the
newcomers. In 1914, El Paso Texas became the first jurisdiction in the U.S. to ban the sale and possession of marijuana. This
ban gave police the right to search, detain and question Mexican immigrants without reason , except
the suspicion that they were in possession of marijuana. Folklore started to erupt about the effect that marijuana had on those who
used it. As Harry Anslinger stated, “Reefer makes darkies think they're as good as white men.”¶ Fast forward to 2012.
Marijuana is still an illicit substance and the laws are still being used to justify the search,
detainment and questioning of populations deemed “untrustworthy” and “suspicious” by modern
society, namely the poor and young men of color. A prime example is New York’s Stop and Frisk program, which
stopped nearly 700,000 people in 2011. Hailed as a strategy for removing guns and violent crime from the streets, this method of
stopping and questioning “suspicious” individuals, highlights the racial inequities associated with drug laws.
From 2002 to 2011, African American and Hispanic residents made up close to 90% of people
stopped. This is not limited to New York. In California, African-Americans are 4 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana, 12
times more likely to go to prison with a felony marijuana charge, and 3 times more likely to go to prison with a marijuana possession
The strategy of using marijuana laws to stop, detain and imprison poor and minority
populations must stop NOW . In the past 75 years we have seen mounting evidence of the benign
nature of the marijuana plant, and its tremendous potential for medical development. But the rampant
charge.¶
misinformation about the effects of marijuana USE is dwarfed by the lifetime of suffering that a
marijuana CONVICTION can bring. In 2010, there were 853,839 marijuana arrests in the U.S., 750,591 of those were for
possession. A drug conviction in America is the gift that keeps on giving. Affected individuals must face a lifetime of stigma that can
prevent employment, home ownership, education, voting and the ability to be a parent. The issue of mass incarceration and the War
on Drugs is featured in the new documentary, The House I Live In. In the film, Richard L. Miller, author of Drug Warriors and Their
Prey, From Police Power to Police State, presents a very sinister take on the method behind the Drug War madness. Miller
drug laws , such as those for marijuana are part of a process of annihilation aimed at
poor and minority populations . Miller poses that drug laws are designed to identify, ostracize,
confiscate, concentrate, and annihilate these populations by assigning the label of drug user,
criminal, or addict, seizing property, taking away freedom and institutionalizing entire
communities in our ever growing prison system.¶ We can stop this from happening . Marijuana was
deemed illegal without acknowledging science or the will of the people. 75 years later, 50% of the population
supports marijuana legalization, and families are still being torn apart and lives destroyed over the
criminal sanctions associated with its use. The most vulnerable members of our society are also the targets
of a prison industrial complex out of control and getting bigger every day. Someone is arrested for
marijuana in the U.S. every 38 seconds, we have no time to waste , tax and regulate now.¶ Oregon, Colorado
suggests that
and Washington are all considering a more sensible and humane approach to marijuana as all three have tax and regulate initiatives
on their ballots this November. This
is a unique opportunity for citizens to cast a vote heard round the world, to
stand up not only for the freedom to consume marijuana, but against the atrocities and human
suffering that result from the criminalization of it.
Legalizing marijuana will not end systemic racism, but it is a step in the right
direction that has tangible positive effects and can build momentum for broader
movements
Franklin and Title 14 - Neill Franklin is the Executive Director at Leap, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition; Shaleen Title
is a social justice activist for marijuana legalization and author of “Ending the Drug War: A Dream Deferred” (Neill Franklin and
Shaleen Title, 3 Reasons Marijuana Legalization in Colorado Is Good for People of Color, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/neillfranklin/marijuana-legalization-race-racism-minorities_b_4651456.html)
As the president acknowledged, marijuana prohibition targets black and brown people (even though marijuana
users are equally or more likely to be white). Ending prohibition through passing legalization laws, as Colorado and
Washington have, will reduce this racial disparity. The war on drugs, as we all know, has led to mass
criminalization and incarceration for people of color. The legalization of marijuana, which took effect for
the first time in the country in Colorado on January 1, is
one step toward ending that war. While the new law
won't eradicate systemic racism in our criminal justice system completely, it is one of the most effective
things we can do to address it. Here are three concrete ways that Colorado's law is good for people of color. 1. The new
law means there will be no more arrests for marijuana possession in Colorado. Under Colorado's new law,
residents 21 or older can produce, possess, use and sell up to an ounce of marijuana at a time. This change will have a real and
measurable impact on people of color in Colorado, where the racial disparities in marijuana possession arrests
have been reprehensible. In the last ten years, Colorado police arrested blacks for marijuana possession at
more than three times the rate they arrested whites, even though whites used marijuana at higher rates. As noted by
the NAACP in its endorsement of the legalization law, it's particularly bad in Denver, where almost one-third of the people arrested
for private adult possession marijuana are black, though they make up only 11% of the population. These arrests can have
devastating and long-lasting consequences. An arrest record can affect the ability to get a job, housing, student loans and public
benefits. As law professor Michelle Alexander describes, people (largely black and brown) who acquire a criminal record simply for
being caught with marijuana are relegated to a permanent second-class status. When
we make marijuana legal, we
stop those arrests from happening. 2. Unlike under decriminalization, the new law means there will be
no more arrests for mere marijuana possession in Colorado, period. In the Jan. 6 article "#Breaking Black: Why
Colorado's weed laws may backfire for black Americans," Goldie Taylor mistakenly suggests that Colorado's new legalization law
may "further tip the scales in favor of a privileged class already largely safe from criminalization." Much of the stubborn "this-
changes-nothing" belief about the new law stems from confusion between decriminalization and
legalization . There is a profound difference between the hodgepodge of laws known collectively as "decriminalization" passed
in several states over the past 30 years, and Colorado's unprecedented legalization law. Decriminalization usually refers to a
change in the law which removes criminal but not civil penalties for marijuana possession, allowing police to issue civil fines (similar
to speeding tickets), or require drug education or expensive treatment programs in lieu of being arrested. Because of the
ambiguity in some states with decriminalization, cops still arrest users with small amounts of marijuana due to
technicalities, such as having illegal paraphernalia, or for having marijuana in "public view" after asking them to empty their pockets.
One only need look as far as the infamous stop-and-frisk law in New York, where marijuana is decriminalized, to
see how these ambiguities might be abused to the detriment of people of color. In Colorado, however, the marijuana industry is now
legal and above-ground. People therefore have a right to possess and use marijuana products, although as with alcohol,
there are restrictions relating to things like age, driving, and public use. Police won't be able to racially profile by
claiming they smelled marijuana or saw it in plain view. 3. We will reduce real problems associated with the illicit
market. As marijuana users shift to making purchases at regulated stores, we'll start to see improvement in problems that were
blamed on marijuana but are in fact consequences of its prohibition. The violence related to the street-corner drug trade will begin to
fall as the illicit market is slowly replaced by well-guarded stores with cameras and security systems. And consumers will now know
what they're getting; instead of buying whatever's in a baggie, they have the benefit of choosing from a wide variety of marijuana
products at the price level and potency they desire.
Advocating for marijuana legalization serves as a training ground for larger
movements challenging mass incarceration and facilitates coalition-building
Tate 14 [Katherine, Professor of Political Science @ UC Irvine, Something's in the Air: Race, Crime, and the Legalization of
Marijuana, pg. 9]
legalization of personal- use marijuana is the only alternative to
draconian laws drawn up in the "war on drugs" regime of the past three decades . It is well established
For increasing numbers of Americans,
that concern and paranoia over petty "crack" cocaine arrests for sales, possession, and use drove the mass warehousing of
California's prisons and jail populations to become the largest in the United States (Lusane 1991: Provine 2007: Reinerman and
Levine 1997: Weatherspoon 1998: Weaver 2007). Miller (2008) contends that the U.S. federal system of crime control
has left minority citizens less able to challenge unfair sentencing laws. Noting that marijuana
possession constituted nearly 8 of 10 drug- related arrests in the 1990s. Michelle Alexander (2010) insists that
this period of "unprecedented punitiveness" resulted "in prison sentences (rather than dismissal,
community service, or probation)" to the degree that "in two short decades, between 1980 and 2000 the
number of people incarcerated in our nation's prisons and jails soared from roughly 300.000 to
more than 2 million. By the end of 2007, more than 7 million Americans—or one in every 31
adults— were behind bars, on probation, or parole" (Alexander 2010. 59). Pushed by drug prosecutions,
the rising rate of incarceration reached unprecedented levels in the 1990s . Today's movement toward
more prisons, mandatory minimums and reinstatement of the death penalty logically followed the racially exploitative "law and order"
campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s (Murakawa 2008). Conservative American politicians use the mythical Black or Hispanic male
drug dealer, like the Black female welfare queen, to drum up votes. A widespread consensus in reported government statistics,
advocacy studies, and policy think tanks suggests that African Americans bear the brunt of law-and-order
management of U.S. marijuana laws because of how marijuana use is racialized. Political scientist Doris
Provine contends that the U.S. government increased its punitive response toward drug use as a
response to racial fears and stereotypes. She writes: "[d]rugs remain, symbolically, a menace to
white, middle-class values" (2007. 89). Both politicians and media have used this issue to construct a crisis and sustain
punitive state drug laws. The war on drugs, she concludes, has greatly harmed minority citizens through
their imprisonment, contributing to deep inequalities in education, housing, health care, and equal
opportunities to advance economically. The facts of use. sales, and possession, confirmed by academic and critical
legal studies literature, are strikingly different from how the national and local media choose to present them. One study focusing on
marijuana initiate found "among Blacks, the annual incidence rate (per 1.000 potential new users) increased from 8.0 in 1966 to
16.7 in 1968. reached a peak at about the same time as "Whites" (19.4 in 1976). then remained high throughout the late 1970s.
Following the low rates in the 1980s, rates among Blacks rose again in the early 1990s, reached a peak in 1997 and 1998 (19.2 and
19.1. respectively), then dropped to 14.0 in 1999. Similar to the general pattern for Whites and Blacks. Hispanics' annual incidence
rate rose during late 1970s and 1990s, with a peak in 1998 (17.8)" (National Survey on Drug Use 1999). Individuals and
groups in civil society, advocacy communities, and state legislatures must put forth a serious struggle
among activists and potential coalition partners who can understand the need for reform as a matter
of civil rights and justice, and not the morality of marijuana consumption. Supporting decriminalization potentially can be the
training ground for a new generation of leadership in addressing the larger problem of mass
incarceration and social and political isolation associated with it. For Black people and their allies
who long for the days— against all odds—of political education, voter mobilization, legal reform ,
group solidarity, challenge to the political parties, and political empowerment, expressed in the
modern civil rights movement, the matter of decriminalization is ripe for galvanizing a
collaboration at the grassroots . Too many Blacks have assumed that the "War on Drugs" ended
with the dissipation of the "crack" emergency, when, in sum, marijuana's criminalization—rather
than incarceration—of Black people has been more perennial. If Michelle Alexander (2010) is correct in arguing
that mass incarceration has effectively reasserted Jim Crow second-class citizenship (or no citizenship)
rights on African American people, then they must get off the sidelines of the legalization of cannabis or
decriminalization struggle and stop allowing others to fight what is essentially their battle. This has long been the case in the
challenge to the crushing "prison industrial complex." Whites and others, for the most part, have been the leaders in reform efforts
concerning such things as mandatory minimums, the old 100:1 gram of cocaine-to-crack formula, and health care for geriatric or HIV
AIDS patients in prisons, while we have seen Calvin "Snoop- Dogg"' Broadus become more influential than the congressional Black
Caucus to our young. When ordinary people change their thinking and consciousness and begin to
demystify small, personal- use marijuana, then the leaders will eventually come around without
reticence or fear. The marijuana debate needs to be reframed to remove all penalties against its
use (Scherlen 2012). This is our exit strategy: decriminalization reform is the only path to reversing
the dismal trends minorities face in America.
Policy can be used effectively to begin to dismantle institutional racism
Bouie 13 - Jamelle Bouie, “Making and Dismantling Racism,” THE AMERICAN PROSPECT, 3—11—13,
http://prospect.org/article/making-and-dismantling-racism
Over at The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates has been exploring the intersection of race and public policy, with a focus on white
supremacy as a driving force in political decisions at all levels of government. This has led him to two conclusions: First, that
antiblack racism as we understand it is a creation of explicit policy choices —the decision to exclude, marginalize,
and stigmatize Africans and their descendants has as much to do with racial prejudice as does any intrinsic tribalism. And second,
that it's possible to dismantle this prejudice using public policy . Here is Coates in his own words: Last
night I had the luxury of sitting and talking with the brilliant historian Barbara Fields. One point she makes that very few Americans
understand is that racism is a creation. You read Edmund Morgan’s work and actually see racism being inscribed in the law
and the country changing as a result. If we accept that racism is a creation, then we must then accept that it
can be destroyed. And if we accept that it can be destroyed, we must then accept that it can be
destroyed by us and that it likely must be destroyed by methods kin to creation. Racism was
created by policy. It will likely only be ultimately destroyed by policy . Over at his blog, Andrew Sullivan
offers a reply: I don’t believe the law created racism any more than it can create lust or greed or envy or hatred. It can encourage or
mitigate these profound aspects of human psychology – it can create racist structures as in the Jim Crow South or Greater Israel.
But it can no more end these things that it can create them. A complementary strategy is finding ways for the targets of such hatred
to become inured to them, to let the slurs sting less until they sting not at all. Not easy. But a more manageable goal than TNC’s
utopianism. I can appreciate the point Sullivan is making, but I'm not sure it's relevant to Coates' argument. It is absolutely true that
"Group loyalty is deep in our DNA," as Sullivan writes. And if you define racism as an overly aggressive form of group loyalty—
basically just prejudice—then Sullivan is right to throw water on the idea that the law can "create racism any more than it can create
lust or greed or envy or hatred." But Coates is making a more precise claim: That there's nothing natural about the
black/white divide that has defined American history. White Europeans had contact with black
Africans well before the trans-Atlantic slave trade without the emergence of an anti-black racism. It took
particular choices made by particular people—in this case, plantation owners in colonial Virginia—to make black skin a
stigma, to make the "one drop rule" a defining feature of American life for more than a hundred years. By enslaving
African indentured servants and allowing their white counterparts a chance for upward mobility,
colonial landowners began the process that would make white supremacy the ideology of
America. The position of slavery generated a stigma that then justified continued enslavement —
blacks are lowly, therefore we must keep them as slaves. Slavery (and later, Jim Crow) wasn't built to reflect racism as
much as it was built in tandem with it. And later policy, in the late 19th and 20th centuries, further
entrenched white supremacist attitudes . Block black people from owning homes, and they're
forced to reside in crowded slums. Onlookers then use the reality of slums to deny
homeownership to blacks, under the view that they're unfit for suburbs. In other words, create a
prohibition preventing a marginalized group from engaging in socially sanctioned behavior—owning
a home, getting married—and then blame them for the adverse consequences. Indeed, in arguing for gay
marriage and responding to conservative critics, Sullivan has taken note of this exact dynamic. Here he is twelve years ago, in a
column for The New Republic that builds on earlier ideas: Gay men--not because they're gay but because they are men in an allmale subculture--are almost certainly more sexually active with more partners than most straight men. (Straight men would be far
more promiscuous, I think, if they could get away with it the way gay guys can.) Many gay men value this sexual freedom more than
the stresses and strains of monogamous marriage (and I don't blame them). But this is not true of all gay men. Many actually yearn
for social stability, for anchors for their relationships, for the family support and financial security that come with marriage. To deny
this is surely to engage in the "soft bigotry of low expectations." They may be a minority at the moment. But with legal marriage, their
numbers would surely grow. And they would function as emblems in gay culture of a sexual life linked to stability and love.
[Emphasis added] What else is this but a variation on Coates' core argument, that society can create stigmas by using law to force
particular kinds of behavior? Insofar as gay men were viewed as unusually promiscuous, it almost
certainly had something to do with the fact that society refused to recognize their humanity and
sanction their relationships. The absence of any institution to mediate love and desire encouraged
behavior that led this same culture to say "these people are too degenerate to participate in this
institution." If the prohibition against gay marriage helped create an anti-gay stigma, then lifting
it—as we've seen over the last decade—has helped destroy it. There's no reason racism can't work the
same way.
Marijuana legalization has the potential to end the broader drug war by creating
regulatory experimentation and momentum against prohibition
Berman 14, Professor of Law
[April 2014, Douglas A. Berman, “Reflecting on the Latest Drug War Fronts”, Federal Sentencing Reporter, Vol. 26, No. 4, “Is the
Drug War Ending or Retrenching?”, pp. 213-216]
Why State Marijuana Legalization Could Dramatically Transform Drug War Battles and Forces As
reflected in the primary materials reprinted in this Issue, alongside the current debate over modest modifications to federal drug
sentencing schemes, federal
officials have been forced to confront and respond to much more
dramatic drug law reforms taking place in the states. In 2012, voters in Colorado and Washington legalized recreational
use and sales of marijuana. These reforms came on the heels of these states and more than a dozen others enacting laws
permitting persons to legally obtain mari- juana for medicinal purposes under various regulatory schemes. These state-level
marijuana law reforms, particularly in the two states in which voter approval of recreational marijuana use required state officials to
create and monitor regulatory regimes for marijuana distribution and use, forced the Department of Justice to review and articulate
whether and how federal officials would continue to enforce existing federal prohibitions on all marijuana use and distribution in
states that had legalized such activity. Reprinted in this Issue are two documents that reflect the results of the Justice Department’s
latest efforts to provide guidance to states that have legalized marijuana use and to actors with those states involved with marijuanarelated businesses: (1) an August 2013 memorandum signed by Deputy Attorney General James Cole providing guidance, through
the articulation of eight national priorities, for on-going federal marijuana enforcement, and (2) a February 2014 memorandum from
the U.S. Department of the Treasury setting out expectations for any financial institutions involved in providing services to
marijuana-related businesses. Much might be said concerning the substance and style of these federal policy memos, and it will
likely be years before it is clear what concrete impact these statements of federal policies and practices will have on the day-to-day
activities of persons working in and around state marijuana industries. But, regardless of exactly how federal policies and practices
impact state marijuana regulations and businesses, the new reality that public officials and private actors in a
number of states are now working within and around a new legalized marijuana regime could
have an extraordinary, transformative potential with respect to the broader drug war . Unlike
sentencing reform, the creation of new state regulatory regimes necessarily and dramatically alters the
basic drug war landscape and the basic work of those on the battlefield. As suggested above, even
significant drug sentencing reforms do not change the essential terms on which the drug war is
fought, nor are they likely to reorient the perspectives and commitments of the traditional
combatants in this war. In sharp contrast, new laws legalizing and regulating recreational use of
marijuana demand that governmental moneys and energies —which were previously devoted to
drug supply reduction strategies, interdictions, and incarceration— are now directed toward new
programming and invest- ments intended to ensure safe and limited access to certain drugs
along with revised strategies for reducing drug abuse and related harms . Voters in Colorado and
Washington have now essentially demanded their governments experiment with new models of legal
regulation for marijuana focused primarily on safeguarding the health and security of those
citizens who want to use drugs responsibly and those who wish to avoid drug use. With government
priorities reoriented in this way, some addi- tional space has been cleared for legitimate and
responsible businesses and other private-sector actors to invest in and contribute to creating a
legal, regulatory, and social environment in which some respon- sible drug use is encouraged,
and drug abuse is discouraged and treated as a public health problem rather than as a criminal
justice concern. With legal recreational marijuana regulations and realities just starting to emerge in Colorado and
Washington, and in light of the varied experiences in states with varied medical marijuana regulatory structures, it is far too early to
predict just how and how quickly state-level marijuana reforms can and will transform national policies and perspectives on the drug
war more generally. But it
is clear that these reforms have already ensured that a new set of policy
makers and institutional players are thinking about regulation of drug distribution and use in
radical new ways . And once it becomes easier to understand and experience a serious, reasonable
alternative to a criminal justice response to at least some drugs, the prospect of a full withdrawal
from the drug war, rather than just a limited retrenchment in that war, becomes much more
realistic.
Plan
Thus the plan: The United States should legalize marihuana in the United States
with a regulated licensing system including set-asides and start-up capital for
black-owned and Latin@-owned businesses, as well as businesses owned by
individuals from other groups marginalized by drug prohibition. The United
States should apply marihuana legalization retroactively, expunge and
permanently seal criminal records for individuals previously arrested on
marihuana charges in the United States.
