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A. Definition:
Resolved is a determination regarding an opinion or proposition
Law Dictionary: What is RESOLUTION? definition of RESOLUTION (Black's Law
Dictionary)http://thelawdictionary.org/resolution/#ixzz2XdvQGb50,
13
The determination or decision, in regard to its opinion or intention, of a deliberative or legislative body, public assembly, town
council, board of directors or the like. Also a motion or formal proposition offered for adoption by such a body.
B. Interpretation: The AFF has to specify the manner in which they stand resolved in relation to
the statement of the resolution.
C. Violation: The AFF did not spec their resolve. The AFF engages in a normative form of debate
which suspends the question of how we relate to the resolutional statement which structures the
debate space. This is an assumption of privilege that is bad for debate and debaters. This
question is apriori because how one is Resolved structures what is debatable.
Elaine Vilorio,Coming Out As Black,http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elaine-vilorio/black-hispanics_b_3313173.html,05/23/2013
I'm Black. After many years in the closet, after many years of breathing that stale air of self-denial, I can finally say this.
Growing up, I dreaded the question "What are you?" I always proudly answered that I was Hispanic. In fact, I made it a point to emphasize my Hispanicity simply because I knew what
"I'm Hispanic; I speak Spanish;my parents come from Dominican Republic. I'm Hispanic. And, just to clarify, I'm Hispanic." To this, the
The problem was I perceived the identification of
"Hispanic" outside the realm of Blackness;but then, I wasn't the only one.Take note that the other person in my scenario thought the
same thing. Right aftermy declaration of Hispanicity, he/she stripped away the "Black" labelwith the phrases "I thought" and
was coming next.
other person confessed: "Oh... I thought you were Black. You definitely look Black."
"You definitely look."
The conventional definition of "Black" completely leaves out Hispanics, and this is because the latter is
ashamed of African ancestry.As a result of this shame, American society has excused Latinos from
identifying themselves as Black or African American. I recently read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s Black in Latin America, and I'm amazed at what I
learned. Eleven million Africans survived the Middle Passageand cameto the Western Hemisphere. Out of this almost
unfathomable number, only 450,000 Africans came to the United States. Gates expresses the significance of these numbers nicely: "The 'real' African American
experience...unfolded in places south... of Texas, south of California, in the Caribbean islands and
throughout Latin America." [1] Why, then, has the stereotypical Hispanic comprised mostly European and Indigenous features?Where did the
Black go? It was buried under unofficial segregation, under whitening campaigns of populations and
national histories, under racism.
And, Suspension of the Resolved of the topic is anti-Black
Wilderson10’( Frank Red White and Black: Cinema and the structure of U.S. Antagonisms) pg. 57
I am calling for a different conceptual framework, predicated not on the subject-effect of cultural performance but
on the structure of political ontology, a framework that allows us to substitute a culture of politics for
a politics of culture.The value in this rests not simply in the way it would help us rethink cinema and performance, but in the way it can help us theorize what is at present only intuitive and
anecdotal: the unbridgeable gap between Black being and Human life. To put a finer point on it, such a framework mightenhance the explanatory power of
theory, art, and politics by destroying and perhaps restructuring the ethical range of our current
ensemble of questions. This has profound implications for non-Black film studies, Black film studies,
and African American studies writ large because they are currently entangled in a multicultural
paradigm that takes an interest in an insufficiently critical comparative analysis— that is, a
comparative analysis in pursuit of a coalition politics(if not in practice then at least as a theorizing
metaphor) which, by its very nature, crowds out and forecloses the Slave's grammar of suffering.
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D. Standards
1. Limits:
A. R-Spec provides the best limits for multiple forms of debate. We check abusive performance
arguments like irony affs. This means under our interpretation we provide the best
distribution of ground for traditional and performance teams.
B. R-Spec is key to kritik ground. Otherwise the AFF’s relationship to the topic can become a
moving target that spikes out of our K links.
C. AFF always gets the perm. R-Spec is key to checking back AFF bias in clash of civilization
debates.
D. Cross Ex Doesn’t Check – They can rearticulate their relationship to the topic throughout the
debate. Can’t check back moving target.
2. Education:
A. Moving Target destroys pragmatic education. Politics is always about our relation to power.
R-Spec ensures we learn pragmatic portable advocacy skills.
Wise 2009, TIM WISE 2009 (HEY DUDE, WHERE'S MY PRIVILEGE? RACE AND LAWBREAKING IN BLACK AND WHITE MAY 19, 2009
HTTP://WWW.ZMAG.ORG/ZNET/VIEWARTICLE/21490)
This is perhaps the most blatant example of white privilege imaginable: the ability to do what
you want, when you want, without fear of consequence, and then to have that behavior deemed
largely harmless, even when, for others, it would be viewed as dysfunctional, destructive, and
evidence of a profound cultural flaw. Well it's time to flip the script on all that; time to note
that it isn't the culture of black and brown youth, or working class youth (of whatever color),
that needs changing. They aren't the problem.They aren't the ones with inverted value systems. They aren't the ones whose presence on
campus is the problem. It's some among the ones with money and insufficient melanin who are the problem. And it's time we treated them like one, especially when, by their
behavior, they literally beg us to do so.
B. Blackness is intrinsic to any discussion of Latin America. Normalizing a discussion of our
relation to the topic guarantees this kind of education.
Torres, pg 3. 1998
Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean: Central America and Northern and Western South America, Arlene
the social systems and dynamics of communitiesand regions from areasof Latin America
and the Caribbean where blackness is significant in human social relations and historical and
contemporary discourse.The term black, according to Webster, is an adjective derived from latin constructs meaning, in a literal sense, " sooted,smoke black from flame," Its first meaning in the twentieth
century is "opposite to white."The "sooted" (darkened, blackened) concept derives in an earlier ( or deeper) etymology from the Latin flag rare, "flame," "burn" with a transformation to "flagrant."The
concept of blackness, as it is explored in these two volumes, reflects again and again on the ironies of its origins. A theme running through these booksis the dialectic between
the darkening influences of white domination in the African diaspora and the enlightened
cultural, social , and economic creativity produced and reproduced in the eternal fires of black
rebellion.
The two volumes introduced here present essays on
C. Locking discussion of Blackness into the Neg is anti-Black and destroys education
Wilderson-10- Frank Wilderson- Red , White, and Black- Cinema and the Strucutre of Usantagonisms- 51-52
This violence which turns a body into flesh, ripped apart literally and imaginatively, destroys the possibility of ontology
because it positions the Black in an infinite and indeterminately horrifying and open vulnerability, an object made available
(which is to say fungible) for any subject. As such, "the black has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white
man" or, more precisely, in the eyes of Humanity. 8 How is it that the Black appears to partner with the senior
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and junior partners of civil society (Whites and colored immigrants, respectively), when in point of fact
the Black is not in the world? The answer lies in the ruse of analogy. By acting as //the Black is present, coherent, and above all human, Black film theorists
are "allowed" to meditate on cinema only after "consenting" to a structural adjustment. 9 Such an adjustment, required for the "privilege" of participating in the political economy of academe, is not unlike the structural adjustment debtor nations must adhere to for
the privilege of securing a loan: signing on the dotted line means feigning ontological capacity regardless of the fact that Blackness is incapacity in its most pure and unadulterated form. It means theorizing Blackness as "borrowed institutionality." 10 Ronald
Judy's book (Dis)Forming the American Canon: AfricanArabic Slave Narratives and the Vernacular and his essay "On the Ques Page(s): 51, Red, white & black by Frank B. Wildersontion of Nigga Authenticity" critique the Black intelligentsia for building
aesthetic canons out of slave narratives and hardcore rap on the belief that Blacks can "write [themselves] into being." 11 Judy acknowledges that in such projects one finds genuine and rigorous attention to the issue that concerns Blacks as a social formation,
In writing
the death of the African body,Equiano['s eighteenth-century slave narrative] gains voice and emerges from the abject muteness of objectivity
into productive subjectivity. It should not be forgotten that the abject muteness of the body is not to not exist, to be without effect. The abject body is the very stuff, the material, of experiential effect.Writing the
death of the African body is an enforced abstraction. It is an interdiction of the African, a censorship
to be inarticulate, to not compel, to have no capacity to move, to be without effect, without agency, without
thought.The muted African body is overwritten by the Negro, and the Negro that emerges in the ink flow
ofEquiano's pen is that which has overwritten itself and so becomes the representation of the very body it
sits on. 12 Judy is an Afro-pessimist, not an Afrocentrist. For him the Negro is a symbol that cannot "enable the representation of meaning [because] it has no referent." 13Such is the gratuitousness of
the violence that made the Negro.
namely, resistance. But he is less than sanguine about the power of resistance which so many Black scholars impute to the slave narrative in particular and, by extension, to the "canon" of Black literature, Black music, and Black film:
D. Deliberative Education Good – Real deliberation is always tied to the material and the
everyday.
(MattStannard, Department of Communication and Journalism, University of Wyoming, Faculty Senate Speaker Series Speech, April 18, 2006, http://legalcommunication.blogspot.com/2006/08/deliberation-debate-and-democracyin.html)
. This blindness concerning materiality is precisely why
deliberative politics must include the voices of the materially disadvantaged. It is why the "perspective
of the oppressed" is not only morally necessary, but epistemologically necessary. Within Habermas’s communicative ethics is
We tend to think reason will prevail—or that if it doesn’t, we can explain its failure discursively
found both the classic Rawlsian test of how policies and arrangements affect the least advantaged members of society, and the Marxian imperative for emancipation from the artificial and enforced scarcity and silence
is vital to making what we do relevant—because even if democratic legitimacy depends on discursive justification, such justification occurs in a "dirty" material world,
the "excrement" of which Marx wrote as a metaphor for the day-to-day material challenges of ordinary people. The aggregate of those material challenges constitutes the
very conditions of humanity itself, and awareness of those conditions in their totality requires a
commitment to deliberation in all levels of the social world.
The complexity and interdependence of human society, combined with the control of political decision making—and political conversation itself—
in the hands of fewer and fewer technological "experts," the gradual exhaustion of material resources
and the organized circumvention of newer and more innovative resource development, places
humanity, and perhaps all life on earth, in a precarious position.
. This
of economics
3. Ethics:
A. Responsibility starts in the building of the 1AC.
B. Blackness is never germane to the topic unless we specify our relation to it. This is a unique
reason to vote neg. <card about how civil society is anti-black. Wilderson Anti-Black, Philiac
and phobic>
C. Our educational standard is revolutionary. If we aren’t learning how to challenge systems of
oppression then we need to stop talking.
Anthony Paul
Farley, 2005. “Perfecting Slavery.” Loyola University Chicago Law Journal, Volume 36 2005.Pps. 112-115
We who have slavery with us still are made up of memory and forgetting. Freedom is our calling. Slaves are not called. Education is required to pursue
our calling.