Contention 2: Climate Change
Federal legalization is vital for the hemp industry to reach full capacity
Matt Snyders 13, Award Winning Journalist, Dec/Jan 2013 Issue, The Hemp Connoisseur,
http://issuu.com/thcmag/docs/thcissue5
"One dollar a gallon generates $300 per acre for the farmer," he says. "But remember, that just from the seed. That doesn't factor in
the fibers, the hurds, the main organic material that goes into fiber, paper, concrete, what have you." Some experts put the figure at
50 cents. Others higher. No one has a crystal ball, but the main point to take away is that the current price of hemp is
artificially inflated, its demand artificially suppressed. Compare that to the our current biofuel
crop-of-choice. Corn is a grain of very little use outside of food and fuel— and yet its production
is not only allowed, but subsidized, by the federal government. Hemp is capable of providing
everything maize does, ethanol included, and then some. But that's not the only advantages. Ed Lehrburger,
President and CEO of PureVision Technologies—a Colorado-based renewable energy company which focuses on converting
biomass into fuel—has long touted the advantages of hemp, not just in terms of its excellent cellulose content for processers, but
the ease and affordability with which farmers grow it. ¶ "This is a plant requires less water and less fertilizer
than most, easy to harvest, grows in many soil types, you don't have to replant every year , you can
harvest not only the biomass, but the seeds to make different products," he says. "But the main point I want to emphasize is you
can't get high from industrial hemp." ¶ That said, you can get pretty much everything else from it. Virtually every material of
human use today every can be made from hemp: fabrics, plastics, concrete, oil, food, paper, cosmetics, soaps,
medicine. Glass is about the only material hemp is can't provide. Any state or that nation harnesses the full
potential of industrial hemp for these uses is going to be left with a stockpile of waste material
that can be converted into fuel, according to Das and Lehrburger, at which point the term "energy independence" moves
from politicized buzzword to concrete attainable reality. ¶ Hemp's versatility is why Henry Ford had it in mind when he designed his
first cars— at the time hemp production was not only allowed but encouraged by the United States government and hemp materials
were comparatively cheaper and more readily available. The first Model-T Fords not only featured hemp-based bodies which
boasted greater collision impact than their steel counterparts despite being lighter and more fuel efficient, but indeed ran on hempbased ethanol. In fact Ford never intended his vehicles to run on gasoline. ¶"The fuel of the future is going to come from fruit like the
sumach out by the road, or from apples, weeds, sawdust—almost anything," he told the New York Times in 1925. There is fuel in
every bit of vegetable matter that can be fermented. There's enough alcohol in one year's yield of an acre of potatoes to drive the
machinery necessary to cultivate the fields for a hundred years." ¶A couple of caveats: don't expect hemp to
revolutionize the biofuel industry in the immediate short term. Until and unless the federal
government lifts its impossible-to-justify ban on the most vital cash crop in human history, it will
be next to impossible for the industry to hit critical mass . Hemp's sizeable infrastructure and
start-up requirements will deter investors and large-scale farmers from jumping on board until they
can produce at full capacity without having to worry about armed agents banging down their door
and seizing their life savings. "It's not like opening up a little dispensary retail storefront and taking
your chances with the feds," points out Lehrburger. "You're talking thousands of acres. That's not a
small deal. Which is why there needs to be a law at the federal level that legalizes hemp before things
really rev up. That's the bottom line.”
Reliance on corn ethanol trades off with food and fails to solve warming—
transitioning to hemp is key to solve
Nicole M. Keller, J.D. Candidate, “The Legalization of Industrial Hemp and What It Could Mean for Indiana’s Biofuel Industry,”
INDIANA INTERNATIONAL & COMPARATIVE LAW REVIEW v. 23, 2013, p. 575-582.
While the potential impact of an industrial hemp industry is large for most Indiana industries, the primary reason that Indiana should
legalize industrial hemp is because doing so would be extremely beneficial to its economy, specifically in the area of biofuel. Indiana
is committed to a thriving biofuel industry. n199 Since its creation in 2005, the Indiana [*576] Department of Agriculture has made
agro-energy one of its strategic goals. n200 According to the Indiana Department of Agriculture's website: The Midwest really
can be the Middle East of biofuels . [Indiana's] numerous new E85 pumps, more than a dozen new ethanol plants, the
world's largest soy biodiesel facility, and the establishment of BioTown are evidence that [the state] won't rest until Indiana is the
nation's biofuels capital. Beyond the use of traditional grain for ethanol, Indiana will strive to be a leader in cellulosic ethanol.
Cellulosic is the future of biofuels and can be maximized by Indiana's research universities like Purdue. n201 Currently,
because Indiana is one of the nation's leading producers of corn, n202 it has naturally followed that corn is the main input for the
production of agricultural biofuel in the state. n203 However, funneling corn out of the food supply into the fuel
supply has cost Indiana export revenue, n204 and contributed to the increase in global corn prices.
n205 Before corn was used as an ethanol feedstock, Indiana exported over fifty percent of the corn produced by Indiana farmers.
n206 Now, that "extra" corn is not exported but kept at home to produce biofuel. n207 In response to the decreased exports Indiana
argues that, "as U.S. ethanol production expands, higher U.S. and world corn prices would provide incentives for Brazil and
Argentina to expand corn production and compete with U.S. corn in world markets." n208 However, price increases caused
by taking corn out of the food chain for fuel production has increased food shortages in areas
where the food supply is already at risk for insufficiency. n209 For example, "[b]etween 2002 and 2007, world
food prices increased by some 140 percent due to a number of factors including, increased demand for the biofuels feedstocks and
As a result of [*577] these higher prices, "in 2008 . . . a further 100
million [were added] to the world's undernourished [population]. " n211 While Indiana's argument that
rising agricultural fuel and fertilizer prices." n210
increased competition would put downward pressure on the price of corn is true, and it would relieve some of the effects affecting
the world food crisis, it is not necessary to remove corn from the food supply, nor subject our corn
industry to the risk of lost market share. The introduction of hemp as a feedstock for biofuel
would replace the corn that is currently being removed from the food chain to supply biofuel
needs. Replacing the corn with hemp would lessen the pressure on global corn prices as the
supply of corn increased, n212 thus helping to alleviate some of the effects third world nations are
suffering as a result of the global search for alternative fuel. Furthermore, foregoing export revenue in Indiana
is also unnecessary. Indiana has enough farmland n213 that it is fully capable of maintaining its pre-ethanol corn export levels, while
supporting its growing biofuel industry with industrial hemp. IX. Hemp vs. Corn Furthermore, Indiana should switch to producing
industrial hemp as a biofuel feedstock because it is a more efficient resource . n214 There is no question
that "corn ethanol is energy efficient." n215 It has "an energy ratio of 1.34 [, which means] for every BTU dedicated to producing
ethanol there is a 34 percent energy gain." n216 Unfortunately, corn puts high demands on land and water
resources, n217 and producing biofuel from it is energy and resource-intensive. n218 Industrial
hemp, by comparison, because of its high cellulose content has an estimated 540 percent energy gain . n219
Through Indiana's own research it knows that biofuel from cellulous is the direction the industry is taking. n220 According to Alan
Greenspan, "[c]orn ethanol, [*578] though valuable, can play only a limited role [in energy independence],
because its ability to displace gasoline is modest at best. But cellulosic ethanol , should it fulfill its
promise, would
help to wean us of our petroleum dependence ." n221 In addition to hemp's high cellulous
content, hemp requires little from its growing environment . n222 It can be grown on land unsuitable
for other feedstock crops. n223 For example, China purports to grow industrial hemp on land that will not
displace food crops, or as a rotational crop with soy and wheat. n224 Furthermore, it can be harvested two or
three times per season; n225 it requires nearly no pesticides or herbicides to thrive; n226 and it
coincidentally leaves the land in better shape than it was in before planting, n227 thus creating a
suitable plot for rotational crops where before there were none. n228 Moreover, industrial hemp would thrive
in Indiana farmland because it "tends to grow best on land that produces high yields of corn." n229 The trend in feedstock
crops is now towards cellulous-based ethanol production. n230 Indiana has recognized that cellulose-based
crops are the future for biofuel. n231 In its strategic outlook, Indiana has dedicated itself to becoming a leader in this field. n232 With
industrial hemp's superiority over other cellulosic plants, n233 Indiana would surely gain dominance in ethanol production in the
United States if it were to employ industrial hemp as the main biofuel feedstock. X. Energy Security and Climate Stewardship
Platform As evidence of its commitment to sustainable energy, Indiana has adopted the Energy Security and Climate Stewardship
Platform. n234 The [*579] Platform establishes shared goals for the Midwestern region as they relate to biofuel, environment, and
energy independence. n235 The goal of the Platform is to "[m]aximize the energy resources and economic advantages and
opportunities of Midwestern states while reducing emissions of atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases." n236 In order to
reach its goal, the Platform is committed to meeting various objectives including the implementation of renewable energy
technologies, cost-effective energy efficiency, and to "[a]dd economic value and high-paying jobs to the Midwest's energy,
agriculture, manufacturing and technology sectors through the development and deployment of lower-carbon energy production and
technologies." n237 Some specific strategies to reach the objectives include expanding on the production of biofuels and building a
bio- refinery industry. n238 Regarding transportation and biofuel specifically, the Energy Security and Climate Stewardship seeks to
Develop the Midwest's capacity for production of biofuels and other low-carbon advanced transportation fuels to advance national
energy independence, add value for consumers, revitalize rural economies and the region's manufacturing base, and decrease
greenhouse gas emissions. Accelerate strategies for improving the efficiency of biofuels production and use, reduce fossil fuel
inputs, minimize GHG emissions, decrease water use and strengthen the existing biofuels industry. Develop, demonstrate and
commercialize a variety of biomass-utilizing technologies and other low-carbon advanced fuels covering a portfolio of energy
products and biobased products. Pursue innovative opportunities to increase the biofuels supply while improving water quality, soil
quality and wildlife habitat. Build the infrastructure to allow the bioeconomy to expand. n239 [*580] Industrial hemp is the
ideal feedstock to help Indiana meet all of these objectives. An analysis of each one is useful. 1. Develop the
Midwest's capacity for production of biofuels and other low- carbon advanced transportation fuels
to advance national energy independence, add value for consumers, revitalize rural economies
and the region's manufacturing base, and decrease greenhouse gas emissions . n240 Currently Indiana's
main feedstock inputs are corn and soybean. n241 These inputs are limited in their capacity because they are both food sources as
well. Industrial
hemp, on the other hand, contributes to national energy independence by reducing the
need for fossil fuel inputs. n242 It adds values for consumers because it lets food crops be used for food,
which reduces the price for that food. It revitalizes rural economies by providing low-skilled
agriculture jobs for smaller production farmers. n243 And hemp is a miracle when it comes to
reducing greenhouses gases and leaving the growing environment in a better condition than that
in which it was found. n244 2. Accelerate strategies for improving the efficiency of biofuels production and use, reduce fossil
fuel inputs, minimize GHG emissions, decrease water use and strengthen the existing biofuels industry. n245 Industrial hemp is an
efficient source of biofuel. n246 Both hemp biomass and hemp seed are available to produce fuel, n247 whether it is biodiesel or
ethanol. n248 Additionally, hemp's cellulose content far exceeds anything Indiana is currently using as feedstock, managing a 540%
energy gain when processed, which makes it a very efficient biofuel input. n249 Furthermore, hemp is known to reduce greenhouse
gasses, n250 and requires less water to grow than cotton n251 (however, compared to corn the results are mixed). [*581] 3.
Develop, demonstrate and commercialize a variety of biomass-utilizing technologies and other low-carbon advanced fuels covering
a portfolio of energy products and biobased products. n252 The addition of industrial hemp as a biofuel source would help diversify
Indiana's biofuels portfolio. Additionally, while hemp biofuel is the focus here, the plant is extremely versatile, capable of producing
over 25,000 products, n253 which could fill out Indiana's biobased products portfolio effortlessly. 4. Pursue innovative opportunities
to increase the biofuels supply while improving water quality, soil quality and wildlife habitat. n254 Estimates suggest that
industrial hemp is capable of producing 1300 gallons of fuel per acre of biomass . n255 Hemp can
be grown in conjunction with corn and soybean feedstock because it is capable of growing on
unfarmed land, n256 or in rotation with other crops. n257 Alternatively, industrial hemp can easily replace corn and soybean
feedstock on currently farmed land because such land is ideal for maximum output. n258 Any of these growing options would
increase the biofuel supply. Furthermore, studies show that growing industrial hemp improves water quality
because it requires little to no pesticides, n259 and it improves soil quality, often leaving it in
better condition. n260 The improvement in water and soil quality would naturally lead to an
improvement in wildlife habitat because the environment would be able to support additional
wildlife and plants. 5. Build the infrastructure to allow the bioeconomy to expand . n261 Legalizing
industrial hemp would increase the biofuel supply, increase exports, as well as provide Indiana with new
industries, resulting in increased revenue for the State. The extra revenue received could be reinvested in Indiana's
bioeconomy. [*582] As for Indiana and many other Midwestern states that have adopted the Energy Security and Climate
Stewardship Platform, industrial hemp seems to be an almost perfect answer to their energy needs.
Hemp sequesters carbon which independently solves warming
Richard M. Davis, M.A., Biology & Founder, USA Hemp Museum, HEMP FOR VICTORY: A GLOBAL WARMING SOLUTION,
2009, p. 7.
Who: Every person on earth is at risk of dying from the effects of global warming. Global warming is
also impacting on food, war, clean water and ultimately, human life on earth. We cannot live and keep our
heads in the sand. Hemp biofuel burns clean, and hemp breathes in the excess global warming CO2 gas
from the air as it grows. Every person on earth deserves the means to food, clean water, shelter and other
amenities. Hemp can help at every turn. Our forests are being cut mercilessly, hemp can help.
Healthy forests clean the water and restore the carbon dioxide balance. Hemp can supply paper
and building materials like press board, plaster, cement and plastics for shelter. Hemp can supply a complete protein and
valuable fish type heart healthy oils, without which malnutrition can occur. Hemp is wind pollinated, which helps as an
alternative food source in the face of the “disappearing bees” problem. Hemp biofuels are
domestic, plant based energy sources. Hemp grows quickly, breathes in carbon dioxide from the
air as it grows, exhales oxygen as it grows, burns clean and can be economically produced and
distributed. Wherever petroleum is used, it can be quickly replaced with hemp bio-fuels, which
include alcohols, seed oil and wood, to produce energy. Hemp, a safe energy source, can be
grown, processed and shipped from the same location without the need for a lot of storage space,
empowering family farmers, oil processors and other ancillary businesses.
Warming is real, human caused, and causes extinction—acting now is key to
avoid catastrophic collapse
Dr. David McCoy et al., MD, Centre for International Health and Development, University College London, “Climate Change and
Human Survival,” BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL v. 348, 4—2—14, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.g2510, accessed 8-31-14.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has just published its report on the impacts of global warming. Building on
its recent update of the physical science of global warming [1], the
IPCC’s new report should leave the world in no
doubt about the scale and immediacy of the threat to human survival , health, and well-being. The IPCC
has already concluded that it is “ virtually certain that human influence has warmed the global climate
system” and that it is “ extremely likely that more than half of the observed increase in global average
surface temperature from 1951 to 2010” is anthropogenic [1]. Its new report outlines the future threats of
further global warming: increased scarcity of food and fresh water; extreme weather events; rise in sea
level; loss of biodiversity; areas becoming uninhabitable; and mass human migration, conflict and violence.
Leaked drafts talk of hundreds of millions displaced in a little over 80 years. This month, the American Association for the
Advancement of Science (AAAS) added its voice: “the well being of people of all nations [is] at risk.” [2] Such
comments reaffirm the conclusions of the Lancet/UCL Commission: that climate
change is “the greatest threat to
human health of the 21st century.” [3] The changes seen so far—massive arctic ice loss and extreme weather events, for
example—have resulted from an estimated average temperature rise of 0.89°C since 1901. Further changes will depend
on how much we continue to heat the planet. The release of just another 275 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide would
probably commit us to a temperature rise of at least 2°C—an amount that could be emitted in less than eight years. [4]
“ Business as usual ” will increase carbon dioxide concentrations from the current level of 400 parts per
million (ppm), which is a 40% increase from 280 ppm 150 years ago, to 936 ppm by 2100, with a 50:50 chance that this will deliver
global mean temperature rises of more than 4°C. It is now widely understood that such a rise is “incompatible with an organised
global community.” [5]. The
IPCC warns of “ tipping points ” in the Earth’s system, which, if crossed, could lead
to a catastrophic collapse of interlinked human and natural systems. The AAAS concludes that there is
now a “real chance of abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes with highly
damaging impacts on people around the globe.” [2] And this week a report from the World Meteorological Office (WMO)
confirmed that extreme weather events are accelerating. WMO secretary general Michel Jarraud said, “There is no standstill in
global warming . . . The laws of physics are non-negotiable.” [6]
The impacts of climate change are racist and are falling disproportionately on the
global south—they are happening now
Butler 09 (Simon, maintains an Australian-based ecosocialist blog devoted to the struggle for a safe climate and an inhabitable
planet, 12/4/09, “The racism of climate change” Climate change Social Change)
http://climatechangesocialchange.wordpress.com/2009/12/04/the-racism-of-climate-change/
The impacts of climate change are also racist. Or more precisely, dangerous climate change will impact
first on those who have done least to cause the problem. That rising sea-levels will soon make
many island nations in the Pacific Ocean uninhabitable is just one example of this gross climate
injustice. But throughout the global South, the prevailing poverty and underdevelopment will inflame
the effects of climate change. A critical issue will be food-security. About 1 billion people are
already starving worldwide — almost all in the South. But the United Nation predicts changing weather
patterns and water losses caused by global warming could cause a 25% drop world food
production by 2050. Many of the business-as-usual solutions to climate change are racist. Carbon offsets are based on the
idea that corporations in the rich countries can pay carbon projects in poor countries to make emissions cuts instead. In effect,
offsets allow the biggest polluters to export responsibility for cutting greenhouse gases. Critics have decried the system as a new
“carbon colonialism”. The fast-growing market in offsets, which makes the carbon stored in forests a valuable commodity, has
already led to evictions of tribal peoples from their forests in some countries. A November 23 report by Survival International said
the Ogiek hunter-gatherers of Kenya “are being forced from the forests they have lived in for hundreds of years to ‘reverse the
ravages’ of global warming”. The biofuels industry is another example of a “response” to climate change
that compounds problems for the world’s poorest. Because it uses food to feed cars instead of
people, its expansion will worsen climate change-induced food shortages Racism is an ideology
that justifies inequality and oppression. It’s not just about hate crimes, vilification and discrimination — although these
are very real consequences of racism too. In particular, racism works to make ordinary people in places like
Australia to become desensitised to poverty and injustice elsewhere. No one will escape the impacts of
global warming. But the rich nations are far better placed to adapt and secure scarce resources for themselves — at least in the
short-term. Meanwhile, Oxfam predicts up to 200 million people in the South will be climate refugees by midcentury unless radical action is taken to curb emissions. The governments of the first world will be able to get
away with business-as-usual on climate change as long as racist ideas, even subtle ones, prevail. Ending the threat of climate
change requires ending the right of the vested interests, primarily the world’s big corporate polluters, from continuing to pollute the
planet for profit. Most of all, it’s a struggle to keep all remaining fossil fuels in the ground. This requires a movement of global
solidarity. Informed and determined people in each country have to force this change. Racism is one of the biggest barriers to
building this kind of movement.
Combining radical critique with concrete action to address climate change in the
short-term is key to achieve societal transformation
Christian Parenti, Professor, Sustainable Development, School for International Training, Graduate Institute, “Climate Change:
What Role for Reform?” MONTHLY REVIEW v. 65 n. 11, 4—14, http://monthlyreview.org/2014/04/01/climate-change-role-reform,
accessed 4-24-14.