Education is dangerous to slavery, to the system of white-over-black.James Baldwin, speaking to
Harlem teachers, noted:The
paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one
begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a
person the ability to look at the world for her/himself, to make his own decisions, to say to her/himself this is
black or this is white, to decide for her/himself whether there is a God in heaven or not.35
Baldwin continued:[I]f I were a teacherin this school, or any Negro school . . . dealing with Negro children, who were in my care only a few
hours of every day and would then return to their homes and to the streets, children who have an apprehension of their future which with every hour
grows grimmer and darker,I would try to teach them—I would try to make them know—that those streets, those
houses, those dangers, those agonies by which they are surrounded are criminal. I would try to make each
child know that these things are a result of a criminal conspiracy to destroy her/him. I would teach her/him
that if she/he intends to be [an adult], she/he must at once decide that he is stronger than this conspiracy and
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that she/he must never make her/ his peace with it.And that one of his weapons for refusing to make his peace with it and for
destroying it depends on what he decides he is worth.36
D.
Key to pluralism – Under R-Spec you still have to debate the topic but you get to interpret how
you relate to the topic. This is key to checking back cultural and communicative assimilation .
VALDIVIA-SUTHERLAN 1998, Butte Community College 1998 Cynthia; “Celebrating Differences: Successfully Diversifying Forensics
Programs” National Communication Association’s 84th Annual meeting, November 22 http://www.phirhopi.org/spts/spkrpts05.2/sutherland.htm
In light of Albert and Triandis' argument, a possible explanation for a lack of cultural diversity within forensics' organizations to date is that forensics competition fosters a climate of assimilation, one in which "minority culture members adopt
the norms and values of the dominant group," rather than a climate of pluralism (Cox, 1991, p.35). The importance of the assimilative versus pluralistic environment is crystallized when we recognize that forensics activities uphold an
"argumentative perspective in examining problems and communicating with people" (Bartanen, 1995, p. 2). An argumentative perspective is one that involves the use of reasons in support of acts, beliefs, attitudes and values. Essentially a
westernized perspective founded on the philosophies of classic rhetoricians such as Aristotle, Protagoris, and Quintilian, and modern rhetoricians such as Stephen Toulmin, Chaim Perelman, and Richard Weaver, the argumentative perspective
promotes "rationality in the pursuit of knowledge," (Kim, 1985, in Samovar and Porter, 1991, p. 404). In contrast, an Eastern perspective "places an emphasis on perceiving and knowing things and events holistically and synthetically, rather
than analytically" (p. 403). The significance of these differences is marked, with Eastern thought comprised of vague, sometimes imprecise statements utilizing circular reasoning, while Western thought is comprised of logical and analytical
. In forensic competitions, then, where events are prescribed, speakers are
expected to conform to critic-as-audience expectations asserting the Western argumentative
perspective; such expectations and assertions equate to utilization of standardized events and
conformity constraints.Consequently, in prepared platform speaking events such as persuasive or informative speaking, as well as limited preparation events like impromptu and extemporaneous speaking,
categorizations, utilizing linear reasoning
critics expect to and do hear speeches conforming to Western rhetorical conventions: an introduction with a thesis and preview; a body made up of three to five points, well supported by evidence; and a conclusion that reviews and sums up what
has been presented. In addition to this basic format, critics will also be evaluating clarity and precision of language, careful enunciation and correct pronunciation of vocabulary, and nonverbal behaviors like direct eye contact, appropriate facial
In events like debate, critics will evaluate speakers on the analytical expertise with
which they approach the topic, the amount and credibility of their evidence, and their
rhetorical strategies in attempting to defeat opponents.Finally, critics evaluating oral interpretive events not only assess
expressions, and vocalics.
the ability of speakers to develop characterizations and emotive levels, but also to create introductions functioning as arguments supported by the
competitions function monoculturally, effectively
offering the dominant Westernized perspective. Yet forensic programs exist in environments
that are not monocultural. Consequently, the polycultural environment within which forensics
thrives contains a multiplicity of communicative styles -- styles that have been for the most part
ignored, marginalized, and silencedin the world of competitive speech and debate. ...
literature presented.prescribed
in such a manner,forensic
E. White Supremacy Bad – Contextualizing education is key to checking back the invisibility of
whiteness. This concern is apriori for debate. If they don’t spec their R then they justify whiteness.
This is an independent voter because debaters of color will quit debate and we all know that debaters
of color are the future.
DSRB,THE HARSH REALITIES OF “ACTING BLACK”: HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLICY DEBATERS NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION THROUGH RACIAL PERFORMANCE AND STYLE, PHD, University of Georgia,2008
The stylistic norms of the policy debate community are inextricably attached to the social performance
of identity.In other words, if thestylistic norms privilege the stylistic choices of white, straight,
economically privileged males
then difference marks one
as other unless the individual performs according to those stylistic and identity-based
norms. Racially and/or ethnically different bodies must perform themselves according
to the cultural norms of the debate community
it can often mean changing one’s
, as is clearly indicated by their statistical representation at the heights of competitive success,
. For UDL students
appearance, standardizing language practices, eschewing cultural practices at least while participating
in debate.In essence, students of color are performatively whitened in order to have an opportunity for
achieving in debate competitions. “Acting black” or brown is problematic because those performative
identities are not privileged in terms of successful participation.In fact, they signify a difference, an
opposite, a negative differential. It is not that the debate community actively operates to exclude
based on race, instead it is an exclusion based on racial performance, i.e., how the differentially
colored body chooses to style itself.So, if the stylistic procedures and practices of the national policy
debate community function to exclude those considered other, then engaging style might be a tactical
attack on the viability and maintenance of the traditional system. Once Warner became critical of the UDL he made the difficult choice of rejecting the traditional
debate practices he had heretofore participated in and developed new methods of debate competition, judging, and coaching.
F. Fairness – The AFF has to say how they Spec their R for us to even begin an engaged discussion.
Otherwise we will continue to have clash of civilization debates in which neither side hears each
other. This is also key to political pedagogy.
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Shively, yes THAT Shively, 1997(Ruth Lessl, also former professor of political science at Texas A&M University, Compromised Goods: A Realist Critique of Constructionist Politics, p. 131)
For another thing,to the extent that they are committed to giving students the intellectual skills they need to be
strong participants in democracy, they should provide them with opportunities to apply their own
perspectives to political topics.Inasmuch as many of their students are realists, educatorsshould provide them opportunitiesto look at political
issue from a realist perspective: to understand how their own traditions and deeper assumptions apply to questions
and issues they will need to address in their political lives. Without this, students leave the
university with little sense of how their deeper commitments relate to practical, political debate,
and we should not be surprised, therefore, when they take incoherent moral stands or are swayed
by shallow, emotional appeals. These problems arise neither from the lack of belief on their part,
or from the irrelevancy of their beliefs. It is rather that they have been discouraged from
attempting to make rational connections in these matters, and they have not been taught the skills
needed to defend and apply their real moral commitments to political questions.
E. There is In-Round and Out-of-Round Abuse: What we justify matters for our wellbeing in debates
and what becomes possible in the debate community. It’s too late for the AFF to spec their R now.
Damage is done.
F. Voter for Ethics, Limits and Education
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Blackness Dis Ad
Uniqueness -With no resolve spec- the 1ac link is the disposition they take in the 1ac.
There method keeps Blackness locked neg on every topic.
Cross apply theVilorio 13, Torres 98, as the links the relationship Blackness share
with the debate community via the resolution. Resolve means the responsibility is of
allour ofperformative politics. Its what they justify not what they did just in this round.
So turning a blind eye to blackness via it being germane to the topic replicates
Blackness as suspect.
Link – Chain of Equivalence – Sexton
Civil Society is inherently violent against
Blacks- the “hunting season” card
Frank Wilderson, III- 2003- Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society? –Online - http://ucipc.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/frank_gramsci.pdf
The pedagogical implications are self-evident. For Gramsci this is a process through which various strata of the class struggling for
dominance achieve “historical self-awareness” (Gramsci 333-35). And for this reason civil society[s] itself is not the bane of workers because its
constituent elements (as opposed to the way those elements are combined) are not anti-worker. 1 Therefore: [Gramsci’s] purpose is not to
repress civil society or to restrict its space but rather to develop a revolutionary strategy (a “war of position”) that would
be employed precisely in the arena of civil society,with the aim of disabling the coercive apparatus of the state ,
gaining access to political power, and creating the conditions that could give rise to a consensual society wherein no individual or group is
reduced to a subaltern. (Buttigieg 7) At this moment (the end of subalternity by way of the destruction of the ruling class) the State
becomes “ethical.” Gramsci writes: Every State is ethical in as much as one of its most important functions is to raise the great mass of the
population to a particular cultural and moral level, a level (or type) which corresponds to the needs of the productive forces for development,
and hence to the interests of the ruling classes. (Prison Notebooks 258) He suggests that schools and courts perform this function for the
State, before describing the “so-called private initiatives and activities” which form the hegemonic apparatuses of the ruling class. But these
private initiatives are not “ethical” precisely because of their ability to exist in tandem with the State (i.e., newspapers, cinema, guild associations)
and/or due to their function as its outright handmaidens (i.e., lobbyists, PACs). [Therefore] only the social group [his code word for
“class,” in an attempt to secure the Notebooks’ safe passage past Mussolini’s prison censors] that poses the end of the State and its
own end as the target to be achieved can create an ethical State—i.e. one which tends to put an end to the internal divisions of
the ruled…and to create a technically and morally unitary social organism. (259) In other words, “ civil society can only be the site of
universal freedom when it extends to the point of becoming the state, that is, when the need for political
society is obviated” (Buttigieg 30). “[T]he phenomenon
of ‘subordination’…occurs without coercion; it is an instance of
power that is exercised and extended in civil society, resulting in the hegemony of one class over others who, for their part, acquiesce to it willingly or,
as Gramsci puts it, ‘spontaneously’” (Ibid 22). What appears to be spontaneous is a product of consent manufactured by intellectuals of the
ruling class. Again, not only is consent manufactured but it is backed up by coercion-in-reserve, what Gramsci calls political society: the courts, the
army, the police, and, for the past 57 years, the atomic bomb. It is true that Gramsci acknowledges no organic division between
political society and civil society. He makes the division for methodological purposes. There is one organism, “the
modern bourgeois-liberal state” (Buttigieg 28), but there are two qualitatively different kinds of apparatuses: on the one hand, the ensemble of socalled private associations and ideological invitations to participate in a wide and varied play of consensus making strategies, civil society,
and on the other hand, a set of enforcement structures which kick in when that ensemble is regressive or can no longer lead, political
society. But Gramsci would have us believe not that White positionality emerges and is elaborated on the
terrain of civil society and encounters coercion when civil society is not expansive enough to embrace the idea
of freedom for all, but that all positionalities emerge and are elaborated on the terrain of civil
society.Gramscidoes not racialize this birth, elaboration, and stunting, or re-emergence, of human
subjectivity—because civil society, supposedly, elaborates all subjectivity and so there is no
need for such specificity. Anglo-American Gramscians like Buttigieg and Sassoon, and U.S. activists in
the anti-globalization movement whose unspoken grammar is predicated on Gramsci’s assumptive logic
continue this tradition of unraced positionality which allows them to posit the valency of Wars of Position for Blacks and
Whites alike. They assume that all subjects are positioned in such a way as to have their consent solicited and to,
furthermore, be able to extend their consent “spontaneously.”This is profoundly problematicif only—
leaving revolution aside for the moment—at the level of analysis; for it assumes that hegemony with its
three constituent elements (influence, leadership, consent) is the modality which must be either inculcated or
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breached, if one is to either avoid or incur, respectively, the violence of the State. However, one of the primary claims of this
essay is that, whereas the consent of Black people may seem to be called upon, its withdrawal does not precipitate a “crisis in authority.” Put another way,
the transformation of Black people’s acquiescent “common sense” into revolutionary “good sense” is an
extenuating circumstance, but not the catalyst, of State violence against Black people.State violence against the
Black body, as Martinot and Sexton suggest in their introduction, is not contingent, it is structural and, above
all,gratuitous. Therefore, Gramscian wisdom cannot imagine the emergence, elaboration, and stunting of
a subject by way, not of the contingency of violence resulting in a “crisis of authority,” but by way of direct relations
of force. This is remarkable, and unfortunate, given the fact that the emergence of the slave, the subject-effect of an ensemble of direct relations of
force, marks the emergence of capitalism itself. Let us put a finer point on it: violence towards the Black body is the
precondition for the existence of Gramsci’s single entity “the modern bourgeois- state” with its
divided apparatus, political society and civil society.This is to say violence against Black people is
ontological and gratuitous as opposed to ideological and contingent. Furthermore, no magical moment (i.e.,
1865) transformed, paradigmatically, the Black body’s relation to this entity 2 . In this regard, the
hegemonic advances within civil society by the Left hold out no more possibility for Black life
than the coercive backlash of political society.What many political theorists have either missed or
ignored is that a crisis of authority that might take place by way of a Left expansion of civil society,
further instantiates, rather than dismantles, the authority of Whiteness.Black death is the modern
bourgeois-state’s recreational pastime, but the hunting season is not confined to the time (and
place) of political society; Blacks are fair game as a result of a progressively expanding civil
society as well.
BLACK FOLKS HAVE BE POSITIONED AS A SITE OF ABSOLUTE DERELICTION PRECISELY BECAUSE THE
APCOLYPSE HAS ALREADY HAPPENED TO THEM. ALL OF THE POSITIVIST FORMULATIONS THAT THE
RESOLUTION ATTEMPTS TO LEGISLATE WOULD HAVE A TYPICAL DEBATER ATTEMPT TO REMEDY OR AT
HE VERY LEAST STAVE OFF SOME CATASTROPHE—BUT BLACK FOLKS ARE OUTSIDE OF THE RELATIONS
OF SOVEREIGNTY THAT THE RESOLUTION ASSUMES.
Sexton 06 (Radical History Review Issue 95 (Spring 2006): 250–61)
the institution of transatlantic racial slavery — whose
political and economic relations constitute, present tense, the social fabric of Western
modernity in general, of the Americas in particular, and of the United States
most acutely — cannot be explained (away) by the acquisition of fixed capital, the
minimization of variable capital, or the maximization of profits, much less by the
dictates of gunboat diplomacy, the expansion of strategic overseas military installations,
or the idiosyncrasies of the White House. It may seem so at times, but only
insofar ascontemporary observers, or our historical counterparts, fundamentally
misrecognize the nature of racial slavery: as a brutal regime of labor exploitation; as
We can note furtherthat
the atrocious adjunct to land conquest and the extermination, containment, and/or
forced assimilation of indigenous peoples; or as an endeavor functional to, rather
than in excess of and at times at odds with, the advent and maturation of Eurocentric
capitalism.
Of course, all of these procedures have been important to the history of
racial slavery (and vice versa), but none is essential to its origins, its development
252 Radical History Review
and, above all, its pernicious afterlife.1 Rather, enslavement — the inaugural enterprise
for the age of Europe, the precondition for the American century and its coveted
sequel — is enabled by and dependent on the most basic of operations: symbolic
and material immobilization, the absolute divestment of sovereignty at the site of
the black body: its freedom of movement, its conditions of labor, its physical and
emotional sustenance, its social and sexual reproduction, its political and cultural
representation.Beyond its economic utility,this rendering of the black as the object
of dispossession par excellence —object of accumulation, prototypical commodity,
captive flesh — structures indelibly the historical proliferation of modern conceptions
of sovereignty that now dominate political and legal discourse globally and provide
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the crucial frames of intelligibility for both imperialism and anti-imperialism,
empire and its discontents. Withblacks barred by definition from the very notion of
the sovereign(whatever their nominal legal status, wherever their tentative place of
residence), those not marked by the material and symbolic stigma of slavery have the
exclusive and positive capacity to debate about sovereignty: to trivialize its importance
and rationalize its violation or to struggle in its defense , to name and lament
its loss, and wage war for its recovery.
Blacks, then, suffer a peculiar relation to the U.S. empire in the historic
instance:neither its subjects (certainly not its authors or beneficiaries) nor its objects
(at least not in the most direct sense).
Link
Our contention is that it is unethical to be free in the presence of the slave. And the affirmative clearly
demonstrates both capacity and freedom. Yes this links to all affirmatives. An neg vote represents the
judge take a stand on whether or not we should active participants in our education. This debate is
about how knowledge is produced and reproduce. Being clear about the pedagogical purpose of any
political stance is critical. Not only for possible clash but more importantly maximizing one
educational opportunity. While the actual completion of the act is structurally impossible, the
contemplation of questions it presents are the only way to situate debate on true questions of ethics.
Rejection of this call manifests the fundamental disavow of black suffering that affirms the capacity
and ethicalility of the aff team while black suffering that makes that capacity intelligible.
This mediation is precursor to all legal interrogations, for only here can the epistemological blindness of white
academia be confronted with the fundamental ethic truth that turns assumptive logic of all their scholarship
on its head; for it is Incapacity, not Agency, that is the only ethic stance. In a world of SLAVES it is
UNETHICAL TO BE FREE. It is only in moments of Incapacity, the judges submission to the call, can ethics
and thus all subsequent legal question become coherent
Wilderson-10- Frank Wilderson- Red , White, and Black- Cinema and the Strucutre of Us- antagonisms
Due to the presence of prior existing relations in a world of contemporaries, no "fear of the fear of the world"
is at stake when White theorists meditate ontologically (whether through a cultural object such as film or on a set
of intellectual protocols) and find—as do their Black colleagues—capacity everywhere. It would be more accurate
to say not that they find capacity everywhere, since they do not look everywhere, but that they find it where
they are, among their "contemporaries," and assume its ubiquity. Unlike the Negro, there is nothing homeostatic
about the White (or other Humans). If the Black is death personified, the White is the personification of diversity, of life
itself. As Richard Dyer reminds us, "The invisibility of whiteness as a racial position in white ... discourse is of a piece
with its ubiquity. When I said above that this book wasn't merely seeking to fill a gap in the analysis of racial imagery, I
reproduced the idea that there is no discussion of white people. In fact for most of the time white people speak
about nothing but white people, it's just that we couch it in terms of 'people' in general.. . . Yet precisely
because of this and their placing as norm [Whites] seem not to be represented to themselves as whites but as
people who are variously gendered, classed, sexualised and abled." 25 Thus the threat of discovering oneself in
one's own scholarly or artistic endeavors as "comparison" is not a fate that awaits White academics. White
academics' disavowal of Black death as modernity's condition of possibility (their inability to imagine their
productive subjectivity as an effect of the Negro) 26 stems not from the unbearable terror of that (non)selfdiscovery always already awaiting the Black, but from the fact that, save brief and infrequent conjunctures of
large-scale Black violence (eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave revolts and twentieth-century "urban unrest"), the
socius provides no catalyst for White avowal. In short, thought—essential, ontological thought—is all but
impossible in White cultural and political theory—but it is not (as we will see with Monsters Ball in part 4)
impossible in the unconscious of the White film itself. This state of affairs, the unbearable hydraulics of Black
disavowal and the sweetness and light of White disavowal, is best encapsulated in the shorthand expression
"social stability," for it guarantees the civility of civil society. Put anecdotally, but nonetheless to the point, when
pulled individually by the button, both inmate and guard might be in favor of "criminal rehabilitation," both might
even believe that the warden is a "swell guy," 27 and in their enthusiasm they both might even take for granted that
by "criminal" they are speaking of the inmates and not the guards, or for that matter the warden. However, while the
shared experiences in the political economy of the prison—a common policy agenda, that is, rehabilitation—or
the shared identifications in the libidinal economy of prison—the unconscious captation of both inmate and guard by
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the image of the warden—may certainly be important to any meditation on either prison economy, they are certainly
not essential to such reflection. This means that they cannot break in on the mutually exclusive constituent
elements that make the positions of inmate and guard irreconcilable, at least, not with such a force as to rupture
that positional exclusivity and bring about the end of the (prison) world. This holds true regardless of the fact that the
mobility of symbolic material, that is, the idea of "criminal rehabilitation" and the agreement on who constitutes a
criminal, and the mobility of imaginary captation, that is, the image of the warden, are both without limit in their capacity
for transgression. The libidinal economy of modernity and its attendant cartography (the Western Hemisphere, the
United States, or civil society as a construct) achieves its structure of unconscious exchange by way of a "thanatology"
in which Blackness overdetermines the embodiment of impossibility, incoherence, and incapacity. Furthermore,
political economy achieves its symbolic (political or economic) capacity and structure of preconscious exchange by
way of a similar thanatology. Judy goes so far as to say that at the crux of modernity's crisis is the dilemma
"how to represent the Negro as being demonstrably human within the terms of the law." 28 Here, of course, he
does not mean "law" in a juridical sense but rather "law" as a portal of intelligibility through which one can be
said to have the capacity to access "Reason" and thus be recognized and incorporated as a bona fide subject.
Through Judy's analysis of the Negro (the slave) as modernity's necessity (the Other that Humanity is not: "Simple
enough one has only not to be a nigger"), that which kick-starts and sustains the production of the Western
Hemisphere, we can begin to make the transition from the parasitic necessity of Whiteness in libidinal economy to its
parasitic necessity in political economy. Whiteness is parasitic because it monumentalizes its subjective
capacity, its lush cartography, in direct proportion to the wasteland of Black incapacity. By "capacity" I have
meant something more comprehensive than "the event" and its causal elements and something more
indeterminate than "agency." We should think of it as a kind of facility or matrix through which possibility
itself—whether tragic or triumphant—can be elaborated: the ebb and flow between, on the one hand, "empty
speech," racist actions, repressive laws, and institutional coherence and, on the other hand, "full speech,"
armed insurrection, and the institutional ennui. This is what I mean by capacity. It is a far cry from Spillers's state
of "being for the captor" and Judy's "muted African body," a far cry from pure abject- or objectness: without thought,
without agency, "with no capacity to move." 29 In short, White (Human) capacity, in advance of the event of
discrimination or oppression, is parasitic on Black Without the Negro, capacity itself is incoherent, uncertain
incapacity: 30 at best.