These measures could be realistic and effective in the short term. They are not my preferred version of social
change, nor do they solve all problems. And achieving even these modest emissions reducing reforms will require
robust grassroots pressure. If capitalism can transition off fossil fuels over the next several decades, that
will merely buy time to continue struggling on all other fronts; most importantly, on all other
fronts of the environmental crisis. The left needs to have credible proposals for dealing with the
short-term aspects of the climate crisis as well as having a systematic critique and vision of long-term
change. Both should be advocated simultaneously , not pitted against each other. We are compelled
by circumstances to operate with multiple timeframes and at multiple scales . Reforms and
reformism is an important part of that. Given the state of the left globally, which outside of Latin America is largely in
disarray, achieving socialism will take a very long time indeed. Thus, the struggle for climate mitigation and adaptation
cannot wait for revolution.
Contention 3: Solvency
Legalization of marijuana is inevitable at the state level but momentum has yet to
reach the federal government
Bartlett 14 (Bruce, American historian whose area of expertise is supply-side economics. He served as a domestic policy
adviser to Ronald Reagan and as a Treasury official under George H. W. Bush, 1-3-14, "Why Legalizing Marijuana Is a Smart Fiscal
Move" The Fiscal Times) www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2014/01/03/Why-Legalizing-Marijuana-Smart-Fiscal-Move
On January 1, sales and use of recreational marijuana became legal in the state of Colorado. Washington State and the nation of
Uruguay will follow later this year. Other states such as Oregon and California have ballot initiatives scheduled that may legalize
marijuana there as well. It
is a virtual certainty that if these initial experiments work out, as was
previously the case with casino gambling, it will spread rapidly to other states. Several factors
appear to be at work in the drive to legalize recreational marijuana. First is the abject failure of the
war on marijuana, which, surprisingly, began right at the moment when prohibition of alcohol was ending. Polls are
unanimous in showing rising support for marijuana legalization, especially among younger
Americans. Opponents are gradually dying off, literally, according to an April 2013 Pew poll. In October, Gallup
found that support among all Americans for legalization exceeded maintenance of the status quo for the first time since it began
asking the question in 1969. Americans' Views on Legalizing Marijuana Importantly, support for marijuana legalization
is not driven mainly by those who use it now or would like to; that is, it’s not just an issue of self-interest. Rather, it
is because non-users no longer see marijuana as a gateway drug that automatically leads to the use of more
serious drugs, according to a December Associated Press/Gfk poll. In fact, a rising percentage of people
believe that legalization of marijuana will actually curb the use of harder drugs--17 percent now from 10
percent in 2010. Perhaps the dominant factor driving marijuana legalization is the desperate search for
new revenue by cash-strapped state governments. The opportunity to tax marijuana is potentially
a significant source of new revenue, as well as a way of cutting spending on prisons and law
enforcement. The California Secretary of State’s office, for example, estimates savings in the hundreds of millions of dollars
from both factors. The following summary is from a proposed state ballot initiative in California (No. 1617). Summary of estimate by
Legislative Analyst and Director of Finance of fiscal impact on state and local government: Reduced costs in the low hundreds of
millions of dollars annually to state and local governments related to enforcing certain marijuana-related offenses, handling the
related criminal cases in the court system, and incarcerating and supervising certain marijuana offenders. Potential net additional
tax revenues in the low hundreds of millions of dollars annually related to the production and sale of marijuana, a portion of which is
required to be spent on education, health care, public safety, drug abuse education and treatment, and the regulation of commercial
marijuana activities. Interestingly, anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist has given his blessing to taxes on marijuana, since it is an
extension of existing taxes on cigarettes and liquor applied to a comparable commodity, rather than a new tax per se. The potential
revenue obviously depends a lot on details that are presently unknown—the ultimate price of legal marijuana, which could be
substantially lower than the present price in illegal markets; the tax rate; the elasticity of demand for marijuana; and the extent to
which states and the federal government permit a legal marijuana market to function without crippling regulation. A 2010 Rand
Corporation report found that many financial estimates of marijuana legalization are simply unknowable since existing research is
limited by the availability of data for a market that has long been illegal. A new Rand report on marijuana use in the state of
Washington now estimates that usage may be 2 to 3 times greater than previously estimated. It is not surprising that
revenue considerations should be critical in the marijuana legalization movement. That was
previously the reason why cigarettes were not banned until the 1920s despite a strong nationwide
movement to do so. In the wake of Prohibition, governments simply needed cigarette tax revenue
too badly. And when Prohibition ended, the need for new revenue after the Great Depression
decimated government budgets was a driving force. Indeed, according to author Daniel Okrent, expectations of
the revenue from taxing legal liquor were so great in 1932 that some people thought it might permit the repeal of income taxes. It’s
worth remembering that in 1900, taxes on alcohol and cigarettes constituted half of all federal revenues. Indeed, the only reason
Prohibition was possible in the first place was that the income tax established in 1913, which was greatly expanded by World War I,
would replace the revenue lost from the liquor tax after Prohibition. The principal opponents of marijuana legalization are industries
that presently benefit from it being illegal. For example, it is reported that the beer industry invested heavily against a 2010
marijuana legalization initiative in California that ultimately failed. Other vested interests that currently benefit from the outlawing of
marijuana include police unions, the private prison industry, prison guard unions, and pharmaceutical companies fearing that lowcost legal marijuana might replace profitable high-cost prescription drugs such as Vicodin. I don’t have the data to prove it, but I
have long suspected that virtually every economist favors the legalization of marijuana and probably most hard drugs as well-regulated as has long been the case with alcohol and, increasingly, tobacco. The famous economists Milton Friedman, Gary Becker
and Robert Barro have written many columns advocating legalization, and I am not aware of a single economic analysis in
opposition to legalization. I think most economists believe it’s just a repetition of the mistake of Prohibition. I am doubtful that
the legalization of marijuana or any other currently prohibited drug is likely at the federal level any
time soon. There is no movement in Congress to do so and politicians such as former New Mexico governor
Gary Johnson and Baltimore mayor Kurt Schmoke who supported the idea got nowhere. It will happen at the grass roots level in
states that permit voters to propose initiatives and at the federal level only after we have enough years of experience to have a good
understanding of the consequences. It may take another 20 years, but eventually it will happen.
State-led legalization leads to white market control—retroactive application of
new marijuana laws and focus on the distribution of profits is crucial to achieve
legalization that is socially just
Shipps 11-4-14 (Joan, DC statehood activist, "Yes on 71: A Moral Case for Legalizing Marijuana" Huffington Post)
www.huffingtonpost.com/joan-shipps/dc-marijuana-legalization_b_6077894.html
If marijuana legalization is to be socially just, we have to concentrate not only on future decriminalization
and breaking up the prison industrial complex, but also on how the benefits of marijuana legalization will be
distributed. In particular, I'd like to address some compelling and legitimate concerns, recently advanced by two influential
women in the policy realm, about how well-intentioned legalization laws, if not carefully implemented, could continue to perpetuate
many of the same systems of societal oppression explained in some detail above. Who Gets Rich? Who Stays in Prison? Michelle
Alexander Talks Ongoing Racial Disparities Notably, while many of those deriving profit from a booming
marijuana industry are white men, a disturbingly high number of black people -- who have been
historically been arrested for marijuana at much higher rates than their white counterparts -continue to languish behind bars, even in states where marijuana has been legalized. Though
Colorado has legalized marijuana, for example, more than 210,000 of the state's citizens arrested
for marijuana possession between 1986 and 2010 remain imprisoned . The speaks to a lingering injustice that
Colorado's legalization laws, however successful at tax revenue generation, continue to perpetuate, and at great human and tax
payer expense. Or, as Michelle Alexander eloquently observed in describing the stark racial contrasts that persist, even in an
increasingly post-legalization era: "In many ways the imagery doesn't sit right. Here are white men poised to run big marijuana
businesses, dreaming of cashing in big - big money, big businesses selling weed - after 40 years of impoverished black kids getting
prison time for selling weed, and their families and futures destroyed. Now, white men are planning to get rich doing precisely the
same thing?" As we contemplate marijuana legalization in Washington, D.C., it is vital for social justice that
we avoid a fate whereby mass incarceration continues unabated and the benefits of marijuana legalization are
privatized and concentrated. Notably, the D.C. Council recently voted in favor of a bill that would expunge and
permanently seal criminal records for D.C. residents previously arrested on non-violent marijuana
charges. The enactment of this law is crucial. If we are to legalize marijuana in my city, it would be unconscionable to keep
citizens who had the misfortune of being convicted before the advent of Initiative 71 to remain locked in cages and subject to a
lifetime of lesser citizenship rights currently prescribed under federal law.
The plan shapes the market and empowers black communities
Wallace 14 [07/17/14, Anne Wallace is a New York lawyer who writes extensively on legal and business issues. She also
teaches law at the college and professional level., “Black Enterprise and Marijuana”, http://www.mjinews.com/black-enterprisemarijuana/]
Another option would be to set aside a certain percentage of state marijuana business licenses for
minority-owned businesses. This could resemble existing programs that call for women and
minority owned business set-asides for government contracting work. However, state business
licenses rather than government contracts are the vehicle here. Some states, such as Washington, New
York and Massachusetts, strictly limit the number of marijuana business licenses. This makes the
licenses extremely valuable . What if a certain percentage were set aside the communities most
damaged by bad public policy decisions of the past? To harness the economic power of legalized
marijuana, it is important to listen to the voices of all players, going beyond the usual collection of investors,
college kids turned weed innovators, patients and now-aging children of the ’60s. Some of the best thinkers may be
those black entrepreneurs ready to reap reparations, rethink social conservatism and build industry relationships.
Set-asides solve and will successfully increase minority-owned businesses
Chatterji 13 – Professor of Business @ Duke
(Aaron, “The Impact of City Contracting Set-Asides on Black Self-Employment and Employment,” Journal of Labor Economics)
Aggregate Self-Employment and Employment
The evidence suggests that city set-asides led to a reallocation of self-employment from white to black men. Black selfemployment gains coincided with white losses, particularly in the most affected industries (Table 3A) and among the older-skilled
(Table 6). The evidence on employment reallocation is much weaker, though there may have been small losses for whites in the
more affected sector (Tables 5). Set-asides may have caused a substitution of black-owned for white-owned
businesses that were previously awarded city contracts. Conversely, if the black firms winning contracts were less efficient than
the previous awardees, then the total number of businesses could increase as more would be needed to complete the governmentfinanced projects. We provide suggestive evidence on these questions of substitution and efficiency by examining the city-wide
impacts of set-asides.¶ We estimate the aggregate effects on self-employment and employment using equations similar to (2) and
(3), but without race interactions and adjusted only for MSA fixed effects. Figure 5 plots the MSA-level, event-year effects for selfemployment and employment and their standard error bands. Panel A shows that self-employment is modestly higher one-year after
program adoption but then reverts to pre-program levels in event years 2-to-4. Panel B shows the self-employment effects for the
most and least affected industries. Self-employment rates in the most affected sector increased slightly in the post- program period
(relative to the pre-program trend), but the magnitudes are small and statistically insignificant. ¶ In Panel A, MSA-wide employment
increased after program initiation; employment rates are significantly higher 2-to-4 years after set-asides. However, since the
reversal in the pre-program trend¶ begins a year before the programs, it is unclear whether the post-program aggregate gains are
strictly due to set-asides. Panel C shows overall employment separately for the most and least affected industries. In the least
affected sector, employment fell sharply in the years preceding set-asides and continued to fall after, though at a slightly slower rate.
By contrast, employment is significantly higher in the most affected sector after set-asides, consistent with the possibility that the
programs increased aggregate employment. But again the gains appear to start a year before program initiation, making it difficult to
attribute them solely, or even primarily, to set-asides.¶ Set-asides seemed to have had no impact on city-wide self-employment
and instead affected the racial composition of business owners. This is sensible as city records indicate that setasides changed the share of city contracts awarded to minorities but not the total amount of procurement
outlays (MBELDEF 1988). The evidence is inconsistent with the view that set-asides were grossly inefficient – if contracts went to
less-productive black-owned businesses, cities would need to compensate by hiring more firms to complete the projects. Further
contradicting this view, data from the Statistical Abstracts of the United States show that total city expenditures did not increase after
set-asides (results available from authors).31 The fact that overall employment increased also suggests that the new black
business owners were no less productive than the whites they replaced, and that the (self-reported)
black self-employment gains were not driven by “fronts” created to attract set-aside dollars (e.g.,
firms fraudulently changing the owner’s identity).¶ Before concluding, we note that we found no evidence of other policy changes
that coincided with the staggered timing of city set-aside programs. There were no conflating changes in important federal
programs, such as unemployment insurance and welfare, and a detailed analysis of U.S. Census Bureau (2008) annual budget data
for each city in our sample showed no significant changes in city expenditures. Kerr and Nanda (2009) find that the deregulation of
branch banking led to significant growth in both entrepreneurship and business failures among new ventures. However, the timing of
these state-level deregulations do not match that of city-level set asides.32 We also examined whether nonrandom movement of
blacks to the cities that created set-aside programs potentially contaminate our results. However, we found no program effects when
we estimated equations (2) and (3) using the total black population as the dependent variable. The large and significant estimated
effects of set-aside programs on black self-employment do not appear to be driven by confounding factors such as migration, other
policy changes, or economic trends.¶ VII. Conclusion¶ This study quantified the impact of city set-aside programs – affirmative
action policies that are among the most significant, racially-based interventions since the 1960s. We
construct a new database of program dates that enables a more comprehensive and reliable analysis than previously possible. We
find that set-asides
had a large and significant impact on African-American business ownership
during the 1980s, with the black-white self-employment gap falling by three percentage points. These gains were realized
entirely in the industries targeted by set-asides and correspond with other information on the growth in, and the setaside amounts awarded to, black-owned businesses. The better-educated were the primary beneficiaries, and the programs
appear to have reallocated self-employment from white to black men. There is no evidence that the new,
black businesses were less productive than the white-owned businesses that were replaced.¶ Consistent with black-
owned firms hiring a disproportionate number of blacks, the racial gap in employment fell roughly
four percentage points after set-asides. These results, however, are sensitive to beliefs about the continuation of preexisting trends, as the programs were preceded by several years of declining employment in the industries that did not benefit from
the programs (e.g., manufacturing and the public sector). Black employment rates in the sector most affected by set-asides are
more stable in the pre-program period. The effects in the most affected sector imply that set-aside programs had larger
impacts on black employment than affirmative action programs that explicitly set goals for minority hiring in firms receiving
federal contracts (as summarized in Leonard 1990).¶ Nationally, the relative self-employment rate of blacks declined in the 1970s
but rebounded in the 1980s (Fairlie and Meyer 2000). Our estimates imply that in the absence of city set-aside
programs, the black self-employment rate would have continued to decline relative to the white rate during
the 1980s. The finding of increased black employment provides support for the view that growth in
black businesses may reduce black unemployment more than general economic development.
2AC
State Legalization: Inevitable
Legalization is inevitable
Smith 3-24 (Rich, contributor, 3-24-15, “It's Official. We're All Potheads Now Or soon will be.” Daily Finance)
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2015/03/24/americans-support-marijuana-legalization/
"All the cool kids are doing it" -- and now they might even vote for it. That's the upshot of a recent poll out of Pew Research Center,
which shows that the
scales are now tipping decidedly in favor of nationwide legalization of
marijuana. According to Pew, America passed the 50 percent mark for favoring legalization
nationwide back in October, with 52 percent of voters now supporting it. And now, one of the presumably
hardest-core groups opposing legalization -- Republicans -- is starting to throw its support behind
legalization as well. Take our free online course on: Economics 101 Start Now » View all Courses Broadly speaking, Pew's
research finds that registered Democrats favor legalization more often than Republicans do. But among millennials (i.e.,
voters in their 20s and early 30s), Pew finds that 63 percent of Republican voters now support legalizing
marijuana outright -- no prescriptions or medical-use-only ID cards required. That's 14 percentage points fewer than millennial
Democrats who support legalization, and about on par with Democratic baby boomers and Generation Xers. Meanwhile, support for
the contrary argument -- putting marijuana users in prison -- is rapidly evaporating across party lines. Says Pew: "Most Americans
(76%) think that people convicted of possessing small amounts of marijuana should not have to serve time in jail, with large
majorities of both Republicans and Democrats agreeing on the issue." What Does Your State Say? Currently, four states -- Alaska,
Colorado, Oregon and Washington, along with the District of Columbia, permit smoking marijuana recreationally. Alaska's and D.C's
ballot measures, though, only went into effect in just the past few weeks. Meanwhile, 26 jurisdictions -- including those five
above -- have legalized the use of marijuana for medical purposes . In alphabetical order, these include: Alaska
Arizona California Colorado Connecticut Delaware District of Columbia Hawaii Illinois Iowa Maine Maryland Massachusetts
Michigan Minnesota Missouri Montana Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York Oregon Rhode Island Vermont
Washington state And four more -- Mississippi, Nebraska, North Carolina and Ohio -- have decriminalized
possession of marijuana. California has the nation's oldest medical marijuana law (Proposition 215, passed by a majority of
voters in 1996). Washington and Oregon have arguably the most lenient medical marijuana laws (both states permit the possession
of up to 24 ounces of pot). But Massachusetts gives them a run for their money -- permitting licensed medical marijuana users to
keep as much as a 60-day pot supply on hand. Depending on how often you smoke it, that could be a lot of pot... Finally, a handful
of states, including Alabama and Florida, have hedged on the issue, permitting the use of a prescription marijuana extract known as
cannabidiol, or CBD, but not permitting smoking of marijuana per se. What the Future Holds With a majority of
voters now supporting the legalization of marijuana, we may be approaching a legislative tipping
point. According to marijuana policy website Leafly.com, as many as six more states are likely to
approve full legalization in the near future: Arizona California Maine Massachusetts Nevada
Wyoming Voters on a Leafly-sponsored poll, however, say New Mexico has a slightly better chance of passing legalization
before Wyoming does. But whichever state is next to legalize pot, one thing is certain: With younger voters of all
political stripes now favoring legalization, it doesn't matter how many older voters still oppose it.
The laws of demographics, and the actuarial tables, make it certain that in time, legalization will
happen -- everywhere in the U.S.
Afro-Pessimism: A2 “Disparity Remains”
Legalizing marijuana reduces the arrest rate for pot-related offenses by 95%-even if racial disparaties remain in those residual arrests, the plan is still net
beneficial
Ingraham 3-26-15 (Christopher, reporter, "After legalization, Colorado pot arrests plunge" Washington Post)
www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/03/26/after-legalization-colorado-pot-arrests-plunge/
Arrests in Colorado for the possession, cultivation and distribution of marijuana have plummeted 95 percent
since voters in that state legalized recreational use of the plant in 2012. That's according to a new analysis of
Colorado judiciary data by the Drug Policy Alliance, an organization working to reform the nation's drug laws. The total number of
marijuana court cases fell from 39,027 in 2011 to 2,036 cases in 2014. Those 37,000 fewer cases represent a savings of
37,000 fewer people who have to
deal with the stigma and financial burden of an arrest and possible conviction. They represent countless
untold millions of dollars in court costs and law enforcement fees. They represent
police man-hours able to be devoted to other tasks. “It’s heartening to see that tens of thousands of otherwise law-abiding
Coloradans have been spared the travesty of getting handcuffed or being charged for small amounts of marijuana," said the Drug
Policy Alliance's Art Way in a press release. "By focusing on public health rather than criminalization, Colorado is better positioned
to address the potential harms of marijuana use, while diminishing many of the worst aspects of the war on drugs.” Critics have
been quick to point out that while the arrest rates fell, disparities in arrest rates for black and white
marijuana offenders still remain. "These data indicate that while the number of marijuana possession arrests has dropped, the
law enforcement practices that produce racial disparities in such arrests have not changed since the passage of Amendment 64,"
the report concludes. Inequalities in pot arrest rates have given momentum to marijuana legalization efforts nationwide, particularly
in DC. A 2013 ACLU report found that despite similar rates of use, blacks are 3.7 times more likely than whites to be arrested for
marijuana possession. Of
course, few serious observers have ever believed that marijuana legalization
was a magic wand to fix racial injustice in law enforcement. Disparities in policing have roots that go back well
before the drug war, and it will take a lot more than drug reform to fix them. But cutting the black arrest rate for
marijuana offenses by two-thirds is a welcome first step , and the report brings other good news as well. Arrests
for "synthetic marijuana," a catch-all term for dangerous, technically-legal drugs that mimic the effects of marijuana, are down 27
percent since 2013. Teens and young adults are often tempted to try synthetics because, being legal, they're usually easier to
obtain than actual marijuana. But marijuana legalization removes some of the incentive to experiment with sketchy gas-station
highs. These numbers add to the already rosy preliminary data from Colorado's first year of full marijuana legalization, including
statistics showing that fatal car accidents are flat, crime is unequivocally down, and tax coffers are filling up. There are, of course,
plenty of challenges still facing the state. Regulators still haven't found a clear way to identify and label edible products. Testing for
purity and potency is still a relatively new field. But the sharp fall in arrest rates indicates one clear success of
Colorado's marijuana program: rolling back one of the major excesses of the war on drugs.