Wilderson concludes
Again, if accumulation and fungibility are the modalities through which embodied Blackness is positioned as incapacity,
then genocide is that modality through which embodied Redness is positioned as incapacity. Ontological incapacity,
I have inferred and here state forthright, is the constituent element of ethics. Put another way, one cannot
embody capacity and be, simultaneously, ethical. Where there are Slaves it is unethical to be free. The
Settler/Master's capacity, I have argued, is a function of exploitation and alienation; and the Slave's incapacity is
elaborated by accumulation and fungibility. But the "Savage" is positioned, structurally, by subjective capacity and
objective incapacity, by sovereignty and genocide, respectively. The Indian's liminal status in political economy, how
her or his position shuttles between the incapacity of a genocided object and the capacity of a sovereign subject,
coupled with the fact that Redness does not overdetermine the thanatology of libidinal economy (this liminal capacity
within political economy and complete freedom from incapacity within libidinal economy) raises serious doubts about
the status of "Savage" ethicality vis-a-vis the triangulated structure (Red, White, and Black) of antagonisms. Clearly,
the coherence of Whiteness as a structural position in modernity depends on the capacity to be free from genocide,
perhaps not as a historical experience, but at least as a positioning modality. This embodied capacity (genocidal
immunity) of Whiteness jettisons the White/Red relation from that of a conflict and marks it as an antagonism: it stains
it with irreconcilability. Here, the Indian comes into being and is positioned by an a priori violence of genocide.
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Cross apply the Wilderson 08, 10, DSRB 08, as the impact to framing of Blackness out the topic .
This the same unethical relationship the makes the black body as slave ,as an fungible object in an out
of the debate community. Any representational politics, that seek to be free of this burden of freedom
is claiming to be free in the face of the slave. That internal link that makes Black violence in every
affbut especially amongst the resolved. Freedom always comes at a price.
THE “VIEW FROM NOWHERE” THAT MOST PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE FOSTERS
CANNOT THEORIZE FOR THE BLACK BODY OR HOPE TO SOLVE FOR THE HARMS OF
WHITE SUPREMACY
Yancy 05,Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 19.4 (2005) 215-241
I write out of a personal existential context. This context is a profound source of knowledge
connected to my "raced" body.Hence,I write from a place of lived embodied experience, a site of
exposure.In philosophy, the only thing that we are taught to "expose" is a weak argument, a
fallacy, or someone's "inferior" reasoning power. The embodied self is bracketed and
deemed irrelevant to theory, superfluous and cumbersome in one's search for truth. It is
best, or so we are told, to reason from nowhere. Hence, the white philosopher/author
presumes to speak for all of "us" without the slightest mention of his or her "raced"
identity.Self-consciously writing as a white male philosopher, Crispin Sartwell observes:
Left to my own devices, I disappear as an author. That is the "whiteness" of my authorship. This whiteness of authorship is, for us, a form of
authority; to speak (apparently) from nowhere, for everyone, is empowering, though one wields power here only by becoming lost to oneself. But
such an authorship and authority is also pleasurable: it yields the pleasure of self-forgetting or [End Page 215] apparent transcendence of the
mundane and the particular, and the pleasure of power expressed in the "comprehension" of a range of materials.
(1998, 6)
To theorize the Black body one must "turn to the [Black] body as the radix for interpreting racial
experience"(Johnson [1993, 600]).1It is important to note that this particular strategy also functions as a lens
through which to theorize and critique whiteness; for the Black body's "racial" experience is fundamentally
linked to the oppressive modalities of the "raced" white body. However, there is no denying that my own "racial"
experiences or the social performances of whiteness can become objects of critical reflection. In this paper,my
objective is to describe and theorize situations where the Black body's subjectivity, its lived reality, is reduced
to instantiations of the white imaginary, resulting in what I refer to as "the phenomenological return of the
Black body. These instantiations are embedded within and evolve out of the complex social and historical
interstices of whites' efforts at self-construction through complex acts of erasure vis-à-vis Black people.These
acts of self-construction, however, are myths/ideological constructions predicated upon maintaining white power. As James Snead has
noted,"Mythification is the replacement of history with a surrogate ideology of [white] elevation or [Black]
demotion along a scale of human value"(Snead 1994, 4).
Link -predictable scripting of blackness – Script, shoot and role’em- you get a role , role, role. As
passive Directors of the shooting of___(insert the name of the Aff)__ they keep everything at eye level.
“they have incorporated colored folks into our fold, whenever possible and at our own pace, provided
they’re team players, speak highly of us, pretend to care what we’re thinking, are highly qualified,
blah, blah, blah…but, and this is key, we won’t entertain the rancor which shits on our fantasy space.
We’ve killed too many Indians, worked too many Chinese and Chicano fingers to the bone, set in
motion the incarcerated genocide of too many Black folks,
Unique debate impact.This debate was about debating about debate. Every team should be ready to
debate about the impact of their own practice. Its not what you do its what you justify. Because you
never check the structure that makes other Aff’s or even the impacts in Aff possible one’s
performance then just one act who at best may risk spill over. This is not us framing you, but the
1ac’s performative representational politics, this impact is terminal to your stylistic representation.
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Not only do they risk the representational politics of race and gender that frames the people of the 1ac
as ‘things’ to be framed.
Freeze- This an impact turn. Any possible education claims of the Aff are turned at the point in which
the 1ac’s resolve is not specified. But framing is endemic debate for Black students, and at the point
the 1ac’s representational politics stand silent in the face of the academic lynching of Black bodies you
are the politics that set the scene for the institutional “pinic” as “pick a nigger” is the debate continued
and justifiable norm.
Shift Moving target- Blackness never come a legitimate political stance, killing k aff ‘s like your in
other rounds thus making students who speak of Blackness as targets on every topic on either side.
DSRB, GHETTO KIDS GONE GOOD,pg 83, 2012
A close examination of UDL media coverage reveals more subtle and complex layers of meaning embedded within the lines of human-interest
stories. Through the lens of Jackson's theory of media scripting, it is possible to highlight the manner in which the UDL news stories invite
audiences to embrace certain assumptions about inner-city youths, the debate activity, and the representational politics of race and
gender. The media framing ofblack youths, given the significance of the black body in the U.S. social narrative,
does not determine but suggests available scripts from which to make young black bodies intelligible.For this
analysis, I am interested in the inscription of corporeal bodies, the tangiblesurface of the body and its material relation to
other bodies in the social structure.Jackson (2006) argues that the body is a "discursive text" that can be written and
rewrittenupon (p. 7). This process of writing and rewriting the body is bound by "prior inscriptions"of the body
as a socio-historical construct (Jackson, 2006, p. 7). Thus,the body is neverfree of inscriptions. Inscriptions are
always already a necessary condition of the intelligibilityof social bodies.The body carries certain markers
(like sex, race, and ethnicity) that are madeintelligible through the normative field of social interaction. Jackson
(2006) notes:As with any theatrical script, the script is the text, and the act of scripting is the writing of the text. Therefore,to script someone
else's body is to actively inscribe or figuratively place one's self, worldview, or ascriptions onto another
projected text, which often requires dislocating the original text and redefining the newlyaffected or mirrored
text as the counterpositional or oppositional Other. (p. 53) In other words,the process of inscription is bound by the
very social discourses that bring a subject into being as black. This process of subjection requires the
repetition of certainscripts to maintain the constitution of the subject as a racialized body. Scripting is a part of the very
process ofsubjectification. Certain inscriptions have more discursive purchase, as they coincide with other discourses and
in relation to other apparatuses of power-both institutional and cultural-that produce and are produced by the
process of subjection.For Jackson (2006^ in order to understand how the scripting process functions in the
development of racial and gender stereotypes,one must look specifically to the manner inwhich scripts are
oveilaid on corporeal bodies to signify otherness, especially in the processof dominant viewpoints asserting themselves
as natural, normalized perspectives. Withinnews frames about poor urban communities of color, the frame often suggests the
availablescripts by which bodies of color may be read based on the social ideologies surrounding race,class,
and gender within U.S. society. The frame is a narrative container, it (en)framesparticular narrative foci. Although the
frame is not deterministic, it (re)produces or (re)iteratesscripts that are intelligible for the intended audience. The
process of reiteration is criticalbecause it is the incessant reproduction of the script attached to bodies that
allows particularscripts to take hold of the social imagination (Gillbom, 2005, p. 490).
Bodily inscriptions inherently unstable, which is why it becomes necessary to repeat orreiterate such inscriptions
for the body to remain intelligible within specific kinds of frames.In this context, Jackson's (2006) concept of scripting is
uniquely insightful for this study as itaccounts for how the black body is inscribed in (and by) the public
imagination, and itrequires an interrogation of the significance of the body as a means of making media
scriptsintelligible. For Jackson, the body seems to function as a symbolic device that interacts withthe
individual's prior knowledge of certain kinds of bodies, particularly those bodies markedby Otherness.
Jackson's (2006) ar.alysis focuses on the scripting of the black male body in U.S. popular culture, simultaneously situating popular
discourse in articulation with racialized scripts across various media. Jackson begins by tracing the images of blackness in
early U.S. popular culture including Uncle Tom, Sambo, the Coon, the Buck, the Jezebel, and the Tragic
Mulatto, images that he argues chain out in contemporary popular culture. He notes that there is an
interrelationship between historical images and narratives of blackness and thescripting of black bodies
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through public discourses. The negative discourses surroundingboth black culture and black bodies are
birthed from early colonial and imperial interactionwith Africa. As European expansionism began to seek
control over African resources, theresulting colonial rule of African nations and the development of the
trans-Atlantic slavetrade required a discursive framing with which to justify Europeans' and EuroAmericans'insouciance toward atrocity. Characterizations of the black body and black culture asabnormal,
irrational, intellectually inferior, culturally deficient, violent, licentious, and potentiallycriminal have
permeated colonial and post-colonial discourse about blackness. Therepetition of these inscriptions of
blackness produces a discursive field through which blackbodies become intelligible to the social
imagination.
It is not that the black body has no agency in responding to racialized inscriptions . Thosemarked by blackness
produce and are produced by these prior inscriptions. The black body,despite its agency, is confined within the
field of racialization. Particularly in the context ofnews media representation, the black body has limited control over the
scripting of themeanings attached to and associated with blackness. Given that the news media repetitivelyreuse
specific framing practices in association with inner-city black youth, the frame providesa conceptual limit on any
attempt to reinscript the bodies of black youths through transformativenarratives. This essay, therefore, is
concerned with how the media recycle frames ofblack criminality, familial dysfunction, cind intellectual
inferiority to script subject positionsfor the bodies of the black youths featured in inspirational human-interest
stories.
Impact – Black victimization.cross apply Wilderson 10’ cultural polticsvs a poltics of culture.
H.rap brown prove ubiquitous violence that is endemic via the framing of Black as negative resolve
that Aff took.
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FOR THE BLOCK: The time has come to normalize a discussion of power relations in debate
practice. Only R-Spec opens space for a discussion of internal others to the United States and Latin
America. This kind of education is at the heart of any ethical discussion of US-Latin America
relations and is key to producing scholarship that helps Black and Brown students in debate.
h.rap brown, die nigger die,pg Pg.67-69
.
All black people are involved in the struggle. Revolutionaries are not necessarily born poor or in the ghetto. There is a role for every person in revolution if he is revolutionary. You don’t have to throw a Molotov cocktail to be a revolutionary
One thing which the Black college student can do is to begin to legitimatize the brother’s actions begin to articulate his position, because the college student has the skills that the blood doesn’t
have. It reminds me of the old story about the father and his son. The son comes to the father and says, “You told me that the loin was the king of the jungle. Yet in every story I read, the man always beats
the lion. Why is that?” The father looks at the son and says, “Son, the story will always end the same until the lion learns how to write.” If you don’t begin to tell your own
story, you will always be Aunt Jemima; you will always be “rioting.” You must begin to articulate
a position of your own. The Black college student, if he is revolutionary, can help Black people to
purge themselves of the misinformation that they’ve been fed all lives.White nationalism has been
instilled in us whether we know it or not.We have been told that George Washington is no hero of blacks. He had 13 children and none by Martha. They were slaves. They tell us we should
celebrate Christopher Columbus was a 15th century Eisenhower. He was so dumb. He was trying to get to India Did you ever see where India is on a map?But America has the power to legitimatize these people and make them heroes in
. America has negroes in the dilemma of thinking that everything black is bad. Black cows
don’t give good milk. Black hens don’t lay eggs. Black mail is bad. You wear black to funerals and
white to weddings. Angel food cake is white, devils food cake is black. And all good guys wear white hats. And black people fall for it.
our minds
Everything black is bad. That’s white nationalism. And they tell you, you cant talk about black nationalism. So how do you combat it if you grow up telling your children that they respect Santa Claus. Come Dec
25 is santaclaus is so white that he slides down a black chimney and comes out white. But you tell your children that santaclaus brought these toys and you take them to see the white santaclaus. So therefore it
becomes instilled in their minds that santaclaus is good because santaclaus is white. Thus we help foster that type of white nationalism. You must begin to define for yourself; you must begin to define your black
heritage. You must begin to investigate and learn on your own. They will never tell you that Hannibal is black. They’ll never tell you that there were black societies back in the 16 th century and were the most
modern at that time and the highest degree of their culture existed there. Every time you open a book here in America, they gonna show you uncle tom’s cabin or they gonna show you double O soul with a piece
that a black student gets is irrelevant,
fruitless and worthless unless he uses it to define and articulate positions that are relevant to the
black people.It does you no good to come to school and cross the burning sand. Hell you aint never get off the burning sand. Pledging is no good for black people in America. When the man moves
of watermelon.It is the responsibility of the black college student to combat this sort of thing
. The education
against you, your Omega sticker does not mean that he is going to pass you by. All it mean is he might take you to a different camp. If you must pledge, pledge to be a revolutionary. You are involved in the
struggle whether you want to be or not. Your badge of involvement is your skin. Therefore, you got to quit walking around talking about those people out there acting crazy. Them!! That’s you!! Anything we do
will have a profound impact on
you.
At: CX and Lit checks
1. Ethically guts the meaning of the 1ac to footnote Blackness in this topic
2. If lit checks slin
1.THE DEBATE COMMUNITY FUNCTIONS FROM THE STANDPOINT OF REFORM THAT
ACTS AS A SMOKE SCREEN WHICH KEEPS US FROM ENGAGING IN THE ANTAGONISM
THAT IS NECESSARY FOR THE DESTRUCTION OF THE WHITE ORDER.
2.) WHITE PEOPLE ARE GUILTY TILL PROVEN INNOCENT, WHICH REALLY MEANS WE
MUST ADDRESS THE WAY THAT THEIR WHITENESS EFFECTS THEIR PERFORMANCE.
Wilderson III, former member of the Umkhonto we Sizwe, 2008 [Frank B., Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid South End
Press, pg. 407-411] heyo
So, let’s bust “We” wide open and start at the end: White people are guilty until proven innocent. Fuck the compositional moves of substantiation and supporting evidence: I was at a conference in West
Oakland last week where a thousand Black folks substantiated it a thousand different ways. You’re free to go to West Oakland, find them, talk to them, get all the proof you need. You can drive three hours to the
mountains, so you sure as hell can cut the time in half to drive to the inner city. Knock on any door. Anyone who knows 20 to 30 black folks, intimately—and if you don’t know 12 then you’re not living in America,
White people are guilty until proven innocent.Whites are guilty of being friends with each
Whites are
guilty of wanting stability and reform.
White people,like Mr. Harold and those in the English Division,are guilty of asking themselves the question, How
can we maintain the maximum amount of order (liberals at Cabrillo use euphemisms like peace, harmony, stability),with the minimum
amount of change, while presenting ourselves—if but only to ourselves—as having the best of all possible
intentions. Good people. Good intentions. White people arethe only species, human or
you’re living in White America—knows the statement to be true.
other, of standing up for their rights, of pledging allegiance to the flag, of reproducing concepts like fairness, meritocracy, balance, standards, norms, harmony between the races. Most of all,
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otherwise, capable of transforming the dross of good intentions into the gold of grand
intentions, and naming it “change.”
These passive revolutions, fire and brimstone conflicts over which institutional reform is better than
the other one, provide a smoke screen—a diversionary play of interlocutions—that keep
real and necessary antagonisms at bay. White people are thus able to go home each night,
perhaps a little wounded, but feeling betterfor having made Cabrillo a better place…for everyone…
Before such hubris at high places makes us all a little too giddy, let me offer a cautionary note: it’s scientifically impossible to manufacture shinola out of shit. But White liberals keep on trying and end
White people love their jobs, they love their institutions, they
love their country, most of all they love each other. And every Black or Brown body that
doesn’t love the things you love is a threat to your love for each other. A threat to your
fantasy space, your terrain of shared pleasures.
up spending a lifetime not knowing shit from shinola. Because
incorporating Black and Brown bodies to either term of the debate. What choice does one have? The
White people are guilty of structuring debates which reproduce the
institution and the institution reproduces America and America is always and everywhere a bad
thing—this term is never on the tale, because the level of abstraction is too high for White liberals. They’ve got
too much at stake: their friends, their family,their way of life. Let’s keep it all at eye level, where Whites
can keep on eye on everything. So the Black body is incorporated. Because to be
unincorporated is to say that what White liberals find valuable I have no use for. This, of course, is antiinstitutional and shows a lack of breeding, not to mention a lack of gratitude for all the noblesse oblige which has been extended to the person of color to begin with. “We will incorporate
colored folks into our fold, whenever possible and at our own pace, provided they’re team
players, speak highly of us, pretend to care what we’re thinking, are highly qualified, blah, blah,
blah…but, and this is key, we won’t entertain the rancor which shits on our fantasy space. We’ve
killed too many Indians, worked too many Chinese and Chicano fingers to the bone, set in
motion the incarcerated genocide of too many Black folks, and we’ve spent too much time at the beach, or in our gardens, or hiking in
Passive revolutions have a way of
third (possible, but always unspoken) term of the debate,
the woods, or patting each other on the literary back, or teaching Shakespeare and the Greeks, or drinking together to honor our dead at retirement parties (“Hell, Jerry White, let’s throw a party for Joe White and Jane
White who gave Cabrillo the best White years of their silly White lives, that we might all continue to do the same White thing.” “Sounds good to me, Jack White. Say, you’re a genius! Did you think of this party idea all
on your own?” “No, Jerry White, we’ve been doing it for years, makes us feel important. Without these parties we might actually be confronted by our political impotence, our collective spinelessness, our insatiable
appetite for gossip and administrative minutia, our fear of a Black Nation, out lack of will.” “Whew! Jack White, we sound pathetic. We’d better throw that party pronto!” “White you are, Jerry.” “Jack White, you old
too much time White-bonding in an effort to forget how hard we killed
and to forget how many bones we walk across each day just to get from our bedrooms to
Cabrillo…too, too much for one of you coloreds to come in here and be so ungrateful as to tell
us the very terms of our precious debates are specious.”
fart, you, you’re still a genius, heh, heh, heh.”)
But specious they are, as evidenced by recent uproar in the Adjunct vs. Minority Hire debates, or whether or not English 100 students should be “normed.” The very terms of the debate suture discussions
around White entitlement, when White entitlement is an odious idea. White are entitled to betray other Whites, nothing else… Beyond that you’re not entitled to anything. So how could you possibly be entitled to
decide who should pass and who should fail? How could you possibly be entitled to determining where the sign-up sheet for Diversity Day buses will or will not be placed, and how funds should be allocated?
Okay…so some of you want to hire a “minority” as long as s/he’s “well mannered and won’t stab us in the back after s/he’s in our sacred house;” and some of you want to hire an adjunct (Jill or Jeffery
White) because, “What the hell—they’ve been around as long as Jack, Joe, Jerry, and Jane White, and shucks fair is fair, especially if you’re entitled.” And entitlement is a synonym for Whiteness. But there’s only one
job, because for years you’ve complained about the gate, while breathing collective (meaning White) sighs of relief that it was there to protect you from the hordes. (Somewhere down the street in Watsonville an
immigrant is deciding whether to give his daughter or his wife up for the boss to fuck that he might have a job picking your fruit. Somewhere up the road in Oakland a teen is going to San Quentin for writing graffiti on
a wall. And you’re in here trying to be “fair” to each other, while promoting diversity—whatever that means. By the time you’ve arrived at a compromise over norming or faculty hires—your efforts to “enlighten”
whoever doesn’t die in the fields or fall from the earth into prison—the sista has been raped and the brotha busted. But then you’ve had a difficult day as well.) So, do what you always do. Hire the most qualified
candidate. Here are some questions and guidelines to speed the search committee on its way and make everyone feel entitled.
Ext-to the violation
bc without the specing there resolve we can only assume they are tacitly complicit with whiteness.
Leonardo 04“The Color of Supremacy: Beyond the discourse of ‘white privilege’” California State University Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 36, No. 2, 2004 Zeus
Leonardo Associate Professor Language and Literacy, Society and Culture zeus Leonardo has published numerous articles and book chapters on critical social thought in education
When it comes to official history, there is no paucity of representation of whites as its creator. From civil society, to science, to art, whites
white imprint is
everywhere. However, when it concerns domination, whites suddenly
disappear, as if history were purely a positive sense of contribution.
Their previous omnipresence becomes a position of nowhere, a
certain politics of undetectability. When it comes to culture, our students learn a benign form of
represent the subject for what Matthew Arnold once called the best that a culture has produced. In other words,
multiculturalism, as if culture were a purely constructive notion free of imperialist histories and examples of imposition.
Encouraging white students to reinsert themselves into the underbelly of history does not always have to occur in a
There are ways to address domination that require very
little from people who benefit from it
selfdestructive context.
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And we sovle the aff
The Current political discourse in the 1ac only has the alleged neutral and universal notions of
political discourse. The language of liberal individualism serves as a cover for coordinated collective
group interests, one that only promote racial outcomes that benefit whites engery is no
different.