Heidegger K: Bronner
Technical solutions are necessary and solve
Bronner 4 Stephen Eric, Professor of Political Science and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, “Reclaiming the
Enlightenment” Columbia University Press p. 31-32
Technology is crucial for dealing with the ecological devastation brought about by modernity. A
redirection of technology will undoubtedly have to take place: but seeking to confront the decay of the
environment without it is like using an umbrella to defend against a hurricane. Institutional action
informed by instrumental rationality and guided by scientific specialists is unavoidable.
Investigations are necessary into the ways government can influence ecologically sound
production, provide subsidies or tax-benefits for particular industries, fund particular forms of
knowledge creation, and make "risks" a matter of public debate. It is completely correct to note that: "neither
controversial social issues nor cultural concerns can be settled simply by scientific fiat, particularly in a world where experts usually
disagree and where science can be compromised by institutional sponsors. No laboratory can dictate what industrial practices are
tolerable or what degree of industrialization is permissible. These questions transcend the crude categories of technical criteria and
slide-rule measurements."7 Enlightenment thinking is not intrinsically committed to treating nature as an
object for technical manipulation. But, if it were, the need would exist for a philosophical corrective. This would treat
nature as a subject in its own right or, better, with pressing needs that underpin our own as a species, lie-vising narrow definitions of
"evidence" will prove necessary to bring that about and it will prove necessary to revise existing standards of accountability for
dealing with conditions in which human interaction with nature is be- coming ever more specialized, bureaucratic, and complex. In
theoretical terms, it may even be necessary to move a step further. Ernst Bloch, for example, sought to counter an unreflective
mechanical materialism—empiricism and positivism—by making reference to what he considered the repressed tradition of the
"Aristotelian left" that reaches back over Schelling, Spinoza, and Leibniz to Giordano Bruno and then to Avi-cenna, Averroes, and
Plotinus.8 This philosophical tendency* posits the existence of a "life-force" (natura natiirans) beyond the stratum of nature (natura
naturata) that vulgar materialists reduce to its constituent parts. With this vital and "living" notion of nature, which
suggests that the whole is more than the sum of its empirical parts, the idea of an ecosystem
takes on new meaning. Such a stance, in principle, is less a rejection than a logical outgrowth of
Enlightenment thought. It is the same when considering cruelty to animals and other sentient beings. To be sure: Descartes
believed that animals had no souls and that they were mere machines ruled by necessity. Though LaMettrie and others satirized this
belief, it must have soothed the conscience of many a scientist willing to torture animals in the name of progress or, worse, many an
entrepreneur willing to mutilate and slaughter them by the millions not simply for food, but for the perfect scent, a fur coat, or a piece
of ivory. Enlightenment pedagogy, in any event, rests on educating the sentiments, while its concern
with constraining the exercise of arbitrary power is predicated on compassion for the weak and
the mute. No beings are weaker and with less of a voice in resisting arbitrary power than animals:
protecting them and their environment therefore, again, does not contradict Enlightenment ethics,
but instead becomes its logical extension. Natural law was seen by many of the most important
philosophes as linking humans and animals. Thus Alexander Pope spoke about a "vast chain of
being," utilitarians sought animal welfare legislation, Goethe maintained that "each animal is an
end unto itself," while Voltaire wrote in his Treatise on Toleration (1763)":9 It seems to me that those who
have the audacity to believe animals no more than machines have renounced the light afforded by nature. There is a manifest
contradiction in conceiving God to have given animals all the organs of sentience while maintaining that he did not give them
sentience. It seems to me equally that they must never have observed animals if they cannot recognize their needs expressed in
differing tones, their suffering, joy, fear, love, anger, and all their differing sentiments; it would be very strange if they could express
so well what they cannot feel. Animal rights is still seen by many as romantic and bizarre rather than as a genuinely progressive
ethical issue with political appeal. Even TIjc Economist (February 15, 2003), a magazine not noted for identifying with the helpless,
noted a new trend: in various parts of the United States, dogs and cats are be-ing legally defined as "companions" rather than
property. Germany now has a constitution that speaks of the right of animals to decent treatment and even more radically, in New
Zealand, the Animal Welfare Act of 1999, treats great apes as "non-human hominids" and prevents experimentation on them unless
the research will benefit the apes or, ultimately, seek to alleviate their suffering. Reclaiming the Enlightenment calls for
clarifying the aims of an educated sensibility in a disenchanted world. But this requires science.
The assault upon its "instrumental" character or its "method" by self-styled radicals trained only
in the humanities or social sciences is a self-defeating enterprise. Criticizing "bourgeois"
science" is meaningful only with criteria for verification or falsification that are rigorous,
demonstrable, and open to public scrutiny. Without such criteria, the critical enterprise turns into
a caricature of itself: creationism becomes as "scientific" as evolution, astrology as instructive as
astronomy, prayer as legitimate a way of dealing with disease as medicine, and the promise of
Krishna to help the righteous a way of justifying the explosion of a nuclear device by India. 10
Striking is how the emphasis on "local knowledge"—a stance in which all science is seen as
ethno-science with standards rooted in a particular culture 11 —withdraws objectivity, turns the
abdication of judgment into a principle of judgment, and recalls what was once a right-wing
preoccupation with "jewish physics," "Italian mathematics," and the like. Forgotten is that those
who do physics or biology or mathematics all do it the same way or, better, allow for open scrutiny
of their own way of doing it. The validity of science does not rest on its ability to secure an
"absolute" philosophical grounding, but rather on its universality and its salience in dealing with
practical problems. There is a difference between the immanent method of science and the
external context in which it was forged. The sociology of science is a completely legitimate
endeavor. It only makes sense to consider, for example, how an emerging capitalist production
process with imperialistic aspirations provided the external context in which modern science
arose. But it is illegitimate to reduce science to that context or judge its immanent workings from
the standpoint of what externally inspired its development .12
Afro-Pessimism: 2AC
Totalizing rejection of the law sacrifices the immediate needs of those suffering
from violence. Using the law for its strategic effects while recognizing its inherent
limitations allows us to have short-term legal strategies that are not mutually
exclusive with the alt
Smith, 13 [Andrea Smith, Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at UC Riverside, "The Moral Limits of the Law:
Settler Colonialism and the Anti-Violence Movement," Settler Colonial Studies, 2-28-13, 2:2, 69-88, Taylor & Francis, accessed 1017-14]
At the same time, violence against Native women is at epidemic rates. The 1999 Bureau of Justice Statistics report, American Indians and Crime, finds that sexual assault
among Native Americans is 3.5 times higher than for all other races living in the US. Unlike other racial groupings, the majority of sexual assaults committed against Native
American women are inter-racial.3 In particular, the majority of people who perpetrate sexual assault against Native women are white. Because of the complex jurisdictional
issues involving tribal lands, the majority of sexual assaults against Native women are committed with impunity. Depending on the tribe, non-Native perpetrators of sexual
assault on Indian reservations may fall out of state, federal and tribal jurisdiction. And tribes themselves have not developed effective means for addressing violence in their
communities. The intersections of gender violence and colonialism in Native women’s lives force Native anti-violence advocates to operate through numerous contradictions.
First, they must work within a federal justice system that is premised on the continued colonisation of Native nations. Second, they must work with tribal governments that often
engage in gender oppressive practices. In addition, as Native studies scholar Jennifer Denetdale argues, many tribal governments act as neo-colonial formations that support
tribal elites at the expense of the community.4 Third, they must also address women who need immediate services, even if those services may come from a colonising federal
government or a tribal government that may perpetuate gender oppression. Given the logics of settler colonialism, it may seem to be a hopeless contradiction to work within the
we are often presented with
two dichotomous choices: short-term legal reform that addresses immediate needs but further
invests us in the current colonial system or long-term anti-colonial organising that attempts to avoid
the political contradictions of short-term strategies but does not necessarily focus on immediate needs. This
essay will explore possibilities for rethinking this dichotomous approach by rethinking the role of
legal reform in general. The essay foregrounds alternative approaches using a Native feminist
analytic towards engaging legal reform that may have a greater potential to undo the logics of
settler colonialism from within. As I have argued elsewhere, Native feminism as well as Native studies is not
limited in its object of analysis.5 Rather, in its interest in addressing the intersecting logics of
heteropatriarchy and settler colonialism, it is free to engage with diverse materials. In looking then
towards alternative strategies for undoing settler colonialism through the law, I contend that it is
important to engage important work that might not seem to be directly about Native peoples or
settler colonialism if this work helps provide new resources for how we could strategically engage
the law.
US legal system at all. In fact, many social justice advocates eschew engaging in legal reform for this reason. Consequently,
Consequently, I engage the work of legal scholars and activists that address very different areas of law as a means to challenge some of the current assumptions that undergird both reformist and revolutionary approaches to the law.
DECOLONIAL REALISM Critical race theorist Derrick Bell challenged the presupposition of much racial justice legal reform strategies when he argu ed that racism is a permanent feature of society. While his work is generally cited as a critical race theoretical
approach, I would contend that his work implicitly suggests a settler colonial framework for understanding legal reform. That is, many of the heirs of Derrick Bell do not follow the logical consequences of his work and argue for an approach to race and the law that
seeks racial representation in the law.6 However, Bell’s analysis points to the inherent contradictions to such an approach. Rather than seeking representation, Bell calls on Black peoples to ‘acknowledge the permanence of our subordinate status’.7 Espousin g the
framework of ‘racial realism’, Bell disavows any possibility of ‘transcendent change’.8 To the contrary, he argues that ‘[i]t is time we concede that a commitment to racial equality merely perpetuates our disempowerment’.9 The alternative he advocates is resistance
for its own sake – living ‘to harass white folks’ – or short-term pragmatic strategies that focus less on eliminating racism and more on simply ensuring that we do not ‘worsen conditions for those we are trying to help’.10 While Bell does not elaborate on what those
strategies may be, he points to a different kind of reasoning that could be utilised for legal reform. In his famous story, ‘Space Traders’, aliens come to planet Earth promising to solve the world’s problems if world leaders will simply give up Black people to the aliens.
This story narratively illustrates how thin white liberal commitments to social justice are. First, the white people of cours e do give up Black people to the aliens without much thought. But what more dramatically illustrates this point is that the reader knows that,
almost without a doubt, if this were to happen in real life, of course Black people would be given up. Within this story, however, is a little-commented scene that speaks to perhaps a different way to approach legal reform within the context of white supremacy.
Gleason Golightly, a conservative black economics professor who serves as an informal cabinet member for the President, becomes embroiled in a fight with the civil rights legal establishment about the best means to oppose the proposed trade. Golightly had
previously pleaded with the President and his cabinet to reject it. When his pleas are not heard, he begins to reflect on how his support for conservative racial policies in the interests of attaining greater political power had been to no avail. He realises the strategy
behind his appeal to the President was doomed to fail. In retrospect, though [his] arguments were based on morality […] [i]nstead of outsmarting them, Golightly had done what he so frequently criticised civil rights spokespersons for doing: he had tried to get whites
to do right by black people because it was right that they do so. ‘Crazy!’ he commented when civil rights people did it. ‘Crazy!’ he mumbled to himself, at himself.11 Realising the error of his ways, Golightly interrupts this civil rights meeting in which activists plan to
organise a moral crusade to convince white Americans to reject the space traders proposal. Instead, he suggests that they should tell white people that they cannot wait to go on the ship because they have learned they are being transported to a land of milk and
honey. White people, argues Golightly, so oppose policies that benefit Black people, even if they benefit white people, that they will start litigating to stop the space traders’ proposed plan.12 The civil rights establishment rejects this strategy as a moral outrage and
begins a racial justice campaign, ultimately to no avail. What this story troubles is social justice movements’ investment in the morality of the law. Despite the US legal system’s complicity in settler colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism and white supremacy since its
inception, they advocate strategies for change that rest on the presupposition that the law can somehow be made to support the end of sexism, racism and classism. Historically, as more radical racial and social justice organisations were eith er crushed or co-opted
by the US governments during the 1970s, these movements shifted from a focus on a radical restructuring of the political and economic system to a focus on articulating identity based claims that did not necessarily challenge the prev ailing power structure.13 If
groups were not going to directly challenge the state, they could then call on the state to recognise their claims to equality and redress from harms perpetrated by other social actors. Ironically, then, the same US government that codified slavery, segregation, antiimmigrant racism, and the genocide of indigenous peoples, now becomes the body that will protect people of colour from racism. The fact that the US itself could not exist without the past and continuing genocide of indigenous peoples in particular does not strike
it may be possible to engage in legal reform in the midst of these
contradictions if one foregoes the fantasy that the law is morally benevolent or even neutral. In
doing so, more possibilities for strategic engagement emerge. For instance, in the ‘Racial Preference Licensing Act’, Bell
liberal legal reformists as a contradiction. Bell suggests that
suggests that rather than criminalise racial discrimination, the government should allow discrimination, but tax it. Taxes accrued from this discrimination would then go into an
‘equality’ fund that would support the educational and economic interests of African-Americans.14 As I have argued elsewhere, the law enforcement approach has been
similarly limited in addressing the issues of gender violence when the majority of men do, or express willingness to engage in, it.15 As a result, criminalisation has not actually
led to a decrease in violence against women.16 Anti-violence activists and scholars have widely critiqued the supposed efficacy of criminalisation.17 As I will discuss later in this
essay, Native women in particular have struggled with the contradictions of engaging the legal system to address the legacies of colonial gender violence. While there is
growing critique around criminalisation as the primary strategy for addressing gender violence, there has not been attention to what other frameworks could be utilised for
addressing gender violence. In particular, what would happen if we pursued legal strategies based on their strategic effects rather than based on the moral statements they
propose to make? DISTRUSTING THE LAW Aside from Derrick Bell, because racial and gender justice legal advocates are so invested in the morality of the law, there has not
been sustained strategising on what other possible frameworks may be used. Bell provides some possibilities, but does not specifically engage alternative strategies in a
sustained fashion. Thus, it may be helpful to look for new possibilities in an unexpected place, the work of anti-trust legal scholar Christopher Leslie. Again, the work of Leslie
may seem quite remote from scholars and activists organizing against the logics of settler colonialism. But it may be the fact that Leslie is not directly engaging in social justice
to disinvest in the morality of the law in a manner which is often difficult for those who
are directly engaged in social justice work to do. This disinvestment, I contend is critical for those
who wish to dismantle settler colonialism to rethink their legal strategies.
work that allows him
In ‘Trust, Distrust, and Anti-Trust’, Christopher Leslie explains that
while the economic impact of cartels is incalculable, cartels are also unstable.18 Because cartel members cannot develop formal relationships with each other, they must develop partnerships based on informal trust mechanisms in order to overcome the famous
‘prisoners’ dilemma’. The prisoner’s dilemma, as described by Leslie, is one in which two prisoners are arrested and questioned sep arately with no opportunity for communication between them. There is enough evidence to convict both of minor crimes for a on e
year sentence but not enough for a more substantive sentence. The police offer both prisoners the following deal: if you confess and implicate your partner, and your partner does not confess, you will be set free and your partner will receive a ten-year sentence. If
you confess, and he does as well, then you will both receive a five-year sentence. In this scenario, it becomes the rational choice for both to confess because if the first person does not conf ess and the second person does, the first person will receive a ten-year
sentence. Ironically, however, while both will confess, it would have been in both of their interests not to confess. Similarly, Leslie argues, cartels face the prisoners’ dilemma. If all cartel members agree to fix a price, and abide by t his price fixing, then all will benefit.