DELEGITIMIZING THE NORMATIVITY OF “WHITENESS”A Critical Africana
Philosophical Study of the Metaphoricity of “Whiteness” Clevis Headley
Unlike Kierkergaard’s third stage, the religious stage made possible by an unconditional act of faith, the third
stage of whiteness will more closely resemble his notion of the teleological suspension of the ethical and the
inability to rationally inscribe this suspension in a universal discourse. Not being concerned with ultimate
meaning or with religious affirmation, the third stage of whiteness will not be a deconstruction or
abolition of whiteness but, rather, a teleological suspension of whiteness. Whiteness cannot be
dismantled through rational and analytical means. Its suspension must come in the form of a
continuously affirmed refusal to prolong the ontological and existential project of whiteness. The
project of whiteness must be suspended for the greater good of human liberation beyond whiteness.
The project of whiteness has proven too costly for human existence. The existential price is simply too
costly for those who are forced to involuntarily participate in this project. Hence, teleologically
suspending whiteness is a solution, a counter-project that cannot be rationally stated. It defies neutral
conceptualization because there is no direct and rationally persuasive way of linguistically describing
the urgency of this cause. The reason why the question of the suspension of whiteness cannot be
framed in the language of our legal and political system is because our language itself is infected with
the project of whiteness.After all, what would it mean to argue in favor of renouncing whiteness and its
benefits by using a discourse imbued with the categories that perpetuate whiteness? To the extent that
whiteness, understood as white supremacy, is a global system of white racial domination similar to
patriarchy,Africana philosophers can call attention to racial bias in language in the same manner that
feminist philosophers have called attention to gender bias in language.For example, the alleged neutral and
universal notions of political discourse, which should function neutrally, promote racial outcomes that
benefit whites.38 Lipsitz claims that “the language of liberal individualism serves as a cover for
coordinated collective group interests.”39 Robyn Wiegman, calling attention to Cheryl Harris’s distinction between corrective justices,
which seeks “compensation for discrete and ‘finished’ harm done to minority group members or their ancestors,” and distributive justice, which “is the claim an
individual or group would have been awarded under fair conditions,” 40 affirms Harris’s claim that “the
goals of affirmative action—to
address the harms done to those people minoritized by racial . . . oppression—are undermined when
corrective justices is the interpretative frame because not only is the harm assumed to be finished but
the practices through which harm has been done are individualized, confined to the one who
perpetrated it and the one who endured it. In this context, whites can claim to be innocent and
therefore in need of counter legislative protection because they have not individually perpetuated
harm.”41
Ext: to Deliberative politics
Stannard advocates debates between cultures to resist ethnocentrism – this is what we do when we
confront cultural institutions of whiteness
(Matt Stannard, Department of Communication and Journalism, University of Wyoming, Faculty Senate Speaker Series Speech,
April 18, 2006, http://legalcommunication.blogspot.com/2006/08/deliberation-debate-and-democracy-in.html)
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And absent a debate community that rewards anti-institutional political rhetoric as much as liberal
rhetoric, those students would have little-to-no chance of being exposed to truly oppositional ideas.
Moreover, if we allow ourselves to believe that it is "culturally imperialist" to help other peoples build
institutions of debate and deliberation, we not only ignore living political struggles that occur in every
culture, but we fall victim to a dangerous ethnocentrism in holding that "they do not value
deliberation like we do." If the argument is that our participation in fostering debate communities
abroad greases the wheels of globalization, the correct response, in debate terminology, is that such
globalization is non-unique, inevitable, and there is only a risk that collaborating across cultures in
public debate and deliberation will foster resistance to domination—just as debate accomplishes
wherever it goes.
OUR ADVOCACY TO ERADICATE WHITENESS IS DEPENDENT ON CHANGING HOW
PUBLIC POLICIES ARE FORMULATED. RECONCEPTUALIZING OUR POLITICAL WILL
STARTS WITH VOTING ON THIS FRAMWORK, AND THIS IS THE CRITICAL FIRST STEP.
YANCY & JOHNSON 2005, George & Clarence, White on White, Black on Black, “Reconceptualizing Blackness
and Making Race Obsolescent,” p. 182
It wouldof course be naïveand foolhardy to think that making race talk meaningless in the manner I am proposing would
end racism.22 On the otherhand, my reconceptualization project should be seen as a necessary first step toward the
elimination of racism. As in the Enlightenment when ideas were put to political use in shaping public policy, so the view I
am advancing is intended similarly to provide a first step toward a policy of deracializing society. I recognize that there is a
second, and equally important, step to end racism. This step consists in the political will of the society to undergo
transformation. It is in this step that public policies are formulated. The ideas I have advanced are useful therefore only
insofar as they are drawn upon in and by the second step in which public policies are formulated. Or, alternatively, unless
there is the political will to have a deracializedsociety,my reconceptualization project will not be practically realized. Even
so, the reconceptualization projectcould serve to indicate that it is conceptually (or theoretically) possible toend racism.
And once the conceptual obstacle to eradicate racism is removed, the next step would be to overcome the practical
obstacles. And that too, in time, is achievable.
Ext to the impact debate
DSRB, GHETTO KIDS GONE GOOD,pg 95, 2012
As Jackson points out, scripting is not a static,
monolithic process of one-size fits all
meaning-making; rather, it is possible that subversive scripts can be generated for and by
audiences. Dominant media frames suggest scripts for the audience to use in interpreting
narratives about the ubiquity of inner-city decay, black violence, and nihilism. Such representations
prime audiences to adopt the redemptive scripts deployed to describe triumphal
UDL participants. Yet, as I have demonstrated, in order to embrace the redemptive script,
the audience must also accept associated scripts that mark inner-city black youths as deviant,
violent, and culturally dysfunctional. There is always the potential that the audience will read
against the normative frames news media offer to them; however, that does not belie the fact
that there is likely a suggested reading ofthe frame (During, 2003). In other words, this article
can make no determination of how audiences actually read the news representation of UDLs,
but it does suggest that the news framing practices suggest particular readings based
on prior
representations of deviance and criminality in inner-city communities of color.
Solvency turns
The (perm/racial advantages) is merely cultural tourism – whiteness allows the privileged tourist to
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vacation in the identity of the exotic other secure in the promise of a return to safety and comfort at
the end of the adventure
Nakamura,Lisa Ph.D., Graduate Center, City University of New York (English), "Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity
Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet",2000
Tourism is a particularly apt metaphor to describe the activity of racial identity appropriation , or
"passing" in cyberspace. The activity of "surfing," (an activity already associated with tourism in the
mind of most Americans) the Internet not only reinforces the idea that cyberspace is not only a place where travel and
mobility are featured attractions, but also figures it as a form of travel which is inherently recreational, exotic, and
exciting, like surfing. The choice to enact oneself as a samurai warrior in LambdaMOO constitutes a form of
identity tourism which allows a player to appropriate an Asian racial identity without any of the risks
associated with being a racial minority in real life. While this might seem to offer a promising venue for nonAsian characters to see through the eyes of the Other by performing themselves as Asian through on-line textual
interaction, the fact that the personae chosen are overwhelmingly Asian stereotypes blocks this possibility by reinforcing
these stereotypes.
This theatrical fantasy of passing as a form of identity tourism has deep roots in colonial fiction , such as
Kipling's Kim and T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and Sir Richard Burton's writings. The Irish orphan and spy
Kim, who uses disguise to pass as Hindu, Muslim, and other varieties of Indian natives, experiences the pleasures and
dangers of cross cultural performance. Said's insightful reading of the nature of Kim's adventures in cross cultural
passing contrasts the possibilities for play and pleasure for white travelers in an imperialistic world
controlled by the European empire with the relatively constrained plot resolutions offered that same boy back
home. "For what one cannot do in one's own Western environment, where to try to live out the grand dream of a successful
quest is only to keep coming up against one's own mediocrity and the world's corruption and degradation, one can do
abroad. Isn't it possible in India to do everything, be anything, go anywhere with impunity?" (42). To practitioners of
identity tourism as I have described it above, LambdaMOOrepresents an phantasmatic imperial space, much
like Kipling's Anglo-India, which supplies a stage upon which the "grand dream of a successful quest" can
be enacted.
Since the incorporation of the computer into the white collar workplace the line which divides work from play has become increasingly fluid. It is difficult for employers and
indeed, for employees, to always differentiate between doing "research" on the Internet and "playing": exchanging email, checking library catalogues, interacting with friends
and colleagues through synchronous media like "talk" sessions, and videoconferencing offer enhanced opportunities for gossip, jokes, and other distractions under the guise of
work.3 Time spent on the Internet is a hiatus from "rl" (or real life, as it is called by most participants in virtual social spaces like LambdaMOO), and when that time is spent
in a role playing space such as Lambda, devoted only to social interaction and the creation and maintenance of a convincingly "real" milieu modeled after an "internation al
community," that hiatus becomes a full fledged vacation. The fact that Lambda offers players the ability to write their own descriptions, as well as the fact that players often
utilize this programming feature to write stereotyped Asian personae for themselves, reveal that attractions lie not only in being able to "go" to exotic spaces,4 but to co-opt the
exotic and attach it to oneself. The appropriation
of racial identity becomes a form of recreation, a vacation
from fixed identities and locales.
This vacation offers the satisfaction of a desire to fix the boundaries of cultural identity and exploit
them for recreational purposes. As Said puts it, the tourist who passes as the marginalized Other during
his travels partakes of a fantasy of social control, one which depends upon and fixes the familiar
contours of racial power relations.
EXT- TO EDU –WITHIN AN WHITE OVER BLACK WORLD.
IF EDUCATION IS TO BE MEANINGFUL FOR THE SLAVE IT MUST BE FOCUSED AROUND
AND CULMINATE IN TOTAL REVOLUTION
Anthony Paul Farley, 2005. “Perfecting Slavery.” Loyola University Chicago Law Journal, Volume 36
2005.Pps. 128-131
We are called and our childhood begins. We begin as children. We begin to make choices and those choices
are what we become. Our calling must be preceded by our education in that calling. 103 We are educated or
trained and that training regimen, our specific education, may become our calling, depending upon what
we choose to make of ourselves and our situations. Freedom, then, is the only calling. The slave has no
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choices. The will of the slave is not its own. The slave is owned and so cannot own its choices. The slave,
being property, cannot own. Property cannot own property.
We are called out of objecthood. Education is a calling into freedom, a calling out of objecthood. The slave
is not called. The slave is not free. The slave is an object. The slave, however, may come to understand itself
as an object and that makes it the most peculiar object in the world or out of it. The slave is the most
peculiar object in that it senses its own abjection, it understands the abjection it senses as its own abjection,
and, furthermore, it senses that abjection as the only thing that it may rightly be said to own. The slave
owns only its abjection. Can freedom be made from such a call? Anything is possible. And abjection is a
calling. Abjection calls the slave into objecthood. The slave perfects itself as a slave when it follows the call
to objecthood. The call to objecthood, abjection, implies, for the cunning slave, another direction.104 The
slave has no maps for these other territories.
Slavery is death. For the master, education in the slave is a horror.105 For the master, the educated slave is
uncanny.106 Education brings the slave, who is death, back from death, back from the undiscovered
country, back to life. This is uncanny for the master because the master has knowing non-knowledge that
to return from death, the slave must end slavery.107 The master experiences this knowing non-knowledge
as uncanny. We fear death and the slave is the body of the death that we
fear:
The fear of the dead, who return to take away with them the living, has found an explanation from the point
of view of individual and social psychology in the unconscious death wishes which the survivor harbored
against the dead person while he lived, because of which he now fears that person’s vengeance.108
The master should be afraid. The slaves that return from the undiscovered country do indeed plan to “take
away with them the living”109 and so the fear of death, and of the return of the dead, has a foundation.
White-over-black—death—is the foundation. Education undermines the foundation of white-over-black
and so education of the slave is the foundation of the fear of the dead. Education is the way that the slave
begins its return from the undiscovered country. Revolution is the way that the returned slaves complete
their return and, through that completion, manage to “take away with them the living.”110
What will be cast into the fire next time? Heed the words of C.L.R. James’s unknown anarchist, “[w]e have
a right to burn what we cultivate,” and an answer appears. The slaves are the ones who cultivate the
philosophy of right.111 It is the slaves calling to create the rule of law. And that is what they will burn to
free themselves from the Promised Land. It only takes a single spark.
1. OUR STRUGGLE PRIORITIZES A CRITIQUE OF WHITENESS ABOVE ALL OTHER
INTERESTS – IT IS ESSENTIAL TO SUCCESSFUL POLICY CONSTRUCTION
Alcoff 2005, LINDA MARTIN ALCOFF, PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY AT HUNTER COLLEGE/CUNY
GRADUATE CENTER, 2005, “THE WHITENESS QUESTION”
One of the most difficult aspects of these white anti-racist projects is what I have called “the whiteness question,” meaning the question of white
identity. Many race theorists have argued that antiracist struggles require whites' acknowledgment that they are white; that is, that their
experience, perceptions, and economic position have been profoundly affected by being constituted as white (Frankenberg 1993).Race may
be a social construction without biological validity, yet it is real and powerful enough to alter the fundamental
shape of all our lives (Gooding-Williams 1995; Taylor 2003). Part of white privilege has been precisely whites'
ability to ignore the ways white racial identity has benefited them. A liberal approach to answering this question is developed
in Judith Katz's now-classic White Awareness: Handbook for Anti-racism Training (1978). This book is representative of the popularized
psychological approach to antiracism, an approach often generated in, and aiming to be suited for, the kinds of in-house workshops and
encounter groups that have developed from corporate America since the 1960s, though Katz's own context was closer to universities. Many
corporations have discovered that racism (sometimes) impedes productivity, and therefore they have hired consultants to retrain and
“sensitize” white management personnel. This is, of course, only part of the audience for antiracism training; some universities and movement
organizations have also tried approaches such as Katz's. But the specific social location and source of funding needs to be kept in mind when
analyzing the reeducation approaches used in antiracism workshops. White Awareness attributes widespread responsibility for racism to
whites. However, Katz is highly critical of white guilt fixations on the grounds that these are self indulgent. She explains that such criticisms led
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her to move from black-white group encounters to all-white groups. She also avoided using people of color to reeducate whites, she says,
because she found that this led whites to focus on getting acceptance and forgiveness from their nonwhite trainers. Katz describesfacing
the
enormity and depth of racism as painful and demoralizing, since one loses one's sense of self-trust and even selflove; but she nonetheless holds out the hope that whites can become antiracist and that “we may ultimately find
comfort in our move to liberation” (vii). She holds that racism causes whites to suffer; it cripples their intellectual and psychological
development and locks them “in a psychological prison that victimizes and oppresses them every day of their lives” (14). Such claims do not, of
course, entail that whites' victimization by racism is worse than or equal to that of other groups, but Katz's wording is striking. Throughout the
book, racism is portrayed as a kind of macro-agent with its own agenda, operating separately from white
people.This problem takes on added significance given that antiracism and “sensitivity” training occur within the context of a corporate
culture that continues to use racism and cultural chauvinism as an excuse to pay people of color far lower wages by undervaluing comparably
challenging or even more difficult work. Katz makes no reference to exploitation or the need for a redistribution of
resources, and instead treats racism as a psychological pathology that can be solved through behavior
modification. Although racism no doubt is debilitating for whites in a number of ways, unless we analyze who
benefits from and promotes racism, both objectively and subjectively, we cannot see clearly what needs to be done
to counter it.
2. OUR ADVOCACY TO ERADICATE WHITENESS IS DEPENDENT ON CHANGING HOW
PUBLIC POLICIES ARE FORMULATED. RECONCEPTUALIZING OUR POLITICAL
WILL STARTS WITH VOTING ON THIS FRAMWORK, AND THIS IS THE CRITICAL
FIRST STEP.
YANCY & JOHNSON 2005, George & Clarence, White on White, Black on Black, “Reconceptualizing Blackness
and Making Race Obsolescent,” p. 182
It wouldof course be naïveand foolhardy to think that making race talk meaningless in the manner I am proposing
would end racism.22 On the otherhand, my reconceptualization project should be seen as a necessary first step
toward the elimination of racism. As in the Enlightenment when ideas were put to political use in shaping public
policy, so the view I am advancing is intended similarly to provide a first step toward a policy of deracializing
society. I recognize that there is a second, and equally important, step to end racism. This step consists in the
political will of the society to undergo transformation. It is in this step that public policies are formulated. The
ideas I have advanced are useful therefore only insofar as they are drawn upon in and by the second step in which
public policies are formulated. Or, alternatively, unless there is the political will to have a deracializedsociety,my
reconceptualization project will not be practically realized. Even so, the reconceptualization projectcould serve to
indicate that it is conceptually (or theoretically) possible toend racism. And once the conceptual obstacle to
eradicate racism is removed, the next step would be to overcome the practical obstacles. And that too, in time, is
achievable.
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Net-benefit to the method
DiAngelo 2006 [Robin, Assistant professor at Westfield State College, “White Fragility in Racial Dialogues,” Inclusion in Urban Educational Environments: Addressing Issues of Diversity, Equity, and Social Justice, edited by
Denise E. Armstrong and Brenda J McMahon, page 216-217]
At the same time that Whites are taught to see their interests and perspectives as universal, they are
also taught to value the individual and to see themselves as individuals rather than as part of a racially
socialized group (Bonilla-Silva, 2003; McIntosh, 1988). Individualism erases history and hides the
ways in which wealth has been distributed and accumulated over generations to benefit Whites
today.It allows Whites to view themselves as unique and original, outside of socialization and
unaffected by the relentless racial messages in the culture. Individualism also allows Whites to
distance themselves from the actions of their racial group and demand to be granted the benefit of the
doubt, as individuals, in all cases. Given the ideology of individualism, Whites often respond
defensively when associated with other Whites as a group or “accused” of collectively benefiting from
racism, because as individuals, each White person is “different” from any other White person and
expects to be seen as such. Whites invoke these seemingly contradictory discourses – universalism and
individualism – as needed. Both discourses work to deny the significance of racial positions (Croteau, 1999;
DiAngelo, 2004; Helms, 1990; Tatum, 1997). In the dominant position, Whites are almost always racially comfortable and expect to remain so (Helms, 1992).When racial discomfort arises,
Whites typically respond as if something is “wrong,” and blame the person or event that triggered the
discomfort (usually a person of color). Since racism is necessarily uncomfortable in that it is
oppressive. White insistence on racial comfort guarantees racism will not be faced except
in the most superficial ways.
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Apriority issue
western thought and political agenda praxis is western language and given the fact western institutions like debate only
own response to rhetoric, the severity of the violent relation to Africans is always already happening . This relationship
inherently upon utterance estranges and cleanly severs African thought and tongue from action and political response of
the African. This process not only erodes the relationship of the African’s agenda/best interest from their actions, the
erosive nature of western language makes the African subject a preverbal vegatable in western controlled institution in as
much Western institutions institutionalize the African subject ponokeyo to japeto without free will placin the African
subjest in a pregatoryal space at best.
Without specifying blackness the africa
Thiong'o, Ngugiwa (2004) "African Identities: Pan-Africanism in the Era of Globalization and Capitalist Fundamentalism," Macalester International: Vol. 14,
Article 9. Available at: http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/macintl/vol14/iss1/9 36-37
The linguistic incorporation of the African elite into the European memory has dire consequences for
Africa,the most obvious being the almost universal acceptance by educated Africans that English,
French, and Portuguese are the proper languages for producing and storing knowledge and
information. This has meant that the masses,the social agency of change, are being denied access to the knowledgeand
information they most need to change the world. Trickle-down economics, so beloved by capitalist fundamentalists, becomes reflected in trickle-down education and information. I have talked a
feel that the linguistic incorporation of the
African educated elite into the European bourgeois memory is an active contributor to Africa’s
backwardness. In that sense every educated African who remains doggedly locked within the linguistic walls
of European languages, irrespective of his/her avowed social vision (of the right or left), is part of the
problem and not the solution. European memory sits like a dead weight on the self-imagination of
Africa, and it prevents the elite, even the most radical, from connecting itself towhat Fanon describes asthe
revolutionary capital,17which is the people. More than anything else,it is this that prevents us from thinking of
alternatives outside the Western hegemonic economic-political-cultural matrix. Take the instance of the elite clinging to Europe’s
great deal about this problem in my books Decolonising the Mind and Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams, and the more I look into the situation, the moreI
conceptualization of the nation-state. In pre-capitalist times, the world was largely without protected borders over which it was a crime to cross. Borders were often the meeting point of mutual exchange and, in some cases, the site of intellectual
The
birth of the European nation-state, the slave plantation, and the colony and prison are simultaneous
products of the same moment in history. It is not surprising that these institutions have similar features. The primary one is that of an
and cultural cross currents. Borders united more than they divided. The nation-state, the form into which capitalist modernity organized its power, was born with notions of ownership in general and of territory in particular.
enclosed space, often with a single point of entry and exit. They are gated spaces with a supervising authority. Like all such spaces, the gate is guarded all
The
border now becomes a wall, marking separation of those within and those without. The plantation, the
colony, the prison, and the nation-state mimic and anticipate each other in additional ways as well. The
the time. You cannot enter or even exit without the approval of the all-seeing centralized authority. The comings and goings are recorded.
slave plantation is reminiscent of the enclosure movement in England where peasants were hounded out of common lands to become reservoirs of labor in congested towns.18 Those who turned to stealing sheep as a means of livelihood were
hanged. But later they were exported to colonies-as-prisons. A good number of colonies, including Australia and Angola, doubled as penal territories. It is not surprising, for instance, that in France the Minister for Prisons was also in charge of
colonies.19 The nation-state is built on division and separation and central control, with the prison playing an increasing role in its exercise of power. Today, some countries have prison populations that could constitute a separate nation.
White supremacy is the unnamed political system that shapes the modern world. Our
Hobbseian social contract is really a RACIAL contract which ENFORCES this system. We
must aggressively ENGAGE a broader debate to situate discussions of race and challenge
these assumptions.