However, individual cartel members are faced with the dilemma of whether or not they should join the cartel and then cheat by lowering prices. They fear that if they do not cheat, someone else will and drive them out of business. At the same time, by cheating, they
disrupt the cartel that would have enabled them to all profit with higher prices. In addition, they face a second dilemma when faced with anti-trust legislation. Should they confess in exchange for immunity or take the chance that no one else will confess and implicate
them? Cartel members can develop mechanisms to circumvent pressures. Such mechanisms include the development of personal relationships, frequent communication, goodwill gestures, etc. In the absence of trust, cartels may employ trust substitutes such as
informal contracts and monitoring mechanisms. When these trust and trust substitute mechanisms break down, the cartel members will start to cheat, thus causing the cartel to disintegrate. Thus, Leslie proposes, anti-trust legislation should focus on laws that will
strategically disrupt trust mechanisms. Unlike racial or gender justice advocates who focus on making moral statements through the law, Leslie proposes using the law for strategic ends, even if the law makes a morally suspect statement. For instance, in his article,
‘Anti-Trust Amnesty, Game Theory, and Cartel Stability’, Leslie critiques the federal Anti-Trust’s 1993 Corporate Lenience Policy that provided greater incentives for cartel partners to report on cartel activity. This policy provided ‘automatic’ amnesty for the first cartel
member to confess, and decreasing leniency for subsequent confessors in the order to which they confessed. Leslie notes that this amnesty led to an increase of amnesty applications.19 However, Leslie notes that the effectiveness of this reform is hindered by the
fact that the ringleader of the cartel is not eligible for amnesty. This policy seems morally sound. Why would we want the ringleader, the person who most profited from the cartel, to be eligible for amnesty? The problem, however, with attempting to make a moral
statement through the law is that it is counter-productive if the goal is to actually break up cartels. If the ringleader is never eligible for amnesty, the ringleader becomes inherently trustworthy because he has no incentive to ever report on his partners. Throug h his
inherent trustworthiness, the cartel can build its trust mechanisms. Thus, argues Leslie, the most effective way to destroy c artels is to render all members untrustworthy by granting all the possibility of immunity. While Leslie’s analysis is directed towards policy, it
also suggests an alternative framework for pursuing social justice through the law, to employ it for its strategic effects rather than through the moral statements it purports to make. It is ironic that an anti-trust scholar such as Leslie displays less ‘trust’ in the law than
do many anti-racist/anti-colonial activists and scholars who work through legal reform.20 It also indicates that it is possible to engage legal reform more strategically if one no longer trusts it. As Beth Richie notes, the anti-violence movement’s primary strategy for
addressing gender violence was to articulate it as a crime.21 Because it is presumed that the best way to address a social ill is to call it a ‘crime’, this strategy is then deemed the correct moral strategy. When this strategy backfires and does not end violence, and in
many cases increases violence against women, it becomes difficult to argue against this strategy because it has been articulated in moral terms. If, however, we were to focus on legal reforms chosen for their strategic effects, it would be easier to change the
strategy should our calculus of its strategic effects suggest so. We would also be less complacent about the legal reforms we advocate as has happened with most of the laws that h ave been passed on gender violence. Advocates presume that because they helped
pass a ‘moral’ law, then their job is done. If, however, the criteria for legal reforms are their strategic effects, we would then be continually monitoring the operation of th ese laws to see if they were having the desired effects. For instance, since the primary reason
women do not leave battering relationships is because they do not have another home to go, what if our legal strategies shifted from criminalising domestic viol ence to advocating affordable housing? While the shift from criminalisation may seem immoral, women
are often removed from public housing under one strike laws in which they lose access to public housing if a ‘crime’ (including domestic violence) happens in their residence, whether or not they are the perpetrator. If our goal was actually to keep women safe, we
might need to creatively rethink what legal reforms would actually increase safety. REVOLUTIONARY REFORMS As mentioned previously, there has been insufficient evaluation of the strategic effects of legal strategies opposing gender violence. However, the
work of Native anti-violence scholar and activist, Sarah Deer, points to possible new directions in engaging legal reform for the purpose of decolonis ation. Deer notes that the issues of gender violence cannot be separated from the project of decolonisation. For
instance, currently, tribal governments are restricted to sentencing tribal members to three years in tribal prison for even major crimes such as rape. Much of the focus of the anti-violence movement has been on increasing the number of years tribal governments
can incarcerate members. Because of this effort, the Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010 increased the length of sentences from one to three years. However, Deer notes that prior to colonisation, violence against women was virtually unheard of, even though tribes
did not have prisons.22 Instead, tribes utilised a number of social mechanisms to ensure safety for women and children, and none of t hese mechanisms are prohibited by federal legislation. Because the federal government restricts the amount of prison time all owed
for sexual offenders, tribes primarily call on the federal government to expand tribes’ ability to incarcerate. However, as a variety of scholars have noted, expanded sentencing has not actually led to decreased violence.23 Thus, rather than focusing their attention
simply on incarceration, Deer suggests that tribes look to pre-colonial measures for addressing violence and begin to adapt those for contemporary circumstances.24 At the same time, Deer n otes that it is not necessarily a simple process to adapt pre-colonial
measures for addressing violence. Unfortunately, many of the alternatives to incarceration that are promoted under the ‘restorative justice model’ have not developed sufficient safety mechanisms for survivors of domestic/sexual violence. ‘Restorative justice’ is an
umbrella term that describes a wide range of programs that attempt to address crime from a restorative and reconciliatory rat her than a punitive framework. As restorative justice frameworks involve all parties (perpetrators, victims, and community members) in
determining the appropriate response to a crime in an effort to restore the community to wholeness, restorative justice is op posed to the US criminal justice system, which focuses solely on punishing the perpetrator and removing him (or her) from society through
incarceration. These models are well developed in many Native communities, especially in Canada, where the legal status of Native nations allows an opportunity to develop community-based justice programs. In one program, for example, when a crime is
reported, the working team that deals with sexual/domestic violence talks to the perpetrator and gives him the option of participating in the program. The perpetrator must first confess his guilt and then follow a healing contract, or go to jail. The perpetrator is free to
decline to participate in the program and go through the criminal justice system. In the restorative justice model, everyone (victim, perpetrator, family, friends, and the working team) is involved in developing the healing contract. Everyone is also assigned an
advocate through the process. Everyone is also responsible for holding the perpetrator accountable to his contract. One Tlingit man noted that this approach was often more difficult than going to jail: First one must deal with the shock and then the dismay on your
neighbors faces. One must live with the daily humiliation, and at the same time seek forgiveness not just from victims, but f rom the community as a whole […]. [A prison sentence] removes the offender from the daily accountability, and may not do anything towards
rehabilitation, and for many may actually be an easier disposition than staying in the community.25 These models have greater potential for dealing with crime effectively because, if we want people who perpetuate violence to live in society peaceably, it makes
sense to develop justice models in which the community is involved in holding him/her accountable. Under the current incarcer ation model, perpetrators are taken away from their community and are further hindered from developing ethical relationships within a
community context. However, the problem with these models is that they work only when the community unites in holding perpetr ators accountable. In cases of sexual and domestic violence, the community often sides with the perpetrator rather than the victim. As
Deer argues, in many Native communities, these models are often pushed on domestic violence survivors in order to pressure th em to reconcile with their families and ‘restore’ the community without sufficient concern for their personal safety.26 In addition, Native
advocates have sometime critiqued the uncritical use of ‘traditional’ forms of governance for addressing domestic violence. T hey argue that Native communities have been pressured to adopt circle sentencing because it is supposed to be an indigenous traditional
practice. However, some advocates contend that there is no such traditional practice in their communities. Moreover, they are concerned that the process of diverting cases outside the court system can be dangerous for survivors. In one example, Bishop Hubert
O’Connor (a white man) was found guilty of multiple cases of sexual abuse but his punishment under the restorative justice model was to participate in a healing circle with his victims. Because his crimes were against Aboriginal women, he was able to opt for an
‘Aboriginal approach’ – an approach, many argue, that did little to provide real healing for the survivors and accountability for the perpetrator. Deer complains that there is a tendency to romanticise and homogenise ‘traditional’ alternatives to incarceration. First, she
notes traditional approaches might, in fact, be harsher than incarceration. Many Native people presume that traditional modes of justice focus on conflict resolution. In fact, Deer argues, penalties for societal infractions were not lenient – they entailed banishment,
shaming, reparations, physical punishment and sometimes death. Deer notes that revising tribal codes by reincorporating traditional practices is not a simple process. It is sometimes difficult to determine what these practices were or how they could be made useful
today. For example, some practices, such as banishment, would not have the same impact today. Prior to colonisation, Native communities were so close-knit and interdependent that banishment was often the equivalent of a death sentence. Today, however,
banished perpetrators could simply leave home and join the dominant society. While tribes now have the opportunity to divest from the US colonial system, many Native women remain under violent attack. They may need to use the federal system until such time
that more advanced decolonisation becomes possible. Thus Deer advocates a two-fold strategy: 1) The short-term strategy of holding the federal government accountable for prosecuting rape cases; and 2) encouraging tribes to hold perpetrators accountable
directly so that they will eventually not need to rely on federal interference. This approach can be misread as a simple formula for reform. However, it is important to remember that the project of prison abolition is a positive rather than a negative project. The goal is
not to tell survivors that they can never call the police or engage the criminal justice system. The question is not, should a survivor call the police? The question is: why have we given survivors no other option but to call the police? Deer is suggesting that it is not
inconsistent to reform federal justice systems while at the same time building tribal infrastructures for accountability that will eventually replace the federal system. If we focus simply on community accountability without a larger critique of the state, we often fall back
on framing community accountability as simply an add-on to the criminal justice system. Because anti-violence work has focused simply on advocacy, we have not developed strategies for ‘due process’, leaving that to the state. When our political imaginaries are
captured by the state, we can then presume that the state should be left to administer ‘justice’ while communities will serve simply as a supplement to this regime. To do so, however, r ecapitulates the fundamental injustice of a settler state that is founded on slavery,
genocide and the exploitation of immigrant labour. Further, we are unable to imagine new visions for liberatory nationhood that are not structured on hierarchical logics, violence and domination. We face a dilemma: on the one hand, the incarceration approach for
addressing sexual/domestic violence promotes the repression of communities of colour without really providing safety for survivors. On the other hand, restorative justice models often promote community silence and denial under the rhetoric of community
restoration without concern for the safety of survivors. Thus, our challenge is to develop community-based models that respond to gender violence in ways that hold perpetrators accountable. Unfortunately, in this discussion ad vocates often assume only two
possibilities: the criminal justice system or restorative justice. When anyone finds faults with the restorative justice model, it is assumed that the traditional criminal justice approach must be the back-up strategy. Deer’s approach, by contrast, is to work with the
criminal justice system while continuing to develop effective strategies for addressing violence. These will eventually eliminate the need to rely on the criminal justice system. Of course, the trap of pursuing reforms is that they can create investment in the current US
legal system and detract from building new systems of governance that are not based on violence, domination and control. At the same time, we are not going to go from where we are now to revolution tomorrow. Thus, it becomes important to strategise around
what may be called ‘revolutionary’ reforms. Other abolitionists have argued that the only reforms that should be supported are those that diminish the criminal justice apparatus. Other abolitions have argued that this approach leaves people vulnerable to the ‘cri mes
of the powerful’, such as rape and domestic violence.27 It is in this context that we can understand Deer’s current projects. She has worked on building tribal infrastructure by encouraging and assisting tribes to develop tribal civil protection orders. Her strategy is not
so much based on the rationale that civil protection orders will in themselves provide protection for women. Rather, by developing these orders, tribes gain the practice of developing their own systems for addressing violence. Deer notes that this is one area that is
not likely to be interfered with by the US federal government. At the same time, it is not an approach that is directly tied with investing tribes in the project of incarceration. Thus, it becomes a reform that tribal communities may adopt now as they develop creative
responses for addressing violence. The reason for this suggested reform is that many tribal governments incorrectly think that the federal government is already adequately addressing gender violence and do not take initiative to address it themselves.28 In the end,
the importance of Deer’s recommendation is not so much an investment in that particular strategy, but the manner in which it encourages us to think of short-term strategies that are not simply based on increased incarceration, strategies that will more likely fall
under the federal radar screen so that tribal communities have more time to practice new ways of supporting accountability for violence. This will encourage communities to develop better decolonial practices in the future. As Deer notes, a ‘long-term vision for
radical change requires both immediate measures to address sexual violence and a forward-looking effort to dismantle the culture of rape that has infiltrated tribal nations’.29 At the same time, many other Native activists are engaging community accountability
strategies that do not work with the current system at all. These strategies are not broadly advertised because these activists do not want to gain the attention of federal authorities. Yet, many communities have developed informal strategies for addressing
authorities. For instance, one man who assaulted a relative was banished from his community. As he was simply able to move to the city, tribal members would follow him to various work places, carrying signs that described him as a rapist. Again, this may be a
strategy that we may or may not support. But the point is that it is important to engage the experimental and ‘jazzy’ approac hes for developing community-based accountability strategies.30 In his recent book X-Marks, Scott Lyons engages with Native activists and
Those who call for decolonisation often do not effectively engage in
any short-term reformist strategy, even though they may save the lives of indigenous peoples
who are currently under immediate attack. As a result, the immediate needs of people often get
sacrificed in favour of articulating seemingly politically-pure ideals.
scholars who call for decolonisation as a central focus for organising.31
Conversely, those who do engage in short-term reform strategies often decry the
goal of decolonisation as ‘unrealistic’. In doing so, they do not critique the manner in which these strategies often retrench rather than challenge the colonial status quo. Lyons affirms the need for decolonisation, but notes that decolonization happens with preexisting materials and institutions. He calls on Native peoples to think creatively about these institutions and about the ways in which they can be deployed not just for short-term gains but for a long-term vision of liberation. BEYOND SHAMING THE SYSTEM Legal
reformists who often focus on shaping the law to reflect their moral values and those who focus on extra-legal revolutionary strategies often share the same goal. Often the presumed ‘radical’ strategy adopted by social justice groups is to engage in civil
disobedience. While these groups ostensibly break the law, they often do so in rather ceremonial fashion; they essentially want to shame the system. People are supposed to get arrested, and those in power are supposed to be so shamed by the fact that an unjust
system required people to break the law. The expectation is that they will then change the laws. Acts of civil disobedience often are not targeted toward changing a policy directly or building alternative systems to the current one. Many Native groups in the
southwest US, however, have developed an alternative framework for extra-legal social change. Rather than breaking the law to change the system, they propose to make Native communities ungovernable. For instance, during the passage of SB1070, Native
groups with the Taala Hooghan Infoshop, O’odham Solidarity Across Borders, and others occupied the Border Patrol Office.32 However, rather than engaging in the occupation with the expectation of getting arrested, they chained themselves to the building so that
the office could not perform its work. This approach has continued with their efforts to stop the US government’s desecration of the San Francisco Peaks through the construction of a ski resort. While they have not eschewed legal strategies for stopping this
desecration, they have focused on preventing tourists from visiting the area so that the ski resort will no longer be economically viable. According to their promotional material on TrueSnow.org: For the last decade defenders of the peaks have used every legitimate
way they could think of to try to stop the US Forest Service from allowing treated sewage effluent to be sprayed on the Peaks to make snow. More than 20,000 people took part in the Forest Service Environmental Impact Statement process with letters and appeals
asking them not to spray treated sewage effluent on the peaks to make snow. Thousands of us went to Flagstaff City Council meetings to voice our opposition to the sale of treated sewer water for the project. Yet still they approved it – before even an environmental
impact statement was done. They were the most clueless of all. Currently the Hopi tribe is seeking lawsuit against the city because of this treated sewage effluent sale. A group of tribes and environmental and social justice organizations took a lawsuit all the way to
the steps of the Supreme Court. The lawsuits have only called into question the legitimacy of what is loosely termed the ‘justice’ system. For it seems there is no justice in this system. It is just us, IN this system. There is also yet another lawsuit in play which I have
termed ‘Save the Peaks Coalition vs The Snowbowl Movement’ which may have the possibility of stopping this project in the long term. But if we wait for a verdict, all the trees will be cut and the pipeline installed. This has not stopped the politically connected ski
area from going ahead with their project right now and they have already clear-cut 100,000 trees (or more) and have already buried a few miles of pipeline along Snowbowl road. If they lose in court they would be expected to repair the damages. How do you get
back 400 year old trees? Greed and hatred seems to be Snowbowl's only motivation […]. But isn't there some way to stop it? Well we could hit them where it hurts! In the pocketbook. If you live in the Fort Valley area of Flagstaff you must see by now how little
Arizona Snowbowl really cares about the ‘economic benefits’ it brings our fair town. I know some of us had a good deal of trouble even going to work when the snow was good and Snowbowl was busy. The traffic jam was incredible. Stretching more than 15 miles.
They took our livelihood away and hope to make that a daily occurrence by having a ‘predictable’ ski season using sewer water to make snow. This jam up gave us an idea! Why don't we do the same thing? Arizona Snowbowl does n ot own the mountain, and it is
perfectly legal to drive up to the area for any permitted public lands use. This means hiking, camping, praying, skiing, sitting, loving, mushroom hunting, etc. So what do I do? It is time to stop waiting for a government entity, an environmental group, or any of the
people you have come to expect to save the peaks for us. The time has come to show them how much power the people have! And believe me, you are the most powerful people in all of the world! You! Yep you! You can d o it! All summer the Arizona Snowbowl is
open Friday, Saturday, and Sunday for scenic skyrides, food, and alcohol. They do get a pretty good business up there and it would have an impact if the mountain was just ‘too busy’ with people doing all the other things our Public Forests are for. There is nothing
illegal about it and it would send a clear message to the forest service that we don't need Snowbowl to ‘recreate on the mountain’. Heck, we don't even need a ski area up there to ski! In essence, take a vacation. Just do it up on the peaks and don't use Snowbowl.
Our government officials are forgetting what ‘all power to the people’ really means. You cannot wait any longer for someone else to save the peaks for you. It will take of all us together to do this. So what are you waiting for? Pack a lunch this Saturday morning and
Converge on the Peaks!33 What these activists suggest is to divest our moral investment in the law. This will affect not only what legal reforms we may pursue, but what revolutionary strategies we might engage in. Rather than engaging in civil disobedience to force
In the debates prevalent within
Native sovereignty and racial justice movements, we are often presented with two seemingly
orthogonal positions – long-term revolutionary extra-legal movements or shortterm reformist
legalist strategies. Short-term legal strategies are accused of investing activists within a white
supremacist and settler colonial system that is incapable of significant change. Meanwhile,
revolutionaries are accused of sacrificing the immediate needs of vulnerable populations for the
sake of an endlessly deferred revolution. The reality of gender violence in Native communities
highlights the untenability of these positions. Native women’s lives are at stake now – they
cannot wait for the revolution to achieve some sort of safety. At the same time, the short-term strategies often adopted to address gender violence
legislators to change laws to conform to our moral principles, we might be free to engage creatively in strategies that build political and economic power directly. CONCLUSION
have often increased violence in Native women’s lives by buttressing the prison industrial complex and its violent logics. While this reformist versus revolutionary dichotomy
suggests two radically different positions, in reality they share a common assumption: that the only way to pursue legal reform is to fight for laws that that reinforce the
appropriate moral statement (for instance, that the only way to address violence against Native women is through the law and to make this violence a ‘crime’). Because the US
legal system is inherently immoral and colonial, however, attempts to moralise the law generally fail. It is not surprising that the response to these failures is to simply give up on
pursuing legal strategies. However, the works of Derrick Bell, Christopher Leslie, and Sarah Deer, while working in completely different areas of the law, point to a different
We can challenge the assumption that the law will reflect our morals and instead seek to
use the law for its strategic effects. In doing so, we might advocate for laws that might in fact
contradict some of our morals because we recognize that the law cannot mirror our morals
anyway. We might then be free to engage in a relationship with the law which would free us to
approach.
change our strategies as we assess its strategic effects. At the same time, by divesting from the
morality of the law, we then will also simultaneously be free to invest in building our own forms of
community accountability and justice outside the legal system. Our extra-legal strategies would
go beyond ceremonial civil disobedience tactics designed to shame a system that is not capable of
shame. Rather, we might focus on actually building the political power to create an alternative
system to the heteropatriarchal, white supremacist, settler colonial state.
Try or die for racial optimism—multiple historical events demonstrate that
progress is possible, and hope is necessary to achieve change
Kennedy, 14 [Randall, African American American Law professor and author at Harvard University,
Fall, Black America's
Promised Land: Why I Am Still a Racial Optimist, http://prospect.org/article/black-americas-promised-land-why-i-am-still-racialoptimist]
Beneath the malaise is a deep current of racial pessimism that has a long history in American
and African American thought. Pessimists believe that racial harmony predicated on fairness is not part of the
American future. They posit that the U nited S tates will not overcome its tragic racial past. They maintain
that blacks are not and cannot become members of the American family (even with a black family
occupying the White House). They believe that the U nited S tates is a white nation that will always be
governed on behalf of white folk. For pessimists, the Obama presidency is no sign of racial transcendence; to the
contrary, it is a demonstration of the intractability of American pigmentocracy. For them, the Obama ascendancy shows that in order
to rise to the top of American politics, a black politician must be willing to forgo substantively challenging the racial status quo
(though he is allowed to cavil about it rhetorically). For them, the Obama administration simply mirrors the racial diversification of an
existing order in which a relatively small sector of upper-crust blacks prosper while the condition of the black masses stagnates or
deteriorates—the consequence of a misbegotten theory of racial trickle-down. For them, the Obama era is littered with
bitter incongruity: While a black man is commander-in-chief, Michael Brown and thousands like him
are stalked, harassed, brutalized, and occasionally killed in Ferguson-like locales across America. The pedigree
of black racial pessimism is impressive. In its ranks one finds such figures as Henry McNeal Turner, Marcus Garvey,
Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Randall Robinson, and the extraordinary W.E.B. Du Bois. One encounters
Frederick Douglass declaring in 1847, “I cannot have any love for this country … or for its Constitution. I desire to see its overthrow
as speedily as possible, and its Constitution shriveled in a thousand fragments.” In that tradition, one also finds Derrick Bell,
professor of law at Harvard, teaching in the 1990s that the United States is irredeemably imprisoned by its past, that “racism is an
integral, permanent, and indestructible component of this society,” and that “black people will never gain full equality in this country.”
Garvey, Muhammad, Du Bois, Malcolm X: Library of Congress; Bell: David Shankbone THE PESSIMISTS: Henry McNeal Turner,
Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, W.E.B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Randall Robinson, and Derrick Bell The
tradition of black racial pessimism has its white counterpart. According to Thomas Jefferson, “The two races, equally free, cannot
live in the same government.” Alexis de Tocqueville doubted that “the white and black races will ever live in any country upon an
equal footing,” but believed “the difficulty to be still greater in the United States than elsewhere.” According to Abraham Lincoln,
differences between blacks and whites “will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.”
But the pessimists, black and white,have not been the only influence on American thought about the
prospects for racial progress. Arrayed against them are optimists who contend that blacks are (or
can become) members of the American family and insist that racial harmony bottomed on fairness
is attainable. This, in fact, has been the predominant tradition among blacks. Its adherents include
Booker T. Washington, Thurgood Marshall, Roy Wilkins, Mary McLeod Bethune, Jesse Jackson,
and John Lewis (joined by whites such as the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
and Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton). The most memorable spokesman for the optimistic tradition
was Martin Luther King Jr. On April 3, 1968, the night before he was assassinated, he told his followers to take heart
because he knew that, eventually, they would overcome the obstacles they faced. He knew this because he had “been to the
mountaintop” and glimpsed the Promised Land, though he might not make it there himself. King was vague, however, about the
Promised Land’s boundaries and topography. He had famously spoken of a nation where individuals will be judged not by the color
of their skin but by the content of their character. Yet that formulation is popular partly because it is open to contending
interpretations. Is it a condemnation of all racial distinctions? Or is it a condemnation only of invidious racial distinctions? Is it meant
to posit a rule of non-discrimination that should go into effect immediately even at the cost of barring efforts to rectify past racial
wrongdoing? Or is it meant to posit a rule of nondiscrimination that should go into effect only after the consequences of past
wrongdoings have been ameliorated? Bethune, Marshall, Wilkins, Jackson, King: Library of Congress THE OPTIMISTS: Booker T.
Washington, Mary McLeod Bethune, Thurgood Marshall, Roy Wilkins, Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr., and
Barack Obama These questions underlie the debate that has been raging for decades over competing conceptions of the racial
Promised Land. In one conception, the Promised Land is a society henceforth substantially free of intentional racial discrimination in
major domains of the public sphere. In this society, no effort is made to rectify the oppressive consequences of past racial
misconduct because, it is argued, trying to do so is futile, unfair to those innocent of past wrongdoing, and conducive to the
perpetuation of race-mindedness. This view has been propounded vigorously in the legal writings of Justices Clarence Thomas and
Antonin Scalia, mainly in critiques of affirmative action. Chief Justice John Roberts, also a champion of this view, expressed it
epigrammatically when, abjuring a race-conscious plan for school integration, he quipped that the best way to stop racial
discrimination is to stop racially discriminating—no matter whether the aim is to assist or oppress a vulnerable group. Under this
conception, we enter the racial Promised Land when racial discrimination is a negligible feature of social life, even if the vestiges of
racial subordination in the past are evident and consequential. Let’s call this model of racial justice the conservative conception of
the racial Promised Land. Today, one can go into a hospital, visit the ward for newborns, and make accurate estimates about the
babies’ varying life trajectories on the basis of their racial identities. The progressive conception of the racial Promised Land is more
ambitious. It envisions two essential landmarks. The first is the requirement of the conservatives that invidious racial discrimination
be reduced to a negligible influence. The second condition is that the vestiges of past discrimination—the racial gaps that so
dramatically scar the social landscape—be erased. Pursuant to the progressive perspective, we will reach the racial Promised Land
when blackness is no longer a uniform that, holding other variables steady, signals that its wearer bears a notably higher risk than
whites of premature death, impoverishment, unemployment, incarceration, victimization by criminality, homelessness, police
harassment, and similar afflictions. Today, one can go into a hospital, visit the ward for newborns, and make accurate estimates
about the babies’ varying life trajectories on the basis of their racial identities. When accurate estimates of this sort are no longer
possible, progressives contend, we will have reached the racial Promised Land. Some observers insist that what I have dubbed the
conservative model of the racial Promised Land is at hand or at least nearby. They maintain that, for the most part, we have
overcome. They proclaim “Mission Accomplished” or at least mission near-accomplished. This is mistaken. Intentional
invidious racial discrimination constitutes a force in American life that is far from negligible. It is a
substantial headwind that blacks and other racial minorities face in many key areas , including
housing, finance, employment, criminal justice, electoral politics, and markets for romance and
marriage. There is a library of empirical literature establishing this fact beyond sensible
controversy—studies based on similarly situated but racially disparate testers who meet different fates when they seek to buy
automobiles, rent housing, get jobs, or obtain loans. And then there are the lessons of everyday life that
suggest forcefully that in crucial interactions with police officers, prosecutors, judges, and other
authorities armed with discretion, outcomes differ, all too often, depending on the race of the
person being assessed. It is difficult to imagine that the dismal train of events surrounding the
deaths of Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown would have been identical had they been white. Even
more distant is the progressive conception of the racial Promised Land. In practically every key index of well-being, a
chasm separates the circumstances in which whites and blacks typically find themselves . The
income gap separating blacks and whites widened from about $19,000 in the late 1960s to about $27,000 in 2011. The wealth gap
increased from $75,000 in 1984 to $85,000 in 2011. Blacks are nearly three times more likely to live in deep poverty than
whites. Black men are six times as likely as white men to be incarcerated. And on. And on. And on.
We have failed to reach the racial Promised Land in either its conservative or its progressive
definition. With respect to both of these destinations, our society remains far afield. Still, I put myself in the
optimistic camp. I am hopeful first and foremost because of the predominant trajectory of
African Americans —a history that John Hope Franklin framed with the apt title From Slavery to Freedom. In 1860, four
million African Americans were enslaved while another half-million were free but devoid of fundamental rights in many of the
jurisdictions where they lived. In 1860, the very term “African American” was something of an oxymoron because the Supreme Court
had ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford that no black, free or enslaved, could be a citizen of the United States. But within a decade, the
Thirteenth Amendment (1865) abolished slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) established birthright citizenship and required
all states to accord all persons due process and equal protection of the laws, and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) prohibited states
from withholding the right to vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. People who had been sold on the
auction block as youngsters helped to govern their locales as public officials when they were adults. In 1861, Jefferson Davis of
Mississippi resigned from the United States Senate to join the Confederate States of America, which he led as president. In 1870,
Hiram Revels, the first black member of Congress, occupied the seat that Davis abandoned. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel) Duane
Merrells walks with an upside down flag in a protest Monday, August 18, 2014, for the killing of Michael Brown, who was shot by
police August 9 in Ferguson, Missouri. Brown's shooting in the middle of a street sparked a more than week of protests in the St.
Louis suburb. The First Reconstruction was overwhelmed by a devastating white supremacist
reaction. But the most fundamental reforms it established proved resilient, providing the basis
for a Second Reconstruction from the 1950s to the 1970s. During that period, too, the distance traveled by
blacks was astonishing. In 1950, segregation was deemed to be consistent with federal constitutional equal protection. No federal
law prevented proprietors of hotels, restaurants, and other privately owned public accommodations from engaging in racial
discrimination. No federal law prohibited private employers from discriminating on a racial basis against applicants for jobs or current
employees. No federal law effectively counteracted racial disenfranchisement. No federal law outlawed racial discrimination in
private housing transactions. In contrast, by 1970 federal constitutional law thoroughly repudiated the lie of separate but equal. The
1964 Civil Rights Act forbade racial discrimination in privately owned places of public
accommodation and many areas of private employment. The 1965 Voting Rights Act provided the basis for
strong prophylactic action against racial exclusion at the ballot box. The 1968 Fair Housing Act
addressed racial exclusion in a market that had been zealously insulated against federal
regulation. None of these interventions were wholly successful. All were compromised. All
occasioned backlash. But the racial situation in 1970 and afterwards was dramatically better than
what it had been in 1950 and before. Today, at a moment when progress has stalled, we need to
recall how dramatically and unexpectedly conditions sometimes change. Until recently who’d-a thunk it
possible for the president to be an African American? In the 1980s, I used to ask law students how long affirmative action programs
ought to last. Champions of such programs, seeking to ensure their longevity, would say that affirmative action would be needed
until the country elected a black president. That reply would elicit appreciative laughter as listeners supposed that that formula would
preserve affirmative action for at least a century. But then along came Barack Obama and with him the remark that soon became a
cliché: “I never thought that I’d live to see a black president.” Obama’s election is much more than a monument to one politician’s
talent and good fortune. Changes in public attitudes, law, and custom have clearly elevated the fortunes of African Americans as
individuals and black America as a collectivity. Hard facts may give plausibility to the pessimistic tradition,
but they make the optimistic tradition compelling . Despite the many wrongs that remain to be
righted, blacks in America confront fewer racist impediments now than ever before in the history
of the U nited S tates. The courage, intelligence, persistence, idealism, and sacrifice of Fannie Lou Hamer and Rosa Parks,
Julian Bond and Bob Moses, Medgar Evers and Bayard Rustin, Viola Liuzzo and Vernon Dahmer—and countless other tribunes for
racial justice—have not been expended for naught. The facts of day-to-day life allow blacks to sing more confidently than ever
before James Weldon Johnson’s magnificent hymn “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” often referred to as the Black National Anthem: The
belief that we can overcome makes more realistic the possibility that we shall overcome. Optimism gives buoyancy to thinking that
might otherwise degenerate into nihilism My optimism involves more than a sociological prediction . I am also
swayed by my intuition regarding which of these hypotheses —the pessimistic or the optimistic—will do the
most good. Hope is a vital nutrient for effort ; without it, there is no prospect for
achievement . The belief that we can overcome makes more realistic the possibility that we shall
overcome. Optimism gives buoyancy to thinking that might otherwise degenerate into nihilism,
encourages solidarity in those who might otherwise be satisfied by purely selfish indulgence,
invites strategic planning that can usefully harness what might otherwise be impotent
indignation, and inspires efforts that might otherwise be avoided due to fatalism. On Election Day
1996, exit polling showed General Colin Powell beating President Bill Clinton by a comfortable margin. But Powell was not Clinton’s
opponent. Senator Bob Dole was. Powell had considered seeking the Republican Party nomination but declined in the end to do so.
Before he made that decision, polls suggested that he could win the nomination and the general election, but friends were skeptical.
Powell recalls that Earl Graves, the publisher of Black Enterprise magazine, told him, “Look, man … [w]hen [white voters] go in that
booth, they ain’t going to vote for you.” Maybe Graves was correct. Real voting might have produced different results from the polls.
Furthermore, whereas the actual candidates had suffered a year of merciless scrutiny on the campaign trail, Powell on Election Day
was a mere hypothetical candidate who suffered from none of the wear and tear that a presidential contest exacts. At the end of a
campaign, the general might not have remained so attractive. Still, Powell’s apparent popularity does provide a basis for
conjecturing that America’s readiness to elect a black president had been an unrecognized part of the political landscape for longer
than many had appreciated. Powell may well have denied himself the opportunity to make a successful historic leap by being selfdefeatingly pessimistic. A major fear of many blacks is that acknowledging progress will prompt underestimation of racial obstacles
that blacks at every socioeconomic level continue to face. When Americans are polled about their perceptions of racial affairs,
whites are typically more upbeat than blacks. The more affluent they are, the more upbeat white observers tend to be. Inordinately
impressed by progress, they all too often prematurely declare victory over racism. Although complacency nourished by an overly
rosy view of racial affairs is a real danger, I stand by my conviction that a clear-eyed assessment favors black optimism. Who, after
all, have been the figures most beneficial to blacks? Was it the Martin Delany who decamped for Africa, thinking America to be
irremediably racist? Or was it the Martin Delany who returned, recruited blacks for the Union, and participated significantly in
Southern politics during Reconstruction? Was it the pre-1966 Stokely Carmichael who sang “We Shall Overcome” in the splendid
early days of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)? Or was it the post-1966 Stokely Carmichael (later renamed
Kwame Ture) whose impatient bitterness helped to destroy the SNCC and rationalize an indulgent exile to Guinea that squandered
a substantial talent? Was it my long-time colleague of blessed memory, Derrick Bell, who posited the permanence of racist white
dominance? Or was it a student who rightly admired Professor Bell but eschewed his pessimism and followed a different path, a
black student who, years later, put Bell’s hypothesis to a test by seeking the highest elected office in the land under the slogan “Yes
We Can!”? WGBH - video screen shot A young Barack Obama introduces Professor Derrick Bell at a 1991 demonstration for
diversity at Harvard Law School. That student, of course, was Barack Obama, and his presidency has been the setting for much
debate between pessimists and optimists. Some detractors, perhaps the angriest, started from a position of raised expectations.
They thought that Obama embodied the “audacity of hope” and that he would somehow bring about sweeping changes.
Disappointed, they have expressed themselves in the angry, accusatory rhetoric of betrayal. Obama, Cornel West charges, “posed
as a progressive and turned out to be counterfeit.” Others condemn Obama but without disappointment. They see their low
expectations as having been validated. Certain pessimists have maintained that Obama’s election indicated little in terms of “real”
racial progress. They even discount the symbolic significance of his ascendancy, stressing his exceptionality. Although he calls
himself black, Obama is the offspring of a black African father and a white American mother and is thus distinguished genealogically
from most African Americans. Much was made of his Muslim-sounding name. But some observers maintain that popular acceptance
of that, too, should be viewed skeptically. It would have signaled more, they argue, had America elected a black person raised in,
say, Detroit with a name such as Tyrone Washington or Jamal Jefferson. Pessimists argue that, substantively, the Obama
presidency has delivered no more to blacks than would have been delivered by any other centrist-liberal Democrat (say, Hillary
Clinton), and that in certain respects the Obama presidency delivered less because Obama sought excessively to prove that he was
a president for all Americans and not merely black Americans. They contend that Obama’s blackness was an asset that he used for
personal marketing and that the white establishment seized upon for advertising, “The United States cannot sensibly be accused of
practicing or condoning racism! It just elected a black president!” Pessimists will now also enlist the horrifying events in Ferguson,
Missouri, to reinforce their claim that despite the civil rights movement, antidiscrimination legislation, affirmative action, and the
election of Obama, the narrative of race relations in America is a doleful tale—not a march upward from slavery to freedom, but a
trek sideways from plantation to ghetto. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy) President Barack Obama and First Lady
Michelle Obama welcome President Hu Jintao of China at the North Portico of the White House for the State Dinner, January 19,
2011. What is an optimist in the waning years of the Obama presidency to say in the face of this challenge? Obama’s election
signaled a dramatic, substantive change in racial beliefs and attitudes. In 1960, his victory would have been impossible: Too many
whites would have been unwilling to vote for a black candidate—any black candidate—because of doubts about the capacities of
anyone of black African ancestry. Recall that there were no black cabinet officers until Johnson appointed Robert Weaver as
secretary of housing and urban development in 1966, and no black Supreme Court justices until Johnson nominated Thurgood
Marshall in 1967. The specter of black intellectual and characterological deficiency stunted the careers of many talented blacks, and
still does. That Obama was able to win the presidency—twice—is a sign that rumors of racial inferiority, while still extant, are much
diminished in influence. That a black man has been the master of the White House for the past six years does indeed reflect and
reinforce a remarkable socio-psychological transformation in the American racial scene. If that is “tokenism,” give us more of it. In
thinking about the meaning of Obama, it is important, too, to focus on the special status of the presidency. The person who occupies
that office is not only the head of the executive branch of the federal government, the person who nominates all federal judges, the
commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and thus a person with the wherewithal to destroy most, if not all, of humankind. The
president is also the nation’s mourner-in-chief, booster-in-chief, spouse-in-chief, and parent-in-chief. That a black man has been the
master of the White House for the past six years does indeed reflect and reinforce a remarkable socio-psychological transformation
in the American racial scene. If that is “tokenism,” give us more of it. I have emphasized progress that blacks have
made in absolute terms: where they stood 50 years ago and where they stand today. But what
about the position of blacks relative to whites—those yawning gaps in wealth, income, educational
attainment, and risk of imprisonment that have remained unclosed and that have, in some ways, widened even further
during Obama’s tenure? There is no use denying that reality. America remains racially stratified and will
continue to be long after the Obama presidency. There is also no use, however, in denying other facets of the American racial
reality. One is a comparative view. In considering the appropriate attitude to adopt toward America—allegiance, for example, or disaffiliation—it is sensible to compare the United States to other divided societies. Negrophobia in America is, alas, all
too present. But it pales in comparison with the prejudice against racial, ethnic, religious, and
national minorities in many countries around the globe. As bad as the American racial problem is,
as urgently as it calls for concentrated attention, its condition is less dire and more encouraging
than might be gleaned from an analysis that views the American situation in isolation, divorced
from international comparisons. There is also no good purpose served by ignoring manifestations
of progress that display themselves even in heartrending crises. Consider the events in
Ferguson. The killing of the unarmed teenager, the callous inattentiveness to his body, the militarized police response to protest,
and the dubious investigation by local authorities of this tragic death display much of what is terrible in American race relations: an
atavistic fear of young black men; quick resort to excessive force against African Americans; racial residential separation; black
powerlessness that foments resentment; white dominance that encourages contempt; an utter lack of mutual trust. But the
events in Ferguson have also revealed other responses . The federal government took note of
what happened and actively involved itself via the president, attorney general, and the director of
the FBI. The Ferguson tragedy became the leading news story all over the country. Blacks have
not been the only ones calling the police to account and demanding reform. Whites from various
walks of life, including right-wing politicians like Rand Paul, have also been doing so. Never in American
history, in analogous circumstances, has there been a higher level of interracial empathy.
Overcoming the racial burdens—individual, communal, institutional—that encumber us will take
unremitting effort, major deployments of intelligence and imagination, daunting amounts of time,
huge expenditures of money, and the resolute conviction that America’s racial affairs can and will
improve. Is the uncertain prospect of a better future worth that investment? The lessons of
American history and a comparison of our society with others around the world impel me to say
yes . I am a racial optimist. Only time will tell whether my faith is wise.
Anti-black antagonisms are not ontological—the ability to communicate about
Blackness proves Black positionality can be altered, and utopian fatalism is more
violent than productive engagement
King Watts 15—Associate Professor, Media and Technology Studies, UNC Chapel Hill
(Eric, “Critical Cosmopolitanism, Antagonism, and Social Suffering”, Quarterly Journal of Speech Volume 101, Issue 1, 2015, dml)
I have been asked by more than one graduate student at more than one university how I hope to reconcile the claims
of Afro-Pessimism with my insistence that voice is a fundamental human capacity. I maintain, more or
less consistently, that voice is a public occurrence animated by the acknowledgment of the ethical and
affective dimensions of speech.16 The repetition of the inquiry is energized by the fact and mode
of Afro-Pessimism being taken up in debate and argument organizations, programs, and competitions . I am
not going to attempt to complete this reconciliation in this space, in part because I have not quite accomplished it. But I do have to
briefly sketch out the terms of the challenge in order to try to evaluate the strengths and limits of critical cosmopolitanism as an
academic practice that would ask “why and how” Communication Studies might interact with the Afro-Pessimistic enclave in Black
Studies. While criticizing the work of Black film theory, Frank Wilderson embarks upon an ambitious and provocative campaign
meant to foster an understanding of the conditions of impossibility for Black subjectivity within the contemporary ontological
paradigm. The term “Afro-Pessimism” signals the work of scholars who are “theorists of structural positionality.”17 As such,
Blackness and Whiteness18 are interrogated as emerging through a conjuncture with brutal modern technologies of organization
and domination, and the birth of the very idea of race. Put simply, it took the modern invention of slavery and colonialism to bring
about the racial ideologies that make Blackness and Whiteness intelligible. The Slave/Black, then, should not be considered
exploited labor or simply oppressed. “Rather, the gratuitous violence of the Black's first ontological instance, the Middle Passage,
‘wiped out [his or her] metaphysics … his or her customs and sources on which they are based.’”19 The Black occupies a
coordinate that marks a fundamental structural antagonism with the West, with Whiteness and, indeed, with the Human. It is quite
easy to see why the term “Pessimism” is apt. The Black names the condition of state violence, a flesh-object brought into the world
for “accumulation and fungibility.”20 The Black is essential to the production of Western subjectivity and to notions of what it means
to be human. “In short, White (Human) capacity, in advance of the event of discrimination or oppression, is parasitic on Black
incapacity: Without the Negro, capacity itself is incoherent, uncertain at best.” Not only is the Black incapacitated as a
structural determinate, the Black is “a structural position of noncommunicability.” 21 But there is
a form of communication here nevertheless because the Black paradoxically signifies the
“outside” that allows for the articulation of “anti-Black solidarity.” 22 There is theoretical and
historical support for such an analysis. For example, the early twentieth-century Americanization
projects used Blackness as an exclusionary trope meant to help spur non-White immigrants from
Europe and Asia toward Whiteness.23 And here is where the term “Pessimism” seems inadequate . As a
structurally overdetermined body-image in the Western imaginary and symbolic field, Blackness
registers near-nothingness: In perceiving Black folk as being alive, or at least having the potential to live in
the world, the same potential that any subaltern might have, the politics of Black film theorists' aesthetic methodology and desire
disavowed the fact that “[Black folk] are always already dead wherever you find them.”24 Given this dire
diagnosis, why and how might we interact with Afro-Pessimism? Speaking from the point of view of
a Black rhetorical scholar (and a scholar of Blackness), the answer to why is virtually self-evident:
thinking through Blackness as a condition of possibility for rhetorical action and social justice
is a life-long pursuit that, given the tragic killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014, feels
especially burning.25 Given the affective intensity of the charge of Black noncommunicability, a
failure to meaningfully interact would engender a different kind of “violence” ; in this case a
structural injunction sponsored by a lingering and recurring anxiety regarding the authority of
Communication Studies. And so how might we interact? If I take up the orientation of critical cosmopolitanism, I
need to recognize immediately that my efforts can be dismissed by the Afro-Pessimist as colonial; that is,
as a reiteration of the sort of practices that presume that one's epistemologies can translate other's
bodies of knowledge into comprehensible and useful concepts and constructs. And yet, we must begin
where we are ,
not where we hope to be . Hence, I want to make two modest and one not-so-modest
suggestions for how Communication Studies in general and Rhetorical Studies in particular might interact: first, Wilderson calls
for “a new language of abstraction” to elaborate “Blackness's grammar of suffering.”26 But in my
Afro-Pessimism is already too reliant on a language of abstraction. Lois McNay, in The Misguided
of political power are overwrought owing to a social
weightlessness brought about through high abstraction. She recommends the reinvigoration of the concept of “social
reading,
Search for the Political, recently contends that theories
suffering”—not as an entrenched category of victimage but, rather, as the habitus of lived experience that must be articulated to analyses of structural
positionality.27 Second, I agree with McNay (who says nothing about Afro-Pessimism, by the way) that
structural
antagonisms are not static , but are movable and moving configurations . The AfroPessimist in Wilderson's account must agree that when a non-Black person is thrust toward the horrible
condition approximating (but not identical to) the Black's structural position, that adjustment can
rightfully be called a “Blackening.” As a happening—and not an event that has simply always already happened—
this racialized procedure makes itself felt and knowable in the dense social fabric of the everyday.