MILLS Associate Prof of Philosophy @ U Illinois, Chicago 1997
Charles-; The Racial Contract; p. 1-3
White Supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today. You will not find this term
inintroductory, or even advanced, texts in political theory. A standard undergraduate philosophy course will start off with Plato and
Aristotle, perhaps say something about Augustine, Aquinas, and Machiavelli, move on to Hobbes, Locke, Mill and Marx, and then wind up with
Rawls and Nozick. It will introduce you to notions of aristocracy, democracy, absolutism, liberalism, representative government,
socialism, welfare capitalism, and libertarianism. But though it covers more than two thousand years of Western political
thought and runs the ostensible gamut of political systems, there will be no mention of the basic political system that has shaped
the world for the past several hundred years. And this omission is not accidental. Rather, it reflects the fact that standard
textbooks and courses have for the most part been written and designed by whites who take their racial privilege so much for granted that
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they do not even see it as political, as a form of domination. Ironically, the most important political system of recent global
history- the system of domination by which white people have historically ruled over and, in certain important ways, continue to
rule over nonwhite people-is not seen as a political system at all. It is just taken for granted, it is the background against which
other systems, which we are to see as political are highlighted. This book is an attempt to redirect your vision, to make you see what, in a
sense, has been there all along. Philosophy has remained remarkably untouched by the debates over multiculturalism, cannon
reform, and ethnic diversity racking the academy; both demographically and conceptually, it is one of the “whitest” of the humanities.
Blacks, for example, constitute only about 1 percent of philosophers in North American universities-a hundred or so people out of more than ten
thousand-and there are even fewer Latino, Asian American, and Native American philosophers. Surely this underrepresentation itself stands in
need of an explanation, and in my opinion it can be traced in part to a conceptual array and a standard repertoire of concerns whose abstractness
typically elides, rather than genuinely includes, the experience of racial minorities. Since (white) women have the demographic advantage of
numbers, there are of course far more female philosophers in the profession than nonwhite philosophers (though still not proportionate to
women’s percentage of the population), and they have made far greater progress in developing alternative conceptualizations. Those African
American philosophers who do work in moral and political theory tend either to produce general work indistinguishable from
that of their white peers or to focus on local issues (affirmative action, the black “underclass”) or historical figures (W.E.B Du Bois,
Alain Locke) in a way that does not aggressively engage the broader debate. What is needed is a global theoretical framework for
situating discussions of race and white racism, and thereby challenging the assumptions of white political philosophy, which
would correspond to feminist theorists’ articulation of the centrality of gender, patriarchy, and sexism to traditional moral and political theory.
What is needed, in other words, is a recognition that racism (or, as I will argue, global white supremacy) is itself a political system, a
particular power structure of formal or informal rule, socioeconomic privilege, and norms for the differential distributionof
material wealth and opportunities, benefits and burdens , rights and duties. The notion of the Racial Contract is, I suggest, one
possible way of making this connection with mainstream theory, since it uses the vocabulary and apparatus already developed for
contractarianism to map this unacknowledged system. Contract talk is, after all, the political lingua franca of our times.
The affirmative rhetorical silence on whiteness is an active stance that allows white privilege to
thrive by masking its existence and treating is as an assumed norm.
We once believed that SILENCE was golden interpreting it to be a precious and valuable commodity.
While still viewed as a precious and valuable commodity the color has changed and SILENCE is now
the veil and cloak of WHITENESS and WHITE PRIVILEGE
DR. CRENSHAWProf of Speech Comm @ Univ. Ala. 1997
Carrie-PhD. USC; former director of debate @ Univ. of Ala.; WESTERN JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION
This analysis of Helms’ opening argument illustrates how the ideology of white privilege operates
through rhetorical silence. Helms’ statement was an argument over the meaning of the UDC—its members,
its actions, and its insignia. It was an ideological struggle to maintain silence about the members’ whiteness and its
implications through a strategic use of gender. Two key issues arise here. First, rhetorical silence about
whiteness sustains an ideology of white privilege. Second, intersecting gendered
discourses
work
to
preserve
this
silence.
Helms’ silence about whiteness naturalized the taken-for-granted assumptions contained
in his framework for understanding who is harmed by this decision. The “colossal unseen
dimensions [of] the silences and denials surrounding” whiteness are key political tools for
protecting white privilege and maintaining the myth of meritocracy (McIntosh 35). This silence
is rhetorical and has important ideological implications. Scott observes that silence and speaking have
symbolic impact and as such are both rhetorical. When considering the dialectic of speaking and
silence, he thinks of silence as the absence of speech. Silence is active, not passive; it may be
interpreted. Furthermore, silence and speech may be both simultaneous and sequential.The absence of
speech about whiteness signifies that it exists in our discursive silences. It may often be
intentional; it can be interpreted, and it can occur simultaneously with the spoken word.
Whiteness’ silence is ideological because it signifies that to be white is the natural condition, the
assumed norm. Scott notes that silences symbolize the nature of things—their substance or natural condition.
Silences symbolize “hierarchical structures as surely as does speech” (15). Indeed, the
very structure of privilege generates silences, and “ironically, the most powerful rhetoric
for maintaining an existing scheme of privilege will be silent” (10). Thus, silent rhetorical
constructions of whiteness like Helms’ protect material white privilege because they mask its existence.
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U Mad Bruh?
R-Spec
MDAW turnt it up!
Racism must be rejected in EVERY INSTANCE without surcease. It justifies atrocities,
creates another and is truly the CAPITAL SIN.
MEMMI
2000
Professor Emeritus of Sociology @ Unv. Of Paris
Albert-; RACISM, translated by Steve Martinot, pp.163-165
The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without remission, probably never achieved, yet
for this very reason, it is a struggle to be undertaken without surcease and without concessions. One cannot be indulgent
toward racism. One cannot even let the monster in the house, especially not in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means
to augment the bestial part in us and in other people which is to diminish what is human. To accept the racist universe to
the slightest degree is to endorse fear, injustice, and violence. It is to accept the persistence of the dark history in which we
still largely live. It is to agree that the outsider will always be a possible victim(and which [person] man is not [themself] himself an
outsider relative to someone else?).Racism illustrates in sum, the inevitable negativity of the condition of the dominated; that is it
illuminates in a certain sense the entire human condition. The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it is, and always in question, is
nevertheless one of the prologues to the ultimate passage from animality to humanity. In that sense, we cannot fail to rise
to the racist challenge. However, it remains true that one’s moral conduct only emerges from a choice: one has to want it.
It is a choice among other choices, and always debatable in its foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking,
that the choice to conduct oneself morally is the condition for the establishment of a human order for which racism is the very negation. This is almost a
redundancy. One cannot found a moral order, let alone a legislative order, on racism because racism signifies the exclusion of
the other and his or her subjection to violence and domination. From an ethical point of view, if one can deploy a little religious
language, racism is “the truly capital sin.”fn22 It is not an accident that almost all of humanity’s spiritual traditions counsel respect for the weak,
for orphans, widows, or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows or strangers. It is not just a
question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments. Such unanimity in the safeguarding of the other suggests the real utility
of such sentiments. All things considered, we have an interest in banishing injustice, because injustice engenders violence and
death. Of course, this is debatable. There are those who think that if one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression
of others is permissible. But no one is ever sure of remaining the strongest. One day, perhaps, the roles will be reversed.
All unjust society contains within itself the seeds of its own death. It is probably smarter to treat others with respect so that they treat you
with respect. “Recall,” says the bible, “that you were once a stranger in Egypt,” which means both that you ought to respect the stranger because you
were a stranger yourself and that you risk becoming once again someday. It is an ethical and a practical appeal – indeed, it is a contract,
however implicit it might be. In short, the refusal of racism is the condition for all theoretical and practical morality.
Because, in the end, the ethical choice commands the political choice. A just society must be a society accepted by all. If
this contractual principle is not accepted, then only conflict, violence, and destruction will be our lot. If it is accepted, we
can hope someday to live in peace. True, it is a wager, but the stakes are irresistible.
At: the Framing of the Spec arg
THE SUFFERING OF BLACK BEING EXISTS BEYOND THE LIMITS OF INSTRUMENTAL LANGUAGE. THE ATTEMPT TO FORCE OUR
UTTERANCE INTO PRESCRIBED DISEMBODIED INSTRUMENTAL SPEECH RE-ENACTS CHATTEL SLAVERY
Shaye 2013 [http://amaryahshaye.wordpress.com/2013/02/15/meditation-on-representation-i-the-quest-for-redressredemption/]
And thinking that if we just articulate a black subjectivity that is able to be for itself as possible, (as many liberal responses to Beyonce, did and the response to Brandon’s article);
thinking that if we just say she is owningthe stage,her sexuality, and the Super Bowl, we are making black being for itself a
possibility is to concurrently engage in an erasure of the very trauma of that would make their performances
liberativein the first place. That is, we must necessarily minimize the violence of slavery and the violence that
continues to structure black life in order to assert that it could possibly be overcome, even if for a moment, within a 10 minute
halftime performance or a 1 hour weekly show. The allusions to stereotypes of black women emerged in both discussions. From Jezebel to Sapphire to Mammy,
these histories are inescapable and powerful images that do continue to be repeated. They do continue to haunt. Yet little has been said of the trauma that goes
along with performances of blackness in the public eye and I think it is this trauma that Wilderson alludes to that perhaps sheds light onto the silence that is
found in the responses to critiques of black female representations which posit a liberative black female performance. That is, in order to read these
performances as liberativea certain inattentiveness to trauma must be present. The redemptive turn wherein these black female performances become sites
of pleasure, power, and agency that free them from the strictures of white supremacy and patriarchy must necessarily articualte the traumas of black female
representations as being overcome in order to assert their liberation from them. This effect of occlusion, covering over the wounds of trauma that still persist
and antagonize black female bodies, is my main concern with the responses that seek a redemptive lens for black female bodies .That
words fail to mean
when we attempt to describe the atrocity that visits black women’s bodies daily, the repeated violences that
constitute black being in modernity, suggest, as Wilderson writes, that all we have is a language of taxonomy. A listing of the
offenses, a confession of the privileges, a recounting of the death toll.But we are incapable of reckoning with these
ghosts that haunt theactress and the singer and the everydayblack female because we still require the death of black bodies in order to
constitute legality, beauty, space, freedom. And then we require a mask over this death, asking black women to
sing songs to us to make us forget the erasures that happen with each performance.In her brilliant book “Scenes of Subjection:
Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making,” Saidiya Hartman questions the reading of black performances as holding some pleasure, power, or agency that is able to
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U Mad Bruh?
R-Spec
MDAW turnt it up!
escape from the terror of white supremacy, citing the property relations established in slavery as enacting a transformation upon black flesh that leaves it
open and vulnerable to a being for the (white) other: The
fungibility of the commodity makes the captive body an abstract and
empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others’ feelings, ideas, desires, and values; and, as property, the
dispossessed body of the enslaved is the surrogate for the master’s body since it guarantees his disembodied
universality and acts as the sign of his power and dominion. Thus, while the beaten and mutilated body presumably establishes the brute materiality of existence,
the materiality of suffering regularly eludes (re)cognition by virtue of the body’s being replaced by other signs of
value, as well as other bodies. Thus the desire to don, occupy, or possess blackness or the black body as a
sentimental resourceand/or locus of excess enjoyment is both founded upon and enabled by the material relations
of chattel slavery.9
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