If the Black is in a structural position that delimits the impossibility of capacity, might we enjoin
an analysis of the vocabulary of that impossibility itself ? And since a “Blackening” receives
intelligibility from the structural position of the Black, might we gain some productive
understanding from a scrutiny of key discursive and material forms of “Blackening”? Was not
Michael Brown “Blackened” in and through (and not only a priori to) his bodily encounter with state violence? Given my ongoing
scholarly interest in the Zombie, I am willing to concede that an Afro-Pessimist might claim that Brown was, at the
moment he was shot to death, “the dead but sentient thing, the Black” struggling “to articulate in a world of living
subjects.”28 This concession functions as an assertion : the Zombie is not wholly outside Western
intelligibility; it haunts the nether regions between Human and Black. Its undead existence is material and
social, and supplies some vital resources for inventing a new language—a grammar of (Black) suffering. Perhaps “there is no way to
Africa through the Black,”29 but maybe there is a route through the Zombie. I have argued for such a project using the terminology
of reanimating Zombie voices.30 Lastly, we might think of this gloomy predicament as a tenuous point of contact with AfroPessimism. Wilson's intellectual history provides the basis for such a conception. Communication Studies has been (and
continues to anguish over the extent that it still is) in the structural position of inferior and alienated. There should be no shame in
admitting that the discipline, in relation to both the Social Sciences and the Humanities, has been and is subject to being
“Blackened.” Indeed, its originary moment, as I alluded to above, meant the rejection of a set of nationalistic
proprietary politics that treated Speech teachers like disposable labor. By any reasonable measure, that
structural positioning—despite the fact that the people involved were White—was a racialization, a “Blackening.” Let's be perfectly
clear: there is no identification being made here with the fundamental antagonism associated with
the Black. However, this racialized politics (among other political registers) might provide a new critical
vocabulary for Communication scholars if we do the painful work of coming to grips with the
discursive and material practices of “Blackening.” There are structures of different scales .
Academic structural dynamics are not dissociated from the identity ideologies implicated in
nationalism and cosmopolitanism, citizenship and exile, privilege and destitution, Whiteness and
Blackness. Indeed, Wilderson's critique is launched from and resides within those very same
structural dynamics . It seems to me then that, at the very least, our shared social suffering with AfroPessimism—although of vastly different magnitudes and qualities—should be asserted as a
mode of transnational fidelity .
The psychoanalytic basis of their theories is non-falsifiable and should be
rejected
Paul Gordon, psychotherapist who has not drunk the kool-aid, “Psychoanalysis and Racism: The Politics of Defeat,” RACE &
CLASS v. 42 n. 4, 2001, pp. 17-34.
But in the thirty years since Kovel wrote, that attempt to relate mind and society has been fractured by the advent of postmodernism,
with its subsumption of the material/historical, of notions of cause and effect, to what is transitory, contingent, free-¯oating,
evanescent. Psycho- analysis, by stepping into the vacuum left by the abandonment of all metanarrative, has tended to put mind
over society. This is particularly noticeable in the work of the Centre for New Ethnicities Research at the University of East London,
which purports to straddle the worlds of the academy and action by developing projects for the local community and within education
generally.28 But, in marrying psychoanalysis and postmodernism, on the basis of claiming to be both
scholarly and action oriented, it degrades scholarship and under- mines action , and ends in
discourse analysis a language in which meta- phor passes for reality. Cohen's work unavoidably raises the
question of the status of psycho- analysis as a social or political theory, as distinct from a clinical one. Can psychoanalysis, in other
words, apply to the social world of groups, institutions, nations, states and cultures in the way that it does, or at least may do, to
individuals? Certainly there is now a considerable body of literature and a plethora of academic courses, and so on, claim- ing that
psychoanalysis is a social theory. And, of course, in popular discourse, it is now a commonplace to hear of nations and societies
spoken of in personalised ways. Thus `truth commissions' and the like, which have become so common in the past decade in
countries which have undergone turbulent change, are seen as forms of national therapy or catharsis, even if this is far from being
their purpose. Never- theless, the question remains: does it make sense, as Michael Ignatieff puts it, to speak of nations having
psyches the way that individuals do? `Can a nation's past make people ill as we know repressed memories sometimes make
individuals ill? . . . Can we speak of nations ``working through'' a civil war or an atrocity as we speak of individuals working through a
traumatic memory or event?' 47 The problem with the application of psychoanalysis to social institu- tions
is that there can be no testing of the claims made. If someone says, for instance, that nationalism is a form of
looking for and seeking to replace the body of the mother one has lost, or that the popular appeal of a particular kind of story echoes
the pattern of our earliest relationship to the maternal breast, how can this be proved? The pioneers of psychoanalysis,
from Freud onwards, all derived their ideas in the context of their work with individual patients and their
ideas can be examined in the everyday laboratory of the therapeutic encounter where the validity of an
interpretation, for example, is a matter for dialogue between therapist and patient. Outside
of the con- sulting room,
there can be no such verification process, and the further one moves from the individual patient,
the less purchase psycho- analytic ideas can have. Outside the therapeutic encounter, anything
and everything can be true, psychoanalytically speaking. But if every- thing is true, then nothing
can be false and therefore nothing can be true. An example of Cohen's method is to be found in his 1993 working
paper, `Home rules', subtitled `Some re¯ections on racism and nation- alism in everyday life'. Here Cohen talks about taking a
`particular line of thought for a walk'. While there is nothing wrong with taking a line of thought for a walk, such an exercise is not
necessarily the same as thinking. One of the problems with Cohen's approach is that a kind of free association, mixed
with deconstruction, leads not to analysis, not even to psychoanalysis, but to . . . well, just more
free association, an endless, indeed one might say pointless, play on words. This approach may well
throw up some interesting associations along the way, connections one had never thought of but it is not to be confused
with political analysis. In `Home rules', anything and everything to do with `home' can and does ®nd a place here and, as I
indicated above, even the popular ®lm Home Alone is pressed into service as a story about `racial' invasion.
Prefer substance over discourse
Tuathail, Professor of Geography at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 96
(Gearoid, Political Geography, Vol 15 No 6-7, p. 664,
Science Direct)
While theoretical debates at academic conferences are important to academics, the discourse
and concerns of foreign-policy decision- makers are quite different, so different that they
constitute a distinctive problem- solving, theory-averse, policy-making subculture. There is a
danger that academics assume that the discourses they engage are more significant in the
practice of foreign policy and the exercise of power than they really are. This is not, however, to minimize
the obvious importance of academia as a general institutional structure among many that sustain certain epistemic communities in
particular states. In general, I do not disagree with Dalby’s fourth point about politics and discourse except to note that his
statement-‘Precisely because reality could be represented in particular ways political decisions could be
taken, troops and material moved and war fought’-evades the important question of agency that I noted in my review
essay. The assumption that it is representations that make action possible is inadequate by itself.
Political, military and economic structures, institutions, discursive networks and leadership are
all crucial in explaining social action and should be theorized together with representational
practices. Both here and earlier, Dalby’s reasoning inclines towards a form of idealism. In response to Dalby’s fifth point (with its
three subpoints), it is worth noting, first, that his book is about the CPD, not the Reagan administration. He analyzes certain CPD
discourses, root the geographical reasoning practices of the Reagan administration nor its public-policy reasoning on national
security. Dalby’s book is narrowly textual; the general contextuality of the Reagan administration is not dealt with. Second, let me
simply note that I find that the distinction between critical theorists and post- structuralists is a little too rigidly and heroically drawn
by Dalby and others. Third, Dalby’s interpretation of the reconceptualization of national security in Moscow as heavily influenced by
dissident peace researchers in Europe is highly idealist, an interpretation that ignores the structural and ideological crises facing the
Soviet elite at that time. Gorbachev’s reforms and his new security discourse were also strongly self- interested, an ultimately futile
attempt to save the Communist Party and a discredited regime of power from disintegration. The issues raised by Simon Dalby in
his comment are important ones for all those interested in the practice of critical geopolitics. While I agree with Dalby that questions
of discourse are extremely important ones for political geographers to engage, there is a danger of fetishizing this
concern with discourse so that we neglect the institutional and the sociological, the materialist
and the cultural, the political and the geographical contexts within which particular discursive
strategies become significant. Critical geopolitics, in other words, should not be a prisoner of the sweeping ahistorical
cant that sometimes accompanies ‘poststructuralism nor convenient reading strategies like the identity politics narrative; it needs to
always be open to the patterned mess that is human history.
Social death theory is wrong and re-entrenches colonialism
Tracey Walker 12, Birkbeck University Masters in Psychosocial Studies, “The Future of Slavery: From Cultural Trauma to
Ethical Remembrance”, Graduate Journal of Social Science, 9.2, July, JSTOR
To argue that there is more to the popular conception of slaves as victims who experienced social death
within the abusive regime of transatlantic slavery is not to say that these subjectivities did not
exist. When considering the institution of slavery we can quite confidently rely on the assumption that it did indeed destroy the self-hood and the
lives of millions of Africans. Scholar Vincent Brown (2009) however, has criticised Orlando Patterson’s (1982) seminal book Slavery
and Social Death for positioning the slave as a subject without agency and maintains that those
who managed to dislocate from the nightmare of plantation life ‘were not in fact the living dead’,
but ‘ the mothers of gasping new societies’ (Brown 2009, 1241). The Jamaican Maroons were one such
disparate group of Africans who managed to band together and flee the Jamaican plantations in order to
create a new mode of living under their own rule. These ‘runaways’ were in fact ‘ferocious fighters and master strategists’, building towns
and military bases which enabled them to fight and successfully win the war against the British army after 200 years of battle (Gotlieb 2000,16). In
addition, the story of the Windward Jamaican Maroons disrupts the phallocentricism inherent within the story of the slave ‘hero’ by the very revelation
that their leader, ‘Queen Nanny’ was a woman (Gotlieb 2000). As a leader, she was often ignored by early white historians who dismissed her as an
‘old hagg’ or ‘obeah’ woman (possessor of evil magic powers) (Gotlieb 2000, xvi). Yet, despite these negative descriptors, Nanny presents an
interesting image of an African woman in the time of slavery who cultivated an exceptional army and used psychological as well as military force
against the English despite not owning sophisticated weapons (Gotlieb 2000). As an oral tale, her story speaks to post-slavery generations through its
representation of a figure whose gender defying acts challenged the patriarchal fantasies of the Eurocentric imaginary and as such ‘the study of her
The
label of ‘social death’ is rejected here on the grounds that it is a narrative which is positioned from
the vantage point of a European hegemonic ideology . Against the social symbolic and its gaze, black slaves
were indeed regarded as non-humans since their lives were stunted, diminished and deemed less valuable in comparison to the Europeans.
However , Fanon’s (1967) assertion that ‘not only must the black man be black; he must be black in
relation to the white man’ (Fanon 1967, 110) helps us to understand that this classification can only
have meaning relative to the symbolic which represents the aliveness of whiteness against the
backdrop of the dead black slave (Dyer 1997). Butler (2005) makes it clear that the ‘death’ one suffers relative to
the social symbolic is imbued with the fantasy that having constructed the Other and interpellated
her into ‘life’, one now holds the sovereignty of determining the subject’s right to live or die : this
experiences might change the lives of people living under paternalistic, racist, classist and gender based oppression’ (Gotlieb 2000, 84).
death, if it is a death, is only the death of a certain kind of subject, one that was never possible to begin with, the death of the fantasy of impossible
the
concept of social death has proved useful for theorists to describe the metaphysical experience of those who live antagonistically in
relation to the social symbolic, it is nevertheless a colonial narrative within which the slaves are confined to a one
dimensional story of terror. In keeping with Gilroy’s (1993b) argument that the memory of slavery must be constructed from the slaves’
point of view, we might instead concentrate, not on the way in which the slaves are figured within the
European social imaginary, but on how they negotiated their own ideas about self and identity.
We might therefore find some value in studying a group like the Maroons who not only managed
to create an autonomous world outside of the hegemonic discourse which negated them , but
also, due to their unique circumstances, were forced to create new modes of communication
which would include a myriad of African cultures, languages and creeds (Gottlieb 2000). This creative and
resistive energy of slave subjectivity not only disrupts the colonial paradigm of socially dead slaves,
but also implies the ethical tropes of creation, renewal and mutual recognition. In contrast, the
passive slave proved to feature heavily in the 2007 bicentenary commemorations causing journalist Toyin Agbetu to interrupt the official
speeches and exclaim that it had turned into a discourse of freedom engineered mostly by whites with stories
of black agency excluded 8 . Young’s argument that ‘one of the damaging side effects of the focus on white people’s role in abolition is
mastery, and so a loss of what one never had, in other words it is a necessary grief (Butler 2005, 65). The point to make here is that although
that Africans are represented as being passive in the face of oppression’, appears to echo the behaviour in the UK today given that a recent research
poll reveals that the black vote turnout is significantly lower than for the white majority electorate and that forty percent of second generation ‘immigrants’ believe that voting ‘doesn’t matter’.9 Yet, Gilroy (1993a) argues that this political passivity may not simply be a self fulfilling prophecy, but might
allude to the ‘lived contradiction’ of being black and English which affects one’s confidence about whether opinions will be validated in a society that, at
Without considering the slaves’ capacity for survival and their fundamental role in overthrowing the European regime of slavery, we limit the use–
value of the memory and risk becoming overly attached to singular slave subjectivities seeped in
death and passivity. The Maroons story however, enables slave consciousness to rise above the
mire of slavery’s abject victims and establishes an ethical relation with our ancestors who lived
and survived in the time of slavery.
its core, still holds on to the fantasy of European superiority (Gilroy 1993a).
Alternative fails—calling for the destruction of civil society and the state glosses
over important infrastructural questions that must be addressed in order for
societal change to be successful. Their stance cedes the political to authoritarian
and reaction elites
Bryant 12 — Levi R. Bryant, Professor of Philosophy at Collin College, holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Loyola University in
Chicago, 2012 (“Underpants Gnomes: A Critique of the Academic Left,” Larval Subjects—Levi R. Bryant’s philosophy blog,
November 11th, Available Online at http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/underpants-gnomes-a-critique-of-the-academicleft/, Accessed 02-21-2014)
I must be in a mood today–half irritated, half amused–because I find myself ranting. Of course, that’s not entirely unusual. So this
afternoon I came across a post by a friend quoting something discussing the environmental movement that pushed all the right
button. As the post read,¶ For mainstream environmentalism– conservationism, green consumerism, and resource management –
humans are conceptually separated out of nature and mythically placed in privileged positions of authority and control over
ecological communities and their nonhuman constituents. What emerges is the fiction of a marketplace of ‘raw materials’ and
‘resources’ through which human-centered wants, constructed as needs, might be satisfied. The mainstream narratives are replete
with such metaphors [carbon trading!]. Natural complexity,, mutuality, and diversity are rendered virtually meaningless given
discursive parameters that reduce nature to discrete units of exchange measuring extractive capacities. Jeff Shantz, “Green
Syndicalism”¶ While finding elements this description perplexing– I can’t say that I see many environmentalists treating nature and
culture as distinct or suggesting that we’re sovereigns of nature –I do agree that we conceive much of our relationship to the natural
world in economic terms (not a surprise that capitalism is today a universal). This, however, is not what bothers me about this
passage.¶ What I wonder is just what we’re supposed to do even if all of this is true? What, given
existing conditions, are we to do if all of this is right? At least green consumerism, conservation, resource
management, and things like carbon trading are engaging in activities that are making real differences. From this passage–and
maybe the entire text would disabuse me of this conclusion–it sounds like we are to reject all of these interventions because they
remain tied to a capitalist model of production that the author (and myself) find abhorrent. The idea seems to be that if we endorse
these things we are tainting our hands and would therefore do well to reject them altogether. ¶ The problem as I see it is that this is
the worst sort of abstraction (in the Marxist sense) and wishful thinking. Within a Marxo-Hegelian context, a thought is abstract when
it ignores all of the mediations in which a thing is embedded. For example, I understand a robust tree abstractly when I attribute its
robustness, say, to its genetics alone, ignoring the complex relations to its soil, the air, sunshine, rainfall, etc., that also allowed it to
grow robustly in this way. This is the sort of critique we’re always leveling against the neoliberals. They are abstract thinkers. In their
doxa that individuals are entirely responsible for themselves and that they completely make themselves by pulling themselves up by
their bootstraps, neoliberals ignore all the mediations belonging to the social and material context in which human beings develop
that play a role in determining the vectors of their life. They ignore, for example, that George W. Bush grew up in a family that was
highly connected to the world of business and government and that this gave him opportunities that someone living in a remote
region of Alaska in a very different material infrastructure and set of family relations does not have. To think concretely is to engage
in a cartography of these mediations, a mapping of these networks, from circumstance to circumstance (what I call an “ontocartography”). It is to map assemblages, networks, or ecologies in the constitution of entities.¶ Unfortunately, the academic left
falls prey to its own form of abstraction. It’s good at carrying out critiques that denounce various
social formations, yet very poor at proposing any sort of realistic constructions of alternatives .
This because it thinks abstractly in its own way, ignoring how networks, assemblages, structures, or
regimes of attraction would have to be remade to create a workable alternative . Here I’m reminded by the
“underpants gnomes” depicted in South Park:¶ [YouTube video omitted]¶ The underpants gnomes have a plan for achieving profit
that goes like this:¶ Phase 1: Collect Underpants¶ Phase 2: ?¶ Phase 3: Profit! ¶ They even have a catchy song to go with their work:¶
[YouTube video omitted]¶ Well this is sadly how it often is with the academic left. Our plan seems to be as follows:¶
Phase 1: Ultra-Radical Critique¶ Phase 2: ? (Question Mark)¶ Phase 3: Revolution and complete
social transformation!¶ Our problem is that we seem perpetually stuck at phase 1 without ever
explaining what is to be done at phase 2. Often the critiques articulated at phase 1 are right, but
there are nonetheless all sorts of problems with those critiques nonetheless. In order to reach phase
3, we have to produce new collectives. In order for new collectives to be produced, people need to
be able to hear and understand the critiques developed at phase 1. Yet this is where everything
begins to fall apart. Even though these critiques are often right, we express them in ways that only
an academic with a PhD in critical theory and post-structural theory can understand. How exactly is
Adorno to produce an effect in the world if only PhD’s in the humanities can understand him? Who are these things for? We seem to
always ignore these things and then look down our noses with disdain at the Naomi Kleins and David Graebers of the world. To
make matters worse, we publish our work in expensive academic journals that only universities
can afford, with presses that don’t have a wide distribution, and give our talks at expensive hotels
at academic conferences attended only by other academics. Again, who are these things for? Is it an accident
that so many activists look away from these things with contempt, thinking their more about an academic industry and tenure, than
producing change in the world? If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, it doesn’t make a
sound! Seriously dudes and dudettes, what are you doing?¶ But finally, and worst of all, us Marxists and anarchists all
too often act like assholes. We denounce others, we condemn them, we berate them for not
engaging with the questions we want to engage with, and we vilify them when they don’t embrace
every bit of the doxa that we endorse. We are every bit as off-putting and unpleasant as the
fundamentalist minister or the priest of the inquisition (have people yet understood that Deleuze and Guattari’s
Anti-Oedipus was a critique of the French communist party system and the Stalinist party system, and the horrific passions that
type of “revolutionary” is the greatest friend of the
reactionary and capitalist because they do more to drive people into the embrace of reigning
ideology than to undermine reigning ideology. These are the people that keep Rush Limbaugh in
business . Well done!¶ But this isn’t where our most serious shortcomings lie. Our most serious shortcomings
are to be found at phase 2. We almost never make concrete proposals for how things ought to be
restructured, for what new material infrastructures and semiotic fields need to be produced, and
when we do, our critique-intoxicated cynics and skeptics immediately jump in with an analysis of
all the ways in which these things contain dirty secrets, ugly motives, and are doomed to fail.
How, I wonder, are we to do anything at all when we have no concrete proposals ? We live on a
planet of 6 billion people . These 6 billion people are dependent on a certain network of
production and distribution to meet the needs of their consumption. That network of production
and distribution does involve the extraction of resources, the production of food, the maintenance
of paths of transit and communication, the disposal of waste, the building of shelters, the
distribution of medicines, etc., etc., etc.¶ What are your proposals ? How will you meet these
problems ? How will you navigate the existing mediations or semiotic and material features of
infrastructure? Marx and Lenin had proposals. Do you? Have you even explored the cartography of the problem? Today we
are so intellectually bankrupt on these points that we even have theorists speaking of events and
acts and talking about a return to the old socialist party systems, ignoring the horror they
generated, their failures, and not even proposing ways of avoiding the repetition of these horrors
in a new system of organization. Who among our critical theorists is thinking seriously about how to build a distribution
arise out of parties and identifications in general?). This
and production system that is responsive to the needs of global consumption, avoiding the problems of planned economy, ie., who
is doing this in a way that gets notice in our circles? Who is addressing the problems of micro-fascism that arise with party systems
(there’s a reason that it was the Negri & Hardt contingent, not the Badiou contingent that has been the heart of the occupy
movement). At least the ecologists are thinking about these things in these terms because, well, they think ecologically. Sadly we
need something more, a melding of the ecologists, the Marxists, and the anarchists. We’re not getting it yet though, as far as I can
tell. Indeed, folks seem attracted to yet another critical paradigm, Laruelle. ¶ I would love, just for a moment, to hear a radical
environmentalist talk about his ideal high school that would be academically sound. How would he provide for the energy needs of
that school? How would he meet building codes in an environmentally sound way? How would she provide food for the students?
What would be her plan for waste disposal? And most importantly, how would she navigate the school board, the state legislature,
the federal government, and all the families of these students? What is your plan? What is your alternative? I think there are
alternatives. I saw one that approached an alternative in Rotterdam. If you want to make a truly revolutionary contribution, this is
where you should start. Why should anyone even bother listening to you if you aren’t proposing real
plans? But we haven’t even gotten to that point. Instead we’re like underpants gnomes, saying “revolution is
the answer!” without addressing any of the infrastructural questions of just how revolution is to
be produced, what alternatives it would offer, and how we would concretely go about building
those alternatives. Masturbation.¶ “Underpants gnome” deserves to be a category in critical theory; a
sort of synonym for self-congratulatory masturbation. We need less critique not because critique
isn’t important or necessary–it is–but because we know the critiques, we know the problems .
We’re intoxicated with critique because it’s easy and safe . We best every opponent with critique.
We occupy a position of moral superiority with critique. But do we really do anything with
critique? What we need today , more than ever , is composition or carpentry . Everyone knows
something is wrong. Everyone knows this system is destructive and stacked against them. Even
the Tea Party knows something is wrong with the economic system, despite having the wrong
economic theory. None of us, however, are proposing alternatives . Instead we prefer to shout and
denounce. Good luck with that.
Their call to reject the state in every instance is complicit with the evil they
criticize
Jeffrey Issac (professor of political science at Indiana University) 2002 Dissent, Spring, ebsco
As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, an unyielding
concern with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility. The concern may be morally laudable,
reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity of
one’s intention does not ensure the achievement of what one intends. Abjuring violence or refusing to make
common cause with morally compromised parties may seem like the right thing; but if such tactics entail impotence,
then it is hard to view them as serving any moral good beyond the clean conscience of their
supporters; (2) it fails to see that in a world of real violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a
form of powerlessness; it is often a form of complicity in injustice. This is why, from the standpoint of
politics—as opposed to religion—pacifism is always a potentially immoral stand. In categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in
principle to oppose certain violent injustices with any effect; and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about
unintended consequences as it is about intentions; it is the effects of action, rather than the
motives of action, that is most significant. Just as the alignment with “good” may engender
impotence, it is often the pursuit of “good” that generates evil. This is the lesson of communism in the
twentieth century: it is not enough that one’s goals be sincere or idealistic; it is equally important, always, to ask about the effects of
pursuing these goals and to judge these effects in pragmatic and historically contextualized ways . Moral absolutism inhibits
this judgment. It alienates those who are not true believers. It promotes arrogance. And it undermines political effectiveness.
Reformism is effective and brings revolutionary change closer rather than
pushing it away
Richard Delgado 9, Minority scholar, Chair of Law at the University of Alabama Law School, J.D. from the University of
California, Berkeley, his books have won eight national book prizes, including six Gustavus Myers awards for outstanding book on
human rights in North America, the American Library Association’s Outstanding Academic Book, and a Pulitzer Prize
nomination. Professor Delgado’s teaching and writing focus on race, the legal profession, and social change, 2009, “Does Critical
Legal Studies Have What Minorities Want, Arguing about Law”, p. 588-590
CLS critique of piecemeal reform Critical scholars reject the idea of piecemeal reform.
Incremental change, they argue, merely postpones the wholesale reformation that must occur to
create a decent society. Even worse, an unfair social system survives by using piecemeal reform to
disguise and legitimize oppression. Those who control the system weaken resistance by pointing
to the occasional concession to, or periodic court victory of, a black plaintiff or worker as evidence that
the system is fair and just. In fact, Crits believe that teaching the common law or using the case method in law school is a disguised means of preaching
2. The
incrementalism and thereby maintaining the current power structure.“ To avoid this, CLS scholars urge law professors to abandon the case method, give up the effort to find
critique of piecemeal reform is familiar,
imperialistic and wrong . Minorities know from bitter experience that occasional court victories do not mean the Promised Land is at hand . The
critique is imperialistic in that it tells minorities and other oppressed peoples how they should interpret
events affecting them. A court order directing a housing authority to disburse funds for heating in
subsidized housing may postpone the revolution, or it may not . In the meantime, the order keeps
a number of poor families warm. This may mean more to them than it does to a comfortable
academic working in a warm office. It smacks of paternalism to assert that the possibility of
revolution later outweighs the certainty of heat now, unless there is evidence for that possibility. The Crits do not offer
such evidence. Indeed, some incremental changes may bring revolutionary changes closer , not push
them further away. Not all small reforms induce complacency; some may whet the appetite for
further combat. The welfare family may hold a tenants‘ union meeting in their heated living room .
CLS scholars‘ critique of piecemeal reform often misses these possibilities, and neglects the
question of whether total change, when it comes, will be what we want.
rationality and order in the case law, and teach in an unabashedly political fashion.
The
CLS
Empathy
Empathy is good -- don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater
Chabot Davis 4
[12/05/2004, Kimberly Chabot Davis teaches twentieth-century U.S. literature and film at Bridgewater State College. Used to teach
20th century American literature and culture in the History and Literature Program at Harvard University. Chabot Davis's articles on
contemporary culture have been published in Twentieth Century Literature, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Journal for the
Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, South Atlantic Review, Politics and Culture, and Modern Fiction Studies, “Oprah's Book Club
and the politics of cross-racial empathy”, International Journal of Cultural Studies 2004 7: 399]
While some object to the sympathetic emotions on the grounds that they substitute for political action, other cultural critics and
race theorists treat sympathy as an inherently colonizing action, and they reduce empathy to an
imperialistic drive to incorporate the other into the self. While some of these critics are informed by postcolonial
theories exposing the drive for knowledge of the exotic other as a form of power, others are influenced by the Freudian
view of identification as a hostile erasure of the other, ‘in which the object that we long for and
prize is assimilated by eating and is in that way annihilated as such’ (Freud, 1955: 105; see also hooks,
1992). In critical race theory, studies of cross-racial sympathy take a decidedly pessimistic tone about the possibilities of coalition,
which has the unfortunate consequence of reifying the very racial categories that they seek to undermine.10 For example, Robyn
Wiegman despairs that integrationist novels and films are ultimately wedded to white authority, and concludes that ‘the
transformatory hope of identifying with the pain and suffering of others seems ever more bound to an imperialistic cast’ (1995: 200).
In researching her book Racechanges, Susan Gubar sadly concludes that crossracial masquerade and imitation ‘inevitably leads to
the disappearance of the other’s otherness’ (1997: 245). While these writers take a despairing tone, Doris Sommer aggressively
condemns cross-racial sympathy and empathy alike. Focusing on the narrative strategies that ethnic writers use to refuse access to
white readers, Sommer dismisses the sympathy of white liberals as an ‘appropriation in the guise of an embrace’ (1994: 543) and a
facile form of connection that lasts ‘hardly longer than the reading of a novel’ (p. 529). Arguing that ‘empathy is the egocentric
energy that drives one subject to impersonate another’ (1999: 22), she echoes Freud’s view of identification as a metaphoric
substitution of the self for the other. These writers shed light on a problematic possibility of sympathy and empathy – that the
privileged sympathizer will ignore differences in his or her zeal to connect emotionally with the sufferer. Erasing the subjective
experience of people of color, the white empathizer falsely claims someone else’s particular pain as his own. While some critics
focus on this desire for sameness as an erasure, others are more critical of the hierarchy they
believe is implicit in sympathy’s operation. As Berlant puts it, ‘compassion is a term denoting privilege:
the sufferer is over there’ (2004: 4) and the observer has the power to either help or turn away. I agree
that sympathy may involve power relations between subject and object, and may keep hierarchies firmly in place by granting the
sympathizer a feeling of benevolent largesse and by denying agency to the sufferer. These consequences, however, are
not implicit to the operation of sympathetic emotions . Empathetic experiences of seeing from the
vantage point of another can lead to a recognition of that person’s subjecthood and agency , and
can lead the white empathizer to not only become critically aware of racial hierarchy , but to
desire to work against the structures of inequality wherein her own power resides. My case study of
Oprah’s Book Club addresses both the promise and limitations of empathy and sympathy, asserting that the politics of these
emotions depend upon how they are experienced and to what end they are employed . While the
possibility of appropriation is an important concern, critics also have a responsibility to bring to light moments
of empathy or compassion with progressive political significance, lest we lose hope in the
potential for change in the racial order . It strikes me as particularly ironic that these despairing conclusions are voiced
by white anti-racist scholars whose own critical work attests to the radical potential of some acts of cross-racial affiliation. In our
zeal to avoid celebratory analyses that underestimate the power of white hegemony, we need to
avoid throwing out the proverbial baby (empathy and compassion) with the bathwater. As many
social scientists have argued, empathy can inhibit aggression, and the absence of empathy is a telling
feature of inter-group violence, such as the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.11 In the context of an alarming international rise in
hate groups and terrorism, left-oriented scholars cannot afford to give up on empathy’s promise of
fostering cross-cultural understanding and desires for social justice and equality. Reception analysis
My reception study suggests that sympathy’s colonizing functions and its ability to inhibit action are not
intrinsic to its structure , but merely one possible deployment thereof. By offering evidence here of the more
radical possibilities of empathy visible on The Oprah Winfrey Show, I do not claim that the critics of sympathy are
categorically wrong, but merely that they are diminishing the complexity of the sympathetic emotions . One
could argue that a similarly one-sided argument is put forth by Martha Nussbaum (2001), who optimistically
implies that compassion is the cure for what ails modern society. Predicated on the assumption that reading
good books produces empathetic and moral people, Nussbaum’s philosophical reflections ignore the considerable diversity of
reader responses to texts. My reception study, however, exposes both negative and positive strains of empathy and sympathy,
while drawing attention to previously underappreciated progressive effects. While I do not claim that these radical deployments are
predominant, either on Oprah’s programs or in the reading public at large, I found enough recurrence to warrant attention.
BW Binary Bad
Anti-blackness is not the master-key—the focus on it as such skews discussions
of racial justice and promotes nationalistic and xenophobic forms of racism
Sunstrom 8, Associate Professor of Philosophy
[2008, Ronald R. Sunstrom is a black Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Francisco; additionally, he teaches
for USF's African American Studies program and the Master of Public Affairs program for the Leo T. McCarthy Center of Public
Service and the Common Good. He was awarded the 2008 Sankofa Faculty Award from USF's Multicultural Student Services,
USF's 2009 Ignatian Service Award, and was a co-winner of the 2010 USF Distinguished Teaching Award. His areas of research
include political theory, critical social and race theory, and African American and Asian American philosophy, “The Browning of
America and the Evasion of Social Justice”, pp. 65-92]
The future of race in the United States, or elsewhere, will not be determined solely through the American
instinct to return to black white politics—as if the question of the conservation or elimination of
race and racial justice is in the hands of whites and blacks who need to hash out their issues for the
sake of all of us. That somehow American racial problems are primarily black and white problems is the
conceit of too many Americans. This conceit is rooted in an image of an America defi ned by Protestantism, the English
language, and its ties to Europe and populated by fading yet romantic “Indians,” a few Mexicans, and “Orientals” but dominated by
whites and blacks. In this fantasy, the racial problems that we have are determined by the painful yet interesting
history between whites and blacks. From here, liberals and conservatives part company, but the central vision
holds—both sides affi rm that black-white division is the United States’ core racial problem, and that solving black-white
confl ict is the master key to all of its racial problems . The result of this assumption has been that the concerns,
problems, and questions, specifi c to blacks and whites and the relationship between them, have historically dominated discourse
over race in the United States. The domination of this focus, often called the blackwhite binary, has colored
the U.S. reaction toward, and policies about, Native Americans, Asians, Latinos, and its colonial
subjects, such as Puerto Ricans and Filipinos.1 The color line, which W. E. B. Du Bois famously claimed
marked the twentieth century and spanned the globe, was imagined in the cast of the black-white binary. In the
following sections I clarify various conceptions of the black-white binary and consider their relative merits and failings. I then turn to
the host of objections against this binary. I support the primary complaint against the
binary, that it does not engender
accurate descriptions of the United States’ racial past or present , and it skews discussions of the
future of race and racial justice toward the perspectives and interests of blacks and whites. Some
readers may think that the problems with the black-white binary are so obvious and great that the
subject is not worth a chapter-length study. I urge such readers to momentarily suspend their incredulity about the
blackwhite binary so that they can consider the demands for justice that motivate its proponents. I argue that the black-white binary
should not simply be dismissed, for incautious dismissals of it end up casting off the demands of justice that frequently motivate
statements that seemingly support the binary. Nonetheless, there are troubling aspects of the black-white binary
that go beyond the usual objections, leadin g, fi nally, to its total rejection. The black-white binary is
rooted in a peculiar conception of black-white American nationalism and xenophobia that is
ultimately hostile to American multiculturalism. Such a view is fundamentally illiberal, and the people of
the United States should not capitulate to its desire that the false image of America as black and
white not be upset .
1AR
K Ans: Extinction Outweighs
Extinction outweighs
Bostrum 12 (Nick, Professor of Philosophy at Oxford, directs Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute and winner of the Gannon
Award, Interview with Ross Andersen, correspondent at The Atlantic, 3/6, “We're Underestimating the Risk of Human Extinction”,
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/were-underestimating-the-risk-of-human-extinction/253821/)
human extinction risks are poorly
understood and, worse still, severely underestimated by society . Some of these existential risks are fairly well known, especially the
Bostrom, who directs Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, has argued over the course of several papers that
natural ones. But others are obscure or even exotic. Most worrying to Bostrom is the subset of existential risks that arise from human technology, a subset that he expects to
grow in number and potency over the next century.¶ Despite his concerns about the risks posed to humans by technological progress, Bostrom is no luddite. In fact, he is a
longtime advocate of transhumanism---the effort to improve the human condition, and even human nature itself, through technological means. In the long run he sees
technology as a bridge, a bridge we humans must cross with great care, in order to reach new and better modes of being. In his work, Bostrom uses the tools of philosophy and
mathematics, in particular probability theory, to try and determine how we as a species might achieve this safe passage. What follows is my conversation with Bostrom about
some of the most interesting and worrying existential risks that humanity might encounter in the decades and centuries to come, and about what we can do to make sure we
outlast them.¶ Some have argued that we ought to be directing our resources toward humanity's existing problems, rather than future existential risks, because many of the
existential risk mitigation may in fact be a dominant moral
priority over the alleviation of present suffering . Can you explain why? ¶ Bostrom: Well suppose you have a moral
view that counts future people as being worth as much as present people . You might say that fundamentally it doesn't
latter are highly improbable. You have responded by suggesting that
matter whether someone exists at the current time or at some future time, just as many people think that from a fundamental moral point of view, it doesn't matter where
something. A human life is a human life. If
you have that moral point of view that future generations matter in proportion to their population
numbers, then you get this very stark implication that existential risk mitigation has a much
higher utility than pretty much anything else that you could do. There are so many people that could come
into existence in the future if humanity survives this critical period of time---we might live for billions of years, our descendants
might colonize billions of solar systems, and there could be billions and billions times more people than exist currently.
Therefore, even a very small reduction in the probability of realizing this enormous good will tend to
outweigh even immense benefits like eliminating poverty or curing malaria, which would be tremendous under ordinary standards.
somebody is spatially---somebody isn't automatically worth less because you move them to the moon or to Africa or
Race K: A2 “Exclude White People”
Oppression is not just a problem for the oppressed—it is something those who
are in the position of the oppressor must actively combat. White individuals have
a an obligation to actively fight against structures of oppression
WPCR No Date "White People Challenging Racism" www.wpcr-boston.org/faqs/
Racism is a WHITE problem : white people today may not have taken part in creating structural
racism but they do receive unearned advantages because of it, and are therefore responsible for
undoing such inequity. It is up to white people to educate each other about racism and not rely on
people of color to do so. Transforming the institutions that perpetuate racism and white privilege
requires the participation of white people. 5) Why is a course on the role of white people in eliminating racism open
to people of color? Don’t white people need a “safe space” to feel free to talk about their prejudices? There can be no guarantee of a
“safe” space when racism is discussed. White people need to be open to dialogue that may reveal unintended racism.
People of color DO talk about racism, although being among white people talking on the subject can be painful. Yes, white people
have to spend time to understand racism and commit to doing something to end it, but they also need to hear the
experiences/perspectives of people of color who are willing to share them. 6) Why do you want people who take the course to make
an action plan? Don’t people need to get rid of their stereotypes before they take effective action? Thinking, feeling, and doing can
interact dynamically. Understanding the history and dynamics of institutionalized racism that few learn
in school, can give white people new perspectives to help them act . Acknowledging feelings such as guilt
and fear can help develop healthier feelings: yearning for racial justice, joy of appreciating people as individuals, and feelings of trust
and solidarity from acting together for what they know is right. Doing speaking up practices and committing to
action plans can bolster us, and spur us to learn and think about the information and strategies
we need to act effectively. 7) If racism is a powerful force continuously in action in almost every aspect of our lives, even if
we act, what difference it make? Each of us has the ability to act for racial justice in some sphere of our
lives: family, friends, jobs, businesses, school, clubs, neighborhoods, communities: all these changes count. 8) If a white
person who wants to challenge racism doesn’t know what to do to make a difference and so does nothing, isn’t that better than
doing the wrong thing?
Doing nothing is not neutral . W
hether we want to or not, each and every one of us – is making a difference right now. The
question is: what kind of difference do you want to make? If all the people who were troubled by
racism were to take some action to change the system where they intersect with it, things would
change very quickly. It takes work, it takes commitment, it takes perseverance, it takes humility.
But if we do nothing to act to challenge racism, we are colluding with it. In short, doing nothing is
supporting racism.